 One of the critical things that we do in the Gathering Vigils is capture these great stories, both teaching and form folks, but also be used to inspire folks. Once you hear their story, it's like, hey, they're just regular folks like us, and they were putting X, Y, and Z scenario, and here's what they did to kind of get through it and what they had to rely on. General Frank Klotz, he's Lieutenant General Retired. He was the first operational commander of Global Strike. We went out, spent some time in his home, and no one really fully owned that distinct mission set. They said, hey, we need to get back to it so someone's an advocate for it. Have the opportunity to sit with somebody like that and hear from them is a good experience. And I think his leadership abilities and leadership philosophy transcends any specific thing he does. I think we're having a good leader that's being recognized for the leadership. I think the Global Strike was their situation, but it could have been any situation that he was given. I think he would have taken the right approaches to handle it. And he had some really good insights talking about his experience when he thought he was doing a good job standing up Global Strike. And he thought he was doing all these great things, and he certainly was. But then on a climate assessment survey that he got, and there was a particular non-commissioned officer from a maintenance unit that was complaining about how the bathroom didn't work in their hangar. And they had to walk out into the snow a mile or whatever it was to find a porta potty. It really struck home for him in the saying that, hey, I might be doing these amazing things, but if it doesn't reach somebody's daily environment, it's for not really. And the reason why that struck home is at Lake and Heath, there's lots of construction projects, and we lose sight of that airman that is dealing with a doorknob that's broken off or a roof that leaks. And his retelling and recounting of that experience really, and that's something that I want to make sure that I do or think about when I get back out of the field. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Dr. Mel D'Aliot. It is my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, Lieutenant General Retired Frank Klotz. General Klotz was born in Lubbock, Texas in 1950, the son of a career Air Force pilot. He is a distinguished graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, and his academic achievements include being a Rhodes Scholar from the Academy, a White House Fellow, and a Senior Research Fellow at the National War College. As a Rhodes Scholar, General Klotz attended Oxford University in England, where he earned a Master's and Doctorate of Philosophy in Politics. Upon leaving Oxford, General Klotz was an International Political Military Affairs Officer in Washington, D.C., where he ultimately returned to the United States Air Force Academy as a member of the Political Science Department. After serving as a White House Fellow, he was trained in missile operations and assigned to Grand Fork's Air Force Base, North Dakota. General Klotz has served as a Combat Crew Commander and Evaluator, and has commanded at the Squadron, Group, Wing, Numbered Air Force, and Magcom Level. His experiences include working as the Chief of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Plans Branch for NATO, Defense Attache in Moscow, and the Director of Nuclear Policy and Arms Control on the National Security Council staff. He concluded his 37-year military career as the first-ever Commander of Air Force Global Strike Command. After his retirement from military service, General Klotz was nominated by President Obama to be the Director of the National Nuclear Security Administration, where he served until 2018. General Klotz currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife Nancy. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome to the stage General Klotz. Thanks. Well, thank you very much for that very kind introduction, Mel. Mel and I served together at Marksdale Air Force Base a few years ago, and I can personally attest that he was one of the brightest, smartest, most widely read experts on military strategy and nuclear deterrence in the Air Force. So I think Air Command and Staff College is blessed to have him as a member of the faculty. Let me also express my appreciation to the entire Gathering of Eagles team and the GOE Foundation that organized this great event, and to all the sponsors at the various events that we have gone to for their contributions and making this week a success. And I'm personally grateful to Majors Kerry Young and Dan Connors for their superb work in preparing for and conducting the oral history interview that they did, and then masterfully editing successive iterations of the chapter that was ultimately published in this book. So if you haven't got a copy of it yet, I think they'll be on sale out in the entrance, and you'll have an opportunity to read through all the oral history interviews that have been done. I'm delighted to be back at Maxwell Air Force Base and to address the ACSC class of 2019 and to personally congratulate each and every one of you on your success in completing this major milestone in your professional career. I have to confess, however, that I always approach the prospect of speaking during the first hour to after lunch with a certain amount of trepidation. I recall when I first started teaching political science at the Air Force Academy, I naturally assumed that the toughest hour to deliver a lecture would be during first period, 7.30 in the morning, when the cadets would most likely still be only half awake. But I soon discovered that after they had gobbled down a Snickers bar for breakfast and washed it down with a bottle of Coke, that they were really quite