Madam Chairman, this area has been a particularly tough challenge. We have a very strong reserve community support system. We have honorary colonels and we have regimental support units. The reserve units can be found in towns and cities throughout the country. For most people in Canada, the local armoury and the local units they have come to know are their contact with the Canadian forces.
We are below the strength that is in the white paper for our level of reserve members. In the current land force reserve restructuring, we are talking about the militia, the army in this context. We are attempting to increase those numbers. We have already reached the first phase increase. We were at 13,500. We said we wanted to get up to 15,500. We are either at or near that at the moment.
We also are looking at how to speed up recruitment. One of the things we have heard from the reserve community is the concern about how long it takes to become a reservist once a person signs up. We are about to get a breakthrough in that area and should be able to speed it up. We should be able to look at additional equipment and roles and things like that. Much of that will come in phase two. We committed to phase one some $758 million last fiscal year and there is $833 million for the current fiscal year. We have increased our allocation for the reserves.
We have a project office headed by a major general who is carrying out the land force reserve restructuring that the government has adopted. The government believes the reserves have an important role to play, whether it is the army, the navy or the air force. While much of our restructuring and focus at this point in time is on the army component of the reserves, they are all an important part of the Canadian forces operations.
We are now seeing increasing numbers go to our peace support operations. I believe we are up to 15% now. We are looking at sending a whole company size unit into one of our peace support operations, all reservists. This will be the first time we have done that. We are providing some of the additional resources they need in order to move up and take a bigger role in terms of our total force operations.