Thank you very much for the question.
What we're trying to do here is to make sure we have an understanding of our inventory overall. This means the location of it, the quantity of it, the state of it, and ultimately the price of it from a valuation perspective. The latter is key to the public accounts and also key in the context of replacement inventory. The first three are particularly important in the context of military operations: the inventory we have, how much, and where it's located.
All of these activities we've talked about in total are bent to come together and to rationalize the entire inventory. There are different activities because there are different aspects to it, including how we do stock-taking and where our stock is. As we do stock-taking, we go back into the hundreds of warehouses we have. We literally have inventory all over the country and around the world. Every ship at sea has inventory in it, and it gets drawn locally. A technician goes into the bowels of the ship, draws inventory, and months later comes back alongside and puts in a request to replenish things.
What we're trying to do is rationalize what we have. As we go through it, we take stock of it and we identify things. In some cases, we have inventory that has sat on the shelf for 50 years unopened. Do we still need it? Is it a propeller for a ship that's 30 years old? I hope to never use the propeller, but if we have a ship run aground, we have to have access to it to use it. For us, inventory is quite different from what it is in the private sector.
All of these activities include finding out what we have: the stock-taking, the disposal of it, the making sure that we're changing our processes so we're not over-buying inventory. That's the accountability that the deputy talked about. We are raising this up so that our level ones—the commanders of the army, navy, air force—understand that this is part of their key accountability. All of these activities are subsets of a plan that we are doing. We are operating in a cohesive fashion and trying to bring all that together under the governance so that we ultimately can come before you and say we have a handle on all of our inventory—where it is, how much of it there is, what state it's in, and what the value of it is. It's a very large undertaking, given that in some cases we're going back decades to look at the valuation of some of the inventory we hold.