TROA 2001 Annual Meeting

Each year, TROA holds a national meeting to give association members from across the United States an opportunity to gather. TROA's chairman of the board and national president review the past year's progress and outline goals for the coming year. In late October, members of the board of directors, staff directors, and approximately 200 national members assembled in one of America's most patriotic cities—Boston. Surrounded by historical reminders of what makes this nation unique and strong, TROA's leaders discussed last year's victories—such as tricare For Life—and reviewed plans to achieve future success with legislative goals such as concurrent receipt.

Chairman's Message

On behalf of the TROA board of directors, welcome to our annual meeting. n We are delighted to be here in Boston, as we haven't held a meeting here in many years. n Boston happens to be where my roots are. n And while many of my colleagues on the board say that I have retained just the barest trace of a Boston accent, I don't believe that at all.

Being in Boston is part of our ongoing efforts to keep in direct touch with you, the members of our association. We hold each annual meeting in a different region of the country so the TROA members there not only can hear about our programs and operations firsthand, but also can have an opportunity to buttonhole their elected representatives on the board of directors. TROA is a large corporation, but it is also each and every one of you, and we want to know how we can do better to serve you and further your interests. Be sure to tell your friends in Colorado Springs, Colo., by the way, that we are going to join them next year, a year from now. While we have our membership meeting each year, we also have a convention every four years. The next one will be in Nashville, Tenn., in October 2004. And we hope that all of you can come to Nashville to join us.

Before we begin discussing TROA, I am sure you realize that all of us were touched deeply by the events of last month. We shared America's sadness for those killed and missing and their families. We saluted the brave rescuers and supported our president as he faced tough challenges.

These tragedies prompted us to establish the American Patriot Scholarships program that will provide educational assistance to a son or a daughter of any u.s. military person, officer or enlisted, killed in the line of service. These scholarships will be funded by specific donations from members or anyone else. One hundred percent of the money donated will go to the fund. TROA has already given $25,000 to kick-start this program.

This morning I would like to give you a big picture view of TROA and then let our president, Lt. Gen. Mike Nelson, USAF-Ret., fill in some of the operational details. Before I do that, though, I want to give you the current status of TROA's look at possibly renaming the association.

In our look at TROA's future, we engaged a professional marketing company called Age Wave Impact to look at TROA's image in how we appeal to the current and potential members. One of Age Wave Impact's recommendations is that we look at the name of the association in light of the fact that we have members of all types, active duty, Reserve, Guard, and former officers, as well as retired officers and their surviving spouses. As a result, the board appointed a Name Committee, chaired by board member Capt. Kathy Bruyere, USN-Ret., to review the options.

In a competition between several commercial contractors, Age Wave Impact was selected to do the following study of TROA's name. Age Wave Impact and the Name Committee met with the board yesterday to go over the results of the study. The final Age Wave Impact report and the Name Committee's recommendation then will be developed and sent to the board in January. The board will review the committee's reports, and at our next meeting in February 2002, the Name Committee will decide whether to make a motion to the board concerning TROA's name. If there is a motion and the board approves it, the committee will meet in April to discuss a plan for presenting the issue to the membership. If the board recommends action that would require an amendment to the TROA bylaws, the recommendation will be part of the ballot that will be in the August 2002 issue of The Retired Officer Magazine.

TROA has grown manyfold since it was founded years ago by Col. Arthur T. Marix, usmc. But despite our growth, we take pride in still operating on the same principle that he formulated. In a nutshell, we support a strong national defense, and we do this by furthering the interests of those who wear or have worn the uniform of their country as well as the interests of their families. Everything we do is aimed at this goal. But let me point out that we don't serve only retirees or only officers. We pursue what will benefit everyone in uniform: officers, enlisted, active duty, Reserve, National Guard, and retired. And this is because the programs and policies that are the continuing focus of our lobbying efforts are those that affect everyone—things like pay, health care, survivors' benefits. From a strategic point of view, we try to anticipate what our members need and want.

Each year the board approves a new five-year plan, a plan that helps us look down the road and get a fix on where we think TROA should be heading for the next five years. Our aim is for our services and products to be meaningful and valuable to you both today and tomorrow. And we want them to be the best of their kind. We want to continue to attract new members with strong voices who will keep our organization powerful.

