Thank you.
First of all I want to thank the Auditor General's office for putting some heat and light on this issue. Many of us knew that this was coming and it was here. It speaks specifically to a capability gap, yet adds in the other elements that are required to generate combat capability—pilots, technicians and aircraft. All of them are equally important, and we need them all to make things happen.
I want to circle back to what I suggested before, because this is going to require the military to think outside the box in solving this problem and to do things that it may not have been willing to do in the past.
We need to lean on our service providers more than ever—KF Aerospace, CAE and Discovery Air are there. Most of those guys, we knew. We used to fly with those guys. They're all retired, and we know they're capable. We know we have existing contracts. We need to put those people in the best position to help us as soon as possible.
I know you've mentioned that you're mulling around financial retention. It has to be done and it has to go to Treasury Board. That is not a slow process, so I would suggest that we just come to terms with that soon and get on with it because our allies are doing it, and if we don't, we're going to be hurting.
I know, General, you mentioned that you talk to your counterparts or their allies often about asking them for help. I think we need to circle back on that because I don't recall, back in the nineties, that we were in much better shape. We were hurting as well, but we responded to an urgent request from our allies, and I think we should maybe circle back and ask them if they can help us out, the marine corps in Australia being probably the best suited to do that.
Also, engaging with industry, maybe in a way that we haven't before.... The current airplane that we're flying right now, Boeing, has the capacity. We ultimately just need to write a cheque to get them to help us train more technicians more quickly. What we do isn't exactly the same. I appreciate that. I was in the squadron and I understand how that works. They can get our squadron or our squadron techs to the 75% solution, and then we can take over from there.
If we do all those things, we'll be able to ramp up our capacity to generate pilots and technicians a lot more quickly. I appreciate that, simultaneously, we need more airframes at the end of the day, so when both those phones ring we can be responsible partners and generate the combat capability that we said we would.
That's all I have.
Thank you.