AUSA 2020: Pentagon News Briefing

good morning good morning how's everybody doing all right good morning ladies and gentlemen thank you all for joining us today here in the room and on the phone my name is colonel kathy wilkinson i'm the media relations director at army public affairs this morning we have our army senior leaders who will give you an update on where we stand in the army as we start our virtual ausa meeting before we start a few notes for the group we've been checking in people on the phone and also in the room so i will call on you um please wait for me to call before asking a question we do have a lot of people on the line today so i do not know if we're going to get through everyone so please keep uh one question and one follow-up so everyone uh gets a chance we have 30 minutes mr secretary the floor is yours oh good morning appreciate everybody for joining us today the the chief in the sma and i uh really are grateful for the ausa organization and for our hqda staff and secretary for putting on an event of this magnitude during a global pandemic where we're doing a vast number of zoom calls and trying to engage with industry and other groups and uh usually we get the opportunity for thousands of soldiers and civil servants from all over the world get to travel to washington and helps us put tremendous focus and energy on our agenda learn from the previous year and how to focus for the following so we're putting a tremendous amount of energy into that and trying to make the time and space to allow the army to get together we huddle with congress as well and and industry and discuss the way ahead so appreciate these efforts as well as the opportunity for to meet with the media i know we usually do it downtown and you get to see a lot of our efforts and joint work we do with the industry in particular this week we have announced focus on people as we seek to balance readiness with other ambitions we're in transformational change as we modernize our equipment our weapon systems our formations and the way we fight in order to maintain deterrence and decisively win in the future people are the foundation of our organization the last 19 years of sustained combat operations in iraq and afghanistan has taken its toll because of focus leadership we pulled ourselves from a readiness trough of two bcts at the highest levels of readiness to over 27 bcts today and just as we did with readiness we must put the same energy and resources into our people with the help from congress and our industry partners we're now seeing our 31 signature systems coming online and modern equipment built around a soldier-centered design was landing within our soldiers and their soldiers reach tough fiscal decisions will be necessary as new equipment lands and we must rapidly scale our formations the chief and i spoke about project convergence last month which is the army's path to transformation it's led by general mike murray of futures command and we just completed the first successful iteration in arizona we're linking the right sensor to the right shooter to generate the right option from influence to lethality by commuting computing at the edge this has enabled us to reduce the cycle time of five minutes from long-range precision fires and assets to targets in less than a minute tremendous tremendous performance last month and we have iterations that will be coming in the future so this campaign of learning is helping us bring the designers and the scientists together with the soldiers at the edge and it's really compressed the span time for us and development of our weapons systems so as you can see we're transforming for everything from our systems to our culture and with that i'd like the chief to open up some comments and we'll take your questions well thank you mr secretary and uh first of all i just like even though i've i've been screened and tested multiple times over the last two weeks i was tested this morning and uh all negative and i've been cleared by the docs to come back in so it's great to be with you all today and no positive tests all negative all the way through and and and the most intensive testing so but but our under abundance of caution we did quarantine for a couple of days and and and met what cdc did and we're cleared this morning so and with that every day is a great day to be united states army because we serve with the world's greatest soldiers and today is a particularly great day because we kicked off this year's ausa annual meeting which is very a very special time for us and i want to thank you all for being here the army is people and that's why our people that's why people first has always been our philosophy and now as the secretary said people is also our number one priority and for people we are transforming how we manage uh talent in our army we're in a war for talent we publish the army people strategy and we're rolling out the implementation plans for how we acquire retain develop and employ all of our people to include our soldiers of all components and our civilians we've launched project inclusion it's our effort to ensure we have an organization that is truly inclusive and everyone feels like a valued member of the team and we continue to continue to aggressively improve our five quality of life efforts housing health care child care spouse employment and pcs moves in other ways we are prioritizing people is by implementing the originally aligned radius and modernization model as we call it rearm to balance the operation tempo of our forces we are looking at ways to reduce requirements and they enable leaders the additional time to invest in their people at the lowest levels and we are changing policies to reinforce our focus on people and we take care of our people we meet our readiness and modernization priorities and we take care of people we have a stronger and more committed force we are moving away as secretary from incremental improvements and modernization in order to meet the challenges we face in the great power competition environment we're living today the time is now for transformational change we're excited to share with you over these next few days how the army is going to transform to meet our future challenges i'm also excited about the opening of the national museum of the united states army scheduled for veterans day the 11th of november this year it's an amazing facility it's amazing facility and shares the history of our army through the artifacts and stories of the soldiers that have served i hope you all get a chance to see it thanks again for being here okay first question is on the phone leeda please ap hi good morning um first question um for the chief and on a follow-up to uh secretary mccarthy um keith can you give us a little bit more detail on some of the things that