lively, even a bit feisty at times. In fact, the toughest time to teach was after lunch, after having consumed a large 2000 calorie meal, most of the cadets, even the brightest students, would start to nod off. And to tell the truth, even I had trouble staying awake during my own lectures. So I hope I'll be able to make it through this one this afternoon. I hope you will as well. Now, when I asked the GOE team what I should talk about this afternoon, they suggested that I recount some of the highlights from the chapter drawn from the oral history interview. Since many of you, in fact, I think virtually all of you, have probably not had the opportunity to read it yet. That chapter is subtitled from Missileer to Air Force Global Strike Command. So I thought I'd focus my remarks on that journey from Missileer to First Commander of Global Strike Command. If there are a few observations about leadership in the profession of arms along the way, then I'll be happy to answer any questions on the subjects that you really want to hear about. Let me start by saying something about Missileers and then explain how I first got into that business. Now, when people think about Air Force Warriors, what most readily comes to mind? For many of us, for most of my life, it was the air crews and the maintenance teams that execute the daily air tasking order in a combat theater. Or perhaps it's the special operations teams conducting daring raids deep inside enemy territory with stealth, precision, and lethality. Or maybe it's the PJs and the medics who provide life-saving care to the wounded or render humanitarian assistance to victims of natural and man-made disasters all around the world. These airmen helped define us as an Air Force. No doubt about it. And they are certainly worthy of our admiration, our gratitude, and our emulation. So too are our Air Force Missileers. Most of the time, by design, by conscious policy, they are out of sight, literally 60 feet underground, and therefore often out of our minds and overlooked. But they are in fact some of the nation's most elite, special, and unique warriors. They are entrusted with operating, maintaining, securing, and supporting the most powerful and awesome weapons ever devised. Weapons that can wreck unprecedented, catastrophic levels of destruction in a matter of mere minutes. Their mission is to ensure that no adversary would ever dare launch a nuclear attack against the United States or our friends and allies out of fear of the devastating consequences that would surely follow if they did. It's a demanding job, Missileer. Standing alert, day after day, month after month, year after year in remote, isolated underground launch control centers. You saw pictures of some of them on the video. They're held constantly to the highest and most rigorous personal and professional standards. They're seldom recognized for their contribution to peace and security, yet they are proud and honored to serve with quiet confidence, dignity, and with seriousness of purpose. It's been my great honor for most of my adult life to serve with Missileers, with those who wear the pocket rocket. But as the chapter in the book points out, I didn't start out to be a Missileer when I graduated from the Air Force Academy. In fact, I was still hoping for a waiver to enter pilot training. As I was explaining to your commander, they didn't have LASIK surgery in those days. But upon commissioning, I immediately went to graduate school in England, and from there by a series of totally unplanned circumstances, I went to a job on the air staff, then back to the Academy to teach, then to Washington again as a White House fellow in the State Department, where I worked on two different nuclear arms control negotiations with the Russians. At that point in my career, 10 years into the career, I had to decide what I was going to do next in the Air Force. Now technically, my AFSC was International Political Military Affairs Officer. It was a relatively new AFSC. It was a very unstructured AFSC, and no one quite was sure what I should do next. So I talked to some people whose opinion I respected. More than one of them said, well look Frank, you've spent two or three assignments writing about nuclear deterrence or working on nuclear arms control. If you're going to be credible in this line of work for the long term, and if you're going to stay in the Air Force, you absolutely have to get some field experience. One of them in fact said, you need to get some grease under your fingernails. You should volunteer for missile duty. Well, I had never really considered doing that. In fact, it was a little late in my career, more than a little risky at that point to make such a move. The vast majority of officer missileeers enter into that duty as second lieutenants. As I was contemplating this step, I asked one colonel how and where he thought I should serve if I did become a missileeer. He replied with a wry, treasure cat-like smile. Well, I'm about to be the next wing commander at Grand Forks Air Force Base North Dakota. I think you should come to Grand Forks and work for me. Well, I was immediately reminded of something one of my favorite instructors at the Air Force Academy had said. And that was, if someone tells you a particular base is a great place to be assigned, if you love hunting and fishing, don't go there, unless you really do love hunting and fishing. Now for the ACSE students who are here, here's a little safety tip. You should always, of course, seek advice and counsel from your mentors and your bosses about what you should do next in your career. But you should also realize there's a potential downside risk to doing so. They may suggest something to you that's totally different from what you had in mind. And having asked them, it can be really, really awkward to disregard