National Defence committee  The major thing about responding by being there is, of course, having the ability to do something about it. When we see police on the road, their just being there is part of it, but the fact is we know there is a penalty. Somebody made the observation, of course, that deterrence didn't require the use of fighter aircraft, but the reality is that was because deterrence was successful.

National Defence committee  I guess my response to that is that it's along the lines of the unknown. We're talking about going for the Russians, who probably will not be the major issue. When you say NORAD knows, well, of course we have recently seen the re-coverage of the events of 9/11, and NORAD was not able to respond to the type of capability, the type of threat, that people were not perceiving.

National Defence committee  It isn't, and the reason why is that you have to ask why the Russians had the motivation to resume bomber patrols when in fact we had more or less worked out arrangements at the end of the Cold War whereby we acknowledged how these are perceived as escalatory activities, or at least as creating a mistrust that had not been there before.

National Defence committee  This is the interesting question. It gets very much into the gestalt of how we try to understand what the Russian intentions are. There are the arguments that Putin is doing this, of course, simply for domestic consumption to show that he is the strong man. In other words, there is this whole aspect that he's not even focusing on the outside world.

National Defence committee  Yes, thank you very much. Almost every single defence expenditure in the modern era will always come in higher than what is expected. In fact, within the open literature this is often the argument that's put forward for signing early. You can never completely keep costs down by getting in early, particularly when dealing with a sole-source provider, but some studies have suggested that if you come in early you will avoid cost escalations.

National Defence committee  Thank you very much. I'm going to be limiting myself to three major issue areas. The first one is the need for the F-35s; the second is the competition or the alternatives, as is often being discussed in the media; and the third, a couple of critiques that in fact suggest that the decision to buy the F-35A may not even go far enough, that we may want to be considering buying some of the B variant.