National Defence committee  Let me try to connect this to another question on PESCO. The alliance has been a cornerstone of our national security for decades, and the continuation of the alliance should be and remain our number one priority. I mentioned that the alliance is a bit of a buffet, so we need to

National Defence committee  It's very important that Canada participates. Just to go back to the debate about it, why did we decide not to do it then? Well, maybe there were still good political reasons to move forward, but the threat wasn't clear and the technology to shoot down wasn't really clear, so tha

National Defence committee  One of the big problems we have with procurement is the budget. The Parliamentary Budget Office has a concept for how to figure out what things cost that includes the full life-cycle costs, incorporating personnel costs and the replacement part costs, and so Canadians are then pr

National Defence committee  I mentioned in my opening remarks the issue of being multipartisan. Something as important as national defence needs to be developed in a multipartisan way. The only way you can do that is if you open the kimono, you bring everybody in, you share the classified and unclassified i

National Defence committee  I mentioned earlier the issue of senior military people speaking. Frankly, we just don't let them do it, unlike some of our allies. In the United States, every four-star is brought before committees, and they're all mandated to speak their own personal views to those committees.

National Defence committee  I'm always delighted to speak, and I'll do it any time anybody wants to listen, but that could be a trait of being an ex-admiral.

National Defence committee  Absolutely.

National Defence committee  As I just mentioned, I did the mission in the Arabian Sea. I took a tanker with me, and we did a six-month deployment to the Arabian Sea to do counterterrorism and counterpiracy. One of the challenges I had when I was there was that we didn't have adequate air assets to do the su

National Defence committee  I would agree that it's largely a political challenge. I'm not sure how you get the debate going. I'm not the expert in that area, but we're undoubtedly not doing it.

National Defence committee  I spoke about the Navy for a period of time when I came back from doing the counter-piracy, counterterrorism mission in the Arabian Sea. Truthfully, you'd speak to an Ontario audience and they would often say, “What do we need a navy for? We have a bridge.” When you have so much

National Defence committee  There's always been a challenge. We went through years of challenge with the brewing conflict between Turkey and Greece. There have always been challenges within the alliance, so this isn't necessarily something new. There is enormous propensity for any nation that starts to go d

National Defence committee  First of all, I think we need to remember that only two years ago, Turkey shot down a Russian airplane. Turkey is pursuing its own path. That path will sometimes mean that Turkey builds relationships with its nearest neighbours, and sometimes that path will be more focused on the

National Defence committee  I've always viewed NATO as a bit of a buffet. Some of us like the shrimp and some of us like the beef. Every member of the alliance looks for something a little different from that buffet. They're looking for different things. We're not all on the same page and we should recogniz

National Defence committee  Yes. I'll be very quick. We need to remember that NATO wasn't started as an organization to do deployed operations, so there are widely divergent views within the alliance on what the nature of NATO operations really ought to be. There has been an enormous amount of reluctance o

National Defence committee  The real strength of the shipbuilding strategy would have been, in my view, to get us down the path of continuous shipbuilding. You get industry started and then you get into producing flights of ships and you continuously build ships. Much of the analysis today would say that it