their advice. On the other hand, their advice may not be all that bad. Either. Every one of us has some notion of what we would like to do next or should do in our next assignment or the one after that. In fact, the Air Force used to publish, I don't know if they still do, give me a head nod if that's the case, career development guides for both officers and enlisted that laid out the perfect path from enlistment or commissioning from Airman Basic to Chief Master Sergeant or from Second Lieutenant to Colonel. Every step of the way. Did they still do that? Yeah, of course. I suppose those guides are intended to be helpful. But in reality, I think as you've heard every one of the Eagles say, it doesn't work that way. Every career is unique. Every career is different. Every career is special. And serendipity, luck and even total surprise can and do play a big part. For example, when I was a relatively senior colonel I was stationed Air Force Base Command headquarters as the director of logistics. I fully expected to retire in that position to remain in Colorado Springs where my wife Nancy and I had bought a lovely home with a wonderful view of the front range and of the Air Force Academy. Then out of the clear blue I was selected by the Air Force for a year-long fellowship at the Council in Foreign Relations, which meant uprooting the family once again and moving from Idillic, Colorado to Brooklyn, New York. Well, we did it and we loved it. And after a few months of being at the council, thoroughly enjoying my work there, I received a totally unexpected call from the Pentagon office that handles general officer assignments. The colonel on the other end of the phone asked me if I would like to be the next defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Well, two thoughts ran through my head. The first thought was that was really the first clue that I had that I was going to be on the next one-star list, which was its awful pleasant surprise. The second thought was I did not speak a single word of Russian. In fact, I learned later that the one word of Russian I did know, vodka, I was mispronouncing. I did, however, speak French. So I told the guy on the other end of the phone, I hear that the defense attaché job in France is coming open soon. You could send me to Paris instead of Moscow. Well, after a few minutes of silence, the colonel replied in a rather irritated voice. There's a lot of people standing in line for that job. Don't worry. We'll send you to Russian language training. Be ready to start classes in two months. Now both of those assignments, New York and Moscow turned out to be enormously challenging, enormously exciting, and professionally rewarding for both me and for my family. But I did not plan for them. I did not hope for them. I had not even thought about them. But I'm sure glad that I followed through with them. So the point is, and I think it's a point that General Chilton just made, you need to be open, you need to be flexible, you need to be prepared for whatever time, circumstances, fate, or the all-knowing, all-powerful military assignment system has in store for you. It may not be what you planned for, it may not be what you hoped for, it may be one of the best assignments that you ever have in your career. So back to the Missileer to First Commander of Global Strike Command journey. Following the advice of my mentors, and believe it or not, over the opposition of the missile detailers at the Personnel Center, I did go to Grand Forks as a missile combat crew member, and I continued performing nuclear alert duty for much of the next 25 years, either in Minuteman missile units or on board U.S. Strategic Command's Airborne Command Post. By the way, all kidding aside, North Dakota is a great place to work and live, even if you don't like hunting and fishing. As many of the Eagles know, the airmen who are assigned there have a strong shared sense of mission, and they really do look out for each other. And the people who live in the neighboring communities are truly great Americans, patriots, and great supporters of the U.S. Air Force. Now at the time I became a Missileer, early in the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, we were still in the midst of the Cold War, locked in a titanic, political, and economic struggle with an adversary and enemy, armed with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, all of which were pointed either at the United States or allies and friends in Europe and Asia. During this era, the nation's nuclear forces, including the intercontinental ballistic missiles, the ICBMs, and the bombers, and the submarines, were the mainstay of the nation's military force posture and national security strategy. The United States invested enormous resources to ensuring that its strategic nuclear forces could withstand any attack that was aimed at them, and retaliate against an aggressor if and when directed to do so by the president. This commitment to maintaining a survivable and capable strategic nuclear force also played a major role in preventing major conflict, conventional conflict between the two nuclear armed superpowers. And it also helped set the conditions that ultimately allowed the United States and its allies to prevail over the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and bring the Cold War to an end. But when this happened, the international environment and security situation changed dramatically, and so too did our defense policy. It was if we had all heaved a sigh of collective relief and said to ourselves, thank goodness we don't have to worry about nukes anymore. Besides, we have other urgent things we have to consider, such as combat operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. The U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent force no longer occupied