I will refer to the last question, if I can back it up from there. It is my aim to have this defence policy update done by this fall. However, if we take the old business about the cup being half full or half empty, the member has certainly given the half empty portion of it. I would like to give the half full portion of it. In fact, it is not only half full; it is more than half full.
Let me start with the whole question of how many people we have in the military. He says we have gone down below the 60,000 level. In fact, yes, we did go down at one point, but at this time we have 60,484 people in our regular forces operations. We are back up to strength.
He worried a bit about attrition, but our attrition rates are down almost 20%. We are beginning to retain people, more than ever before. In fact, we have one of the lowest attrition rates of any among our allies. Traditional attrition rates have been 7.5% to 8% but now are down to 6.3%, which is, as I said, a 20% reduction.
Aside from retaining more of the people in the forces, we are also into a three year recruitment program. This year we set a target of 10,000, which is considerably more than what we had last year, and we have met the 10,000. I will say that we have more than enough reserves. We have made about 85% of our target on the regulars, but there are certain occupations where we still have a challenge to meet. There are certain professional groups, such as engineers, doctors, pilots and technicians of various different groups, where we still have a challenge. The auditor general pointed that out and we quite agree. Steps are being taken to recruit those people. We can do some of that training ourselves, but we are also going to community colleges, to areas where people have graduated from these courses, and we are trying to bring them into the forces. In some cases bonuses are being offered.
There is a wide variety of instruments that we are using to recruit into the Canadian forces. We want to make the Canadian forces an employer of choice. I think we are on the right track in what we have been able to accomplish to this point. We have our numbers back up to over 60,000.
On the northern command, it is an internal United States reorganization. The Americans have not invited Canada to join it per se. They have been communicating with us at the table about how we can work in a co-operative way, because northern command is an internal command that will be concerned with the whole of North America. That is their area of interest. They have other commands that cover other parts of the world in terms of their areas of interest. No other military belongs to those commands. For example, southern command governs all of South America but South American countries do not belong to it.
However, we do have a very close relationship with the United States and we want to work in a co-operative way, so we have been exploring ways in which we might do that. At the same time, we entered into these discussions because we wanted to ensure that the one binational command we have, NORAD, was not subordinated to the northern command, and it will not be. It will be out there distinctively as a binational command. It will be on a parallel with the northern command as the two areas of responsibility of one person. Right now the commander of NORAD also has the space command, so double-hatting in the American context is quite normal. This person will be double-hatted with those two commands.
We are also looking at ways in which we can co-operate more with them. We are not talking about taking our military and putting it under their military. We are not going to assign major forces to this northern command. We are virtually talking about planning the kinds of operations in regard to how we might work together in the future, in no way affecting our sovereignty.