Army Gen. Stephen R. Lyons, commander, U.S. Transportation Command, delivers the keynote address at the National Defense Transportation Association-U.S. Transportation Command Fall Meeting in St. Louis, Oct. 9, 2019.
Transcript
Well it’s great to see everybody. I’ll tell ya for all the awardees congratulations, how about a round of applause for both our corporate and military awardees. Really awesome. So for for Andy, for Admiral Brown, and for John and Bill, for your leadership at NDTA, thanks for all that you do. All the corporate members, 75 years the association, the National Defense Transportation Association has been linkin’ commercial capacity at every level networks and the whole nine yards with the Department of Defense, to be able to project, and sustain combat power, on a global scale. Really an impressive relationship and I really appreciate it. As I look across the crowd tonight, it just reminds me of what it takes in a nation, across the nation, to be able to conduct that level of operation, to be able to project power globally, which is a national strategic comparative advantage for the United States. I apologize, I was a little late getting here today, it was a bit of a battle to get here. Last year and this year, we scheduled the NDTA Fall Meeting right on top of the Secretary and the Chairman’s SLC Triple-S meeting, and I actually had to skip out on two meetings today. Admiral Mewborne flew that way last night, I flew this way, and fought the traffic getting in here this morning. But it’s great to be with you, I did not want to miss this great venue two years in a row. ‘Cause you know I had to miss it last year. But it’s great to see everybody. It’s great to see so many friends. General Handy, it’s good to see you sir, the longest standing TCCC, and transformational at that. It’s always wonderful to see you back in the crowd. Honorable Estevez, good friend. So many great leaders, and frankly some great mentors along the way. I won’t get the chance to talk to and announce everyone of ya, but you’re all great leaders in your own right. And our component commanders that are represented here today, and our Director of Logistics Agency which carries a big weight for the department. And of course our SEL’s Chief France, and all the, he brought the SEL panel together. And the training, I understand, has been phenomenal. Got a report back that Secretary Chao had a great day yesterday, I really appreciate her coming out, and all the folks that came out and spoke this week. So, what I wanna do is, I wanna save a little bit of time for Q and A, I’ve got a couple charts up front, I can frame the discussion for ya. We spent yesterday and the day before really talking about the national defense strategy, and irreversible momentum. I can tell ya, Secretary Esper is fully committed to that document, and what we need to move it forward and cement change for the department. But before I start to talk about anything, let me let me see if I can fire up the crowd, let me go to the video here. (military officer speaking through a radio) (urgent radio conversation) (beep) (crowd yelling) I point out that our ability to project military power globally, at our time and place of choosing, is a strategic comparative advantage, unparalleled by any other nation. (energetic intense music) TRANSCOM’s number one priority is energetic readiness. And our purpose remains unchanged to project and sustain military power globally at our time and place of choosing. Our strategic comparative advantage is inextricably linked to our industry partners. (heartwarming music) Together we will deliver. (applause) It’s what we do. This group is clearly part of that and much more. Now that I know that the special effects person has the ability to turn the lights down, if you could dim those lights just a little bit, I feel like I’m in at an unfair advantage, because I can’t see you and you can see me. So I can’t tell when you’re falling asleep and when you’re awake. So if you could just- yeah, yeah I love to be able to read the audience a little bit, I appreciate that. So, let me run through a few slides with ya, I’ll frame a couple things that I think are important, from a strategic perspective. And then I’ll save time for some Q and A here. So it starts with strategy, I talked about the effort that the Secretary is focused on, the defense strategy, and of course the Chairman’s endorsed the military strategy. It re-introduces for us, when Secretary Mattis published it, and you can hear his voice when you read it. The concept of strategic competition. Not in the sense that in the two plus three construct with typically with China and Russia, as a top two potential adversaries. Not with the intent of going to war with China or Russia, but the intent of competing today to create the conditions to deter and not have to. But clearly delineating that the Department’s mission number one mission, is to establish a combat credible force, that can secure our national objectives on a global scale. That can defend the homeland, that can conventionally deter strategically, can compete. But if necessary can respond, respond immediately and then respond with immediate force. And then respond with a decisive force, when needed. It describes a set of conditions that are different than what we’ve been used to over the last couple decades, in that the logistics, the energetic function of sustainment and logistics, must be successful, under persistent all-domain attack. That’s a fundamental shift with the way that we’ve operated previously. So that shapes the way we think about the future. We continue to conduct operations today, that’s