I'm glad you raised this. Canadians sometimes don't fully understand the need for submarines. It is very simple: If you don't have submarines, you don't have sovereignty. Right? You need to have submarines to provide that sovereignty, especially in the three oceans that we have, and with the impact of climate change, things are opening up. Our subs indeed need some significant investments and they will get them.
We did have the operations that were conducted, but we must be mindful that those were significant. We'll have to go back a very long time to when subs were deployed that far. The subs need to get into a regular maintenance cycle as well and that's what you saw there. They will be deployed, but the bigger projects for the upgrading of submarines are going to happen. A decision was made by the navy to upgrade these submarines because they provide a very important and unique capability that is needed. Based on what the navy's needs were to upgrade, that decision was made, and we will be looking at what the future replacement needs will be.
Let's not forget that we also have to look at a lot of the technology we're working on. Through this time, there's some interesting and very good research that's being done to look at not only what the needs are going to be, but what the capability is going to be in the future.
They do play a very important role, and all of this is going to be looked into as we have the greater long-term discussions about NORAD modernization.