Last year was in a sense the culmination of many years of wearing out shoe leather on Capitol Hill by The Military Coalition and others. At long last, Congress responded by enacting the most important health care legislation for military retirees in many decades, tricare For Life, or as we sometimes call it, TFL. But enactment of this wonderful program last fall didn't mean we could rest on our laurels. It meant that this year we had a new goal of working to ensure that TFL would be implemented smoothly and effectively. To this end, Mike Nelson and his able staff worked very closely with the people in the Department of Defense, the agency responsible for implementing tricare For Life. At every turn, the staff put themselves in your shoes, the TFL customers', and made sure that your perspectives were taken into consideration regarding administration, convenience, cost, and day-to-day operations.

The TFL program started not quite four weeks ago and I am happy to say that initial reports from TROA members all over the country are that TFL has started well. There are some minor growing pains that should be corrected by next month. Additional goodness is that the TFL beneficiaries who drop their Medicare supplemental insurance policies are saving a few thousand dollars a year in premiums. Add that to the savings from our tricare Senior Pharmacy (tsrx) program, and you can see the total program has a very positive financial impact on military retirees and families. And I would point out, particularly, this is true for retirees in the junior officer grades, foreign officers, and especially for our enlisted comrades and their families.

Along that line, TFL means saying good-bye to the Medicare portion of TROA's mediplus® insurance program. mediplus tricare supplements still will be available for TROA members who are under 65, but the 40-year-old Medicare supplement will close down on Jan. 1. And that's okay with us, because TROA didn't set up the supplemental insurance program 40 years ago to make a profit. We set it up because our members wanted it and needed it. That is what drives this association: you, our members. We have always said that we would happily stop the Medicare or tricare supplemental insurance program if we could win a better deal for our members. And now that that better deal is available, we are doing just what we said we would do.

Earlier, I mentioned that your board of directors tries to think strategically about TROA's future. We do this by examining changes in society that may affect the association and its members; economic, technological, sociological changes. And one of the inescapable changes is that we continue to lose World War II veterans and Korean War veterans and their spouses in great numbers. They have formed the core of our association for many years and they will be missed, their loyalty and their strong voices. We must now plan to keep TROA strong by attracting new members in even larger numbers. TROA wants to be what we call your information provider or information navigator, the place you call and the Web site you visit when you want reliable, honest, timely information about subjects that are important to you. And as your navigator, TROA is another specialist that will support you just as your doctor, your lawyer, or your auto mechanic does. In our case, we represent you on Capitol Hill and in the Department of Defense, and we save you the time and effort of chasing after information and products that benefit you.

TROA is a great organization. It has the world's greatest men and women as its members. It enjoys financial stability and it is served by a dedicated and top-quality staff. It gives great value to its members, and it is an outfit whose members always can depend upon it for valuable and timely information. It is an organization that is known for its integrity, both with its members and on Capitol Hill. It is an organization that provides products and services that members need. In short, it is an organization that looks out for you and is there when you need it, just like a member of your family.

Thank you for joining us today and for being members of the TROA family.

President's Report

At the outset I want to assure our members that, the events of Sept. 11 and after notwithstanding, the work of the staff is going on without interruption or degradation. We have not lost a step. Indeed, there is a noticeable renewal of commitment to our members among the staff these days as we refuse to be intimidated by America's enemies.

I am, for instance, very proud of the magazine staff, who worked many extra hours past expired deadlines to respond to events with changes you have already noticed, no doubt, in the format and substance of the October and November issues. They now have undertaken a complete review of our layout in light of the new reality, with some appropriate changes in the offing.

Our Web team also responded quickly, pulling together a list of resources to keep members informed and to suggest ways to help.

And our Personal Affairs department, within days of Sept. 11, published a special e-mail update providing information on survivor benefits to the families of those impacted by the tragic events and offering personal assistance and advice to all, regardless of rank.

Many other departments have likewise responded with new energy and ideas.

We also have been persistent and aggressive in our primary mission, influencing national policy for our members. While the media have understandably been focused on terrorist threats and combat, I can assure you the business of government continues behind the scenes, and we continue to be a part of it.

At the moment, we are watching, as the chairman reported, the early days of tricare For Life (TFL). For example, as we expected in a program of this size, a glitch in computer lists did occur in the early going, but the Department of Defense has been aggressive in fixing it. There may be more, but we expect nothing which would threaten this excellent benefit. The overwhelming majority of you will not even notice these problems, I'm happy to say.

And at the same time we're continuing our yearlong effort to inform our members and care providers about the program and to assure them of its success.

To give you some idea of the magnitude of our outreach, consider these figures: The members of the board and staff, in the first nine months of this year, accepted more than 130 speaking engagements, reaching approximately 34,000 people by this means. We printed and distributed 430,000 TFL brochures for beneficiaries and 810,000 for care providers. Our Personal Profile, which offered individual assessments of TFL applicability at our Web Base and by mail, was used by more than 158,000 beneficiaries of all ranks. All of this was supported by our regular budget and by special funding of $500,000 approved by our board of directors.