center stage. It was still on the stage, but somewhere over in the wings. And its changing size and posture clearly reflected that fact. Through a series of unilateral actions and through negotiated agreements with the Russians, the United States took significant steps to reduce its nuclear forces or to modify their alert levels. When I entered the missile business, there were 1,054 ICBMs on alert at nine different missile bases. By the time I retired from the Air Force, we had only 400 ICBMs at three missile bases. We slashed funding for delivery systems and for nuclear warheads that go on those delivery systems. We stopped developing and deploying brand new systems and relied instead on extending the service lives of existing systems. We also neglected the national laboratories and production facilities for the civilian agency that designs, develops, produces, and maintains every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal. Forcing that enterprise to rely upon facilities and infrastructure that date back to the 1950s and in some cases back to the Manhattan Project to produce the atomic bomb in World War II. And to top it all off, we disestablished the strategic air command, SAC. And we divested it of its nuclear forces, sending its bombers to Air Combat Command, its tankers to Air Mobility Command, and its missiles first to ACC, and then, oops, we'll send them to Air Force Space Command instead. Some very senior American military officers even spoke openly about several elements of America's nuclear deterrent force as being sunset industries soon to be eliminated. Now, think about it. If you're a young airman or a young officer, if your boss doesn't think what you're doing is important or has a future, it's hard for you to think it's important either. In the process of all this and as a result of all this, we lost focus on the nuclear mission, a mission that absolutely has to be done right every time given the awesome power of nuclear weapons. And when you lose focus on a mission, bad things, really bad things, tend to happen. So in the summer of 2009, thanks to the support of General Chilton, my wife Nancy and I left Colorado Springs, an Air Force Space Command for what we assumed would be my last job in the United States Air Force, Assistant Vice Chief of Staff. We moved into General Officer Housing on Bowling Air Force Base. A secure phone had been installed in our quarters in case I had to have a classified discussion after hours. And if a serious issue involving the Air Force anywhere in the world arose in the middle of the night, the established procedure was for the Air Force Ops Center to give me a call first. And then if I thought it was serious enough to wake up the Chief of Staff, they would then call him. Otherwise, they would wait until first thing in the morning to brief him. Now, after I had been on the job for only a few weeks, not even a month, I was awakened by a phone call sometime after midnight. The duty officer on the other end of the line informed me that a B-52 had taken off from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota with nuclear weapons on board and had landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The air crew was supposed to be ferrying cruise missiles whose warheads had been removed and were being collected at a central location before their ultimate retirement. The problem was the munitions maintainers, the transporters, the load crew, and finally the air crews on the ground at Minot had all failed to fully and properly perform the required checks. Checks that would have immediately alerted them to the fact that nuclear weapons were still mated to the cruise missiles being loaded onto that B-52. Now, the duty officer on the phone in the Ops Center did not have a nuclear background and after he had explained all this to me he asked whether the incident was serious enough to wake up the Chief of Staff with the call. Well, this was a major breakdown in good order and discipline within the nuclear operations of the United States Air Force. We had stopped flying nuclear weapons aboard B-52s many, many, many years before and it would take a major crisis and authorizations from the highest levels of the military or even the U.S. government to do so again. So I told him, yes, you better call the Chief of Staff. Now, nuclear professionals within the United States Air Force including many missileeers had been warning about the potential impact of declining resources and declining attention being paid to the nuclear mission for years. But as I mentioned earlier, the Cold War was over, nuclear weapons were being drastically reduced and we were heavily engaged as a nation and as an Air Force in expeditionary operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. The Minot incident was a serious wake-up call, an object lesson of what happens when you lose focus on an important mission. Now, there were several internal reviews of the incident and several external reviews. There were congressional hearings. There were countless newspaper articles about the incident and about the Air Force's stewardship of nuclear forces. Now, one phenomenon that this whole episode illustrates that I think each of you should bear in mind is that when an organization, any organization, military civilian, suffers a serious breakdown like this and the political and media spotlight shine like a laser beam on that organization, every subsequent mistake, regardless of how minor and inconsequential that mistake may be, feeds the narrative that the organization can't do anything right. And it doesn't matter to critics outside the Air Force or outside the military that 99% of the people in that organization take great pride in their work. They have very high standards and they're doing everything right just about every time. I would tell