Fort Huachuca’s premier training in electronic warfare, intelligence and cyber make possible the central disciplines of the world’s future in a joint-force environment where “we can do it all,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter told troops at the Arizona fort yesterday.
The secretary stopped to visit with troops and learn about initiatives from leaders there as he was en route to Singapore, where he will lead the U.S. delegation to the 15th Asia Security Summit at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue.
Carter called the home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence and the hub of Army activity in cybersecurity and remotely piloted vehicles a “huge treasure” for the Defense Department.
“It's the fulcrum of everything that is happening to us and with us as we move from an exclusive focus on [counterinsurgency] to a more full-spectrum outlook,” he said. “Today in the department [as] … we're moving strategically [and] technologically, you are at the center of it.”
ISIL Must Be Defeated
Addressing global threats, Carter emphasized how the soldiers have a role in the campaign to counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
“We have to defeat ISIL and of course, we’re going to… in Iraq and Syria where it began … and show there can’t be a state based upon an ideology like that,” the secretary said, adding that ISIL must be destroyed anywhere it has a footprint in the world, and the military must protect the American homeland from it.
Taking questions from the media following the troop talk, the secretary echoed President Barack Obama when he said two service members who were wounded over the Memorial Day holiday weekend were “in harm’s way as part of the campaign plan execution to defeat ISIL.”
The service members, one serving in Iraq and the other in Syria, were carrying out the purpose for which they deployed there when injured, the secretary said, adding, “It's a serious business in which people are at risk and there should be no doubt and no question, as the president himself made clear yesterday.”
Defeating ISIL, Carter said, is “what our plan is about. We do it by enabling capable and motivated forces who have to hold government territory taken back from ISIL. But there is risk, and the most serious thing that I do is [make] those decisions about putting people at risk.”
(Follow Terri Moon Cronk on Twitter: @MoonCronkDoD)