I think we can predict no better and no worse than anybody else, as you indicate.
I'll speak to ships. I spent a lot of time in that domain. As you indicated, the costs are about one-third acquisition and one-third personnel. If you look at the $100 billion we more or less forecast from a whole-life perspective for the next version of warships, that's what we're talking about. For some of them it would be part of that, meaning personnel costs. We also look at historical costs.
When we developed the through-life costs, the rough order of magnitude numbers, for the surface combatants, it was based on our experience of the Halifax class, the Iroquois class, and things of that nature.
In our budgetary process, of course, we have, on the capital side, the long-term accrual, the long-term budgeting profile. For the operations and maintenance personnel, as you'll appreciate, we have vote 1 done annually in the estimates. So at times we look at the money that's available, and we respond accordingly.
It is hard to predict, but we do have decades of experience of understanding how to do maintenance. There is almost a natural cycle of ebbs and flows. We will look when can we do more heavy maintenance, when we need to defer maintenance, when we can pick it up again, particularly in that long cycle of heavy maintenance.
Beyond the rough order of magnitude estimates, we can't comment on whole-life costs, but we do a lot of work. Our chief financial officer is heavily engaged in that. He has an economist who looks at future costs, including fuel. We have a departmental economic model. We have a cost factors manual that captures all of this on an annual basis. Every year, we capture personnel costs and the cost of operating and maintaining all of our large fleets, as well as the personnel costs, which allow us to see and project into the future. However, it is macro-economic at best.
As we come into more of a three-year profile we do very detailed costing, on maintenance, for example. For the funds that come to me under the national procurement budget—about $2.5 billion a year—we do very detailed work as well. We have a good three to five-year plan, and much rougher order of magnitude estimates downrange.
I think that would be the same for all of our allies. In fact, many of our allies shy away from any kind of through-life life costing. As I talked about, even in the acquisition piece they tend to look at the artifact and try to stay away from infrastructure and other things.
Frankly, I think in Canada we're more forthcoming about looking at the total budget, the total cost. Most of our allies in fact don't go there.