Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security for a New Era:
Focusing National Power

November 14-15, 2001
The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

The Military's Role in Homeland Security

Closing Remarks by General William F. Kernan

Robert Pfaltzgraff: Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you have enjoyed, as I have, a very good meal here, a good lunch and, of course, some wonderful conversations around the tables here as we have at our table, but now the opportunity arises to hear our concluding speaker. Our concluding speaker for this conference is General William F. Kernan or Buck Kernan, United States Army. General Kernan is Commander in Chief, United States Joint Forces Command. And he is, as they say, dual hatted, because he is also Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic. He is responsible to the President and Secretary of Defense, National Command Authority, through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for JFCOM's mission of maximizing the nation's present and future military capabilities to ensure that U.S. forces continue to move forward in a multi-service, multi-national mission capacity in these two hats that he wears. He also provides ready U.S. based Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps forces to support the command's geographical area of responsibility, its domestic requirements and, of course, other unified combat and commands around the world. I might also mention here that General Kernan entered officer candidate school as a staff sergeant. He has worked his way up in the Army, gaining a commission as infantry officer in 1968, and he has had many other command assignments and other appointments during his illustrious career in the United States Army including Commander of the 101st Airborne Division Air Assault, and other commands having to do with airborne forces. So it is with very great pleasure that I welcome General Kernan to give our concluding address and to speak about the role that JFCOM plays in the integration of our military forces in the homeland security mission. So welcome, General Kernan. (Applause)

General Kernan: Thanks very much. It is great to be here. I appreciate the opportunity, and I hope it really is an opportunity. I am a little concerned about doing this after Secretary Ridge, Governor Ridge and, you know, after lunch. (Laughter) I know you all have probably been worn out by now. I just warn you ahead of time that — caution you that my voice has been known to lull small animals and sexy old deviants asleep so... (Laughter) I mean, so feel comfortable. I got about eight slides. I don't have a prepared text. I am going to speak to this thing from some notes, but really what I want to do is try to talk about this from the DoD perspective, Joint Forces COM perspective. It was a great lead-in from Governor Ridge because he is talking about it at the national level. I was elated to hear him say that we need a national strategy. An awful lot of what I am going to talk about today hopefully is embedded in with the vision he has for the future. We got a little bit of setup going on here because we thought the presentation was going on in the other room, so I think we have caught up now with the guy who has loaded the slides up.

And what I want to do is talk a little bit about this mission of homeland security, homeland defense, try to come to grips with it, what we are doing right now, and what we see the way ahead to be. I think all of you recognize the fact that the primary mission or the primary reason for having a military force is to fight and win our nation's war. We know that. We know that. And it has been reiterated time and time again that our number one mission is protection of the homeland. And we have always recognized that, but I will tell you that we always focused on that mission from that attack emanating outside the United States and was primarily a conventional focus. And it sort of reminds me of the story of the Cajun and the game warden. This Cajun had been extraordinarily lucky fishing, and the game warden was a little suspicious as to his fishing prowess. So he accompanied him one day out in the boat and rowed right out in the middle of the lake, and the old Cajun reached in his bag and pulled out two sticks of dynamite, lit them both, threw one overboard and handed one to the game warden. And the game warden talked to him about the fact that was totally illegal, not sportsman-like, against the law, and precisely what he had thought he had been doing. And the Cajun looked at him and said, "Are you going to fish or are you going to talk?" [Laughter]

You know, all of you in this room and many others, if you think about — if you think, you sort of relate to the Cajun. He is out there with this stick of dynamite, you know, and we have been out there focusing on homeland security and what we were going to do to defend this great nation. There was an awful lot of other people who are like the game warden. They had that lit stick of dynamite in their hand, but they were just talking about it. 11 September has got us all fishing, I got to tell you. We are all focused and we are moving forward. This is a dynamic and rapidly evolving mission area. I think that we recognize that post 11 September we were going to have to re-focus our efforts. We were going to have to re-focus away from what we saw as a conventional threat against the United States to a threat that was asymmetrical, this asymmetrical threat called terrorism, and how we were going to address it and be prepared to respond. Joint Forces Command has combatant command of 83 percent of the general purpose forces in the United States, so it only made sense that we take on this mission, interimly, on an interim basis to do the land and maritime piece of it. But that slide that was up there a few minutes ago really reflects the command. On the top of it are the four components. And we get great synergy at Norfolk.

