I'll mention a couple of things. We do have an audit under way on recruitment and retention, and the plan is that we will report on that in the fall. You'll have another opportunity to get into that subject in further detail then.
One thing I did want to touch on was there was a lot of conversation about the numbers, and 14,000 soldiers versus 18,000, and 21,000. I'm afraid the main point in that has been lost a bit. I would refer people to exhibit 5.4, which is on page 11 of our report just above paragraph 5.49. In that exhibit, that's where we identified the 29,000 soldiers with 21,000 funded positions. The next thing we said was that 19,500 was the average number of soldiers, but not all of those soldiers are trained, and that's why it got down to 13,944 or essentially 14,000.
When we did the audit, we were saying there were about 19,500 soldiers, but 14,000 of them were trained. What we are hearing today is that there are now 18,500 soldiers, with about 13,200 trained, if I understand from the lieutenant-general.
The issue, or the most important point, is that from these numbers we reported there has been another decline of about 1,000 soldiers in the army reserve. In all of the conversations about the numbers, that message has gotten lost a bit. What is important is we both agree that you can look at a number of soldiers, and we had 19,500, but then we said only 14,000 of them were trained. Now we're hearing it's 18,500 with 13,200 trained. The issue is that there has been another decline of 1,000 soldiers in that time period.