Fascinating. Remember, we're an army that came out of 40 years of peacetime soldiering. We were in Germany, but I mean....
Over the last 15 years there's been an incredible learning curve, actually telling the young kid at the recruiting centre, “You know what? You might be going off to fight. That's a possibility. You could go into combat arms.” We never used to say that. We used to say, “Do you want a job for life? Do you want a trade?” So that has been shifting very rapidly.
I was commanding the military college during the Oka crisis, where we deployed five brigades with 3,000 troops at Oka. We were sure that seeing the troops in the field, helping sort out an insurrection, and doing it the way we did would enhance recruitment. At that time, people starting pulling their 17-year-olds away from the military college because they said, “Geez, they might be in operations where people actually hurt them.”
However, today the nature of this country has changed. Those under 30 see a responsibility well beyond our borders and our regional hassles. So there is a sense that they could sacrifice for something other than local needs. There is a re-education that's going on now.
They are now recruited with the idea that, yes, they are going to be committed to operations. How much they give in a detailed response, I really don't know.