Three of the four components are co-located right there at Norfolk. We have got Air Combat Command, CINC Land Fleet and (inaudible) Land right there. And only an hour away in Atlanta, we got Forces Command. And I might add that we have got the Coast Guard right there in Norfolk, and the Regional Commander is responsible for the maritime security on the Atlantic, but has also been directed by Jim Loy to be the coordinating commander for maritime security for the continental United States, so you really gain great synergy right there. Makes a great deal of sense that we were given a mission to take this on. The next slide, I don't know if anybody has gotten into the business of defining homeland security, but I think it is important. Definitions are very important. They are essential because they clarify roles and missions and responsibilities. These are definitions that are working definitions right now. They have yet to be embraced by the Office of Homeland Security and codified, I guess, by OSD.

But for the ones we are working with right now, the overarching umbrella term that we use is homeland security. The military's piece of it is homeland defense and military support of civil authorities. Those are our two primary things, and you will see in there under homeland security it talks about prevent, deter, defend, respond. And it specifically mentions consequence management and we have a big role to play in that; we, the military. And you will notice under civil support, consequence management is not identified in this definition. That is not by accident. It is really subsumed up underneath that term civil authority to natural and man-made domestic emergencies. Point out where it talks about homeland defense and protecting against external threats and aggression. We focused on that.

The internal threat primarily is done by law enforcement. Now, we are prepared to augment and support where necessary, but doing anything preemptively, doing anything primarily inside the United States we see as a law enforcement mission. Let me have the next slide, please. Now, this is the current environment we find ourselves. Our adversary crossed that threshold. He crossed that threshold on 11 September, and it wasn't what we normally expected. It wasn't a hijacking. It wasn't a kidnapping. It wasn't a small scale bomb. He basically used a weapon of mass destruction, albeit our own systems, against us; a high yield explosive, catastrophic, horrific event. And we shouldn't forget that. And I know we won't, but we shouldn't also forget why he did it. We oftentimes looked at this as criminal. We were horrified by it. This is amoral. But we are looking at it from our value base. This enemy doesn't hold the same values that we have, doesn't have the same culture. So we see it as amoral. He sees it as a military operation. He is also not bound by the rule of law. And he is definitely not bound by the law of warfare. We are. We are. That creates some opportunities for him, some challenges for us. He will continually be assessing our vulnerabilities.

As the President said, this is going to be a protracted campaign, this war on terrorism. We are talking globally. There is no reason why we have to live this way, and there is no reason why our citizens have to be subjected to this kind of fear. It is going to take a long time. As vigilant as we might be, he is going to be also equally vigilant, and he is going to look for the seams and gaps. He is going to look for our vulnerabilities. We have got to continue to get better. We have got to do the red team assessment ourselves. Have to look at what we can do to improve, and at same time we have got to practice sound operational security. We know how to do this mission. Military support to civilian authorities, we have been doing it for a long time. We are good at it, but we got to get better. And we recognize that. And we have learned from every time we have been employed in support of civil authorities how to do it better. But now the mission area has changed and changed dramatically. We are ready. We can do the mission, and we are postured to do the mission.

Where it says homeland security responsibilities there, you heard — if you could leave those slides up. I don't know if they just flip off, but if you could leave them up there, it would be easier for everybody to reference them. But you heard Governor Ridge talking about the inter-agency, and I think at last count we deal with about 46 different agencies, and there are probably many more out there. Those are government and federal agencies. There are all kinds of nongovernmental agencies that are involved in this. Our National Guard, our Reserve, our active component are also principle players. Different authorities, different responsibilities, and in many respects those authorities give some of our forces great flexibility. The Unified Command Plan right now has about five CINCs involved in homeland defense, homeland security. Of course, Pacific command and Southern command because of their geographic responsibilities, that makes sense. Hawaii, Alaska, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, those will be handled there. You see the breakdown there for the other supporting CINCs. Yeah, there are seams. We talked before that there — I know it has been suggested that there are seams, but this is something that we are not used to — I mean, this was something we are used to.

