Thanks for the question.
The LAV RWS project was based on immediately using 33 brand new vehicles that we had acquired under the LAV III program, which did not have a turret on them because the army had chosen not to put their big anti-armour weapon on the new vehicles. So they had 33 vehicles immediately available.
The United States army had fielded a version of that called a Stryker, with a small weapon station on top. We needed vehicles in Afghanistan that had better side and belly protection quickly, and that could carry the weight. We felt that without the turret, which is two and a half thousand kilograms, we could more rapidly put on more weight in terms of protection and exceed the protection levels that the Americans had achieved with their Stryker.
The challenge was that we had a big hole on the top of the vehicle where the turret normally went and we needed to change the structure of the vehicle--take out all the command and control, radios, etc.--because it was a fighting vehicle, not an administrative vehicle. We had to install a weapon station, and we knew we needed to fundamentally make major improvements to the protection.
The reason we went twice to Treasury Board was that we didn't know the cost of the second part. In our first Treasury Board submission we said we know we need to do the work in terms of remote weapon system design and engineering. We mentioned that we still had the protection part, but we did not have substantive costing information of sufficient rigour and detail to ask Treasury Board for expenditure and contracting authority with the first submission.
We knew the program would be about $100 million. We had to do it in two phases because of the design and costing work on the protection--I could look up the timeframe for you in a second. But before the first one was contracted, we'd gone back to Treasury Board with substantive costing and design work on the armour protection piece. It went from $55 million...and another $55 million. It was slightly over $100 million.