Wednesday, December 19, 2012
"The Force of the 21st Century" (National Press Club)
12/18/2012You are subscribed to Secretary of Defense Speeches for U.S. Department of Defense. This information has recently been updated, and is now available.
"The Force of the 21st Century" (National Press Club)
12/18/2012 03:46 PM CST
"The Force of the 21st Century" (National Press Club)
As Delivered by Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta, Washington DC, Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Thank you very much, Theresa, for that kind introduction. And thank you for the invitation to be here today. I look forward to the opportunity to go back and pick walnuts back in Carmel Valley. I've told this story before, but it makes the point. When I was young, my father -- when he first planted that walnut orchard, as it grew, he would go around with a pole and hook and shake each of the branches. And my brother and I would be underneath collecting the walnuts. When I got elected to Congress, my Italian father said, "You've been well trained to go to Washington, because you've been dodging nuts all your life."
True. It was great training.
I've had the opportunity to be here at the Press Club in, obviously, some of my past jobs as a member of Congress, as OMB Director, and then as chief of staff. In those jobs, words were both my weapon and my shield. In this job, as Secretary of Defense, I have a hell of a lot more going for me, but in a democracy, words remain the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. And it's for that reason that it is an honor for me to again be here at the National Press Club.
I've long had a deep and abiding respect for the Washington press corps. You play an essential role in making our democracy strong by holding leaders and holding institutions accountable to the people they serve. As Secretary of Defense, and in my past jobs, I learned that it was important to be accessible to the press and to be transparent with them with regards to the issues and challenges that you confront. And in this job, I've tried to be as accessible as I can to the Pentagon press corps, to engage regularly with reporters and to encourage other senior officials in the department to do the same.
It is an especially important time to communicate our vision and our priorities as a department, because as I've said time and time and time again over this past year, I believe that we are at a strategic turning point.
After more than a decade of war, the longest extended period of conflict in the history of the United States, at the beginning of 2012, President Obama and the military and civilian leaders of the department came together to publicly release a new defense strategy. It was designed to help the military effectively navigate this turning point and prepare for the future.
Under that strategy, our goal was to reshape the force of the 21st century, to try to meet the new security challenges that we're confronting in this world and try to help the country at the same time reduce the deficits that we're confronting.
We were handed a number in the Budget Control Act to reduce the defense budget by $487 billion over the next decade, almost a half a trillion dollars. And based on my own budget experience at the time, I knew that the approach should be not to just simply cut it across the board and hollow out the force, but to try to develop a strategy for what is it we want the Defense Department to be not just now, but going into the future, as well. And that was the purpose of why we developed the strategy.
As the year 2012 draws to a close, today I want to describe the strategic environment that is shaping our future plans, the progress we have made toward implementing this strategy, and the risks that we face as we work every day to try to keep America safe and secure.
Before I continue, let me just pay tribute to a couple people here who join me at the head table. My Deputy Secretary, Ash Carter, has played and continues to play a crucial role in helping me and DOD develop and implement the strategy, and I deeply appreciate his dedication and commitment to the department. And I also want to pay tribute to my Undersecretary for Policy, Jim Miller, who's also here, who also worked very hard on that strategy to ensure that we develop the right strategy for the future.
And I should also say, Marty Dempsey and all of the members, our service chiefs, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all participated. We all participated in a kind of unprecedented effort to try to openly discuss what were the best steps we could take for the future.
This is a time of historic change for the United States military. One year ago today, soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division crossed out of Iraq into Kuwait as part of the last convoy of U.S. troops to leave Iraq. That war came to an end.
Last year, we also participated in a complex, but successful NATO mission that helped bring down Gadhafi and give Libya back to the Libyan people. It was a complex operation. When you have that many nations involved in a mission, how do you decide targets? How do you determine who goes after those targets? And yet we were able to bring that kind of coordination together, and it served NATO and the United States very well in that effort. And it creates, I think, very much a model for how we should approach the future, if we have to face that kind of situation again.
Our military and intelligence operations -- and that's one of the things I'm very proud of over these last four years, is the integration between intelligence and military operations when it comes to going after terrorists. Over the last year, as a result of those operations, we continue to significantly weaken Al Qaeda's core leadership and put real pressure on their affiliates. We are also now working to bring the conflict in Afghanistan to a successful transition by the end of 2014.
Last week, I made my eighth trip to Afghanistan. I had a chance to sit down with all of our military commanders throughout the region, throughout the country. I also went to Kandahar and met with our military commanders there and also had the opportunity to meet with Afghan leaders, as well. All of them believe that we have fundamentally turned the tide in that effort, after years in which we lacked the right strategy and the necessary resources to try to achieve the mission we are embarked on.
We now have a plan in place, a campaign plan, endorsed in Chicago by NATO, that has strong international support. We've reversed a five-year trend of growing violence. The Taliban to this day has not been able over this last year to regain any of the territory they lost. We are building Afghan security forces that are on track to take the lead for securing the entire country next year.
We continue to transition both governance and security to the Afghans. Seventy-five percent of the population has now been transitioned to Afghan security and control, and next year, we will have 100 percent.
But we've also made clear that our commitment to Afghanistan, as we draw down by the end of 2014, our commitment will continue. We are transitioning; we are not leaving. We will maintain an enduring presence aimed at supporting Afghan forces and ensuring the mission that we were embarked on in Afghanistan, the mission that Al Qaeda never again regains Afghanistan as a safe haven from which to attack the United States or our allies.
After more than 10 years of continuous warfare, deployment after deployment after deployment of our men and women in uniform in these wars, the United States is truly at a critical point. As I said, large-scale conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are drawing to an end. An era of blank-check defense spending is over, and forces will be reduced. And all of this occurs as the United States faces an array of asymmetric threats in the world.
Even while it is obvious that we do not live in a world where another superpower threatens our military supremacy, it is equally obvious that the threats to our security and our global interests are not receding, as they appeared to do in past wars, coming out of World War II, coming out of Korea, coming out of Vietnam, coming out of the end of the Cold War, where the threats receded. The fact is today we still confront these threats in the world, threats that are more complex, more dispersed, and in many ways, more dangerous.
We have made progress. We have made progress against Al Qaeda's core leaders and its affiliates in the FATA. We continue to do it in Yemen and in Somalia. But Al Qaeda is seeking new footholds throughout the Middle East and in countries like Mali, in North Africa. It remains determined to attack the United States and remains one of the serious threats that we must deal with.
North Korea, Iran continue to pose a proliferation threat and are engaged in activities that are destabilizing Northeast Asia and the Middle East. The conflict in Syria is bringing a violent end to a regime that harbors a large stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, and extremists seek to destabilize a nuclear-armed Pakistan. Increasing military spending by rising powers in the Asia Pacific region and turmoil across the Middle East and North Africa are altering the strategic landscape.
At the same time, the nature of military conflict is changing because of the new technologies, like cyber and the proliferation of missiles and WMD. We are seeing potential adversaries -- state and non-state actors alike -- acquire more advanced hybrid and high-end capabilities designed to frustrate the conventional advantages of our armed forces. This means that the military services must remain vigilant, they must remain strong, they must remain prepared to operate in a way that differs significantly from the past.
We will continue to face terrorism and deadly attacks by IEDs, but we must also be ready for more capable adversaries to attack our forces and our homeland in cyberspace, to attack and launch precision strikes against forward bases, to attempt to cripple our power grid, our financial systems, our government systems, to attempt to deny us freedom of action through asymmetric attacks.
As I said, the goal of our new defense strategy is to help shape the force of the 21st century, to try to adapt our forces and operating concepts so that we are better prepared for an unpredictable and dangerous future, even in an era of constrained resources. We have been determined to avoid the approach taken in past drawdowns, where, as I said, there were deep, across-the-board cuts that hollowed out the force and weakened our military, left the military demoralized and unready to carry out the missions assigned to it.
Instead, we have set priorities and made tough decisions to try to build the force of the future and to remain the strongest military power on the face of the Earth.
The strategy consists of five elements. We have already made significant progress this year towards implementing that strategy. And let me describe, if I can, the strategy and what we have done.
The first element of the strategy is to build a force that is clearly going to be smaller and leaner. That's a reality. We are going to be smaller; we are going to be leaner coming out of these last wars. But we must ensure that at the same time the military is agile, flexible, and technologically advanced, and prepared to deploy as quickly as we can to confront crises in this dangerous world.
Facing constrained resources and the drawdown of two troop- intensive wars, we made a decision to favor a smaller and more ready force over a larger force that would be less well-equipped and less trained. As a result, Army end strength is going to be gradually reduced to 490,000 soldiers over these next 5 to 10 years from a high of about 570,000, still well above the force levels that we had in 9/11. And the size of the Marine Corps will also be reduced slightly to about 182,000 from a peak of about 202,000 during the past decade.
We are also making investments to be capable of more quickly confronting a wider range of threats across a more dispersed geography. This past February, the Navy and Marine Corps conducted their first large-scale amphibious exercise in more than 10 years. In March, the Army conducted its first exercise in its new decisive action training environment that emphasizes combined arms maneuver against a combination of irregular and near-peer conventional opponents.
The second element of our defense strategy is to maintain our force projection where we need it, in the Middle East and in the Asia Pacific region. The Asia Pacific region is, obviously, an area of growing importance to our economy and our security. And the Middle East, obviously, represents continuing threats to our security, as well. Even after the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, we have maintained a substantial military presence in the Middle East in order to deter aggression, respond to crisis, ensure regional stability in the face of historic unrest and the continuing threat from Iran.
Last week, I visited some of our troops based in Kuwait, part of a robust Gulf posture that includes roughly 50,000 troops, dozens of ships, fighters, bombers, advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms. We are partnering closely with the Gulf states to boost their capacity in critical areas, such as missile defense and countermining, which will help reduce the pressure to sustain these large deployments over the long term.
I also visited Incirlik, the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, where I announced the deployment of the two U.S. Patriot missile batteries as part of a NATO effort to try to help protect our Turkish allies against the threat of missiles from Syria.
Even as we have asserted our strong and enduring commitment to the Middle East, we are also renewing and expanding our engagement in the Asia Pacific region. The core of our rebalance is modernizing our existing network of alliances and security partnerships throughout the region and developing new security relations, as well.