We have done a great deal to weave those seams together, and we have seams operationally all the time. And we are used to dealing with these. Can they be streamlined? Can we do a better job? Yeah. And we are looking at that, and I will talk a little bit about that later on. Let me give you the mission. I classified it as an evolving mission. And I say it is evolving because I said we are the interim CINC-dom for land and maritime security. That mission statement preceded 11 September. We added the last part of it to put in land and maritime. Whether or not we stay with that mission area is yet to be determined. The sequence that you see in there, our future to present, is intentional. Our primary focus in Joint Forces Command is to look out to the future, do the experimentation, the transformation, do the concept development that looks to the evolution of the joint force. I will submit to you that this war on terrorism and this homeland security has put us in a transformational posture. What we did to address this, and I will show you a little later on, has been very transformational as we stood up the homeland security directory. We drive this transformation through, first of all, coming up with what kind of operational concepts are required. We test them. We validate them. We identify the requirements necessary to satisfy them. We get them in front of the joint requirements oversight council, and ideally we get them fielded very rapidly.

It requires a thorough mission area analysis. You heard Governor Ridge allude to that earlier today. You want to make sure that what you are doing is right. The intellectual change has got to lead physical change. Don't just arbitrarily change because you want to. Determine what you want to do, and then what is required to do it, and then have a game plan to very systematically make it happen. Let me have the next slide, please. These are what I call the homeland security keys to victory. I think they complement what Governor Ridge said. Synchronization and integration of the inter-agency arena is essential. We have a lot of masters out there. Ideally what we would like to do is have some kind of funnel where all these things poured through and we had one task master. We got a sieve out there right now. We get bombarded from everywhere. The fusion of that effort, the synchronization of that effort is very, very important; in particular, intelligence, both foreign intelligence and domestic intelligence. And I know we have got some domestic oversight issues that we have got to wrestle with, and we are looking at those right now. The general counsels are doing that.

We have done a remarkably good job netting ourselves with law enforcement to be better postured, to be proactive rather than reactive, but there is an awful lot more that needs to be done. Active Guard and Reserve, unity of effort. There are roles out there for all of us. Netting all that together is going to be very, very important. I personally believe that the Guard has a primary mission here. The Guard is a Title 32 force. It has different responsibilities, different authorities, different flexibility than the Title 10, the Active and Reserve. But making sure that we all understand what it is that we are doing and who has responsibility and who has primacy is going to be extremely important. We are moving in the right direction. I just had a meeting the other day once again with the Chief of the Guard Bureau and a number of the TAGS. I talk with Roger Schultz routinely. We are in this together. I guarantee there is no light between us. We have locked arms. We are going down the same road together. We are going to make the right decision. You know, the principles of war have served us very, very well.

Focusing on the common objective gives you mission focus. Making sure that there is unity of effort, unity of command, and making sure that it is as simplistic as it can be is some of the keys to success. That third bullet there talks about fused, all-source predictive analysis. We have got to have that. Otherwise we are going to be reactive. If we want to get in front of this, if we ideally want to be able to deter and prevent rather than react, we have got to fuse all this information, the domestic intelligence and the foreign intelligence together. And we need the analytical tools and we need the specialists out there to be able to assess where this threat may come from, what it might be, and how we can best posture ourselves to avoid it. We are moving forward on this. We would all like to do it a lot faster than we are able to do it right now. Protecting our power projection platforms for the military, protecting our critical infrastructure in large measure is what we are doing right now.

