National Defence committee  Thank you for the question. NATO is an association of sovereign nations. Nations take their own decisions for their own reasons in the first instance. So there has never been.... I think NATO dreams of such coherence of approach, that NATO nations as a community would say they're all going to this particular supplier for this particular widget.

National Defence committee  Absolutely.

National Defence committee  I would just add to that—and I think this is something we haven't talked about—our ability to mount a role 3 medical facility in theatre and to sustain it. We used that in Haiti. We've used it in Afghanistan. We've had helicopters to be able to take people off the ground so they don't have to go through IED-infested terrain.

National Defence committee  Thank you very much. In terms of interoperability, maybe I have not explained it well. There has to be a coherence for our own purposes in what we procure. It just so happens that since the First World War, certainly since the Second World War, we have worked so closely together with allies, and we work with the United States in continental defence.

National Defence committee  Thank you. Just to begin, with regard to interoperability for Canada, everything we do is designed to make us interoperable with our allies, because we know we're not going to be doing stuff alone in any sort of expeditionary setting, so it is very inherent in the training and the exercising or the procurement or the equipment that we have.

National Defence committee  We can give it to you. It's Gábor Iklódy. He's the assistant secretary general for emerging security challenges. We can give you his name.

National Defence committee  The reference points, I think, are emerging. As Colonel Irwin just reminded me, NATO did establish a new position of assistant secretary general for emerging security challenges. That may well be somebody the committee would like to hear from. I think he's a Hungarian. That's exactly what they're grappling with.

National Defence committee  It's still working. What Canadians can know is that there is a common community trying to address those issues together.

National Defence committee  Thank you. Interestingly, part of the debate within the alliance is exactly around that question: where is the emphasis across these three tasks? I think if you were to speak to some allies from certain parts of Europe they would say, “Look, the focus absolutely has to be on collective defence.

National Defence committee  I think so. You've touched upon the idea that 21st century security threats are not necessarily sovereign national security threats. Is that what you mean by your question?

National Defence committee  That's exactly it.

National Defence committee  I understand completely.

National Defence committee  That is a very good question. The problems, the security challenges now, are increasingly in that grey space. Cyber is an excellent example, and we can recall what happened with Estonia a while back when there was a cyber-attack on Estonian infrastructure. How do you reconcile an alliance, which is transforming itself but still probably a little bit more in the traditional space than in the new space?

National Defence committee  The impact of the global financial crisis has really been a topic of discussion around the NATO table, for the reasons you say, and the U.S. and the U.K. in particular, but there is no country that hasn't been untouched. If you look at what Poland is going through, or France or Germany, every country is trying to figure out how to deliver the same sort of impact but in a different way.

National Defence committee  Thank you. That's a great question. Every so often people muse about whether we could get away from the consensus principle. But the importance of the alliance speaking with one voice, even if it's at the highest strategic level and then countries individually, nationally, decide how they're going to play that out, that remains so important in terms of the political projection of the alliance.