I believe this has been a remarkably effective effort by our board of directors, the staff, and our chapters, reflecting the very highest commitment of the organization to its members. By the way, if you'd like to learn more about TFL from the TROA experts, stick around this afternoon after lunch when we will reconvene in this room for a session devoted entirely to that subject.

We've also been pushing hard on other fronts, particularly concurrent receipt, which would end the practice of offsetting retired pay dollar-for-dollar for any disability compensation, and improvements to the Survivor Benefit Plan. While it's too early to predict the final outcome, congressional support for concurrent receipt has grown remarkably this year, and we think we have a real chance at a breakthrough in this year's defense authorization bill. In that regard, let me thank all of you who have weighed in with your legislators on this issue. You have truly made a difference, as you always do when you speak as one voice—loudly.

Because the impact of speaking as one powerful voice depends on the total number of voices, membership has been a major focus for us for a long time, and we have not slowed down a bit on this score, either. On the one hand, our marketing people have been astonishingly effective in their efforts. Recruiting numbers are up. Retention rates are at all-time highs. On the other hand, the hill is steep. As the chairman noted, members from World War II and Korea are disappearing from our rolls at a rate that makes increasing our total membership very difficult. For that reason, despite our successes in recruiting and retention, we continue merely to defy gravity, as I frequently put it, by suffering only a slight decline in total membership.

Much is going on in TROA as we try to recruit from younger groups. Far too much for me to catalog here, but be aware that in our magazine and Web site, in our search for appealing products and services, in our recruiting strategies, in our speaking programs, and in our periodic e-mail reports, to mention just a few, we are vigorously pursuing new ideas and new avenues of approach so we can continue to have a huge and effective chorus of voices when we need to be heard.

TROA's Officer Placement Service, tops, one of our most successful services for younger members, is doing its part to attract and keep new people. They're planning two job fairs in 2002, one in Washington and another in San Diego, and they have an ambitious speaking schedule trying to reach as many servicemembers nearing retirement as possible.

Our commitment to chapters also continues to be strong and vigorous. Our chapters provide a great source of political clout through their willingness to be heard and their political contacts, not to mention their vital roles as recruiters and social magnets. For this reason the board has provided the support necessary to put on our annual chapter and council leadership symposia, the latest one in Wilmington, Del., a couple of months ago, designed to strengthen the leadership of chapters. I'm happy to tell you that the board in its meeting yesterday voted to continue the symposium concept for the next four years, further demonstrating their confidence in the future of our chapters.

In every corner of our headquarters, the pulse of activity has maintained its high frequency, and I am proud of that vibrant energy.

There are some significant hills to climb, to be sure. General Hoar made reference to one already, the fact that the victory of TFL means we will close our Medicare supplement at the end of this year. The ending of the Medicare insurance will have two effects, one immediate and clear, the other less certain.

First, as a consequence of our enthusiastic choice, we will have to do without a substantial portion of our revenue from the mediplus program. Nevertheless, I have faith that this organization, always dynamic and innovative, will adapt readily to the new circumstance.

Second, since mediplus subscribers must be members of TROA, we must consider that some loss in membership may evolve as people drop their coverage. I'm hopeful that the good work we've done in helping to achieve TFL, as well as all the other pluses of membership, will convince people to stay with us, but that is yet another challenge we'll gladly take on.

No matter the task, I am confident we can achieve it. As I approach my retirement next April—now in light of the post-Sept. 11 world—I am ever more confident that the strengths of this organization will stand it in good stead. We are overwhelmingly united in one powerful voice; we stand solidly on a foundation of integrity; we enjoy enormous respect in Congress, in the Department of Defense, and among our fellow associations in The Military Coalition; we are engaged in good and just work, which contributes to our nation's security; we are blessed with a supportive board of directors; we are held aloft by a great group of patriotic, loyal members; and we are ultimately buoyed by our unflagging determination to make a positive difference in the world.

With these advantages, nothing can stop us.

As I complete my seventh and final report to you, our members, let me take this opportunity to tell you how grateful I am to have had these six-plus years as your president. This was a dream come true for Barbie and me, and the dream has been both exciting and fulfilling. I've enjoyed the strategic planning, the tactical decision making, and the day-to-day activity that make up life in TROA, but in the end, it is the people who have made this experience wonderful. My friends on the board of directors and their spouses, the unique collection of talent that makes up the staff I work with each day, and, of course, the thousands of members I've had the honor to meet or correspond with over the years have made this an unforgettably warm and happy experience. I thank all of you from the bottom of my heart for this unique privilege.