you have to pay particular attention to those people, the people who are doing everything right and take great pride in their work because their morale is going to suffer when they read the same newspaper articles that talk about how poorly the Air Force may be doing something. You have to constantly remind them that they're valued for the job they do and you have to push back against the naysayers who criticize the entire organization for the mistakes and the transgressions of the few, whether it's the media, the Congress, civilians in the Department of Defense or even other senior military leaders who don't quite understand the business that you're in. Now, because of the problems the Air Force was experiencing at its nuclear enterprise and for a host of other political factors that had nothing to do with nuclear weapons, Secretary of Defense Gates fired the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force that following summer in July 2008. This was an unprecedented event. In its entire history, the Air Force had never lost both its Secretary and its Chief of Staff on the same day. Now, before that happened, I had actually planned to retire, I think for about the fourth or fifth time, at the end of that summer, summer of 2008. By then I would have served the three years required in order to retire at my current rank. And even though the mandatory retirement at 35 years of service was no longer a hard and fast rule, I felt it was time to retire. But I couldn't. And the reason I couldn't is my good friend, lifelong friend, an Academy classmate, George Schwartz, was nominated and ultimately confirmed to be the next Chief of Staff. And I was both professionally and personally committed to helping Nordy transition into this new position. So I personally decided to try and postpone my retirement for six months or so. Once again, fate stepped in. In the fall of 2008, I was hard at work in my Pentagon office when General Schwartz unexpectedly appeared and never did that. We always went to his office. He asked if we could chat. I, of course, replied, yes, sir. And then he said, Frank, I know that you and Nancy are thinking about retiring soon, but I'd like you to do one more job for the Air Force. As you know, he said, we are planning to stand up a new command, a new major command, with responsibility for all of the Air Force's air-capable missiles. And given your nuclear background, we'd like you to get that started. Well, you don't tell the Chief of Staff, no, particularly on something this important or that serious. So now we have arrived at the Air Force Global Strike Command part of the journey. So let me talk about the steps that we took and the challenges we faced in launching a brand-new major command in the Air Force. You might actually find this little brief historical recitation more useful than you at first think. And let me tell you why. You could very well be involved in a similar activity some day. The Air Force and the Department of Defense seem to be in a constant state of organizing and reorganizing. Repeatedly moving the blocks around on the wiring diagram. Think about it. And just since the time you have been students at ACSC we've witnessed changes in how we organize or proposed changes in how we organize in space, which we just talked about in cyber, in the Indo-Pac region, Stratcom and that's just to cite a few of the examples and the most notable examples. And I expect there are more changes underway. Now, the Air Force actually has a fairly well-defined systematic, structured and disciplined process for how we stand up a new organization or feel a new major weapon system or open any new base. The trick, of course, is to follow it. The first step in that process is to come up with an actionable plan. The Air Staff has to first write and the Secretary of the Air Force has to sign something called a program action directive then the Air Force staff or a major command has to develop a P plan or program plan to implement the PED. So we did that. And one of the key decisions in our plan for Global Strike Command was to establish a provisional command headquarters to work on manpower authorizations, initial funding, design of the new commands, patch where to locate the new headquarters and all the other things associated with getting an outfit started. We established the provisional command at Bowling Air Force Base in January of 2009 under the leadership of then Brigadier General Jim Kowalski. As most of you know, Bowling Air Force Base is just across the Potomac River from the Pentagon by putting it there, General Kowalski and his team would have quick and easy access to the Air Staff experts who could have a very good job of actually helping them deal with these and countless other details. Now, as a little side, history has a strange way of repeating itself. Bowling Air Force Base was actually the first headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. It was only located there for slightly less than two years. And when General Curtis LeMay became Commander in 1948, he moved his headquarters to Offit Air Force Base, Nebraska. Now, it's unclear to historians maybe Dr. Day-Ely knows whether he did that in case there was a nuclear attack on the Washington, D.C. area or whether what I think is more likely, he just wanted to be 1,500 miles away from the Pentagon staff. So like General LeMay, we had to decide where to establish global strike commands on our headquarters, and like General LeMay, the Washington, D.C. area was clearly off the table. After a careful analysis of the alternatives and some very difficult political negotiations, we ultimately decided that the new command permanent headquarters would be at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Now, I have often been asked, in fact, as recently as a week or two ago, why