We are prepared to respond to security of civilian critical infrastructure, but we are protecting our power projection platforms right now. We have got to have the flexibility, the freedom of movement to be able to rapidly deploy forces to prosecute this war overseas. It takes a tremendous effort on our part to do this right now. This is manpower intensive. In the future, I think one of the things we need to do is look to see where technology can enable us to do things that right now requires people so that we can be better — we can be more secure on the home base. Streamlining the command and control, we are working through that right now. There is a major Unified Command Plan study going on. We understand what needs to be done. We also know that, as much as possible, you don't want to recreate new organizations. If you have got organizations, if you have got structure, and it just needs to be modified, morphed into something that is more relevant to the mission area that you are addressing today. That is probably the ideal solution and that is one of the things that the joint staff, the service staffs and the other CINCs are looking to achieve here in the next couple of months. Trained and ready forces, trained and ready civil forces, also.

There are 11 million first responders out there. You heard Governor Ridge talk about the criticality of trying to fuse all that together to the standardized procedures, to make sure the right equipment is out there. In the future, one of the things we have got to be able to do is make sure that we work together. In order to work together, we got to have complementary plans. We got to have the communications architecture that supports operations. We have got to be able to identify local, state and regional capability and where there is deficiencies and be prepared to augment that where required. We have got to look at this thing very holistically, and we can't look at it just from the military. The military augments those 11 million first responders out there, but in order to be prepared to do that, we need to know what their current capabilities are and what their deficiencies are. This is all very, very key, of course, to sustaining national will, and national will is what is essential to combat terrorism because that is one of his centers of gravity. His charismatic leadership, the will that his supporters have to promote their interest and deny us ours, it is a large part of our — it is a major combat multiplier for us in combating that, both nationally and internationally. We have got to be ready to respond instantaneously wherever the threat might be.

Right now those rapid reaction forces are coming out of the active component forces. In the future, one of the things we need to look at is whether or not they should come from the National Guard and, if so, how do we resource those to be able to do that? Let me have the next slide, please, because it talks about Title 10, Title 14 and Title 32. Title 10 are the Active components. Title 14 are the Coast Guard, and Title 32 are the National Guard, the state militia. There has been an awful lot of talk about whether or not the federal forces should take this over. No, I don't believe so. Buck Kernan doesn't believe so. That first bullet says it all. It says the governor should retain primacy within the state. They know what needs to be done. They have got a state militia that is postured there to support them on that. That state militia can do law enforcement things if required to augment the police.

We have got limitations with the Active components under Title 10 that, unless the insurrection acts are invoked, that restrict us from doing those kinds of things, and rightfully so. I sort of see us as the active component, as sort of the third team in this. Those 11 million first responders are the first ones out there, and are able to react or deter, then the National Guard, and then lastly the Reserves and Active components where required. Now, there is an awful lot of things that I think we can do and should do. We need to look at those authorities that either give us flexibility or constrain us. I used Title 14 as an example. That is the National Guard. They work with and for the Navy. They can take a naval vessel and put Coast Guardsmen on it and go and do law enforcement type operations. We got to look at what makes the most sense to be able to be more proactive out there in the states and the regions. We have got to come up with a regional command and control architecture, I believe, so that we can get the fusion that is necessary within the ten FEMA regions all the way up to the national headquarters, and the military needs to be complementary to that process, these reaction and response forces I talked about earlier. Right now, there is a limitation as to what the Guard can do, and the Active duty personnel are doing it.

Once we identify and do this mission analysis and determine precisely what is required out there, and then we look at what kind of capability we need at the state level to satisfy that, that can come from the National Guard. What is the actions that we have taken so far at Joint Forces Command? Well, the first thing we did was we restructured the headquarters right away because the number one mission was to do this homeland security. We created a 90-person homeland security directorate by the Joint Forces Command; the nucleus, if you would like, of the standing joint task force headquarters specifically focused on homeland security. How are we going to do this mission area? This is no failure mission. If we are going to maintain trust and confidence and national will, it is essential that we be postured militarily to deny the adversary the opportunity to do something here to hurt our civilians. We have done an awful lot of training. Training continues in combat. It is happening right now throughout the whole — all the AORs, in particular, over there in southwest Asia. You continually hone those skills. We had to do the same thing. We had a new focus. We took those 90 people and put them through a very deliberate training exercise.