you all are going to do going to be doing about reducing deployments and other specific changes how have you made a decision on the reduction in deployment times have you talked to um other co-coms and everything about it and my follow-up to the secretary can you just give us a sense of whether or not there have been any agreements made with other law enforcement agencies about them wearing military uniforms in the event of other unrest and other events particularly surrounding the election and interpreting that thank you yeah yes you know on the um as far as the the the new model that we're working under we you know we our our soldiers have been highly deployed over the last 19 years and done an absolutely fabulous job in in conflicts really uh through the middle east and in support of other co-com commanders and what we realized is we've surveyed the force uh that the op tempo is still extremely high even as the numbers of our forces in in combat has come down so we're taking a look at the rotational deployments uh we're working with the cocom commanders to see how we can accomplish the mission uh in in innovative ways um and and we're going to see that coming out over the the next uh two years the second piece of that is is how we are training in preparing our forces for the rotational deployments there's things that we can do when they're actually forward deployed whether it's gunnery or it's a combat training like scenario that allows us to reduce the op tempo on our units and the intent is to give more time back to our sergeants at the lower level so they have chances to build cohesive teams of highly trained disciplined and fit soldiers at the squad platoon and company level that is the foundation of our arami it's the foundation of everything we do and we just want to give our junior leaders that opportunity to do that lita with respect to your question i know secretary esper has had discussions with secretary wolf related to the the uniforms because of the the concern of creating confusion uh i don't know where those discussions are at present but we can follow up or get uh um the best read on the situation from osd okay okay uh ryan brown cnn hello thank you for for doing this um uh general mcconville first to you uh you thank you for letting us know about this self-quarantined process are the rest of the joint chiefs also have their self quarantines also come to an end are you are you tracking that well i think i'm not going to speak for the other members each one depending on the advice of their doctors where they've been and and uh is is executing uh cdc guidelines so i'd i'd defer those questions to them but um from my host i'll be glad to talk about my standpoint tested multiple times during all all the events uh very very careful on you know wearing the mask using the six feet washing the hands i actually personally test myself five days five times a day with the temperatures and all those type things we take it very very seriously but the same time as leaders there's things that we have to do in person we have to get out there whether it's going to new york city or going to washington state or going to our combat training centers that we where we have soldiers we have to be able to operate uh in this environment so we we take the threat very seriously and we use the mechanisms that are in place and so far that has worked out for us thank you and mr secretary to you in your unique role with the dc national guard do you anticipate any role for the guard being played in the upcoming election securing anything or having any kind of role potentially there have been no requests from other agencies to support at this time but we're always available to support whether it's metropd or other federal agencies okay on the phone defense news jen hi yes um secretary mccarthy you uh told me recently um that you know if we're going to have a lower top line for budget uh future that one thing you will not sacrifice is quality of life for soldiers and their families and you said that you were going to make some announcements regarding some new efforts related to that um is that the rear strategy are there some other things that you plan to be announcing at aosa can you just give me more of a rundown of what those things might be in the next i think day or two we're going to talk about housing and some moves that we're going to make with respect to that with respect to re-arm you know defer to the chief but that that will help create more predictability in the system whether we're communicating with the office of secretary of defense and combatant commanders as well as internally uh to uh to our formations uh but the the five quality of life initiatives that we laid out over a year ago we're going to talk about that and some of the substantial moves we're going to make in the coming months to continue to put more energy against that and give the quality of life to our men and women that they deserve chief anyone in i think it's it's you know very very important you'll see the resources starting to align uh over the next couple years with the quality life initiatives you know we enlist soldiers but we realist families and we had a very very good year this year on retention we want to keep that up we want to compete for the talent of these great soldiers non-commissioned officers warrant officers and and leaders we have and and in order to do that we have to provide a good quality of life for them okay here in the room lucas lucas thomas and fox news gentlemen do you have any plans to have any active duty military police units train or begin training to handle any election security or any potential unrest in the weeks ahead you mean specific plans to specific cities yeah are there any active duty military police units that are in training or plans to begin training for potential deployment in case there's unrest in the weeks to come around the election i don't think we have anything at present no i mean there's no there's been no planning guidance given up from the department of the army directing any military police units to begin training uh for any uh situation but up but our you know as a you know our our soldiers and our units are always prepared in training to conduct emissions but if the question is it has been specific guidance given from us there has not been and uh you've had 144 suicides in the u.s army among the active duty force yet no active duty soldier that i know of has died of the coronavirus which is a bigger threat to the u.s army right now is it suicide or the coronavirus you want to start off now i just i i'm very concerned about the behavioral health impacts of covert uh and and it is it is affecting our soldiers and you know when you when you're the chief of staff you're the secretary you're concerned about what