we chose Barksdale as the site for the new command permanent headquarters? Why not off at Air Force Base? I mean, after all, it's home to the U.S. Strategic Command and close to a large city in good schools, good housing and a good-sized civilian airport. Well, a lot of factors went into our decision. There had to be sufficient office space to house 800 employees. There had to be sufficient housing on the base or in the local community to house their families. We had to have a reasonable airport, so our people could go out and visit other commands in the Pentagon and those people could come visit us. But most importantly in our view, it had to be on the base that had an operational mission so that the commander and the staff could quite literally walk out the front door down to the flight line or to the missile maintenance shops and see the airmen who were actually doing the command's work. Off it did not then, it does now, have a major global strike command, operational command on base. So, Barksdale was the base that best met all the other criteria about capacity and ease of access. The next step in the process was to activate the permanent headquarters at Barksdale, which we did in August 2009, less than nine months after we stood up the provisional command. Now, one of the biggest challenges we faced at the beginning of this exercise was growing the command to its full complement of 800 plus people. When we first got started at Barksdale, we had less than 50, I think around 47 permanent party on board and there's a couple of you here in this room today. So, we had to rely very heavily on a lot of people on TDY orders, on reservists, on National Guard and on contractors to fill key and critical capabilities. Now, recruiting the right people and bring them on board is always one of the biggest challenges of standing up a new organization, whether it is a military organization or an organization in the commercial sector. Several officers warned us that we would never get that many people to voluntarily come to Barksdale Air Force Base. But one of the things that really impressed me at the time was just how many people were willing to do that. Now, a lot of them were veterans of the nuclear deterrence mission. They had watched the steady change and focus and decline in resources over the previous 20-year post-Cold War period. They were excited about the prospect that finally, finally, the Air Force was going to put primacy back into this mission. And they personally wanted to be a part of making sure that that endeavor was a success. There were other people who came to Global Strike Command quite frankly because they wanted to be on the ground floor of a new enterprise. And I used to tell them whatever you decide, wherever you work, whether it's an ops, logistics, personnel, protocol, supply, whatever function you perform in this headquarters, you are making rules for this command that will endure for many years after you've gone on to do something else. I think they understood that very, very well. I think they really took it to heart because everybody that worked at Barksdale in those early days from the senior staff to the newest airmen were really phenomenal and they put their heart and soul into establishing that new command. We assumed responsibilities for day-to-day operations over the deployed nuclear force in a staggered approach. The first step of course, as I said, was to get the headquarters up and running. The next step in the process was to assume full responsibility of the ICBM mission from Air Force Space Command, which we did on the 1st of December, 2009, roughly four months after we established the permanent headquarters. Then two months later, on the 1st of February, we took charge of the B-52 and B-2 bomber missions. As I said, we did all this in a very systematic, step-by-step way to make sure we were fully prepared to take on our new roles and responsibilities. Now, one of the tasks, we'll see mundane, but it's really not, one of the tasks that we had to focus on early in the process was to ensure that we had clear guidance and direction for missile and bomber operations and maintenance and security and support. Every major command in the Air Force has its own set of instructions on how to perform its roles and responsibilities and who it works for. So we had to produce global strike command instructions. Now, given the time pressures that we were under, I was strongly advised that what we should do were Air Force Space Command instructions for ICBM operations and literally draw a line through Air Force Space Command written at the top of every page and write in Air Force Global Strike Command. In the same way, for bomber operations take the Air Combat Command instructions at the top of every page where I said Air Combat Command to write the line through and write Air Force Global Strike Command. Well, we decided we weren't going to do that. First of all, we were a a real major command. This was not an experiment. This was not some temporary measure to fix a pressing political problem. We knew we would not soon go away. Some people expected that we would or made even hope that we would. That sooner or later Air Force Global Strike Command would be absorbed back into another major command too. But we were an Air Force Major Command and we needed to do what every other Air Force Major Command does. We also wanted to make doubly sure that we operated under clearly under the way we operated clearly reflected Air Force and DoD guidance, congressional statute and presidential directors regarding the handling of nuclear weapons. The Air Force had very successfully carried out a particularly important task under Strategic Air Command for 46 years. In SAC, the rules were clear. Everybody knew what they were supposed to do and a very rigorous inspection