National Defence committee  The air force is not involved in the space station, other than providing the gene pool.

National Defence committee  Again, it's not really my domain, and I don't have great knowledge on this. But what I can say is that the Mercury Global project is intended to create that network, much like the C-17 did, with Canadian solutions and autonomy. This is part of that process of creating more flexib

National Defence committee  Again, from a military and air force perspective, we don't have a big investment, if you will, in space itself other than what I mentioned before. We are closely linked with the U.S. Air Force, clearly, through our NORAD and other links with them, understanding where they're goin

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question. We talked about it a little bit earlier on pilot production. The air force currently is responsible for 26 trades inside the bigger Canadian Forces package. Of the 26 trades, we have seven that are still under stress. We define “under stress” as bein

National Defence committee  Thank you for that question.

National Defence committee  Yes. But no, I was going to go there.

National Defence committee  Space of course is a joint domain. Clearly, we use space as an entity, because we travel through near space and we need space as far as enablers are concerned—communications, navigation, intelligence—so space is a very important part of our future, “our” being the Canadian Forces

National Defence committee  In the Canadian Forces right now, space resides under the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff in development and policy. The implementation of space is done through different agencies. The air force, through NORAD, has some operational space activities, such as tracking space objec

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question. We've had a next-generation fighter capability team that's been together since probably 2005 or early 2006. It's not a big team, but there have been folks on this issue for, say, nearly half a decade, so they form a core nucleus of knowledge that we'v

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question. Again, that's probably something that Industry Canada and the ADM Materiel would be in a better position to give you any certainty on. My understanding is that's still valid; the assessment that was done still rings true, to our understanding of the f

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question. The best way to contextualize the difference between the F-35 fifth-generation and all the other platforms that are out there--which are great platforms--is that the F-35 brings a whole different set of skills to any conflict. The big difference is th

National Defence committee  That's the other issue. Any F-35 that joins the network—and it doesn't matter from what country, as we don't even have to know who they are, as far as where they are in the formation—as they come into the network, they automatically share the information they have and instantly g

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question. As I mentioned previously, we started to really look at this in detail around 2003 to 2005. We saw that we had to replace the CF-18s with an aircraft that had to be manned. The study done in 2003 determined that the only thing that could replace a fig

National Defence committee  You can rest assured that the parameter was studied in depth. As I said, we have dealt with allied governments that use those planes. So we have quite a thorough understanding of the capabilities of the planes, although the company might have not provided us with all the informat

National Defence committee  Thank you for your question. The debate on the single-engine versus the two-engine plane is nothing new. There has already been a debate about the CF-18. It is a debate that resurfaces all the time. There are usually two reasons why planes have more than one engine. To start wi