That concludes my report, Mr. Chairman.

Chief Financial Officer's Report

TROA's financial statements for the year 2000 were prepared by the firm Johnson and Lambert & Co. and were published in the October issue of The Retired Officer Magazine. TROA's finances continue to be in excellent shape, and Johnson and Lambert & Co. confirmed that in their 2000 audited report, giving the TROA Scholarship Fund and TROA an A-plus and unqualified opinions—that is auditors' speak for an excellent report. This is in large measure a result of careful stewardship by two of your committees of the board of directors, the Finance Committee chaired by Adm. Jerry Johnson, USN-Ret., and the Investment Committee, chaired by Rear Adm. Jesse Hernandez, USN-Ret.

Let me give you some of the highlights from the 2000 financial statements. Revenues exceeded expenses by $4.9 million. However, 2000 was an interesting year. Net assets decreased by $8.7 million to $84.5 million for TROA due to market value adjustments to the investment portfolio.

For the TROA Scholarship Fund, we received $1.6 million in contributions and bequests, which allowed us to help more than 1,300 students in the 2000-2001 school year.

In summary, your board of directors—in particular, your Finance and Investment committees—has ensured, financially speaking, that TROA is well-financed.

Guest Speakers

Gen. Jones: Thank you, General Hoar. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

It wasn't my intention to turn this into a fashion show so I apologize for the uniform. But we really did land at the airport just a little while ago.

One of the great, great thrills in my job is to be able to be associated with a very special human being, and one of the very first decisions in the Marine Corps that any commandant gets to make is to select his running mate, so to speak. And that is the sergeant major of the Marine Corps.

We have now our 14th sergeant major of the Marine Corps, and I would tell you without any fear of contradiction either for myself or from any Marine that I know that this is the best decision that I've ever made.

I want to take a moment to introduce to you a very special man, a very special Marine, who along with his wife, Rita, is doing some extraordinary things in the Marine Corps, unifying all ranks, sending out a strong message that before we are any rank or any military occupational specialty, we are first and foremost Marines. So I introduce to you today the 14th sergeant major of the U.S. Marine Corps, Sgt. Maj. Alford McMichael.

Sgt. Maj. McMichael: Thank you, General Jones, for being so kind and generous to share this precious time of being before this great organization with me. And let me say to the president, Lieutenant General Nelson, and to all of the members of TROA, it is a great honor and a privilege for me to have the opportunity to be in your presence. I would like to personally thank you for all that you are doing not only for TROA, but for all the men and women who serve in uniform and for all the men and women who have served in the uniform.

I will tell you I keep both eyes on your monthly and annual writings and in your programs and booklets that go about. And it always thrills me from the bottom of my heart that we have people who are willing to stand up long after they leave the service and take the uniform off to make sure that things in the service are going well. It has been very impressive with what you have done for us in lobbying and standing tall for things like pay raises for active members of our armed forces, the survivor benefits and Social Security plans for disabled, and retired-pay redux, and of all those great things, tricare For Life. I will tell you, it has made a difference for those of us who are still standing tall and wearing the uniform each and every day.

There are five areas that I would just like to touch on quickly to let you know how much you make an impact on the U.S. Marine Corps and the great naval service that we serve each and every day.

First, what you do as an association plays a major part in what we do on the streets of America with our great Marines who are better known as recruiters. These young men and women walk the streets of America every day remembering that those of you who have gone before us have given a lot for us to have that opportunity. And we have been successful for more than six years of recruiting 38,000 men and women from your neighborhoods, from your church communities to come and join and serve in the U.S. Marine Corps.

The second one is that you also allow us to be more committed to our recruit training before we take these young men and women. They come and put their feet on the yellow footprints in places like Parris Island and San Diego and even ocs and tbs, where we make our officer leaders of Marines. And these things that we go through, we call the Core of Competence. Nowadays, you cannot walk out of recruit training unless you master all six of those, passing the Crucible or, more importantly, one of the new things that our commandant has been so instrumental in giving the Marines to stimulate their motivation, called the martial arts program. This is a program that has allowed our young Marines to be able to live up to the title of Marine and not have to live behind a myth that people may think you are capable of having combat, hand-to-hand combat training, but the martial arts program will give you the self-discipline and the ability to defend yourself with or without a weapon, from recruit training all the way to retirement. So even Marines that have been around a little more than 31 years like myself still have an opportunity to catch up and be able to train with the young men and women that are walking into our corps today.