Over the past year, we reached major agreements with Japan to realign our forces and jointly develop Guam as a strategic hub. We've worked to strengthen cooperation with the Republic of Korea in space, in cyberspace, in intelligence. And we began a new Marine rotational deployment to Australia, as well as increased Air Force cooperation. Likewise, we are deepening our engagement and developing rotational deployments with allies and partners such as Singapore and the Philippines and expanding our mil-to-mil dialogue and exchanges with China. We are also enhancing our presence and capabilities in the region. That includes reallocating the naval fleet to achieve in these next few years a 60/40 split between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans -- hopefully, we will do that by 2020 -- increasing Army and Marine presence in the region after Iraq and Afghanistan, locating our most advanced aircraft in the Pacific, including new deployments of F-22s and the MV-22 Ospreys to Japan, and laying the groundwork for the first overseas deployment of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to Iwakuni in 2017.
The third element of our strategy is that as we do force projection in the Asia Pacific and in the Middle East, we still have to maintain our global leadership and presence by building innovative partnerships and partner capacity across the globe and using these innovative rotational deployments as a way to do exercises and training with other countries, developing their capabilities so that they can help provide for their own security, in Latin America, in Africa, in Europe and elsewhere.
The past decade of war has reinforced the lesson that one of the most effective ways to address long-term security challenges is to help build the capabilities of our allies. We have seen this approach with our counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and our counterterrorism efforts in Yemen and Somalia.
We are expanding our security force assistance to a wider range of partners in order to address a broader range of security challenges in Asia Pacific, in the Middle East, and as I said, in Europe, Africa and Latin America. To implement this element of the strategy, the services are retaining the security cooperation capabilities we have honed over a decade of war and making investments in regional expertise. For example, through the Army's new regionally-aligned brigade structure, they are able to, in fact, engage on a rotational basis to assist other countries.
The entire U.S. government is working to make our security cooperation, particularly foreign military sales, more responsive and more effective, to cut through the bureaucracy, to cut through the red tape, to be able to provide the assistance that we need to other countries without delay.
We're particularly seeking to boost defense trade with rising powers like Brazil and India. I visited these countries recently to help advance those growing defense partnerships, and Ash Carter has also made an effort in a new joint U.S.-India initiative to boost defense cooperation and trade and streamline our respective export control processes. In order to remain the security partner of choice, the United States must maintain our decisive military edge and adapt to meeting [emerging] threats.
The fourth element of the new defense strategy is that we must always remain capable of being able to confront and defeat aggression from more than one adversary at a time anywhere, anytime. That means if we're engaged in a conflict on the Korean Peninsula and Iran attempts to close the Straits of Hormuz, we must be capable of being able to respond decisively to both locations.
With the strategy we've developed, we believe we have that capability. We're maintaining our ability to simultaneously operate in multiple theaters by investing in critical power projection capabilities, our aircraft carrier fleet, our big-deck amphibious fleet, a new afloat forward staging base, and long-range strike capabilities.
We're also making new investments in the next-generation bomber, a next-generation tanker that will afford our air forces greater mobility, and working every day to put our Joint Strike Fighter program on a firmer footing. To stay ahead of the growing capabilities of potential adversaries and ensure our ability to quickly defeat aggression, we have begun to re-examine our plans in order to ensure that we are prepared for the most realistic scenarios for new and unconventional threats and for asymmetric attacks. We are also refining emerging operational concepts, including joint operational access in air-sea battle that will ensure our ability to project power in areas where our enemies seek to deny us access.
And the fifth element, the last element of our strategy, is that this cannot just be about cutting back on defense. We must also be able to invest in the future, to protect and prioritize key investments in technology and new capabilities, as well as our capacity to grow, to adapt, and to mobilize as needed.
Throughout the strategy review, I made clear that this cannot be simply an exercise, a budget exercise in deciding where we're going to cut. We've made those decisions. We've looked at better efficiencies. We have looked at reductions in force structure. We have looked at procurement reforms. We have looked at compensation. All of those areas were part of our budget proposal to try to achieve the $487 billion in savings. But if we are to maintain the finest military in the world, the finest military power in the world, we have got to invest in priority missions for the future.
For example, despite budget reductions, we are expanding our fleet of unmanned systems -- this is the future -- including new carrier launched surveillance and strike aircraft. In order to boost priority counterterrorism and build partner capacity efforts, we're continuing a planned growth in special operations forces which will reach 72,000 by 2017, more than double the number we had on 9/11.
We have protected investments in countering weapons of mass destruction and accelerated testing of mobile air-sampling systems and ground sensors for nuclear forensics, and we are significantly increasing our cyber capabilities, including our greatest asset -- talented, bright manpower.
The department has also recently developed new rules of engagement in cyberspace that clarify our mission to defend the nation and will enable us to more quickly respond to cyber threats. We are also protecting our ability to re-grow and mobilize the force by emphasizing our Guard and our reserve readiness and protecting a strong industrial base. If we face a crisis, if I have to mobilize, the last damn thing I can do is to contract that responsibility out to another country. I have got to rely on our industrial security base to be there and be able to respond.
These are the five elements of the defense strategy and some of the important steps that we've taken so far to implement it. As a department, we are continuing to refine that strategy, and we will continue to do that, to assess the risks that might prevent us from effectively implementing it.
But right now, as I speak, I see two principal risks. The first risk is the stress on the force, which is still operating at a very high tempo more than 11 years after September 11th. We are still at war in Afghanistan. We have been on a crisis posture in the Middle East and North Africa for the past year. And we will continue to maintain a strong presence in that region even as we rebalance to the Asia Pacific area.
Our outstanding men and women in uniform are the foundation of everything we do. As I've often said, I've got great weapons, I've got great ships, I've got great bombers. None of that is worth a damn without the U.S. men and women in uniform that serve this country.
We need to ensure that servicemembers and their families have the support that they have earned in areas like health and education and employment, and they transition back into their communities so that they can be able to go back home and re-establish their ties to their communities.
In our budget, we've made a concerted effort to ensure the health of the force, their readiness, by protecting operations and maintenance accounts, but keeping the fastest and most flexible weapons platforms, sustaining investment to high-quality personnel and research in science and technology.
But nevertheless, there is pressure on the department to retain excess force structure and infrastructure instead of investing in the training and equipment that makes our force agile and flexible and ready. Aircraft, ships, tanks, bases, even those that have outlived their usefulness have a natural political constituency. Readiness does not. What's more, readiness is too often sacrificed in favor of a larger and less effective force. I am determined to avoid that outcome.
Therefore, I've directed that readiness be treated as a strategic imperative for the department, and we have launched an initiative to assess and improve our readiness across the board. Our effort to do everything possible to ensure a ready force also explains why we express concerns about what we saw in the House and Senate 2013 defense authorization bills. What they did was, in their markups and in the bills that passed each of the houses, diverted about $74 billion of what we asked for in savings in our proposed budget to the Congress, and they diverted them to other areas that, frankly, we don't need.
Final legislation I know is now being negotiated in conference, and we are working -- I come from the Congress, I know the Congress, and we will work with our partners there to try to improve it. And I'm hopeful that we will ultimately arrive at a bill that allows us to continue implementing the strategy we've designed effectively.
We must make every dollar count, and we must continue to carefully manage the balance, sustaining current operations, being ready to respond to crisis and emerging threats, preparing for future operations, and investing in the capabilities of the future.
Balancing these needs effectively requires resources and budget stability, which brings me to the second and greatest risk facing this new defense strategy: a political system that is depriving the department of the budget certainty we need in order to plan for the future.
For more than a year, this department has been operating under the shadow of sequestration, this mindless mechanism that was put in place in order to somehow force the Congress to do the right thing. Because of political gridlock, this department still faces the possibility of another round of across-the-board cuts totaling almost $500 billion that will inflict lasting damage on our national defense and hurt the very men and women who protect this country.
Wherever I visit our troops, wherever I visit our troops, they make clear their concern about those cuts. What does it mean for them? And what does it mean for their families? It is unacceptable to me that men and women who put their lives on the line every day in distant lands have to worry about whether those here in Washington can effectively support them.
We're down to the wire now. In these next few days, Congress needs to make the right decision and to avoid the fiscal disaster that awaits us. My hope is that they will do the right thing and that we will achieve a bipartisan consensus on deficit reduction and the trajectory of defense spending in the future. Otherwise we will weaken this nation in the minds of our allies, our partners, and our potential adversaries, and undermine the work and the sacrifices that our troops are making every single day.
It's easy to get cynical and frustrated in this town. And after 40 years, I know my level of cynicism and frustration. But my confidence and my hope for the future is restored every time I have the opportunity to visit with our troops on the front lines, as I did last week. In them, I see the spirit of public service that has kept this country strong for more than two centuries and which has helped us to overcome every period of crisis and adversity in our history.
That spirit of public service is also in evidence here at this monument to democracy, the National Press Club. Journalists who commit themselves to doggedly pursuing the truth and telling the everyday stories of American people are public servants in their own right.
On my last trip, I was honored to be accompanied by Cami McCormick, an award-winning radio reporter for CBS News who three years ago suffered a terrible injury from an IED attack while covering the war in Afghanistan. It was truly an emotional experience to be with her as she returned back to Afghanistan for the first time after that injury. She put her own life at risk in order to tell the story of that war.
And in her and so many other war correspondents, we see the highest ideals of democracy upheld. We will soon unveil a new exhibit outside the Pentagon Press Briefing Room to honor those journalists who've died in the line of duty over the past decade of war. Alongside the more than 6,000 American servicemembers who have paid the ultimate price since September 11th, these journalists died to preserve our democracy and a government of, by, and for all people. They are heroes, all of them, and I know they will remain forever in our hearts and minds as we continue the hard work of fighting to build a better and safer and more secure future for our children and for the United States of America
"The Force of the 21st Century" (National Press Club)
12/18/2012You are subscribed to Secretary of Defense Speeches for U.S. Department of Defense. This information has recently been updated, and is now available.