In fact, it is going on right now. We have a week-long staff exercise going on right now that is going to culminate in a major CPX next month, for two reasons. One, to solidify our efforts on this homeland security, and also to be properly postured because we have to support the Olympics that are upcoming in Salt Lake City on 2 February, so we are less than 50 days away from a major international event that could also be a major terrorist target. Those other things you see listed there speak to themselves. I will tell you that we use the things that we had learned in transformation, experimentation to restructure ourselves. We didn't do this along the normal staff relationships. We looked at the fact that we had to interface with the inter-agency arena. We created an entity for that. The plans and operations continued, but then we looked at information and intelligence, and they are two different things, and how we were going to fuse that, and lastly knowledge management and what was necessary to support that. We have got a wide variety of communications apparatuses out there. We have a limitation on collaborative tool suites to support all of that. We are identifying what we believe needs to be done for the U.S. military, and ideally with Governor Ridge, if we can make sure that we have a compatible system, that is going to be the key to success in the future.

We are reviewing these authorities right now and making recommendations as to what needs to be done, in particular in the command and control arena. Last slide. Way ahead. The military is in a support role — it should say in a support role. Primacy belongs to the civil authorities and secondarily to the National Guard, but making sure that we have got identification of those plans down at the state and local level and making sure we have complementary plans built at the national level are extremely important. We have got to align the Unified Command Plan to address how we are going to get the synergy that we need to focus on homeland security. I was elated to hear Governor Ridge say that we needed a national strategy. Not only do we need a national strategy, we need a national campaign plan. We are right now in the process of developing a campaign plan. We are doing that in parallel with the joint staff, the service chiefs as well as the components out there. We think we have got it right at our level. If we are going to get a redirect, I would like to know it early on from Governor Ridge.

But it is very important, as you can appreciate, that we have complementary plans. And we need to get those plans all the way down to those first responders, and we need visibility on them, and then we try to nest these things together so we can weave this thing into a tapestry that makes sense. I will tell you that right now, this is hemispheric. We have got a good relationship and we have got good visibility on Canada. We have a lesser visibility on Mexico. We need to look at that. We got to look at how we interact with Mexico, how we ensure that our plans are complementary to their plans just like we have with Canada. We probably need something along the lines that we have with NORAD right now. We enjoy this aerospace protection with Canada but we do not have a similar relationship with Mexico.

I don't know what the way ahead is. That is something that State needs to look at and Office of Secretary of Defense. I think I will close there and see if you have any questions. I will tell you that we understand what needs to be done. We have a war on terrorism, and as Governor Ridge says, it has two fronts, one overseas and one right here in the continental United States. We have to make sure that we have visibility on the forces, and as a primary force provider, I am very sensitive to this, that I can, in fact, provide the combatant commanders of those forces what they need to do the theater engagement and prosecute military operations wherever they may be and at the same time have trained and ready forces available and immediately responsive to whatever threat may exist here in the United States. That is not an easy task. One of the advantages we have in Joint Forces Command is, because we do have all those forces, we are able to look at that. We know precisely what their readiness posture is, we know right now who is being deployed, who is anticipated to be deployed, and who is ready and available to go. Being able to anticipate gives us the ability to look at what needs to be done in the way of mobilization and bringing people up in case we anticipate a greater need than we have currently. So, ladies and gentlemen, I will open for your questions right now.

Robert Pfaltzgraff: Thank you very much. Thank you very much, General Kernan, for this outstanding presentation. We now have an opportunity for discussion and questions. So who would like to be the first? Right over here. Right here. I can give you my mic.

Questions and Answers

Audience: Yeah. General, Admiral, and company, this is a question about money. NORAD has through a window a pretty substantial budget for aerospace security. I think it is going to be seven and a half billion dollars is what is in the new Title 9 suggestion. If I look at ports, harbor, waterway protection — and we have to do a lot of work with the Coast Guard. I have to be honest. I don't think they have anywhere near the kind of money needed to protect the harbor or just the port of, say, Houston, Boston. We are from Boston so look at the problem they have in terms of LNG tankers going into Boston, and the question is what are you going to do about it? And the answer is don't know because we don't know where the money is coming from. Can you comment, because you got the poorer part. Your cousin in NORAD got the most of the money.