Another one is once we recruit them and train them, we want to retain them. We need to retain these great men and women that come into our service. And what you do as an organization has allowed us to tell the story that there is something good happening in our armed forces, that you don't have to get out at the end of your tour, that great things are happening like you have worked for, pay raises, health care for life, tricare, and those things which add to the tangibles that we need each and every day. In 1997, we were asked to retain a little more than 3,000 of our young men and women on their first enlistment. This past year, 2001, we were asked to retain a little more than 6,000. The commandant's vision was we can make that better. During his first year he asked us to step down and do a retention standdown, not because he was afraid we couldn't retain them, but he wanted to give the commanders in his corps the opportunity to take a look at how we could retain them and find better ways and better things to offer them to remain a Marine for life.

At this point, he went even further. He thought if we retained the first-termers, what about those who have served a long time or continue to stay with us, called our career Marines? And to make sure we were taking care of the career Marines, he moved us in a direction of having a career-planner school. He combined it with our recruiter school that had the great selling skills to sell to young men and women walking the street. Now we have our career planners getting those same selling skills to take care of the men and women who are serving within our forces today.

We also have what we call readiness; readiness for our modernization, readiness for our legacy system, readiness for our infrastructure, readiness for our family. And all of this has made us a stronger corps. When I tell you we have a family readiness program, I am really talking about the thing that you help us work on every day, because it is very difficult for us to explain to our family members that they won't have the health care that they expect or they won't have the housing that they expect or they won't have the correct pay or the amount of pay or affordable housing or affordable education. Those are the things where you have encouraged us and have supported us in making sure that we can continue to serve.

Last but not least, there are the retired. When we talk about retirees in the Marine Corps, we are talking about men and women who have left a legacy that has helped us build this great history that we celebrate each and every year. And that is many of us that sit here today. I would like to personally thank you for that. But I will tell you, we want to make sure that we are not only getting you to retirement, we want to make sure that we allow you to stay connected to this great institution. We want you to be able to leave the corps happy about having served, and we want you to leave the corps proud with what you have left behind. And we do that by making sure that the programs that you helped us instill in our society, we want to live up to what we tell society; that if you join the Marine Corps, we will send you back a better or more complete citizen to join our community.

And I will tell you no one can add to our recruiting any more than our retirees, the retirees that are speaking about the service that they served and the things that they did. In the board rooms and in the classrooms and around the church pews are young people who are sitting on the fence, who are not really understanding what patriotism is all about. When they hear you, the greatest generation of men and women that have come and made that generation what it is, it allows us to build a generation like you for the 21st century. So I say it is a great honor to be before you this afternoon. I am very proud of being a Marine. Semper fidelis, semper fidelis TROA, semper fidelis forever. God bless you all.

Gen. Jones: Thank you, Sergeant Major. One of the real pleasures is to be able to address groups. And I make it a point to go down to Quantico where our schools are and talk to the young officers that are coming up, the schools that I went to and the master classrooms that I attended. Last week something unusual happened at amphibious warfare school to which our young charging captains go. I finished my lecture and handed out a handout immediately. And this captain stood up and asked a very, very difficult question that would have taken a lot of time to answer, so I really kind of gave him a halfhearted answer. I moved on to other questions. And clearly, he was not satisfied with my answer, so he went and he raised his hand again. And I acknowledged him again, and he rephrased his question, and again it was so complex that I didn't really want to get into it. So I tried again with a light answer and moved on to another question, and noticed to my dismay that he was still trying a third time. And finally, when he stood up and rephrased his question again, I decided to take him on directly. And I said, "Captain, you sure do ask some difficult questions." And he said, "Well, sir, I am sure you didn't make general by asking easy questions." I said, "No, but it would help you make major."

I think you can see why I am so very proud and fortunate to have Sergeant Major McMichael by my side. And I mean what I say when I just make the simple statement that there are very few things that I do that I don't check with the sergeant major first. The uniform that I am wearing was in fact inspired in large part by the sergeant major. We felt that it was time to try to make a product upgrade. We thought it was time to celebrate the fact that we do have different services. And one of the things I strongly believe in is the strength and the vitality of service cultures.

One of the things that concerns me a little bit is that in this era of jointness, which I completely agree with, that we shouldn't lose our respective service identities; those cultures in the Army and the Navy and the Air Force and the Coast Guard and the Marines are extraordinarily important, and they really make us stronger because we have different ways of doing things, and we share with each other and we borrow from each other; we share good ideas and it makes us stronger. This one-size-fits-all concept as some people advocate without knowing what they are really talking about can really get us into trouble.