"The Force of the 21st Century" (National Press Club)
12/18/2012 03:46 PM CST
"The Force of the 21st Century" (National Press Club)
As Delivered by Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta, Washington DC, Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Thank you very much, Theresa, for that kind introduction. And thank you for the invitation to be here today. I look forward to the opportunity to go back and pick walnuts back in Carmel Valley. I've told this story before, but it makes the point. When I was young, my father -- when he first planted that walnut orchard, as it grew, he would go around with a pole and hook and shake each of the branches. And my brother and I would be underneath collecting the walnuts. When I got elected to Congress, my Italian father said, "You've been well trained to go to Washington, because you've been dodging nuts all your life."
True. It was great training.
I've had the opportunity to be here at the Press Club in, obviously, some of my past jobs as a member of Congress, as OMB Director, and then as chief of staff. In those jobs, words were both my weapon and my shield. In this job, as Secretary of Defense, I have a hell of a lot more going for me, but in a democracy, words remain the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. And it's for that reason that it is an honor for me to again be here at the National Press Club.
I've long had a deep and abiding respect for the Washington press corps. You play an essential role in making our democracy strong by holding leaders and holding institutions accountable to the people they serve. As Secretary of Defense, and in my past jobs, I learned that it was important to be accessible to the press and to be transparent with them with regards to the issues and challenges that you confront. And in this job, I've tried to be as accessible as I can to the Pentagon press corps, to engage regularly with reporters and to encourage other senior officials in the department to do the same.
It is an especially important time to communicate our vision and our priorities as a department, because as I've said time and time and time again over this past year, I believe that we are at a strategic turning point.
After more than a decade of war, the longest extended period of conflict in the history of the United States, at the beginning of 2012, President Obama and the military and civilian leaders of the department came together to publicly release a new defense strategy. It was designed to help the military effectively navigate this turning point and prepare for the future.
Under that strategy, our goal was to reshape the force of the 21st century, to try to meet the new security challenges that we're confronting in this world and try to help the country at the same time reduce the deficits that we're confronting.
We were handed a number in the Budget Control Act to reduce the defense budget by $487 billion over the next decade, almost a half a trillion dollars. And based on my own budget experience at the time, I knew that the approach should be not to just simply cut it across the board and hollow out the force, but to try to develop a strategy for what is it we want the Defense Department to be not just now, but going into the future, as well. And that was the purpose of why we developed the strategy.
As the year 2012 draws to a close, today I want to describe the strategic environment that is shaping our future plans, the progress we have made toward implementing this strategy, and the risks that we face as we work every day to try to keep America safe and secure.
Before I continue, let me just pay tribute to a couple people here who join me at the head table. My Deputy Secretary, Ash Carter, has played and continues to play a crucial role in helping me and DOD develop and implement the strategy, and I deeply appreciate his dedication and commitment to the department. And I also want to pay tribute to my Undersecretary for Policy, Jim Miller, who's also here, who also worked very hard on that strategy to ensure that we develop the right strategy for the future.
And I should also say, Marty Dempsey and all of the members, our service chiefs, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all participated. We all participated in a kind of unprecedented effort to try to openly discuss what were the best steps we could take for the future.
This is a time of historic change for the United States military. One year ago today, soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division crossed out of Iraq into Kuwait as part of the last convoy of U.S. troops to leave Iraq. That war came to an end.
Last year, we also participated in a complex, but successful NATO mission that helped bring down Gadhafi and give Libya back to the Libyan people. It was a complex operation. When you have that many nations involved in a mission, how do you decide targets? How do you determine who goes after those targets? And yet we were able to bring that kind of coordination together, and it served NATO and the United States very well in that effort. And it creates, I think, very much a model for how we should approach the future, if we have to face that kind of situation again.
Our military and intelligence operations -- and that's one of the things I'm very proud of over these last four years, is the integration between intelligence and military operations when it comes to going after terrorists. Over the last year, as a result of those operations, we continue to significantly weaken Al Qaeda's core leadership and put real pressure on their affiliates. We are also now working to bring the conflict in Afghanistan to a successful transition by the end of 2014.
Last week, I made my eighth trip to Afghanistan. I had a chance to sit down with all of our military commanders throughout the region, throughout the country. I also went to Kandahar and met with our military commanders there and also had the opportunity to meet with Afghan leaders, as well. All of them believe that we have fundamentally turned the tide in that effort, after years in which we lacked the right strategy and the necessary resources to try to achieve the mission we are embarked on.
We now have a plan in place, a campaign plan, endorsed in Chicago by NATO, that has strong international support. We've reversed a five-year trend of growing violence. The Taliban to this day has not been able over this last year to regain any of the territory they lost. We are building Afghan security forces that are on track to take the lead for securing the entire country next year.
We continue to transition both governance and security to the Afghans. Seventy-five percent of the population has now been transitioned to Afghan security and control, and next year, we will have 100 percent.
But we've also made clear that our commitment to Afghanistan, as we draw down by the end of 2014, our commitment will continue. We are transitioning; we are not leaving. We will maintain an enduring presence aimed at supporting Afghan forces and ensuring the mission that we were embarked on in Afghanistan, the mission that Al Qaeda never again regains Afghanistan as a safe haven from which to attack the United States or our allies.
After more than 10 years of continuous warfare, deployment after deployment after deployment of our men and women in uniform in these wars, the United States is truly at a critical point. As I said, large-scale conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are drawing to an end. An era of blank-check defense spending is over, and forces will be reduced. And all of this occurs as the United States faces an array of asymmetric threats in the world.
Even while it is obvious that we do not live in a world where another superpower threatens our military supremacy, it is equally obvious that the threats to our security and our global interests are not receding, as they appeared to do in past wars, coming out of World War II, coming out of Korea, coming out of Vietnam, coming out of the end of the Cold War, where the threats receded. The fact is today we still confront these threats in the world, threats that are more complex, more dispersed, and in many ways, more dangerous.
We have made progress. We have made progress against Al Qaeda's core leaders and its affiliates in the FATA. We continue to do it in Yemen and in Somalia. But Al Qaeda is seeking new footholds throughout the Middle East and in countries like Mali, in North Africa. It remains determined to attack the United States and remains one of the serious threats that we must deal with.
North Korea, Iran continue to pose a proliferation threat and are engaged in activities that are destabilizing Northeast Asia and the Middle East. The conflict in Syria is bringing a violent end to a regime that harbors a large stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, and extremists seek to destabilize a nuclear-armed Pakistan. Increasing military spending by rising powers in the Asia Pacific region and turmoil across the Middle East and North Africa are altering the strategic landscape.
At the same time, the nature of military conflict is changing because of the new technologies, like cyber and the proliferation of missiles and WMD. We are seeing potential adversaries -- state and non-state actors alike -- acquire more advanced hybrid and high-end capabilities designed to frustrate the conventional advantages of our armed forces. This means that the military services must remain vigilant, they must remain strong, they must remain prepared to operate in a way that differs significantly from the past.
We will continue to face terrorism and deadly attacks by IEDs, but we must also be ready for more capable adversaries to attack our forces and our homeland in cyberspace, to attack and launch precision strikes against forward bases, to attempt to cripple our power grid, our financial systems, our government systems, to attempt to deny us freedom of action through asymmetric attacks.
As I said, the goal of our new defense strategy is to help shape the force of the 21st century, to try to adapt our forces and operating concepts so that we are better prepared for an unpredictable and dangerous future, even in an era of constrained resources. We have been determined to avoid the approach taken in past drawdowns, where, as I said, there were deep, across-the-board cuts that hollowed out the force and weakened our military, left the military demoralized and unready to carry out the missions assigned to it.
Instead, we have set priorities and made tough decisions to try to build the force of the future and to remain the strongest military power on the face of the Earth.
The strategy consists of five elements. We have already made significant progress this year towards implementing that strategy. And let me describe, if I can, the strategy and what we have done.
The first element of the strategy is to build a force that is clearly going to be smaller and leaner. That's a reality. We are going to be smaller; we are going to be leaner coming out of these last wars. But we must ensure that at the same time the military is agile, flexible, and technologically advanced, and prepared to deploy as quickly as we can to confront crises in this dangerous world.
Facing constrained resources and the drawdown of two troop- intensive wars, we made a decision to favor a smaller and more ready force over a larger force that would be less well-equipped and less trained. As a result, Army end strength is going to be gradually reduced to 490,000 soldiers over these next 5 to 10 years from a high of about 570,000, still well above the force levels that we had in 9/11. And the size of the Marine Corps will also be reduced slightly to about 182,000 from a peak of about 202,000 during the past decade.
We are also making investments to be capable of more quickly confronting a wider range of threats across a more dispersed geography. This past February, the Navy and Marine Corps conducted their first large-scale amphibious exercise in more than 10 years. In March, the Army conducted its first exercise in its new decisive action training environment that emphasizes combined arms maneuver against a combination of irregular and near-peer conventional opponents.
The second element of our defense strategy is to maintain our force projection where we need it, in the Middle East and in the Asia Pacific region. The Asia Pacific region is, obviously, an area of growing importance to our economy and our security. And the Middle East, obviously, represents continuing threats to our security, as well. Even after the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, we have maintained a substantial military presence in the Middle East in order to deter aggression, respond to crisis, ensure regional stability in the face of historic unrest and the continuing threat from Iran.
Last week, I visited some of our troops based in Kuwait, part of a robust Gulf posture that includes roughly 50,000 troops, dozens of ships, fighters, bombers, advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms. We are partnering closely with the Gulf states to boost their capacity in critical areas, such as missile defense and countermining, which will help reduce the pressure to sustain these large deployments over the long term.
I also visited Incirlik, the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, where I announced the deployment of the two U.S. Patriot missile batteries as part of a NATO effort to try to help protect our Turkish allies against the threat of missiles from Syria.
Even as we have asserted our strong and enduring commitment to the Middle East, we are also renewing and expanding our engagement in the Asia Pacific region. The core of our rebalance is modernizing our existing network of alliances and security partnerships throughout the region and developing new security relations, as well.
Over the past year, we reached major agreements with Japan to realign our forces and jointly develop Guam as a strategic hub. We've worked to strengthen cooperation with the Republic of Korea in space, in cyberspace, in intelligence. And we began a new Marine rotational deployment to Australia, as well as increased Air Force cooperation. Likewise, we are deepening our engagement and developing rotational deployments with allies and partners such as Singapore and the Philippines and expanding our mil-to-mil dialogue and exchanges with China. We are also enhancing our presence and capabilities in the region. That includes reallocating the naval fleet to achieve in these next few years a 60/40 split between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans -- hopefully, we will do that by 2020 -- increasing Army and Marine presence in the region after Iraq and Afghanistan, locating our most advanced aircraft in the Pacific, including new deployments of F-22s and the MV-22 Ospreys to Japan, and laying the groundwork for the first overseas deployment of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to Iwakuni in 2017.