not today’s fight. But as we emerge to the future, we spend a considerable amount of time thinking about that. And what does that mean to this end to end value chain, that doest include our commercial partners that are so critically essential to our success? Next slide please. I remind everybody that the only reason that we exist is to project and sustain the joint force. I tell the Secretary, I think I have the best job in the Joint Force, to be honest with ya. Particularly yesterday as when we went through and had a discussion with all the combatant commanders, and the service chiefs and the joint chiefs. TRANSCOM was actually built on the premise of global integration. Which is one of the concepts inside the document. To have the authorities, the assigned forces, and the resources, to operate day in and day out, within the construct of the strategic priorities as directed by the Secretary and the Chairman. It’s an incredible capability, you see it everyday. The ability to shift to the east, focus on CENTCOM ability to shift to the west, INDOPACOM. Or any other particular issue that happens to come. And our great airman and soldiers and sailors and marines and coast guardsmen that are out there everyday, and our commercial partners that are that agile and adaptive to be able to respond to dynamic force employment, is really an… I think, held in amazement by everybody, but particularly by our adversaries. I think as our adversaries look at the United States and the United States military, there are a lot of things to admire. We have great leaders, great non-commissioned officers, we have great technology and weapons systems. But the things I think they focus on the most, that they really admire the most, is this ability to conduct global command control, on a global scale. This incredible network of allies and partners that we have across the globe. And then our ability to project power, at the time and place of our choosing. And for us, that never changes. The environment may get more complex, we may introduce contested environments in the way we plan, and the way we conduct analysis, and the way we conduct operations. But the purpose doesn’t change. And you can kinda see as we evolve, from left to right, and I… Back in the day we didn’t need logistic organizations, it wasn’t very complex. You could forge your way through. But today that’s not the case. And when I look at the far right, and you think about the ability to launch bombers from the continental United States to strike targets in north Africa and return to the continental United States without ever landing in a sovereign territory with five aerial refuels. That’s an incredible capability, but it requires a global integration and synchronization of resources, that are positioned across three different continents. When you think about two weeks ago, and hopefully most of you read in the paper, the ability of our critical care team an incredible medical capability plused up on-board a C-17 aircraft, flies from the continental United States, into Afghanistan picks up a patient at Bagram, double amputee, who had received 100 units of blood, would have never made it under the old construct. Flew that patient all the way back to Texas, with two aerial refuels. That’s the kind of reach that the United States of America has today, and will have into the future. And it’s your great warriors that can do that, and do do that, day in an day out, complimented by our industry partners. Next slide please. As I think about the command, but then more about the Joint Deployment Enterprise, the framework that I think about it is really through this lens right here. First and foremost, it’s a global posture a network, not just an end-route network enabled by military capability, but and end-route network enabled by commercial networks, global trade networks, and so forth and so on. And the incredible relationships with our like-minded partners and allies across the world. That allows us to expand this logistics network to a global scale. That’s what gives us the flexibility to move in one direction or the other direction, complimented, of course, by our mobility platforms. It absolutely amazes me every day what the air component can do, when they get a high priority mission that comes down from the joint staff. One of the two I may have mentioned or many many others, and execute an in-system select a crew, an air frame, in-motion on-task, redirected to a higher priority mission, moving in a different direction. That is really an incredible amount of dynamic capability. And they make it look really really seamless. And then key to all of this, to be able to optimize a global network is global command control. Not at the CoCOM only, but at echelon and every single echelon throughout. Now the ability to respond in that kind of way, whether that’s an immediate response tonight, or whether that’s a decisive response, over a more deliberate time frame, it’s key to deterrence. Our adversaries know that we can come, if we have the will, that we can come. And things like dynamic force employment, our ability to move every single day, very few people, even in the Department have a good sense, for how much activity is going on inside this mobility enterprise, how many brigades or batteries are moving. How many fighter squadrons are conductin’ operations moving across the ocean. And it’s equally challenging for our adversaries to decipher what’s going on inside this mobility enterprise, and our ability to hide a needle in a needle stack, when we need to. It’s an incredible capability as a strategic deterrent and clearly it demonstrates our ability to