So I am a big believer that service cultures are to be treasured and preserved and the rich heritage of our services and the differences of our uniforms are a large part of who we are and what we do. And this uniform is essentially designed to hopefully improve—at least from the Marine Corps' standpoint—to improve the product a little bit. It has got some higher-tech fibers in it, and it was designed really by young Marines. They selected the patterns. They told us what they wanted, what they didn't want in it. And we made some changes, and we came out with a combat uniform that looks exactly like this that will come into the field here in December.

One of the biggest things that they are going to like, even though they don't believe it, is that this uniform is a complete wash-and-wear uniform. And I know people have tried this before and failed because we have well-ensconced in our ranks the gunnery sergeant or the first sergeant who said, "Well, I starch my uniform and, by God, you are going to starch yours." But I have been wearing this uniform for about six months and nobody has ever put an iron to it, nobody has ever put starch on it. And for the average Marine who pays about $50 a month right now maintaining his or her camouflage uniforms, this uniform is an immediate pay raise for our young Marines and sailors who will wear this uniform.

So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about a little bit is this new world order—or disorder—and talk to you a little bit about my role as a service chief and some of the things that the Marine Corps is doing in connection with that.

Asymmetric threats are not—it is not a new word. It is not something that should come as a surprise to anybody. We have had indications all over the world that there was a terrorist potential to strike. We have had air and gas attacks, we have had hijackings of Air France airliners by Algerians who actually wanted to fly that airplane into the Eiffel Tower, but the airplane was taken over by French commandos and that threat was neutralized. We have had hijackings, we have had car bombs, we have had truck bombs. In short, we have had plenty of warning that asymmetric threats and terrorist attacks were infinitely possible. What is shocking to all of us is the scope and magnitude of the attacks on Sept. 11, and that we are into a new world disorder, if you will. And we are going to struggle through it, and we are going to be victorious, and we are going to do as our commander-in-chief says, through the formation of coalitions and through the realization that the military answer is an important part of the answer, but it is not the only answer. We must fight terrorism and fight this insidious threat and economic threat from an economic sense, and we must link anything that purports to provide support and resources for terrorists and cut them off like a multiheaded serpent and cut off the head so that the body dies very, very slowly.

And by that I mean I believe there is a connection between "narco-terrorists," as we have had a war on drugs going on for some time. And I don't think it is a stretch of the imagination to think that a lot of money that fuels terrorist groups the world over comes from narcotics trafficking. And we should consider very hard the plethora of targets that we have out there that we could significantly disrupt and contribute to decreasing the revenue and doing something that certainly would be good for our streets in terms of eliminating or reducing the availability of drugs.

So what surprises us and shocks us today is the scope and the audacity and the magnitude. But the event itself, the threat has been there. My judgment, it has been the most probable of all threats. And now that we have confronted it, and now that we are dealing with it, we will be successful.

There are some lessons that we should draw from it, and I think I see all kinds of great signs that we are in fact doing that. One is, of course, to really examine the construct of our intelligence community and make sure that it is in fact as integrated as we possibly can get it and that we don't have competing stove pipes, if you will, that keep their information within their own organizations or share it at different levels. Intelligence has to come together as a community. It has to be led, and it has to be orchestrated in such a way that actionable intelligence is known and it gets passed up and down the chain of command from the national command authority down to the tangible end in real time. The reason why this is important is because many times when you are dealing with terrorists, and not just a country like Afghanistan, but other countries, the actionable targets that you might want to strike aren't there for very long. You have to be able to be positioned in such a way that you can use the proper amount of force to neutralize these targets when they appear. Frequently, terrorists are able to operate in a decision cycle that is very rapid. And they know that there is no safety for them in large numbers so when they have to convene for whatever it is they want to do, whether it is to take some lives off of ships or meet airplanes and everything else, you have a very small window in which you can act. And so this will necessitate us perhaps to do things a little bit differently. It is not impossible, but we certainly cannot move the large part of the Air Force and the Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps simultaneously to deal with terrorist threats. We are dealing uniquely now with one country. But ultimately, we will develop the agility, I believe, to be able to go off into multiple directions and do things that not only will get inside the terrorists' decision loop but also will severely hamper their confidence and their abilities to even operate.

A second issue that has emerged that is certainly being talked about in the press is the new and focused interest on homeland security. This is probably one of the most important things I think we must tackle and we must do. The good news is that we certainly have the assets to do it. The challenge is to make sure that we organize those assets in such a way that they in fact are responsive and do operate from a military standpoint in a unified command structure of some sort. In my judgment, this is not an additional duty for some commander-in-chief. This is a full-time duty until we get it right. And the president has recognized this and has appointed former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge as his civilian overseer, a Cabinet-ranking official. I think this is a good start. Now it is up to people like me and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to really propose a good solution that fuses and harnesses the elements of the military that can make this a real, workable solution.