The third element of our strategy is that as we do force projection in the Asia Pacific and in the Middle East, we still have to maintain our global leadership and presence by building innovative partnerships and partner capacity across the globe and using these innovative rotational deployments as a way to do exercises and training with other countries, developing their capabilities so that they can help provide for their own security, in Latin America, in Africa, in Europe and elsewhere.
The past decade of war has reinforced the lesson that one of the most effective ways to address long-term security challenges is to help build the capabilities of our allies. We have seen this approach with our counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and our counterterrorism efforts in Yemen and Somalia.
We are expanding our security force assistance to a wider range of partners in order to address a broader range of security challenges in Asia Pacific, in the Middle East, and as I said, in Europe, Africa and Latin America. To implement this element of the strategy, the services are retaining the security cooperation capabilities we have honed over a decade of war and making investments in regional expertise. For example, through the Army's new regionally-aligned brigade structure, they are able to, in fact, engage on a rotational basis to assist other countries.
The entire U.S. government is working to make our security cooperation, particularly foreign military sales, more responsive and more effective, to cut through the bureaucracy, to cut through the red tape, to be able to provide the assistance that we need to other countries without delay.
We're particularly seeking to boost defense trade with rising powers like Brazil and India. I visited these countries recently to help advance those growing defense partnerships, and Ash Carter has also made an effort in a new joint U.S.-India initiative to boost defense cooperation and trade and streamline our respective export control processes. In order to remain the security partner of choice, the United States must maintain our decisive military edge and adapt to meeting [emerging] threats.
The fourth element of the new defense strategy is that we must always remain capable of being able to confront and defeat aggression from more than one adversary at a time anywhere, anytime. That means if we're engaged in a conflict on the Korean Peninsula and Iran attempts to close the Straits of Hormuz, we must be capable of being able to respond decisively to both locations.
With the strategy we've developed, we believe we have that capability. We're maintaining our ability to simultaneously operate in multiple theaters by investing in critical power projection capabilities, our aircraft carrier fleet, our big-deck amphibious fleet, a new afloat forward staging base, and long-range strike capabilities.
We're also making new investments in the next-generation bomber, a next-generation tanker that will afford our air forces greater mobility, and working every day to put our Joint Strike Fighter program on a firmer footing. To stay ahead of the growing capabilities of potential adversaries and ensure our ability to quickly defeat aggression, we have begun to re-examine our plans in order to ensure that we are prepared for the most realistic scenarios for new and unconventional threats and for asymmetric attacks. We are also refining emerging operational concepts, including joint operational access in air-sea battle that will ensure our ability to project power in areas where our enemies seek to deny us access.
And the fifth element, the last element of our strategy, is that this cannot just be about cutting back on defense. We must also be able to invest in the future, to protect and prioritize key investments in technology and new capabilities, as well as our capacity to grow, to adapt, and to mobilize as needed.
Throughout the strategy review, I made clear that this cannot be simply an exercise, a budget exercise in deciding where we're going to cut. We've made those decisions. We've looked at better efficiencies. We have looked at reductions in force structure. We have looked at procurement reforms. We have looked at compensation. All of those areas were part of our budget proposal to try to achieve the $487 billion in savings. But if we are to maintain the finest military in the world, the finest military power in the world, we have got to invest in priority missions for the future.
For example, despite budget reductions, we are expanding our fleet of unmanned systems -- this is the future -- including new carrier launched surveillance and strike aircraft. In order to boost priority counterterrorism and build partner capacity efforts, we're continuing a planned growth in special operations forces which will reach 72,000 by 2017, more than double the number we had on 9/11.
We have protected investments in countering weapons of mass destruction and accelerated testing of mobile air-sampling systems and ground sensors for nuclear forensics, and we are significantly increasing our cyber capabilities, including our greatest asset -- talented, bright manpower.
The department has also recently developed new rules of engagement in cyberspace that clarify our mission to defend the nation and will enable us to more quickly respond to cyber threats. We are also protecting our ability to re-grow and mobilize the force by emphasizing our Guard and our reserve readiness and protecting a strong industrial base. If we face a crisis, if I have to mobilize, the last damn thing I can do is to contract that responsibility out to another country. I have got to rely on our industrial security base to be there and be able to respond.
These are the five elements of the defense strategy and some of the important steps that we've taken so far to implement it. As a department, we are continuing to refine that strategy, and we will continue to do that, to assess the risks that might prevent us from effectively implementing it.
But right now, as I speak, I see two principal risks. The first risk is the stress on the force, which is still operating at a very high tempo more than 11 years after September 11th. We are still at war in Afghanistan. We have been on a crisis posture in the Middle East and North Africa for the past year. And we will continue to maintain a strong presence in that region even as we rebalance to the Asia Pacific area.
Our outstanding men and women in uniform are the foundation of everything we do. As I've often said, I've got great weapons, I've got great ships, I've got great bombers. None of that is worth a damn without the U.S. men and women in uniform that serve this country.
We need to ensure that servicemembers and their families have the support that they have earned in areas like health and education and employment, and they transition back into their communities so that they can be able to go back home and re-establish their ties to their communities.
In our budget, we've made a concerted effort to ensure the health of the force, their readiness, by protecting operations and maintenance accounts, but keeping the fastest and most flexible weapons platforms, sustaining investment to high-quality personnel and research in science and technology.
But nevertheless, there is pressure on the department to retain excess force structure and infrastructure instead of investing in the training and equipment that makes our force agile and flexible and ready. Aircraft, ships, tanks, bases, even those that have outlived their usefulness have a natural political constituency. Readiness does not. What's more, readiness is too often sacrificed in favor of a larger and less effective force. I am determined to avoid that outcome.
Therefore, I've directed that readiness be treated as a strategic imperative for the department, and we have launched an initiative to assess and improve our readiness across the board. Our effort to do everything possible to ensure a ready force also explains why we express concerns about what we saw in the House and Senate 2013 defense authorization bills. What they did was, in their markups and in the bills that passed each of the houses, diverted about $74 billion of what we asked for in savings in our proposed budget to the Congress, and they diverted them to other areas that, frankly, we don't need.
Final legislation I know is now being negotiated in conference, and we are working -- I come from the Congress, I know the Congress, and we will work with our partners there to try to improve it. And I'm hopeful that we will ultimately arrive at a bill that allows us to continue implementing the strategy we've designed effectively.
We must make every dollar count, and we must continue to carefully manage the balance, sustaining current operations, being ready to respond to crisis and emerging threats, preparing for future operations, and investing in the capabilities of the future.
Balancing these needs effectively requires resources and budget stability, which brings me to the second and greatest risk facing this new defense strategy: a political system that is depriving the department of the budget certainty we need in order to plan for the future.
For more than a year, this department has been operating under the shadow of sequestration, this mindless mechanism that was put in place in order to somehow force the Congress to do the right thing. Because of political gridlock, this department still faces the possibility of another round of across-the-board cuts totaling almost $500 billion that will inflict lasting damage on our national defense and hurt the very men and women who protect this country.
Wherever I visit our troops, wherever I visit our troops, they make clear their concern about those cuts. What does it mean for them? And what does it mean for their families? It is unacceptable to me that men and women who put their lives on the line every day in distant lands have to worry about whether those here in Washington can effectively support them.
We're down to the wire now. In these next few days, Congress needs to make the right decision and to avoid the fiscal disaster that awaits us. My hope is that they will do the right thing and that we will achieve a bipartisan consensus on deficit reduction and the trajectory of defense spending in the future. Otherwise we will weaken this nation in the minds of our allies, our partners, and our potential adversaries, and undermine the work and the sacrifices that our troops are making every single day.
It's easy to get cynical and frustrated in this town. And after 40 years, I know my level of cynicism and frustration. But my confidence and my hope for the future is restored every time I have the opportunity to visit with our troops on the front lines, as I did last week. In them, I see the spirit of public service that has kept this country strong for more than two centuries and which has helped us to overcome every period of crisis and adversity in our history.
That spirit of public service is also in evidence here at this monument to democracy, the National Press Club. Journalists who commit themselves to doggedly pursuing the truth and telling the everyday stories of American people are public servants in their own right.
On my last trip, I was honored to be accompanied by Cami McCormick, an award-winning radio reporter for CBS News who three years ago suffered a terrible injury from an IED attack while covering the war in Afghanistan. It was truly an emotional experience to be with her as she returned back to Afghanistan for the first time after that injury. She put her own life at risk in order to tell the story of that war.
And in her and so many other war correspondents, we see the highest ideals of democracy upheld. We will soon unveil a new exhibit outside the Pentagon Press Briefing Room to honor those journalists who've died in the line of duty over the past decade of war. Alongside the more than 6,000 American servicemembers who have paid the ultimate price since September 11th, these journalists died to preserve our democracy and a government of, by, and for all people. They are heroes, all of them, and I know they will remain forever in our hearts and minds as we continue the hard work of fighting to build a better and safer and more secure future for our children and for the United States of America
Monday, December 17, 2012
Looking skyward, scientists worldwide now know the universe’s size, composition, approximate age and rate of expansion, thanks in part to “essential” data derived from a time-sensitive test conducted at the Arnold Engineering Development Complex‘s (AEDC) Mark 1 Aerospace Space Chamber.
On June 30, 2001, a Delta II launch vehicle carried NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) on a mission to make fundamental measurements of cosmology – to literally study the properties of the entire universe.
Jim Burns, AEDC’s space chambers lead, said that the center’s efforts came to light in a recent article published by NASA.
“The solar arrays for NASA‘s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) were tested in Mark 1 during the late 1990s or early 2000,” Burns said. “NASA’s recent story regarding this particular project, like others we’ve supported with testing at AEDC during the 1990s and into this decade, shows the impact our work is having on research today.
“Many years, literally, can transpire between when this type of technology is conceived, developed, and tested at a place like AEDC and before the final mission payoff is realized.”