respond if we need to respond. Our commercial industry partners are our key part of this, as you well know. I was at the Port of Jacksonville last week, 2nd Brigade 1st Cav division out-loading to Europe. Incredible operation to see an entire armored brigade combat team, queued up there, gettin’ ready to load-up on three different vessels. Next slide please. Now when I tell people, is some of the things I already mentioned to ya, about our strategic comparative advantage. I think this audience clearly gets that. And the way we have to think about the emerging joint operating, which is fundamentally different. But what a lot of people don’t realize, is this inextricable link to our commercial industry partners, that play such a vital role. Some more critical than others, I might add. All consequential in some way. What really this means, is that this forum, this NDTA relationship that links our defense transportation providers with the Department, in a meaningful kind of way, to communicate effectively, is really really powerful, and again, Admiral Brown I appreciate what you do there. Next slide please. So this is the way we see it. I asked the team to go back and look and see what kind… This doesn’t measure performance, but does measure a level of activity, in different portfolios. And then where you see the arrows, really indicates the where we see that trend, either at today or headed into the future. I can tell you that as the Department looks at concepts, of globally integrated concepts and dynamic force employment, the intent really is to increase, and continue to increase the level of movements and activity. You’ve seen a lot of that, obviously, with Europe. You’ll see some of it spiking now with INDOPACOM as well, as they look at different kinds of ConOps. You do get a sense for the amount of activity though, which is quite significant. I actually look at every single, in each of these, and I might add, multi-modal is probably in the wrong location, that’s mode agnostic by design, but nonetheless you get a sense with the dollar value. I look at every single one of these portfolios, and I look at every single carrier. I look at volume and I look at performance. And I ask the team who’s performing well, and who’s not performing well. What are the issues? What are those fundamental issues that could affect our ability to project power? We have discussions about this, and if needed, the great thing about this venue, if needed, I can reach out and talk to any one of you. CEOs and we can have a discussion. And you do the same with me, and I appreciate that very much. Next slide please. Been a lot of discussion over the last couple of years, really started with General MacDew on cyber and cyber resiliency, when we talk about all-domain, multi-domain, contested environments, and those kinds of things, cyber is an area that we pay particularly close attention. Based on that being a vulnerability and potential consequence. So we very much appreciate, and you can appreciate the evolution in our contractual language, but not just that, but in our relationships and information sharing about patterns and trends, cyber hygiene, these kinds of things. And so this is the way we see it, based on the feedback, these are self-reporting feedbacks, and I appreciate the level of collaboration in this area. Still a lot of work to do. What I would tell you in the area of cyber is we’re never done. We’re just never done. As we work through the resiliency here, there’s no silver bullets here, we continue to work through cyber hygiene, cyber defense, we’re realigning our architectures, moving to the cloud, many many initiatives to bide down cyber risk for the Joint Deployment Enterprise, particularly the USTRANSCOM. Next slide please. Couple topics of interest, that are relevant today, many of you, I think, all of you, these are in your portfolio, are tracking these. Sealift recapitalization of the organic fleet, but it has trickled down impact on the commercial fleet that’s out there today, as congress gave it the authorization to procure seven used vessels to bring into the ready-reserve fleet. We’re working to accelerate that, I’ve had several discussions with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Navy, as matter a fact, Secretary Spencer was very instrumental in this most recent turbo activation of 32 ships, with Wet and Buz Buzby in the team, really great effort there. If you’re not aware, there might be an initiative out there to improve household goods. I can tell you all the service chiefs are very interested in this, service secretary of branches in this. If you’re not aware, then that means you don’t read the papers, and that’s probably okay too. (audience laughing) but what we’re doing in the household good area to be clear on this, is restructuring our relationship with industry. And I know there’s a lot of myths and perceptions and rumors out there, of what it means and what it doesn’t mean. What it should mean, first and foremost, is that we’re focused on our north star, which is our military members and their families. To be able to give them a quality experience, even in the peak season, which has never been the case in the current construct. Point number two is we are restructuring our relationship with industries so that we have a clear means to hold industry accountable for a deliberate, defined set of metrics of performance. And frankly that helps everybody. And then the third thing we’re really doing here, is inside the Department of Defense, where we’ve got a very bifurcated levels of responsibility inside the Department, we’re cleaning up the levels of responsibility inside