General Kernan: Bob, right up front, we don't know what it is going to cost. We are going through the analysis right now, and we are doing it as we conduct operations. Coast Guard has probably got a better feel for that than I do right now as to what it is going to cost for maritime security. There is a lot of unknowns here also because how are you going to deploy? One of the things we need to look at, though, is if there is new skill sets, if there is new equipment, and obviously the training that is going to be required to support this has all got to be factored in. We do not know what this is going to cost yet. Right now we are reactive in that. We are doing it because it is essential that we do it. And we are ready to do it right now. But as we are doing it, we are basically getting information that will help us, hopefully, put together a budget to address this. And I have no idea what the cost is going to be.

Audience: I am Hardev Lidder from the Indian embassy. Sir, I have not been able to understand what is the inhibition for using the armed forces at a time when it is critical for you to respond? I will give you an example. You have first responders to a crisis. They have research. They don't have adequate response capability as desired. You then go on your next line in which you have to mobilize the National Guard to be able to place units. In between this period you have organization that is best equipped. It has excellent transportation, it has premier manpower, beautiful communication, and it is waiting because somebody hasn't put it into the plan to call them up to fill that gap before the National Guard can take on. I just want your comments on this. I haven't been able to figure out the inhibition that lies behind this.

General Kernan: I want to make sure I understand precisely what your question is. Are you talking about the Active component that is not being employed right now?

Audience: Correct.

General Kernan: Okay. As you may be aware, there is an awful lot of different war plans out there. There are units that are being used — that are being trained. There are units that are identified for commitment in other theaters of operation. Right now, we have not been tasked by the National Command Authority to do anything inside the continental United States. There has been a few cases where we have had some specialty skills go forward, some explosive ordinance demolition teams, some dog handlers and some other things, but we have not been tasked to do that. So their primary focus is still training, being prepared to go in support of other Combatant Commanders. The National Guard is heavily tasked right now in the states to supporting security at the airfields and guarding other critical installations. They are doing that. So right now, the reason why haven't employed the Active component is we have not been required to do that. National Guard has a good handle on that. Now, one of the things — we talked about nesting plans and identification of assets at state and local level. As we look to the future and as we look at what is available in the National Guard within each state and we look to the Reserve that might also be in that state, being able to access that Reserve without mobilization and employing them in response to an incident is also something that needs to be factored in, but we don't have a requirement right now to employ the Active components inside the continental United States. Did that answer your question?

Audience: I think I better clarify myself. I am not talking about this particular incident, but what we were discussing, a methodology of how to respond in the future. I reckon that the whole thing is up for discussion and examination. It is in this context that I framed my query. It is the time period between the occurrence of the incident and when the National Guard can be mobilized, if you have Active components which is available for you as for planning that you may do in various different parts of the country and they do respond, handle the crisis, then mobilization takes place and those components come and relieve the Active components from duty. I think should be able to fill in the critical gap that would exist between the first responder and the mobilization of the National Guard.

General Kernan: We have done that many, many times and we don't really have to mobilize the National Guard. The Governor just simply calls the National Guard out and the employment of state militia. They do not go through mobilization. So we have done that in the past, and we are pretty well practiced in doing that. Now, what does need to be mobilized right now are the Reserve force, the Title 10 forces, and that is one of the authorities we need to look at. And maybe there is some changes that we can do that gives us a little bit more agility out there that can augment the National Guard before you use the active components that are being used by the Combatant Commanders elsewhere.

Robert Pfaltzgraff: Let's go on that our next question right now, and we will take this question right now. Wait for the mic, please.

Audience: Lee Ewing with homeland defense. Sir, for many years in the Active forces, heavily depended on the Reserve forces in the National Guard routinely. Now we are talking about significant new roles for them at home.

General Kernan:Possibly, yeah.

Audience: How do you take care of this potential mismatch if a unit is protecting airports here and flying CAPS over our cities and they are tasked to go to North Korea or to Korea or something?