“In this case that payoff changed how we view the universe and led to the 2010 Shaw Prize and 2012 Gruber Cosmology Prize awarded to Dr. Charles Bennett. And that mission laid the foundation for subsequent and very important ongoing research and related space exploration.”
Bennett, an Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and John Hopkins University Gilman Scholar, is a physics and astronomy department faculty member at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.
Bennett said AEDC’s role was “absolutely critical” in helping to pave the way for this landmark NASA Explorer mission to “map” the universe and study its properties.
In 2000, Bennett was NASA Goddard’s principal investigator for the MAP project and had tasked Alphonso Stewart to find the best place to ground test the probe’s solar array and deployment equipment.
Stewart, an aerospace engineer with NASA Goddard Space Center‘s Mechanical Engineering Branch, was the lead solar array deployment system engineer for the 2000 testing in AEDC’s Mark 1 Aerospace Chamber.
Bennett kept in close touch with Stewart all during the testing at AEDC to monitor the deployment, functionality and survivability of the solar array.
“It would be devastating if it [had] failed; there would have been no recovery from a failure,” Bennett said. “NASA would ask me occasionally, ‘and what if this deployment fails,’ and I would just tell them, ‘end of mission.’
“‘We will get nothing out of it if that happens’ – not the answer they wanted to hear – but it was the truth. Frankly, I leaned very hard on Alphonso and made sure that he understood that this had to work. This was not a best effort. This had to work.”
Stewart, who is currently NASA Goddard’s lead deployable(s) engineer for the James Webb Space telescope, said finding and then choosing AEDC’s Mark 1 Aerospace Chamber as the site for the test paid off in more ways than his team had envisioned.
“At the time, we needed a facility large enough and cold enough to check the functioning of the array,” he said. “That system is both a solar array as well as a thermal shield, it actually shields the spacecraft from the sun, so it get can get very cold.
“For example, when facing the sun, the shield is designed to attenuate the heat it generates down to minus 150 degrees [Celsius], and Arnold’s [Mark 1] facility had the ability to go to minus 200 at the time. So, we were able to test the shield in that very cold environment.
“We didn’t know this [at the time], but we found out that the blanket was so efficient in its ability to reject heat that just within the 30 or 40 seconds of deployment, it changes 100 degrees. We did not calculate that, we just actually saw that in the test.
“And by knowing that, we were able to adjust the size – to make extra material in the blanket because as it deploys, it’s shrinking. So that when it does get to the end of the deployment, there is still enough material to allow it to open up. Not knowing that, you would have had a problem when you got on orbit, the system just wouldn’t open up properly.”
Bennett said after his team had searched the country for a facility to test their equipment, he is grateful for the support provided by AEDC and their team on that history-making test.
“This satellite [WMAP] has made the most accurate measurement of the age of the universe and that made the Guinness Book of World’s Records,” Bennett said. “The universe is 13.7 billion years old – when I was in school, we didn’t know if it was 9 billion or 22 billion – now we know the age of the universe to one percent.
“It’s an extraordinary change and we also now know the results of this satellite about the components of the universe; the contents. For example, your body is made of atoms, mine is, we all are. Your chair is made of atoms, and the Earth is made of atoms.
“You might normally think of everything in the universe as made of atoms, but it turns out, according to the measurements [provided by] this satellite, that the atoms are only 4.6 percent of the content of the universe, actually a tiny amount.”
Bennett, continuing, said, “Five times more (prevalent) than the atoms, there’s something that we call cold, dark matter. This is a kind of material that has gravity, but it doesn’t give off any light at all. That’s why we call it dark matter. We can tell it’s there by its gravity, but not by giving off any light.
“The biggest missing piece of the pie is something that was only recently discovered called dark energy. A Nobel Prize last year was given to the discovery of this dark energy. This satellite actually helped those guys get the Nobel Prize because we showed that the dark energy was there and that it’s 73 percent of the universe.”
Bennett said the dark energy “acts like an anti-gravity, it pushes the universe apart.”
He emphasized that it will take more work to determine what the dark energy and dark cold matter are composed of, “but we do know from this satellite about the percentage that each of these make up; the pieces of the pie.”
Bennett said it also helps to understand how the WMAP functioned.
“The probe was somewhat like a radio receiver,” he said. “In the old days, we used to get our radio and TV signals as electromagnetic spectrum waves received and routed to analog receivers, not digitized signals like we get through cable or routed from satellites. And between stations or channels, we had something we called snow or noise. It turns out that one percent of that is actually from space. That’s from the beginning of the universe; one percent of that static.”
By Philip Lorenz
On June 30, 2001, a Delta II launch vehicle carried NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) on a mission to make fundamental measurements of cosmology – to literally study the properties of the entire universe.
Jim Burns, AEDC’s space chambers lead, said that the center’s efforts came to light in a recent article published by NASA.
“The solar arrays for NASA‘s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) were tested in Mark 1 during the late 1990s or early 2000,” Burns said. “NASA’s recent story regarding this particular project, like others we’ve supported with testing at AEDC during the 1990s and into this decade, shows the impact our work is having on research today.
“Many years, literally, can transpire between when this type of technology is conceived, developed, and tested at a place like AEDC and before the final mission payoff is realized.”
“In this case that payoff changed how we view the universe and led to the 2010 Shaw Prize and 2012 Gruber Cosmology Prize awarded to Dr. Charles Bennett. And that mission laid the foundation for subsequent and very important ongoing research and related space exploration.”
Bennett, an Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and John Hopkins University Gilman Scholar, is a physics and astronomy department faculty member at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.
Bennett said AEDC’s role was “absolutely critical” in helping to pave the way for this landmark NASA Explorer mission to “map” the universe and study its properties.
In 2000, Bennett was NASA Goddard’s principal investigator for the MAP project and had tasked Alphonso Stewart to find the best place to ground test the probe’s solar array and deployment equipment.
Stewart, an aerospace engineer with NASA Goddard Space Center‘s Mechanical Engineering Branch, was the lead solar array deployment system engineer for the 2000 testing in AEDC’s Mark 1 Aerospace Chamber.
Bennett kept in close touch with Stewart all during the testing at AEDC to monitor the deployment, functionality and survivability of the solar array.
“It would be devastating if it [had] failed; there would have been no recovery from a failure,” Bennett said. “NASA would ask me occasionally, ‘and what if this deployment fails,’ and I would just tell them, ‘end of mission.’
“‘We will get nothing out of it if that happens’ – not the answer they wanted to hear – but it was the truth. Frankly, I leaned very hard on Alphonso and made sure that he understood that this had to work. This was not a best effort. This had to work.”
Stewart, who is currently NASA Goddard’s lead deployable(s) engineer for the James Webb Space telescope, said finding and then choosing AEDC’s Mark 1 Aerospace Chamber as the site for the test paid off in more ways than his team had envisioned.
“At the time, we needed a facility large enough and cold enough to check the functioning of the array,” he said. “That system is both a solar array as well as a thermal shield, it actually shields the spacecraft from the sun, so it get can get very cold.
“For example, when facing the sun, the shield is designed to attenuate the heat it generates down to minus 150 degrees [Celsius], and Arnold’s [Mark 1] facility had the ability to go to minus 200 at the time. So, we were able to test the shield in that very cold environment.
“We didn’t know this [at the time], but we found out that the blanket was so efficient in its ability to reject heat that just within the 30 or 40 seconds of deployment, it changes 100 degrees. We did not calculate that, we just actually saw that in the test.
“And by knowing that, we were able to adjust the size – to make extra material in the blanket because as it deploys, it’s shrinking. So that when it does get to the end of the deployment, there is still enough material to allow it to open up. Not knowing that, you would have had a problem when you got on orbit, the system just wouldn’t open up properly.”
Bennett said after his team had searched the country for a facility to test their equipment, he is grateful for the support provided by AEDC and their team on that history-making test.
“This satellite [WMAP] has made the most accurate measurement of the age of the universe and that made the Guinness Book of World’s Records,” Bennett said. “The universe is 13.7 billion years old – when I was in school, we didn’t know if it was 9 billion or 22 billion – now we know the age of the universe to one percent.
“It’s an extraordinary change and we also now know the results of this satellite about the components of the universe; the contents. For example, your body is made of atoms, mine is, we all are. Your chair is made of atoms, and the Earth is made of atoms.
“You might normally think of everything in the universe as made of atoms, but it turns out, according to the measurements [provided by] this satellite, that the atoms are only 4.6 percent of the content of the universe, actually a tiny amount.”
Bennett, continuing, said, “Five times more (prevalent) than the atoms, there’s something that we call cold, dark matter. This is a kind of material that has gravity, but it doesn’t give off any light at all. That’s why we call it dark matter. We can tell it’s there by its gravity, but not by giving off any light.
“The biggest missing piece of the pie is something that was only recently discovered called dark energy. A Nobel Prize last year was given to the discovery of this dark energy. This satellite actually helped those guys get the Nobel Prize because we showed that the dark energy was there and that it’s 73 percent of the universe.”
Bennett said the dark energy “acts like an anti-gravity, it pushes the universe apart.”
He emphasized that it will take more work to determine what the dark energy and dark cold matter are composed of, “but we do know from this satellite about the percentage that each of these make up; the pieces of the pie.”
Bennett said it also helps to understand how the WMAP functioned.
“The probe was somewhat like a radio receiver,” he said. “In the old days, we used to get our radio and TV signals as electromagnetic spectrum waves received and routed to analog receivers, not digitized signals like we get through cable or routed from satellites. And between stations or channels, we had something we called snow or noise. It turns out that one percent of that is actually from space. That’s from the beginning of the universe; one percent of that static.”
By Philip Lorenz
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Walt Reed Staff Appreciation
As Delivered by Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta, Bethesda, MD, Tuesday, December 04, 2012
Thank you very much, Admiral. I appreciate that very much and I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to be here at this one-year anniversary of bringing Bethesda-Walter Reed together. This was an amazing effort, not easy to do, but I commend all of you for your willingness to work together as a team and to make this a success.
I want to thank you for your leadership, because what you have here is a world-class center for healing, for compassion, and for empowerment. I am particularly honored today because, you know, in a holiday season, first and foremost I would like to wish all of you and your families and the entire Walter Reed community a safe and happy and healthy holiday season.