the Department too. Over arching as we move to a a single global household good contract that’s the intent there. We’ll move over to that in the next couple of years. Aerial refueling, always a stressed area in the mobility portfolio, there is some discussions out there about the potential of a craft-like, a commercial augmentation-like capability that’s being explored today. And then digital modernization, Admiral Brown and I have been talking a little bit about inside of this group, you know we focus on sealift and airlift and other things like that, but consequential to TRANSCOM’s success is this global command control construct and I’d like to focus more effort on getting ideas to the table about how we modernize IT, accelerate our move to the cloud, remediate cyber risk, and move in that direction, the direction really that allows us to harness data, big data, advanced analytics, machine learning, potentially AI in the future. But that journey’s gotta begin today, so I really look forward to that level of dialogue, and that reshaping, I think in our relationship with NDTA. I think that might be the last slide. I think it is. So let me just say, again, in this level of strategic competition, you are all at the center of this strategic competition, whether you realize it or not. And so if you look at China, for example, and you look at China’s behavior, and their intent to really disrupt, what’s been really 75 years of of international norms and behaviors, and shape that in their favor and some of their predatory behavior, particularly economically, through state-owned enterprise and others, with their neighbors, and then their investments across the globe. That is a pretty serious level of competition. And where you should be watching for that is through your acquisition value chains we all see the foreign investments, and so forth and so on, and that this is not about going to full-scale war with China. It’s about setting the conditions so that the United States and our allies and partners, who are democratically-minded, remain in a position of advantage and can prevent great power conflict, just as in the last 75 years, we’ve been able to prevent great power conflict. Conflicts have occurred but never a great power conflict. And that’s not where we wanna go, but what we need to do today is to think our way through that, and they clearly see you, they clearly understand this enterprise, and they clearly see you as a pathway to be able to deny or degrade our ability to project power. So we can talk more about that if you’d like. Okay I’m gonna stop there, I think I’ve got a little bit of time for Q and A, and I’ll go where ever you want. I don’t know who’s got charge of questions. Again, thank you very much for being here today. (applause)
(audience moderator) We have some questions coming in from the app, The gentleman over here is probably going to read some to you, I’ve also got a microphone if folks wanna come up so please don’t be bashful I think General Lyon’s guidance to me was, “I prefer to have questions face-to-face”,
Yeah I prefer questions from the audience, if you’ve got ’em.
(audience member) Good Morning sir, we do have some questions coming in from the NDTA app this morning. Secretary McMahon was here yesterday, and he touched briefly on globally integrated logistics, can you give us your vision of what that looks like going forward? The Chairman is the global integrator, of course, but what does that look like to you? What does globally integrated logistics mean to this enterprise going forward?
Yeah it’s a good question. We spent a little bit of time on this yesterday, with the joint staff, and the Secretary too. The services, you might appreciate our work in their multi-domain con options each of the CoCOMs and the geographic regions are equally working their ConOps. Most of those ConOps are very very focused, particularly in their region, or how we’re going to employ certain long-range precision fires, or other capabilities, you can fill in the blank. But none of them right now are looking across the joint logistics implications and there are joint logistics implications in all these ConOps, and I would tell you, the Deputy Secretary talked to me previously, well yesterday as well, we talked a little bit about this, and we’re having a discussion about TRANSCOM’s role in the UCP role, as a joint deployment and distribution coordinator and the coordinating authority that comes with that, is one piece of it. We’re gonna really take that on, in those areas that are inherently joint, consequential outcomes for the joint fight. And then we’ve got to adjust and emerge the way we conduct our analysis in terms of force sizing and shaping, and my point to the Secretary yesterday was that these concepts are quite impressive, some of them have significant implications for logistics. So when concepts like dynamic basing where you begin to de-aggregate your resources at a high rate, that has an implication for force sizing and shaping, for things like mobility, fuel, munitions, and those kinds of things. Other’s concepts could frankly could have a reduced logistics requirement, I can think of some of those as well. And ideally, what the Deputy would like to do, is he’d like to understand the complete cost associated with the ConOp, not just he ConOp itself. When he’s in a decision calculous about the investment portfolio for the Department for the future. So we’re committed to work with the Deputy and the leadership and the Pentagon, but we’ve still got a bit of work to do to close down those gaps on joint logistics. That’d be the way I’d answer that question. Anybody else?
