·
Welcome
to Security Cooperation 2002. Glad
you could join us. Today and
tomorrow, we expect over 400 attendees representing the Department of Defense,
State Department, industry, at least 30 countries, and representatives from
media.
·
It
promises to be a very good conference. Today
we have 4 presentations focused “inside the ball park” – directed to those
who work inside the security cooperation business.
Tomorrow, we have a great line-up of speakers, starting off with the
President of Sikorsky Aircraft, the Ambassador from Bahrain, the Deputy Under
Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, and the Deputy Secretary of
State.
SOME
THOUGHTS TO OPEN:
·
It has
been a very busy year since we held Security Cooperation 2001, two weeks after
9/11.
·
Security
Cooperation has grown in many ways since then and come to play a very important
part in the War on Terrorism. We
have dramatically expanded the level of cooperation with a long list of
countries – of partners in that war: certainly
Afghanistan, but also Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics, and India, just to
name a few.
·
Foreign
Military Financing increased from $3.6B in 2002, to $4.1B in 2003.
I expect it will grow significantly in 2004.
·
The term
Security Cooperation itself is no longer “owned” by the Defense Security
Cooperation Agency. The Secretary
of Defense now uses it to describe an even bigger set of political-military
activities, including the regional engagement work of the Combatant Commanders.
·
In sum,
Security Cooperation has become a major set of tools in the Secretary’s tool
bag for waging and winning the War on Terrorism.
·
Looking
back on the last year, there have been a number of challenges and
accomplishments.
CHALLENGES:
·
To meet
the challenges, we have had to become more agile, more flexible, and we have
certainly had to learn how to speed up processes that were not designed for
speed.
·
By and
large, we are meeting those challenges. Often
because good people figure out ways to overcome bureaucratic hurdles.
·
Let me
give you one example: training and
equipping the Afghan national Army. That’s
a sizeable body of work. There are
big political and military policy issues that have to get sorted out by USDP and
State first. Then JCS and CENTCOM have to determine what that army should
look like, and how it should be equipped. Then
someone has to find the money to pay for it and get congressional approval.
·
Think
back to last October, consider what Afghanistan looked like then, what has
happened since, and where we are now. We’re
making progress. Never as fast as
we would like, but making progress.
·
One of
the reasons we are making progress is the great teamwork of the folks in State
Department’s Political Military Affairs Department headed by Linc Bloomfield.
Greg Suchan, Turk Maggi and a host of people there are making things
happen. They deserve a huge amount of credit. While I’m at it, State Legislative has been fearless
engaging Congress, explaining what, why, and when.
My hat’s off to them.
THE
BUSINESS OF SECURITY COOPERATION:
·
Let me
shift gears now from the broad view, to the nuts and bolts of the security
cooperation business.
·
Last year
we rolled out 10 reinvention initiatives at SC 2001.
We have spent enormous amounts of time and energy implementing them.
We’re making progress. Enough
progress that Defense News saw fit to editorialize, it is possible to bring
about change in Washington.
THE
WAY AHEAD:
·
Let me
tell you where we are going in the next 12 months.
·
We will
continue our transition from reinvention to a climate of continuous improvement
through a concentrated business process reengineering effort.
Fred Beauchamp and Glen Lazarus will tell you more about that in a
moment.
·
We will
drive down the number of open FMS cases through use of the accelerated case
closure procedures and detailed coordinated case closure reviews, and return
unneeded customer funds. We are
going to carefully study the pros and cons of moving away from lots of small
cases to more open, blanket order cases.
·
We will
make the web-based Portal system a success. You can view a demonstration of this capability while you are
here at the conference. This
innovation will help our customers, and reduce the workload out in the commands.
Freda Lodge and Tom Sippel will tell you more this afternoon.
·
We will
complete the DSAMS training module in a little over a year and close out the
three other training legacy systems.
·
We will
continue development of the Case Execution Management Information System (CEMIS)
with an eye toward source selection in late 2004 or early 2005.
·
We will
institutionalize performance-based management by implementing Performance-Based
Budgeting and Performance-based costing in fiscal year 03.
·
We will
move aggressively to ensure our internal processes are CFO-compliant.
·
And we
will build the first security assistance POM. A demonstration of one of our programming tools is available
for your review out in the lobby.
CONCLUSION:
·
In and of
themselves, none of these initiatives are glamorous.
But taken together they add up to increased support for our war fighters
through cooperation with all of our coalition partners engaged in the global war
on terrorism.
·
This is
important work. To those of you
from the Army, Navy, Air Force, DSCA, and the combatant commands, thank you for
the hard work and what you’ve done.
·
To the
State Department team, thank you for the great support.
·
To U.S.
industry, your technology leads the world. Equally important, your spirit of teamwork with us across the
board can’t be beat – thank you.
·
To our
coalition partners here today, thank you for your great support.
This is a common fight. Together,
we will win it.
·
We’re
glad you have joined us for SC 2002 and look forward to these next two days.