This is a season of renewal. It's a season of joy, of peace, and of looking to the future and being thankful for the past. And all of that is encompassed in these great medical centers because that's what it's all about, is giving people that second chance at life and that's what you do.
This is a time of year to reflect on all the blessings that have been bestowed on all of us as citizens of this great country, and in particular the blessings that we have to be members of the Department of Defense family. Someone asked me the other day, kind of, you know, reflecting on the job of Secretary of Defense what's the toughest part of this job and what's the most memorable part of this job?
And for me, it comes down to the men and women who serve this country in uniform. The toughest part of this job is to have to take the time to write notes to the families of those who have lost loved ones in war. And it's tough because as the father of three sons, recognizing the pain that that family must feel at the loss of a loved one is something that leaves a deep impact on me. And the ability to kind of take the time to write a few words of comfort, and there are no words that you can find that can do justice to the pain that's involved here.
But for each one, I try to write a note that not only expresses, obviously, my sorrow, but also says that their loved one loved them, loved their family, loved this country, and gave their life for all they loved. And that makes them an American hero forever. Those are the toughest moments in this job.
The most memorable moments are to come here and visit wounded warriors because the opportunity to be able to look into their eyes, individuals that have suffered the most horrendous injuries you can imagine, as all of you know, but then to walk into these rooms and to look into their eyes and see a spirit of wanting to fight on, and wanting to get back into the battle, and wanting to be whole again. And knowing that if they fight hard enough, they'll make that work.
I mean, to see that spirit -- to see that undying spirit of renewal is for me the most memorable thing because it represents, in my book, the spirit of this country. Each time I visit these heroes here, I come away very moved and very inspired by their dedication, by their patriotism, and as I said, by that sheer strength of spirit that they have.
We as a nation owe them an incredible debt of gratitude for their service and for their sacrifice -- men and women who are willing to put their lives on the line for this country; who are willing to fight and die for the United States of America. That represents the great strength of our country.
I often say, we've got, you know, we have the very best in weapons. We've got great ships. We've got great planes. We're developing future aircraft that are going to be incredible, future fighter planes that are going to be incredible. You know, we've got great technology that's available. But none of that is worth a damn without the men and women in uniform who are willing to put their lives on the line and help to protect this country. That is the real strength. That is the heart and soul of what makes us the strongest country in the world.
We owe them as a result of that the finest medical care that this nation can provide. And that's why I'm so grateful that we have the greatest medical healthcare system in the world, right here. And the strength of our system lies in you, and people like you. Thousands of dedicated professionals who are committed to caring for our sick and for our injured. It lies with each of you. This, as I have said before, is a place where miracles happen, and you are the miracle workers.
Today, I want to thank you, along with the entire military medical community, for the exceptional care, the exceptional support you provide our service members, for these men and women in uniform, for their families, and for our military retirees. You give them a second chance at life.
This community is particularly close to my heart. My wife was trained as a nurse, and one of our three sons is a cardiologist. For those of you that haven't had a wife as a nurse, you don't know what the hell it's all about.
Because there isn't a damn thing I can do without her being right there, and watching everything you do, and watching everything that our sons did, you know? It was incredible.
Their experience and I learned this from Sylvia, and I learned it -- and I see it now in -- in our son, who's a cardiologist. It is very important to understand that no matter how many people you have to deal with, you don't treat people by the numbers. Every one of them has to be special, and it's gotta show in your eyes.
The best caretakers are the ones who have the compassion to work with people, and to treat them with dignity, and care, and understanding. That's not always easy, because you're dealing with a lot of people, and it can be really tough, but the reality is that, that sense of compassion, of making every patient feel special is what it's all about.
I know how tough this job is. I know how difficult it can be, and how hard it is for each of your, and the amount of work it takes, and the amount of sacrifice that it takes to do your job. So, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the commitment that all of you make to this -- it's challenging work, but I can't tell you how important it is to -- not only healing those that have been wounded, but healing our country when we fight in wars makes the hell of a difference in terms of our ability to sense that as tough as these battles are, as tough as these wounds are, that somehow we are strong enough to be able to go on. And that's what you do.
This country, and our armed forces, are emerging from over a decade of war. This is the longest sustained period of war in the history of the United States. There's been a non-stop flow of casualties from distant battlefields. And our military medical community has, I believe, risen to the challenge time and time and time again.
You have provided thorough and effective care for over 50,000 wounded warriors, 50,000 wounded warriors. And you've helped ensure that millions of our men and women in uniform are healthy and able to perform their vital missions.
Thanks to the advances in medical technology and the innovations in medical training -- the incredible amount of innovations and development over these last few years 98 percent of the wounded who reach our combat support hospitals survive their injuries, the highest rate of survival this country has ever achieved.
You made this happen by standing side by side as one team, as one joint facility, Army, Navy, Air Force. You have become one of the best medical teams in the world. And by raising expectations, by making clear that there is always hope, that good things can happen by advancing training, by increasing responsibility, our corpsmen, our medics are now capable of delivering life-saving medical care right there on the battlefield. This is the new standard of medical care, and I'm very proud to say that it is the most advanced in the world.
A real revolution has taken place in battlefield medicine. It has truly been a revolution and in our ability to care for the most serious combat injuries. We have also seen that a higher survival rate can result in a new set of complex injuries when our soldiers return home. And you're responding to that challenge as well.
Here at the center of healing, the center of miracles, you have treated diseases that we've never seen before on our soil. You perform life-saving surgeries that are the first of their kind. And you've developed the most advanced prosthetics in the world. It's thanks to your extraordinary talent and dedication that we are able to provide the level of care that we owe to our wounded warriors.
And I see it when I go into those rooms and talk with them that they know. They've seen the fact that others get their life back as a result of what's been developed here. And that, too, renews their spirit that ultimately they're going to make it and they're going to be okay.
In the decade to come, we're going to be challenged in new ways, and we've got to be ready to meet those challenges as well. Thousands of service members are going to be coming home soon over the next several years, the end of the war in Iraq, beginning to draw down in the war in Afghanistan. We have got to be ready for their arrival by supporting their physical health, their emotional well-being, and their successful transition back into society.
Some of our returning service members will bear both the visible and the invisible wounds of war. Since 2001, nearly 250,000 men and women of the armed services have suffered traumatic brain injury and many more remain undiagnosed. To care for them, this department instituted new guidance in September. We built concussion restoration centers in theater. We've developed traumatic brain injury centers at many of our military bases around the world.
Thanks to the efforts of our military medical professionals, we now have specific guidelines and treatments for what is one of the most elusive injuries that we've ever seen. We've also developed way to better identify traumatic brain injury and we're training our medics and our corpsmen to respond more effectively when a service member experiences a potential concussion.
We have also discovered the value of rehabilitation, and how. The National Intrepid Center of Excellence right here on campus, built by the generous donation of the Fisher family, is a world model, a world model for recuperating the human being, and not just treating the disease.
Let me also note, if I might, that yesterday you dedicated another world-class facility here, cancer treatment center, in honor of Jack Murtha. Jack was a dear friend of mine, had the honor of serving with him, passed away a couple years ago.
We served in Congress. We worked together on a range of issues. He was a legendary advocate for our men and women in uniform, and he was strong supporter, strong as I've ever seen in the Congress of the military's medical community in particular. Jack loved earmarks.
Everybody, including myself, used to line up and talk to Jack about earmarks, and if you -- somebody -- I haven't seen it, but in the Lincoln movie, talks about Lincoln sending people up to the Hill to basically hand out earmarks in order to get their damned vote. That's one of the reasons they may be having a tough time on Capitol Hill, is because they don't have earmarks to hand out. But, Jack knew how to do it, and I've never seen anything like it.
When the Defense Authorization Bill used to come up, and he use to be -- I mean, at the appropriations -- I mean, all these appropriations bills used to go on, they used to be amendments, they used to take days. I used to chair some of the discussions on the floor of the House on these other bills. But, when the Defense Appropriations Bill came up, Jack had basically distributed enough earmarks that, that bill took about 30 seconds on the floor.
So he understood what it meant, but more importantly, he did it in a way that benefited, in particular, the men and women in uniform. He was totally dedicated. Having been a veteran himself, having understood what it meant to go into battle, he really understood what men and women in uniform needed. And so, I am truly delighted that the John P. Murtha Cancer Center will stand as a monument to his legacy and to his commitment to our armed forces.
These centers provide extraordinary physical care for our military family. But here at Walter Reed you also understand the importance of caring for emotional health as well. Together, military medical personnel, and military families are raising awareness about those hidden wounds of war, that I talked about, particularly mental health.
Yet, as we know all too well, the historic rate of suicide within the military continues to haunt us.
Suicide is one of those great and terrible challenges to the health of our force, and one of the greatest challenges we face as a nation, not just a problem that's affecting men and women in uniform, it's affecting society, and it's reflected obviously in our men and women in uniform. Our greatest challenge is identifying those who need our help.
How do we identify those that are facing this kind of terrible crisis?
I know that all of you have not, and will not rest until there is a lifeline for every one of our nation's service members. We must make sure that they know they're not alone; that we're here and that we will stand by them.
This year alone, the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have committed an additional $150 million to support efforts targeting mental health awareness, diagnosis and treatment. We're working to increase the number of mental health professionals, improve access to suicide hotlines, emphasize family counseling. We've got to continue this fight on every front. We've got to make people in the chain of command, people that serve next to each other in a squad, have a sense for looking out for one another, of spotting those conditions, of understanding that there may be trouble.
Now, this -- in many ways, it's a changing society. This is my theory and my theory alone, but, you know, part of the problem of working off BlackBerrys and working off computers is that you're focused on that element and you don't reach out as much to talk to one another, and to just communicate with one another.
And it's when you do that, when you talk to one another, that you understand what the problems are. You can look into their eyes and you can see it. You've got to make sure that people understand that there's a responsibility here to care for one another. We know that it's important to watch people's backs when you're in a foxhole. That applies here. You've got to watch each other's backs with regards to the kind of problems that can impact on people's mental health.