(audience member) Sir, again from the application here, with conflicts to battle fields becoming increasingly asymmetric, military unit organizations and task and purposes are evolving to the with the are evolving with the excuse me with mobility and deployability. What impacts do you anticipate this will have on transportation needs within the global theater?
What the impacts of what? Say that again.
(audience member) The evolution of the asymmetric battlefield and the units and how they’re evolving to meet the challenges on the battlefield what impacts does that have on the deployability from TRANSCOM?
It’s similar related to the ConOps that are workin’ today. Some of you might imagine have a greater demand signature, some perhaps less. But the way I look at it, and the way I look at multi-domain warfare, again back to the core purpose, the nature of logistic aspect, what doesn’t change is we gotta be able to project and sustain a level of combat power that gives us strategic reach and so forth and so on. So if those concepts have increased demands or increased consumption, or damage or destruction in the battle space, those correlate to increased logistic requirements, to be able to replenish that combat potential that was lost in the fight. And to continue to give you the momentum to achieve your strategic objectives. So it’s a demand signal that we’re paying attention to, and then we’ve got to organize ourselves around it, whether it’s a greater or lesser demand. But there’s definitely an impact, on for logistics, and that’s the part that’s got to be integrated in there. Anything else, anybody else got a question?
(Bill Flynn) General. I’m over here, Bill Flynn.
Bill, yes. Congratulations by the way.
(Bill Flynn) Thank you General. So listening to you today, listening to Secretary McMahon yesterday, there are so many priorities and so many things that we need to address jointly, how do we prioritize? What are the top three? How do we think about that? What does that mean for us in commercial industry?
There’s a lot of activity going on, that’s for sure. And there’s a lot of effort, frankly, to look at the (microphone breaks) find that activity with the highest priority. And I would just confess to you, that the highest priority in my view, and this is reflected by the Secretary as well, is warfighter readiness. So it’s our ability to invest and modernize against a near peer competitor, in an all-domain kind of a fight. So there’s this natural tension that you might appreciate and and the world you might want and the world you get are clearly two different things. So where the services are really trying to move themselves forward, CoCOMs like CENTCOM still have a real world dilemma to deal with, counter Iran, the Syria, the Afghanistan. So there’s gonna be a natural competition for resources, on how much you can achieve sustainable readiness, and then modernize for the future, an adversary we’ll face in the future, relative to what we must contend with today. A lot of a lot of thought being given to this. Understanding where the trade spaces are, what we can afford to stop doing, some of the lower priority things, what we must do to get ready against a high-end fight, and what we must do to contain, contend current operations. I think for commercial industry what that means, is you’re gonna continue to see the Department and joint force continue to be fully engaged, and these concepts like dynamic force employment, which you think about this, in other words, like strategic maneuver, so you’re strategically predictable, operationally unpredictable. And this creates a real dilemma for an adversary, but it reinforces that we can come, and it creates, in my view, positions of advantage, physically, psychologically, and temporally, where we continue to move and continue to move the joint force. It’s very powerful what this community what TRANSCOM represents. Both to our allies and partners, but also as a signature to our potential adversaries. So I think that level of activity will continue, regardless of whether it’s eastward or westward. To be honest with you None of the indicators that I have say that the activities or workloads are decreasing. That’s not the case, in fact. Thank you.
(Andy) General, Andy here. Just real quick.
Where you go?
(Andy) Right here
Oh there you are, okay.
(Andy) I was standing up. (laughs) We’ve got General Williams with us today. Can you talk a little bit about the nature of the relationship between DLA, which is combat support agency and TRANSCOM, and how you all work together to produce the effects that you’re talking about?
Well fortunately, General Williams and I, we were battalion commanders together with the great Armored Division, back in the day, and have been great friends ever since. So it’s a great working relationship. And the role that Defense Logistic Agency plays is is really monumental, when you think about everything that they do for the joint force. And the ability of the joint force to again, to project and sustain, it’s impossible without Defense Logistics Agency. So the, as you look to the future, and you look at this particular issue, from the Secretary’s perspective, and you look at how important logistics and the supply chain is. Do you run your supply chain like a business? Or do you run your supply chain like it had to operate combat operations? And so there’s a discussion, and the relationship today is excellent. And the role that DLA plays is monumental, there’s a discussion that’s circulating as to what do we think about the future, how should we integrate the combat support agencies, in a fashion that gives them the operational flavor to make sure we can get the job done against the strategy. So that’s an ongoing discussion today. I think it’s actually, I think there’s a lot of unity of thought on this particular issue right now, at the very senior levels of the Department, DLA and TRANSCOM. Thanks
(audience member) Reliant sir, another question from the app. Along the lines of the previous question, how would you describe the relationship between TRANSCOM and the Department of Transportation? And where do you see that relationship going in the future?