General Kernan: That is a great question. That is a question because that is one of the things we are doing right now. We basically built a matrix and I know what the various Combatant Commanders are requiring right now. I know what they have identified they may need in the future. I also know what my force pool looks like and I know what the readiness posture of that force pool is. We are trying to anticipate what is going to be needed and where they come from. And you need to be able to do that ideally long range enough that if you require mobilization, that you do it in sufficient time that you have been able to bring those forces up, put them through the mobilization center, train them, and do all the last minute things that you need to do before you employ them. So one of the value added, I guess you could say, of being a Joint Forces Command is right now with the — we have got 83 percent of the general purpose forces, so we are primary mission of doing the force provider role. So we are looking at that all the time, and is it a challenge? Yeah. It sure is. And as you look at what we are doing right now in the CAPS, as you pointed out, and the airport security, those are some of those same forces out there that are maybe force listed to do something else, so we then have to look another layer deep. And we are going to have to look at the mission analysis and the force structure to support that in light of this new emerging mission area that we are experiencing right today.

Robert Pfaltzgraff: Our next two questions will come from over here. Right back here, please, and then another one.

Audience: Sir, Tim Buck, former soldier. The Unified Command Plan, as I understand it, is being reviewed right now and there appear to be several scenes in our current structure when we look at it from a homeland security perspective. In particular, you are dual hatted as the Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, I think a first for an Army officer. It may be time to pass that function back to another NATO ally to free you to function or to emphasize two other areas, experimentation and homeland security. You have said a couple of times that you control 83 percent of the general purpose forces in the United States as opposed to 100 percent because you split those forces with Pacific who does not have, my understanding is, homeland security responsibilities. NORAD has air defense responsibilities. You have, as you said in your slides, maritime and land. Is it not time to pull together some of these U.S. responsibilities into a beefed up Joint Forces Command, possibly with another name, to shed some of the old NATO structure, put it back where maybe it belongs now?

General Kernan: Let me ask you a question. Where does it belong?

Audience: Sir, I was hoping that a Four Star would have a whole lot better insight than a former — (Laughter)

General Kernan: Yeah. All those things that you talked about are being looked at. Unquestionably, they need to be looked at. Yeah, Pacific command has forces in the United States and you say, you know, doesn't have the homeland security mission, but he does. He has got it for his geographic area of responsibility as well as the fact that I have tactical command where required of those forces in the continental United States. So we have removed some of that scene. This is not unlike what we experience in combat operations, you know. You have got a joint force commander out there. He has got a JPAC that supports him. He has got an air, land, maritime component out there. There are sort of seams, if you want to look at it that way, but it is more than one individual. It is a team approach to this. And the unity of effort and unities of command is there, I believe. No. I don't have Combatant Command of those west coast based forces. Should I have? That is one of the things that is going to be looked at. Yes, I am dual hatted as Supreme Allied Commander of Atlantic right now. Is that one of the things being looked at? Sure. NATO and the transatlantic bridge are extremely important. We are leveraging NATO right now, you know. This invoking Article Five was a big shot in the arm, it was extremely important. We got five AWACS flying right now to support and protect our airways. That is solidarity. That is trust and confidence. That is important. When you talked about — when you sort of alluded to interoperability, how we are going to do that as we transform, as we modernize and do that in conjunction with our allies and so on that we can do these coalition type operations and make sure that we can all work together, a large part of that is done through this SACLANT hat I wear because SACLANT does have the responsibility to look at, in conjunction with General Ralston, the futures piece. We have got responsibility for looking at combat development and experimentation and DCI. So what is the way ahead on that? I don't know. I think that we have all made some recommendations, and we are looking very hard at what needs to be done.

Robert Pfaltzgraff: We have another question from over here. Was there another question here? I thought I saw another hand up. If not, then who would like to ask the next question? Over here again, please. All the way back.

Audience: Sir, I am Dan Day from the Army Space and Missile Defense Command. Other regional CINCs have intelligence center central support from the national agencies to help them do the job. Will your command have such a center and, if so, will Governor Ridge's office have a piece of that?