And that's something we've got to build into the force as well, and we will. As our troops return home, we will also help them convert their hard-earned experience into roles that are needed by both the military and civilian communities. That means new training programs, pathways, opportunities for our medics and corpsmen to become physician assistants or nurses, supporting advanced degrees, streamlining credential requirements. Because if someone can save a life in Afghanistan, then they can save a life here at home as well. We've got to make that possible.
We are working with other cabinet departments and with the White House to standardize the way state licensing boards recognize military training and experience. And we're also working with human resources and services administration to recruit members in the medical profession who are interested in pursuing similar careers in the private sector.
Having a job ready for our returning service members is an important piece of the larger effort to support our service members, our veterans, and our military families as we come out of this decade of war. And all of you have a critical role to play in that effort as well.
As you support our troops in their greatest time of need, I want you to know that I will continue to fight, continue to try to safeguard this department's support for your mission. You are, as I said, miracle workers, the absolute best at what you do. And we owe it to you to make sure that you have the full support you need in order to do your job. Your skill, you dedication -- that tender compassionate care that you provide those who serve in uniform, those qualities are second to none.
We are extremely proud and extremely fortunate to welcome our troops and their families back from war into your caring arms, into your caring arms. They have fought for us. We have to do everything we can to fight for them.
God bless all of you. God bless our military. And God bless this great nation of ours.
Thank you very much for having me.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
TOP SECRET
Code and, Maybe, a Top Secret
A chimney in a home in Surrey, England, was found in 1982 to hold the remains of a carrier pigeon bearing a World War II coded message. An effort is now under way to find out what it says.
But now, decades after the final flight of military carrier pigeon 40TW194, the bird’s secret message has become a matter of state and the grist of headlines. After a concerted campaign by pigeon fanciers, the encrypted message, which had been folded into a scarlet capsule on the pigeon’s leg, has now been sent to Britain’s top-secret GCHQ listening post and decoding department outside Gloucester to the west of London.
There, 40TW194’s World War II secret might finally be revealed. Or maybe not. “We cannot comment until the code is broken,” said a spokesman for GCHQ, which stands for Government Communications Headquarters. “And then we can determine whether it’s secret or not.”
The tale of 40TW194 speaks to many themes — among them, animal heroism. The Dickin Medal, Britain’s highest decoration for animal valor, has been awarded to 64 feathered, furry or four-legged creatures, including 32 pigeons, since 1943, making birds the bravest of the brave. They include an American pigeon called G.I. Joe, or Pigeon USA43SC6390, which, according to its citation, “brought a message which arrived just in time to save the lives of at least 100 Allied soldiers from being bombed by their own planes.”
A memorial to animals at war was unveiled on London’s Park Lane in 2004 and it, too, commemorates pigeons.
But the story of 40TW194, and its companion, 37DK76, also seems to be a story of just how forgotten a war’s forgotten heroes can be.
The bird’s skeleton was discovered in 1982 at the 17th-century Surrey home of David Martin as he sought to renovate a chimney. Amid a cascade of pigeon bones, “down came the leg with the red capsule on,” he said in one of many interviews he has given in recent days.
Inside the capsule, he discovered a coded message with crucial clues as to the provenance of the bird. The message, for instance, was marked as a duplicate to a message carried by 37DK76. (The first two numerals indicated the pigeon’s year of birth.) It was addressed to “xo2,” now thought to be code for bomber command.
The fact that two birds had been dispatched with the same message, and that the message was in code, seemed to suggest that it might have been carrying word of some major development.
The location of Mr. Martin’s home in Bletchingley might also be a key to the long-secret message. It is between the site of the Allied landing at the Normandy beaches in 1944 and a famous code-breaking center north of London at Bletchley Park. It is also, Mr. Martin said, near the site of a headquarters established by the British field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery at Reigate before the D-Day landings.
“The bird may well have been flying back to Monty’s HQ or Bletchley Park from Nazi-occupied Normandy during the invasion” of 1944, said Colin Hill, the curator of a pigeon exhibit at Bletchley Park, referring to Montgomery by his nickname. The pigeons, he said, routinely accompanied both ground forces and Royal Air Force bomber crews who were told to use the birds to report back their positions if they crash-landed in hostile terrain.
But at first, said Mr. Martin, now 74, and a retired probation officer, no one seemed interested in what might well be a gripping yarn of feathered valor. At the time, the Falklands War was under way. The code-breakers were too busy to worry about pigeon bones. “It wasn’t a story then,” he said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
Only the community of people who love pigeons — including some who race the birds and are schooled in their wartime history — took an interest and began a campaign over many years to get officials to pay attention.
Two years ago, Mr. Martin and his wife, Ann, finally found a taker for a copy of the message: Bletchley Park, which is now a museum.
Over time, curators there became convinced of the message’s uniqueness — other pigeon files used little or no code. And so the original, a tiny message scribbled on a standard military form, was sent on to GCHQ to take a look.
By Thursday, the bird’s destiny was the subject of a bona fide news media happening. As Mr. Martin spoke on the telephone to one reporter, a photographer from another news media outlet was transmitting images from his yard. At Bletchley Park, Mr. Hill could not come to the phone immediately because he was giving a television interview.
Once known for its wartime secrecy, Bletchley Park on Thursday went public with a news release.
A chimney in a home in Surrey, England, was found in 1982 to hold the remains of a carrier pigeon bearing a World War II coded message. An effort is now under way to find out what it says.
But now, decades after the final flight of military carrier pigeon 40TW194, the bird’s secret message has become a matter of state and the grist of headlines. After a concerted campaign by pigeon fanciers, the encrypted message, which had been folded into a scarlet capsule on the pigeon’s leg, has now been sent to Britain’s top-secret GCHQ listening post and decoding department outside Gloucester to the west of London.
There, 40TW194’s World War II secret might finally be revealed. Or maybe not. “We cannot comment until the code is broken,” said a spokesman for GCHQ, which stands for Government Communications Headquarters. “And then we can determine whether it’s secret or not.”
The tale of 40TW194 speaks to many themes — among them, animal heroism. The Dickin Medal, Britain’s highest decoration for animal valor, has been awarded to 64 feathered, furry or four-legged creatures, including 32 pigeons, since 1943, making birds the bravest of the brave. They include an American pigeon called G.I. Joe, or Pigeon USA43SC6390, which, according to its citation, “brought a message which arrived just in time to save the lives of at least 100 Allied soldiers from being bombed by their own planes.”
A memorial to animals at war was unveiled on London’s Park Lane in 2004 and it, too, commemorates pigeons.
But the story of 40TW194, and its companion, 37DK76, also seems to be a story of just how forgotten a war’s forgotten heroes can be.
The bird’s skeleton was discovered in 1982 at the 17th-century Surrey home of David Martin as he sought to renovate a chimney. Amid a cascade of pigeon bones, “down came the leg with the red capsule on,” he said in one of many interviews he has given in recent days.
Inside the capsule, he discovered a coded message with crucial clues as to the provenance of the bird. The message, for instance, was marked as a duplicate to a message carried by 37DK76. (The first two numerals indicated the pigeon’s year of birth.) It was addressed to “xo2,” now thought to be code for bomber command.
The fact that two birds had been dispatched with the same message, and that the message was in code, seemed to suggest that it might have been carrying word of some major development.
The location of Mr. Martin’s home in Bletchingley might also be a key to the long-secret message. It is between the site of the Allied landing at the Normandy beaches in 1944 and a famous code-breaking center north of London at Bletchley Park. It is also, Mr. Martin said, near the site of a headquarters established by the British field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery at Reigate before the D-Day landings.
“The bird may well have been flying back to Monty’s HQ or Bletchley Park from Nazi-occupied Normandy during the invasion” of 1944, said Colin Hill, the curator of a pigeon exhibit at Bletchley Park, referring to Montgomery by his nickname. The pigeons, he said, routinely accompanied both ground forces and Royal Air Force bomber crews who were told to use the birds to report back their positions if they crash-landed in hostile terrain.
But at first, said Mr. Martin, now 74, and a retired probation officer, no one seemed interested in what might well be a gripping yarn of feathered valor. At the time, the Falklands War was under way. The code-breakers were too busy to worry about pigeon bones. “It wasn’t a story then,” he said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
Only the community of people who love pigeons — including some who race the birds and are schooled in their wartime history — took an interest and began a campaign over many years to get officials to pay attention.
Two years ago, Mr. Martin and his wife, Ann, finally found a taker for a copy of the message: Bletchley Park, which is now a museum.
Over time, curators there became convinced of the message’s uniqueness — other pigeon files used little or no code. And so the original, a tiny message scribbled on a standard military form, was sent on to GCHQ to take a look.
By Thursday, the bird’s destiny was the subject of a bona fide news media happening. As Mr. Martin spoke on the telephone to one reporter, a photographer from another news media outlet was transmitting images from his yard. At Bletchley Park, Mr. Hill could not come to the phone immediately because he was giving a television interview.
Once known for its wartime secrecy, Bletchley Park on Thursday went public with a news release.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
The National Science Center, or NSC, is now training kids to stay safe from cyber attack malware when they’re surfing the web or using email and cell phones. A new online game called Cyber Swarm Defenders is targeted to 6th-8th grade students and is also appropriate for younger students.The game is part of the NSC’s newest Cyber Ops education outreach program. The NSC is a public-private partnership between the U.S. Army and NSC, Inc., that uses its resources to stimulate and increase science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known as STEM, proficiency in U.S. students, especially those in grades 4-9.Anything we can do to make the young students of our country understand the cyber threat and get them excited about STEM technologies has a big payoff,” said Ron Ross, chairman of the NSC.
“Educating students about cyber security threats and how to counteract them is imperative,” said Mike Krieger, the Army deputy chief information officer, who serves as the secretary of the Army’s proponent for the NSC. He also serves as the co-chairperson for the NSC’s Partnership Executive Committee, which provides overall direction and oversight for the NSC.Cyber Swarm Defenders is deployed through the social networking site, which was built for children ages 13 and under. Kid-safe requirements are built in, including a parental control feature. This tower-defense strategy game integrates cyber security education and “learn to earn” mini-exercises. Students earn points, badges and game coins as they strengthen their defenses to advance through the game levels.
“Installing the game on a social network site allows us to reach a variety of students and an existing community of users,” said Krieger.