I don’t know how it could be better to be honest with you. You had Secretary Chao yesterday, had a phenomenal time, I got a full report, I really appreciated Administrator Buzby’s here, we have linkages with the Department of Transportation in almost every single ever single area that I can think of: Highways, railways, ports, obviously MARAD. Maintains a great majority of our ready-reserve force fleet. It’s just an incredibly good working relationship and everything that we do in the power of projection sense, from the continental United States projective is integrally linked with the Department of Transportation. Highways for national defense, railways for national defense, sea ports for national defense, strategic sea ports. And Secretary Chao, and all the leadership and Admiral Buzby have been incredible partners at every step of the way. So it’s a really I don’t know if the relationship has ever been better, it’s certainly a great relationship that we have today, and I’m certainly grateful for that I appreciate all that DOT does for us. And I really appreciated getting to Kings Point Buz, that fired me up for three days. What a great, incredibly talented bunch of midshipmen. Anybody else? Can I help anybody else?
(audience member) Sir another one from the app, How is TRANSCOM working to push the envelope of possible in increase logistic capabilities through disruptive technologies and processes, including leveraging commercial partner initiatives.
Well, I think, what I tell people is don’t wear blinders on anything, everything’s on the table. Remember the core purpose? The core purpose is to project and sustain the joint force in combat power. So if people have good ideas on how to do that better, I’m pretty open, I leave it to the components and their services, largely to work the platforms. And then at the CoCOM level, we’re doing a lot of work, in the area of digital modernization. How do we modernize that portfolio? How do we get to the cloud? How do we better leverage the data that we have, that’s largely transactional? To get to a place where we have better analytics, machine learning, potentially AI. I think that’s an important aspect of where we need to head for the future. I had a discussion yesterday with Jay Ramon, he’s the CoCOM, he’s 11 CoCOMs now, he’s the CoCOM commander for SPACECOM, we were having a discussion about what is space lend itself to for logistics? There could be some opportunities down the road, I get asked that question quite often. I think frankly, if I turn that question around to you, you might have some better ideas, but those are my thoughts on it. All right. Anybody else? The Honorable Estevez is coming to the microphone. I apologize for missing the train ride last night, I was very looking forward to that.
(Honorable Estevez) First of all, General Lyons thanks for flipping back and forth from Washington to come out here and talk to this great group. Building on Bill Flynn’s question, and Andy’s question. How do you… So you look at readiness of these component commanders out sitting here, but in order to really go to war in a great power war, you need all these companies in this room, and their networks, not just their assets, you need their networks. How do you measure the readiness, not just of your organic capability, but really understand the readiness of the companies in this room? Do you have the tools to do that? And how are you doing it?