The pieces are there. It is just a question of reshaping them. I would suggest to you that one of the pieces that really can be reshaped to do this is the National Guard. The National Guard exists fundamentally to provide security for the homeland. And it is now incumbent upon our governors of the United States and our guardsmen to come together and restructure and reshape themselves in such a way that they are not built to fight the World War III that may never come, but actually to defend the sanctity of the United States from inside the border in response to weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological attacks, and things of that nature. And I think that we can do this with stunning success.

So we have, in response to Sept. 11, we have really several things ongoing, two principles simultaneously. One is looking at ourselves, at defending our nation and looking at ourselves externally and projecting our forces.

I just came back from a weeklong trip to Saudi Arabia and Egypt and then went off to Bahrain and the Persian Gulf and then out to the uss Theodore Roosevelt Battle Group in the North Korean Sea. And I spent the night with sailors and Marines on board the Peleliu Ready Group. And so I have talked to pilots and I have talked to Marines who actually have been in the skies and on the ground. And I have come back to you full of optimism that these young men and women out there are very proud of the job they are doing. It is a very difficult job. The average mission, for example, the average time a pilot spends in a cockpit when he is launched from the deck of the uss Carl Vinson or the uss Theodore Roosevelt is in excess of six hours, at night, necessitating them to hit tankers two or three times before they execute the mission and come all the way back. The distances are tremendous and a real challenge. They are doing it well. They are doing it safely, and they are making a real contribution.

In response to Sept. 11, all the services are doing certain things. I would like to just tell you what my service is doing. The Marine Corps has had an interest in antiterrorism for some time. It predates Sept. 11. Some of us already had begun reorganizing our forces to make sure that every deployable unit in the Marine Corps be deployed with antiterrorist capability with certain training standards that are done in the unit before they are deployed. We did this more than a year ago. We have had three units in the Marine Corps for a long time that have been involved in antiterrorist work, but they weren't called antiterrorism forces so we decided to call them what they are really doing.

The first unit is the Marines Security Forces Battalion. This I would characterize to you as a Tier I national asset for antiterrorism. Let's declare that antiterrorism is defense and counterterrorism is offense. It is properly located in the Special Operations Command. But the antiterrorism mission is one that really needs to be brought up to the same standard. And the Marine Corps Superior Forces Battalion is actually a world-class antiterrorism force. Ideally, they would be used proactively, not reactively. And they come under the operational control of our fleet commanders and they are to be used in the protection not only of our naval forces but also our embassies around the world.

In a proactive example, several weeks ago they were called in to reinforce the embassy in Macedonia, and that was proactively employed and nothing bad happened at the embassy. That is one force that is already there, about 3,000 Marines, and they are hard at work, and they are doing great things all over the world.

The second one is the special detachments. These are the Marines that are dispatched to 120 different posts and stations guarding embassies and consulates all over the world. Special detachments, sometimes five, six, sometimes 10. I think one of our largest detachments I just saw in Cairo, Egypt, has 29 Marines associated with the embassy. That is a big detachment. But there is clearly some antiterrorism work and skills that they bring to the table.

The third unit was created by my predecessor, General Krulak, in a moment of great tradition. And it is called the Chemical and Biological Incident Response Force, a couple of hundred Marines. When this asymmetric threat first came to our consciousness some years ago, General Krulak formed this out of whole cloth. This wasn't added in. This wasn't an add-on. He did this within the Marine Corps and created a world-class chemical and biological incident response force. The only thing I did was I moved it from Camp Lejeune, N.C., to Washington, D.C., just outside of Washington at Indian Head, Md., a little naval base there, thinking that perhaps Washington was a more likely target than Jacksonville, N.C., even though Marines would probably like to see Jacksonville get it first. But having said that, since they moved to Indian Head, every state of the union, every joint session of Congress, the inauguration, and if you have read the newspapers last week, in doing work on Capitol Hill in the Congress right now, Marines from the Chemical and Biological Incident Response Force were used in that capacity.

And so all we have done is taken those three units that I just mentioned and rolled them into one unit and added an infantry battalion from Camp Lejeune that will specialize in antiterrorism capability, put a brigade headquarters over it and call it the 4th Marine Expedition Brigade (Antiterrorism). And then the colors for that brigade will roll out once again. It is a very famous brigade in the Marine Corps, but we rolled the colors that we deactivated several years ago, and we are reactivating it in this new mission of antiterrorism on Monday. So it will provide an extraordinary capability, not only for use abroad but also for use at home as well.