To access the game from the NSC’s website and click on the Cyber Swarm banner button. Or, go directly to this site. To play, participants must first register on jabbersmack–which is not accessible on some older versions of browsers.
“Our additional focus on cyber threats also significantly enhances the value proposition of the NSC Partnership,” Ross said.
Created by Congress in 1985, the NSC ‘s outreach programs include online teacher tools, two 18-wheeler Mobile Discovery Center vans, Junior ROTC STEM Outreach activities, and Cyber Ops. In addition to the new game, the Cyber Ops program links to a Malware Comic Book and Malware Mystery game that are also appropriate for older students.
“Educating students about cyber security threats and how to counteract them is imperative,” said Mike Krieger, the Army deputy chief information officer, who serves as the secretary of the Army’s proponent for the NSC. He also serves as the co-chairperson for the NSC’s Partnership Executive Committee, which provides overall direction and oversight for the NSC.Cyber Swarm Defenders is deployed through the social networking site, which was built for children ages 13 and under. Kid-safe requirements are built in, including a parental control feature. This tower-defense strategy game integrates cyber security education and “learn to earn” mini-exercises. Students earn points, badges and game coins as they strengthen their defenses to advance through the game levels.
“Installing the game on a social network site allows us to reach a variety of students and an existing community of users,” said Krieger.
To access the game from the NSC’s website and click on the Cyber Swarm banner button. Or, go directly to this site. To play, participants must first register on jabbersmack–which is not accessible on some older versions of browsers.
“Our additional focus on cyber threats also significantly enhances the value proposition of the NSC Partnership,” Ross said.
Created by Congress in 1985, the NSC ‘s outreach programs include online teacher tools, two 18-wheeler Mobile Discovery Center vans, Junior ROTC STEM Outreach activities, and Cyber Ops. In addition to the new game, the Cyber Ops program links to a Malware Comic Book and Malware Mystery game that are also appropriate for older students.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
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Southern Command Change of Command Ceremony
As Delivered by Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta, Doral, Florida, Monday, November 19, 2012
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Thank you very much Ladies and Gentlemen, distinguished guests,
Ambassadors and representatives from our partner nations, men and women
of U.S. Southern Command. Above all, let me pay tribute to General
Fraser, to General Kelly, to their family members, especially Rena and
Karen, it is a real honor and pleasure for me to be able to participate
in this ceremony.
This afternoon, we pay tribute to two very extraordinary officers, to their families, and to the service members and civilians they have led. We celebrate General Fraser's nearly four decades of selfless service to our country, his strong leadership in a number of key positions, and his many lasting accomplishments as SOUTHCOM Commander. In many ways, Doug has come full circle. As a youth, he went with his family to Bogotá, Colombia and finished high school there. So this has been a fitting final assignment after a stellar rise through the ranks of the United States Air Force. Incidentally, Doug is the last active duty member of the Air Force Academy class of 1975, and a number of his classmates have traveled here for this ceremony. If I could ask those classmates to rise, we'd like to thank you for your service as well. Welcome to the Air Force's version of Last of the Mohicans. As we all know, Doug is a fighter pilot. He's flown some of our military's most advanced fighter jets. And as Doug agrees flying is the second greatest thrill known to man. Landing is the first. But he has all that right skills to succeed as a fighter pilot and as a Co-Com Commander: a natural killer instinct...finely tuned physical reflexes...and he has the ability to deal with constant turbulence. Those qualities also help explain why, despite whatever crisis it is, Doug is composed, he's calm, and in he's control in the most demanding and the most high-stress situations. Thanks to his extraordinary record of accomplishment, Doug was an excellent pick to be the first-ever U.S. Air Force officer to lead this command. Shortly after taking command, General Fraser was faced with one of the most significant operational challenges SOUTHCOM has ever faced when it had to confront the devastating earthquake in Haiti. That earthquake's human toll, its huge destruction was immense, with hundreds of thousands killed and one million people displaced from their homes. The main airport and the seaport in the capital city of Port-au-Prince were unserviceable, and the vast majority of public ministries were simply destroyed. SOUTHCOM responded immediately with Operation Unified Response – the largest Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster relief mission this command has ever undertaken. In total, SOUTHCOM delivered 2.3 million meals, 17 million pounds of bulk food, 2.6 million bottles of water, and 150,000 pounds of medical supplies, among many, many other services. The devastation caused by that earthquake in Haiti underscores the fact that the key security challenges in this hemisphere are not just national, they are transnational, and they impact on every nation in this hemisphere. Whether natural disasters, sometimes horrendous in their impact on people and their countries, illicit trafficking, organized crime, or narco-terrorism, the threats to security in the Americas are not contained by political boundaries. That reality of understanding the common threats that face every nation in this hemisphere is one of the core principles of our new defense strategy of building partnerships with other countries. Doug has recognized this reality and responded to it by focusing the team here at SOUTHCOM on the mission of developing bilateral and multilateral defense partnerships with nations in this critical region. He has effectively advanced the kind of small footprint, low-cost approaches to building new defense partnerships, new alliances, that are emphasized in our defense strategy. These partnerships are helping the nations of this region more effectively deal with our shared security challenges. One of General Fraser's most significant and enduring contributions has been rallying support across the U.S. government in order to focus more attention on Central America, which continues to confront the problem of illicit drug trafficking. SOUTHCOM has helped galvanize U.S. and Western Hemisphere support for enhanced engagement in this region. We've made significant progress in partnering with the militaries of Central American nations, and they are now taking greater responsibility for their own security. And even as General Fraser has engaged partner nations across the entire region, he's pushed his staff to set achievable objectives and to be "demanding partners" – in other words, to get measurable results from our programs to build partnership capacity. The annual PANAMAX exercise has been a notable success and one of the real important exercises in this region: this year, Colombia led the land component command for the second time, while Brazil led the maritime component for the first time. These are huge steps toward sharing security responsibilities in the Western Hemisphere. In an era of constrained resources, that is exactly the right approach. SOUTHCOM's Joint Interagency Task Force South has also brought interagency and international cooperation to new levels, particularly through Operation MARTILLO. In 2012, this task force took 152 metric tons of cocaine – worth almost $3 billion – off the market. Operation MARTILLO serves as a real model of regional cooperation for the future – and I've encouraged, and continue to encourage, our regional partners to build on that cooperation in other areas, as well. All of these accomplishments are the direct result of Doug's steady leadership – and the great work of many in this audience. I want to thank everyone, personally want to thank all of you in SOUTHCOM for all you do to keep America safe. As we all know, we could not do these jobs without the strong support of our family. I want to thank Doug's wife Rena and his father Bill for supporting him every step of the way. Your love and your support is critical to this guy's success. Thank you. I'm told if you want anything done around here, all you have to do is tell Rena, and it's done. I want to thank you Rena, and to all of General and Mrs. Fraser's children: Heather, Ian, and Hannah. Thanks to all of you for your service, for your support, for your love, and for your dedication. As I've often said as Secretary of Defense, one of the great strengths of the US military is that we have an outstanding bench of dedicated leaders. One of those comes off of my bench at the Pentagon, John Kelly. John is someone who has always maintained the perspective of an infantryman and the values of the Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Boston where he grew up. His name may be Kelly, but as I always remind him, his mom was Italian. Educated in Catholic schools, John must have been a real pain in the ass to the nuns and to the brothers. He is someone who was always looking, always searching. He joined the Merchant Marine early on and travelled the world. Every damn port that I went to, Kelly had been there before me. From Cam Ranh Bay to Tokyo and beyond, tested in life and tested in battle. He joined the Marines as a grunt, he became an officer, and what an officer he became. He has been tested in battle through four combat deployments – one in the Gulf War and three in Iraq, where he commanded the Multinational-Force West at a critical and challenging time in that campaign. He, I believe, is the true embodiment of a warrior scholar, compassionate, caring and tough, he has educated and inspired all who have had the privilege of serving alongside him. In fact, I am one of those who he has personally educated and inspired by John. As you all know, he's been my Senior Military Assistant since I came to the Pentagon last year. He's been at my side as a trusted confidant and a trusted friend. And more than anyone, he has ensured that the daily reality of those serving on the front lines informs and guides every decision I make. I could not have done my job without his judgment and blunt, honest counsel. It was a profound honor for me to join many of you just a few moments ago to promote John to the rank of General. As I said during that promotion, I learned a lot about John and a lot about his character during our time together. I also learned that in a tough situation it helps to have a Marine from Boston telling you what the hell to do. My over forty years of public service began as a lieutenant in the Army. There are a lot of people that I've had the opportunity to meet, a lot of egos, a lot of smart people, a lot of dumb people, a lot of crooks, and a lot of honest people. There are few that you would like to share a foxhole with and John Kelly is one of those. He's always watched my back, and he's always watched my glass. We've shared a number of drinks together in this job. But he's always applied the great qualities as SOUTHCOM commander as he has applied those qualities to everything he has done. I will be eternally grateful to him, and to be honest, while I will miss him, he will be a great commander here at SOUTHCOM. I very much look forward to relying on his perspective and forthright advice as he leads our military efforts in the region. John is also a man who is intensely loyal and dedicated to family. He's treated me and the rest of the team at the Pentagon like family – and I know he'll treat the SOUTHCOM team like family, as well. And whether you like it or not, you better damn well be a Red Sox Fan. But like Doug Fraser, he also has a truly wonderful family of his own. Let me take this opportunity to publicly thank John's wife Karen, and their children. The Kelly's, like thousands of other military families over the last decade, have felt the heartbreak of war in the most profound way possible. But in them America sees the selflessness, sense of duty and love of country that gives our military, and our nation, its strength. John and Karen, I can think of no better team to help lead the SOUTHCOM effort here. You will continue the great work that Doug and Rena have done here over the past three and a half years. And to borrow an old Air Force metaphor, the Frasers have taken this command to a higher altitude, and with today's change of command, I'm confident that it is in extraordinarily capable hands of John Kelly, that it will soar even higher in the future. Thank you for what you do, what both of you do, to keep this nation safe, strong, and secure. America is blessed by those who are willing to fight and die and lead others into battle. And I want the American people to know that it is generals like Fraser and Kelly that represent the heart and soul and spirit of military leadership. I am so proud of them and all the officers who serve in the United States military. And all who serve with honor and distinction and dedication. God bless them and God bless all of you. | |
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