That’s a great question. Because there’s two answers I think. One is the clean one, which is how we do it today. the question mark in my own mind, is how should we do it in the future, to accommodate for the concepts of operations that are gonna be worked from the services? How we do that today is relatively clean, when we go through the mobility capabilities requirements analysis, we define a demand signal for strategic lift, move the force based on highest demand signal that a globally-based plan brings. And then we look at what has to be the military piece of the that puzzle, and then what can be rounded out with commercial resources? We look at both the capacity piece, think the conveyances, ships, planes, et cetera. We look at the networks. Do we have the right in-route infrastructure in the nodes? Because the activities all take place in the nodes. And that’s not just military nodes, to Mr. Estevez’s point, that’s also commercial nodes. And then that ability to control that entire enterprise to get the outputs that you want. Allocate scarce resources against strategic priorities, and in that context, there’s some easy metrics. You can say is the craft contract, for example, fully subscribed with the number of carriers and the amount of iron that you needed and the answer would be yes. You could say the same thing in the visa under maritime security program. And the answer is yes. And then really, in my own view, what I’m lookin’ for, is do we have any single points of failure? Is there a dependency that is so consequential that there’s a single point of failure that some somebody, either in the uniformed service or the military, or in the commercial industry rather, creates a single point of failure. So you want resiliency. You want resiliency in the network that you described, the nodes and the routes. You want resiliency in the carriers, so if I lose one carrier to a cyber attack, I’ve got other carriers I could go to. And that’s basically how the assessment works, and as we look at, kind of a comprehensive assessment, which we do, both on the military side and a commercial side, that’s how we make that assessment. As we look to the future, I think when you think about a different way to operate, and the calculus isn’t just from port of embarkation to port of debarkation, it might be more complicated assessment that says “What do I need to operate in the lateral,” to create, again, multiple dilemmas for our adversary and multiple options. And so I think we’ll have to continue to evolve our analysis to make sure we are beyond the strategic piece, we also work theater lift and the force sizing on that. But there are some other theater pieces that we’ll have too emerge too, I think, as we look to the future. So, in the area of mobility, that’s clearly ours. I talked to the Deputy Secretary yesterday, I think in the area of fuel and some other things, we’re trying to land where that belongs, but those kinds of things are equally consequential and we’re looking at that and value chain under the joint employment coordinator role. Hopefully that answers your question. But in each of these concepts there is an interface with the commercial providers and commercial industry, and it affords us a level of flexibility, and resiliency, that we wouldn’t normally have, if we didn’t have this this group here. So it’s very important in terms of levels of resiliency that we get. Yes sir.
(Rich Mueller) Good morning sir, my name is Rich Mueller, I’m an airport director at Grant County International Airport, which is in Moses Lake, Washington. We’re all owned by the port of Moses Lake. First, congratulations, it’s good to see somebody that was in the Army to see somebody in the Army standing up there on the stage. So Congratulations, on that. Second, I wanted to say there is a second train ride tonight, sir that some of us are on, I’m sure they’d-
I’m sorry, I’m sorry there’s a what? (audience laughs)
(Rich Mueller) I said there’s a second train ride tonight sir, I’m sure they’d make room for ya. (audience laughs)
I gotta go back to Washington tonight that’s the problem.
(Rich Mueller) I figured that was probably be the case. My serious question though relates to the fact, we’ve just been really impressed, we have a lot of military exercises out of our airport, it’s an ex-SAC base, we can have a lot of fun out there. Especially seeing the Army and the Air Force working together, and seeing all the equipment being moved in and out, very efficiently actually. I guess what I’m trying to get to is that TRANSCOM, the branches work together super well. We have a lot of military exercises that involve bringing equipment in and out for the different branches. But they are not working together yet in the exercises that we’ve seen, as they will on the battlefield. Where do you think TRANSCOM can be that good example, all the way down to the field as it were. Where you can demonstrate that integration that’s at the top level can be done right down on the field level where people have to work together to get the job done, to save lives. First, I think, like at our airport, where it’s practice, so that way when it’s in theater, it’ll be that much more thorough. I guess I see you guys as a fantastic example. So I’d love to see how you can mentor that down the chain.
Well, thanks. I was out at Spokane about a week ago, actually. All that activity you saw wasn’t by accident by the way, it was choreographed somewhere. (laughs) You know a great operation mobility guardian over the three works that AMC led that effort out there, you know what I would say is inside the continental United States in the domestic power projection piece there’s a linkage with services and TRANSCOM, and TRANSCOM owns the synchronization of the power of projection aspects of the movements. Services own their own force generation et cetera. And then when you get into the theater, the theater commander receives those forces, and owns those forces. And the logistics to sustain those forces, belong to the theater commander, and typically their service components. So there is a it doesn’t have to be a clear organizational design, but there is a level of collaboration in coordination that’s quite impressive that makes it work. It makes it work quite nicely. I think actually it works pretty well for the most part, there’s a couple edges we can work on. Anyway I just noticed the clock went to zero, which means I’m out of time, I’m on your break time. But I look forward to seeing you all today, I’ll spend the day here before gettin’ back to D.C. Allow me again please to say, Thank you for what you do and your contributions to national defense. This relationship, again, accommodated by the National Defense Transportation Association for 75 years, is really an important relationship. And there are interests, there are business interests, and national security interests, that intersect in this space, and I’m really grateful to NDTA and all that you do. So thank you very much, have a great day. Thanks for being out here.(applause)