is affecting your soldiers and suicides is affecting our soldiers that's why it's one of our top three uh priorities when it comes to things that we have commanders getting after and you know some of the scientists have said they've not been able to show causation uh between covid and suicide but i would argue at least my sense is it is having an effect because it disconnects people and when we look at uh the after-action reports of of soldiers that have died of suicide it tends to be situations where relationships have gone bad where they start to feel uh that they don't belong that they they're a burden and you know one of the uh initiatives that we have is this this and give time back to our junior leaders so they can build these cohesive teams where everyone feels that they're part of the team and when there's an issue they know who to go to and you know you've all seen this with covet you know especially during the beginning part people were disconnected you know the connection might only be a text between a leader and that's why in some ways we thought it was very very important to get back to uh training our soldiers bringing teams back together so they could take care of each other i don't know sergeant major you want to actually talk about that with this my squad yeah this you know probably about four months ago we talked about the social connection and how do we do this and when i think of this is my squad it's ownership it's culture it's positive but some of that needs to be you know active what i said was at some point in time i even go through my kids you know they like to text before they'll do a facetime if you call them they won't answer the phone you text they'll immediately answer it so actually that's how important it was to stay connected because because of some of the behavior health issues we're seeing so i actually said we should go if you can't be next to each other go with facetime first so you can still see the person you can still see reaction and then i zoom in that camera and then the second one is a voice so you can hear voice and then the last is something where you can't see anybody at text so actually put out a place plan because we were concerned about some of the behavioral health issues do you blame in part the lockdowns for this rise in suicides i don't know if i could categorically say that we're concerned about the isolation and that's why we're trying to find effective ways to communicate with each other okay on the phone matt cox military.com good morning secretary mccarthy could you talk a little bit more about pursuing options for brigade combat or brigade combat training center um you know that are mixed rotations that are a mix you know of italians uh command post exercises light and heavy rotations that you talked about in your uh comments earlier yeah i i think it's probably far more effective if the chief comments on that this is respect to training strategies so general mcconnell you want to weigh in there yeah i think again um our combat training centers or the gold standard for preparing our organizations for large-scale ground combat operations especially in this time of great power competition where we know that we will be contested in every uh domain that we're going to operate and so the combat training rotations you see today are very different than you may have seen four or five six years ago that were focused more on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and you know and that's why it was very important uh that we we stood them up so we are conducting full uh combat uh training center rotations we had one three four are the national guard went out there and did a great rotation we just said the first first we have the first empty division doing uh even a division level uh operation out of the combat training center and and at um jrotc we've had the security force assistance brigade out there we've had two brigades from the 101st airborne division and now we have the second brigade of the 25th infantry with companies from indonesia and thailand because you know the partnerships uh is is extremely important when we're conducting this training but these training events are designed to train the battalion and the brigade in large scale ground combat operations and they are doing a a fabulous job of working these rotations uh with the ever-present threat of kovid uh which has made these a lot more challenging there is no plan to to change these rotations brigade rotation from what they are now to smaller scale for uh italian commanders no absolutely no no there's not i mean the the focus you know one of the you know a great lesson learned is is it's it's really where we get um the the field training exercises or the gunnery type events i mean what's not going to change is you know the training that we're giving to our soldiers our squads our platoons and companies and then um i mean that's where the heavy focus is on the training strategy and then a battalion in brigade you get that training at the combat training site doesn't mean that you won't get that at home station it just means that if there is a time constraint what we're telling commanders is we want you to phone focus on foundational readiness and foundational readiness is at this soldier squad platoon and company level and make sure that we have these cohesive teams at that level that are highly trained their discipline and their fit and then they they go on to the combat training centers and they do extremely well we saw this a great example was uh the one three four um abct uh out of minnesota and came it went to the national training center during kind of right after you know the peak of covid those soldiers were involved in covet they're also involved in some of the civil unrest type operations and they came in trained up to the platoon level they just didn't have time to do much training after that but because they had a strong foundation they were able to really do a great job out there and they quickly picked up on those other skill sets uh as they went forward ideally we'd like to have them trained all the way up but what we're doing is giving instructions to the commanders make sure you have your soldiers trained make sure your squads platoons companies and some of the higher level training you may be able to do in simulation you may be able to do in fire control exercises uh but you've got to give time to the junior soldiers or junior leaders for the chance to develop their cohesive teams at the lowest level i know son made you want to comment on that yeah i still think it's extremely valuable for individual soldier readiness to deploy to a jrtc or a national training center or even over to home fields as you do those all the things about how do you pack your bags how do you make sure all your