National Defence committee  No, sir. The $4,000 to $4,500 are direct operating costs. Sustainment—

National Defence committee  It does include spares, first- and second-line servicing, fuel, oil, and off-base servicing, all the maintenance you need. The only thing we don't include in that, as I say, is the labour costs. Labour costs vary so much around the world, sir, that we take out labour costs.

National Defence committee  We see some figures in the public domain that are really quite significantly greater. We say that a fleet of 65 Gripen would cost you about $50 million Canadian a year to operate on that basis, whereas we've seen figures of $250 million to $300 million to operate the F-35. I'm no

National Defence committee  It would be any number, sir; it's entirely up to you. Probably two squadrons of 24 would be the minimum to give you an operational capability. But it's absolutely up to your operational requirements, if it were a fleet of both F-35 and Gripen. But I would suggest that 24 aircraft

National Defence committee  I'm not aware of that in the last six hours, sir.

National Defence committee  That's correct, sir. They're a mixture of....

National Defence committee  No one has made a commitment, but we are involved in campaigns in the countries I mentioned of India, Brazil, Netherlands, Denmark--

National Defence committee  There is more than serious interest. It is committed now to the program ad infinitum. It will fund the program for 40 years.

National Defence committee  No, sir. The non-recurrings are actually very small, and we don't see a problem. In giving a price of $55 million Canadian, that's the price we would ask for it.

National Defence committee  They would be in-year dollars, today, 2010.

National Defence committee  Not necessarily, because one thing we see—and this is where I'm slightly coming outside my brief—is that as we go into this program we are making economies more and more that we didn't realize in going into the NG program. The unit cost of some of the bigger components is actuall

National Defence committee  Yes.

National Defence committee  That would be entirely up to your configuration requirements.

National Defence committee  It's the fly-away, which is the aircraft pushed out of the shed with nothing on it--a clean aircraft.

National Defence committee  The contents of the aircraft would be there in their entirety. We would not have tanks on the aircraft at that price. We would have pylons. The aircraft would be completely configured to carry whatever you wished.