General Kernan: I couldn't tell you what the future looks like on Governor Ridge's office. I believe we need something like a national inter-agency coordination center — I think that is essential — that feeds the joint inter-agency coordination centers that right now the Combatant Commands are standing up. I believe that whoever has homeland security needs a similar type joint inter-agency coordination group to focus on protection of the homeland, and like I said, ideally it need to be linked to a national inter-agency coordination center. But I don't have one now, but we are going to look at building one and, of course, this is another one of these things that requires resources, people, money, equipment, and the communication architecture to support it all.

Robert Pfaltzgraff: We have time for perhaps one or at most two more questions. Would anyone like to take advantage of this opportunity? Apparently not. I take your silence as being that we have exhausted the subject matter. If not, certainly not — we have exhausted at least the participants. How is that? (Laughter)

General Kernan: That might be true.

Robert Pfaltzgraff: Well, let me on our collective behalf, then, express thanks to you, Buck, for being with us. General Kernan has given us a wonderful overview of the important challenges and responsibilities of the recently stood up JFCOM and has provided us with a suitable culminating experience as we try to think our way through the many issues that we have discussed over the last two days. So many thanks for being with us, General Kernan, and for giving us these concluding remarks and presentation.

General Kernan: Thanks, Bob. (Applause)

Robert Pfaltzgraff: Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to offer just a few concluding remarks. Obviously there is a great deal that one could say about a meeting of this kind coming at the time that it has, the first being that the fact that we were even able to hold it is, itself, I think a remarkable circumstance and experience, but we have indeed succeeded. We have done a great deal in the past two days. We have talked about a wide range of issues. We have been video streaming this meeting as we have proceeded. Transcripts, as I said last evening, are already available. And, of course, we will be producing a report, a printed report, to give broader dissemination to the broader community of the many issues with which we have dealt here.

It only remains for me in closing this conference to express my profound thanks, my profound gratitude to the Army leadership and, of course, to General Shinseki again for his leadership, his vision, in making this possible and allowing this meeting under these circumstances to go forward. I would thank the Army staff, his staff. I would thank the various speakers, all of the speakers, every one of whom has added a new dimension, reinforcing each other and supplementing and filling in gaps as we proceeded over the last two days. I would also thank you, the participants, for all that you have done to help in the synergism of this meeting, the excellent questions, the discussions that we have had, both in the formal sessions and, of course, in the corridors outside.

There are, of course, many, many people who have made this conference possible, logistically speaking. We know that amateurs deal in strategies and professionals deal in logistics, and if ever we had any need to be confirmed in that thought, we found it over these last two days. Much preparation has gone into this meeting. If I were to name everybody who has made a contribution, you would be here all afternoon, but I would like simply to mention three people who played a key role in this. One is the person whom we had from our institute staff who worked in the Pentagon, Elizabeth Tencza, who worked on a daily basis with the Army staff before and after the tragic events of September 11. I would thank Polly Jordan, who has been my right-hand person, my left-hand person, dealing with all of the issues that we had to deal with in our Cambridge office, but doing so with the support of our staff in the Cambridge office and in Washington, D.C., but last, and not least, I want to pay special debt of gratitude and thanks to Omar Jones. Captain Omar Jones — (Applause) hope Omar is here. Captain Jones has followed in the tradition that has been established by his immediate predecessors in these meetings. He has worked with me and I with him over these many months. We have gone through much together. And we have, of course, come through this, I hope, with flying colors; at least he has.

He has directed us to where we should be, and sometimes I have felt that I was misdirected, but not by him, only by my inability to recall where I was supposed to be at all times. He has even gotten a certain nickname here, which is unfortunate, I suppose, but nevertheless, I must tell you this. It is Mullah Omar, and I (Laughter) And that comes from the senior leadership, so he has established himself very clearly here with all of us. So he is — the other Mullah, of course, is in the worst of the tradition and, of course, our Mullah is in the very best of the tradition. So we look at it that way. So on that note I would express thanks again to everyone here, and I would wish you God speed, safe return home, and that we look forward to future meetings of this kind especially, of course, continuing this series. And we are already beginning to make plans for next year and to use this facility to discuss the issues that will be on our agenda at that time. So, again, many thanks and best wishes. The meeting is now adjourned. [Applause]