When I spoke to the Marines on ship in the North Arabian Sea, they had been at sea for 42 days without any port. Their last port was in Darwin, Australia. And so they have been at sea for 42 days and some of them have been able to participate in operations, but most of them have not. And of course, their question is, you know, No. 1, how do I get off this ship? And No. 2 is, when do we get to do something? And I told them they should be patient. Patience is something that warriors need to develop. And you have to have a discipline to be patient. If this is truly a war on terrorism, it is not just a war in Afghanistan. We will be trying to take down terrorist camps wherever they exist. And where they exist is all over the world. And many of the places that they exist are near the littorals of the world, be it South America, be it the Persian Gulf, be it the Mediterranean and in Africa. There are plenty of opportunities out there, but they are anxious. And they are very proud of their current missions, but they also are concerned about their future missions.

I will transition right now to basically the world before Sept. 11 and after Sept. 11. Prior to Sept. 11, some of us in the Pentagon were struggling with things about, quite frankly, defense and defense-planning guidance. And there was great concern that we were not going to be able to not only transform our forces, but also modernize our forces. And there was great angst over some of the fiscal projections we thought were coming our way.

One of the sad realities, I think, of modern life, perhaps of a democracy that has to be this way is that we seem to learn our greatest lessons in the aftermath of great tragedies. And we appear to be learning this lesson. The good news is it is not too late. But the world post-Sept. 11 looks a lot different. It looks a lot different from the standpoint of interest that now is being shown on the part of our elected officials on Capitol Hill, not that they were disinterested before but we have seen in the last 20 years an erosion of interest in being members of the Armed Services committees, the House Armed Services or the Senate Armed Services committee. Some of the giants of the past have left and retired, and the new focus has been more on committees that have to do with commerce and banking or international trade and foreign relations, and less so on committees that have to do with the armed services.

I think that is changed now, and I think it has changed forever. There is now a renewed focus on readiness. There is now a brand new focus on modernization. There is a renewed focus, obviously, on providing the tools. There also has been a reawakening to the fact that conflict is a hard, hard thing to do. That it is very manpower-intensive. And as we are finding out in Afghanistan and other places, that ultimately although we might wish to have a conflict where there are absolutely no casualties on our side, that is virtually impossible, and really the measure of a nation's willingness to achieve its goals and to be felt as a nation of influence has to do with its totality and its total willingness to commit the sum total of its power. And if it means soldiers and Marines and airmen and sailors on the ground, then so be it. You can't do this halfway.

This war is a personal, very intense, as some of you obviously know, very intense experience. And this search for terrorist camps and small targets is going to be extremely personal from the standpoint of the human involvement. So we have wonderful capabilities and we have the opportunity to show them. We can, in fact, be successful and I think we will do that.

As the sergeant major mentioned, we are blessed in the Marine Corps by having tremendous recruiting and retention statistics. I won't go over that. The 2002 budget request, if and when the Senate and the House finish marking it up, is going to be dramatically better than anything we have had in the last 10 years. Certainly from the point of readiness and modernization, I can look you in the eye and say this is the first budget where we won't have to pay for modernization out of our readiness or vice versa. That is a major, major step.

Our own transformation objectives in the Marine Corps are not pie in the sky. They are evolutionary, on land, on sea, and in the air. Most of the programs that we think are going to get us to be the most modern Marine Corps by 2008 are funded, and they are going to continue to be funded in the near future. An organization like yours has a wonderfully important role to play. You serve as advocates. You serve as the reminders that this is important, what we do is important. You serve as a little bit of a conscience for our elected representatives because you have been there, you know what this is all about, you know the risks. And you know what the services need, and you articulate it so very well.

You also serve an educational function, education not only for political leadership but for our public at large. It is very, very important that this connection between the military and American society stay strong and vibrant. Without it, there is nothing good that can come to the democracy. But with it, all things can be done. You also share a history. History is important. You have to learn from your histories. If you don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past, then you have to be able to know where you are coming from, if you ever want to figure out where you are going to go. How else can you go forward as a nation if you don't know your history and you don't know your experiences? We do know for a fact that freedom is not free, and we know that freedom cannot be taken for granted. And we probably have been dealt a stunning reminder of that recently. And we must be willing to sacrifice to maintain the freedoms that we want to enjoy. And the world as we know it today expects this great nation to lead and to be the nation of consequence as we rid ourselves of the surge of terrorism threats to our way of life.

It's really an honor and a pleasure for all of us to be here with you, and I thank you so very much for what you are doing. I thank you for your attention.