family care plans are in order so these large-scale events although we build the base of the foundation still has individual readiness and prepares us for what we need to do when you're at your home station you're still at your home station you know that road you know that where that road goes but when you go to ntc you do a full movement and all the individual tasks are extremely important that's why i think those events on a large scale are still important for us to do even though we may start with a foundational base but do a brigade movement over to jrtcntc is still extremely valuable yeah i just want to make sure maybe you know as we answered the questions i heard there's no intent to reduce combat training center rotations for our units that's not you know what we're discussing we're discussing is what the prerequisites are to actually go to a combat training center and how they fit into the rotational model tara that was an active question um for sma grinston um for many enlisted this is probably the first election they're going to vote in and there have been a lot of questions raised in the public realm about the reliability of a mail-in ballot i wanted to ask what has been done to encourage particularly enlisted that are now assigned to a base or not in their home state to you know register to get their absentee mail and ballot sent in and then secondly for secretary mccarthy um i think the last time we were all in the room together was when everybody was responding to the june 1st protests maybe it might have had one in between then and i wanted to know what is the status of the 15-6 investigation into the use of the national guard helicopters and why that report hasn't been released yet and if there's an intention to release it before the election or hold it until after okay thank you for the question yeah the good news is i've been in the army 33 years so i've had many opportunities to do a mailing ballot and since i've been in the army we've had voting assistance officers in every s1 g1 that i've been in so we do training they you go to the g1 they say here's how we can help you you can do the website but we also do specific training training so that a soldier has someone to go through in their unit to help them when they want to do a male and bad if they can't you know do it all on their own so this is no different than i've had since i've been in the army mail-in ballots have been what i've used almost every time the election comes up because i've been in the army i've not been in my home state for a very long time so this is not new we have voting assistance officers that will guide them through and help them out in every s-1 which is the personal action center for our soldiers and this is this is common we've done this for a long time this may not have bubbled up to you but are you hearing any questions about will it be reliable will this be a reliable way to get my vote sent in for folks that haven't been doing this as long i haven't had any questions uh the army's completed its portion of the inspector general investigation the dod ig has they review these in these cases it's currently with the dodig it's my understanding that it's imminent and it'll be released when it's completed do you know is there any expectation that it should be released before the election just in case that's their discretion okay and last question on the phone sydney friedberg breaking defense okay in the room ma'am yes hello sylvia from afp um you said earlier that if the dc national guard is requested for after the election you you are always available do you have any plan to avoid being dragged on the political scene as it happened in june for general middle do you have any plan to how to handle that um i wouldn't characterize us being dragged onto the scene the protest became very violent on sunday evening in particular of that week and it was necessary to bring in the support to help local law enforcement and federal law enforcement officials due to the tremendous damage police officers and guardsmen being injured over the course of that evening in particular we support law enforcement whether that is at the federal or of state and local levels we don't police american streets so we in in the instance of national guardsmen being called up that are uniquely trained and set for those types of operations uh if we're called upon we'll ask and support that to protect federal property and support law enforcement okay gentlemen we are out of time do you have any closing comments um i'd defer to my colleagues as well if they'd like to but it's going to be tough for us in ausa this week to communicate in this environment we have these chat rooms that have been developed we're going to have the screens in our offices to do follow-ups we are going to make some additional announcements uh on initiatives that we have in place we're going to do the best we can to communicate so there'll be other opportunities for the media i presume uh we'll try to make ourselves available accordingly but thanks for taking the time chief no i just i think everyone knows it's been a challenging year with a with a whole bunch of things going on around the world and then with covid and wildfires and hurricanes and some of the social arrests i just want to say i'm just incredibly proud of our soldiers from the national guard from the reserves from the regular army our families who have worked their way through uh multiple moves during during the survival tour department of the army civilians and and to our soldiers for life our retirees and veterans who have you know stood in full support and uh we just appreciate the americans uh people's support uh during these challenging times i could not be more proud of our people in the army i guess it's like pylon you know what we've gone through in a year has really been unprecedented and most time i say not everybody gets to be the sergeant major of the army during a global pandemic but look at all the things that have happened throughout the years really proud of how our soldiers have have really you know gone through this year it's it's unprecedented over a hundred years and then through in uh the killing of solomonia then you throw in a cova then you have civil unrest and everything that we've done our soldiers have been that they go to to help in some of the pandemic and and our families have been there to support them and that's all compost all the way and it's unbelievable and i'm extremely proud of all our soldiers and our families okay thank you all very much for joining us today thank oh stay healthy

Channel: U.S. Army Professional Forum

Views: 530

Rating: 4.7894735 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: vaTxDqi2L2k

Length: 29min 47sec (1787 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020