and evaluation process made sure that they did. I have the great honor of working a lot recently with General Larry Welsh, the first General Welsh who was a chief of staff, but he was also commander of the Army that commanding SAC he grew up as a fighter pilot but commanding SAC was the easiest job he ever had in the Air Force and the reason was as he says people knew why how and what they were supposed to do and they did it. But when SAC was disbanded and we lost focus on the nuclear mission as an Air Force we also lost the thread on why we were supposed to operate the way we did. In some cases we were doing things simply because that's the way we had done them for years or for decades without really understanding why. The only guarantee that this would no longer be the case would be to write Air Force Global Strike Command's instructions ourselves. And this was no trivial undertaking. We had to produce hundreds of documents over a very short time. But this was a vitally important task and it's one that you may face in that form or some other form as you take charge of a new unit to be effective to achieve success. The fundamental roles, responsibilities and the authorities of the outfit must be clearly understood, effectively communicated and faithfully followed by everyone including leadership. That's especially true for units that have not been performing well or have encountered some serious challenges. Well with the work of standing up Air Force Global Strike Command essentially accomplished, I had fulfilled my pledge to General Schwartz and Nancy and I could finally finally embark upon that next chapter of our lives. All in all I'm very proud of the great work that the Plank Owners, the original cadre of volunteers at Air Force Global Strike Command did to establish the Air Force's new command and to help put the Air Force nuclear enterprise back on a solid footing. And I'm very proud of the command's continuing accomplishments, very impressive accomplishments under four successive commanders. Those skeptics who thought that Global Strike Command was a passing phenomenon and would soon go away once the immediate crisis were over were quite simply wrong. In fact the command's roles and responsibilities continue to grow and expand. It has gained the B-1 bombers. It has assumed responsibility for three additional Air Force bases and it was recently designated the lead command for all Air Force nuclear command control communications. And it's now commanded by a four star general. Nuclear weapons are not going away anytime soon. Even if the United States were to eliminate its entire nuclear arsenal it's highly unlikely that the other nuclear weapons states would follow suit. In fact all of them every single one of them is currently carrying out significant programs to modernize and in some cases to actually expand and diversify their existing nuclear forces based upon their own assessment of the specific political and strategic contexts in which they live. As far as we can see into the future America will need to operate and maintain safe, secure, effective and reliable nuclear forces to deter nuclear attack against the United States and its friends and allies. For this reason there will be a continuing need for an Air Force major command that has nuclear deterrence as its primary and overwriting mission. And that command is Air Force Global Strike Command. So that's the journey from Miss Air to Air Force Global Strike Command. More details can be found in the chapter of this book and all the other chapters on the Eagles. And now that I know now that you're leaving this academic setting you're going to be starved for reading material. And you'll certainly have lots of free time I'm sure in those responsible positions that you're going to. So I encourage you to pick it up. Yeah, many thanks for the opportunity to be here. I am just so honored and thrilled to spend time with the wonderful Eagles and their spouses and their family here. This is probably one of the most uplifting things I've done since I left the military. So thank you, thank you fellow Eagles. And I'd be delighted to take any questions that you may have. Sir, we have time for about two questions. So any questions? Good afternoon, General. Thanks for sharing with us today. Sir, you departed Moscow a couple of months before 9-11 took place. Were you able to maintain ties with leadership? And can you tell us what the Russian response was like? That's an excellent question. Thank you for asking it. I was actually in Moscow on 9-11. One of my tasks when I left Moscow and started working at the National Security Council staff was to work on President Bush, Bush 43's nuclear policy and arms control agenda. And we were in the process of negotiating a new nuclear arms control reduction agreement with the Russians. What ultimately became the so-called Moscow Treaty signed on May 24, 2002. I remember that day because it was my wife's birthday. And we had been negotiating with the Russians for several weeks and months and had not gotten very far. And we happened to be in Moscow doing negotiations in their Ministry of Defense and actually quite frankly for the first time started to see the prospects that we might actually achieve an agreement. Given the time zone difference it was about 4 o'clock in the afternoon and given the time zone difference as soon as we came out of the negotiating room in the Ministry of Defense our cell phones those were those little things that used to flip up started going off and we heard about the first airplane going into the World Trade Center Tower. We held a quick press conference with the Russian and international press then we went to one of the Marriott hotels in Moscow and had a press conference with the US press based in Moscow and that's when the second airplane went into the tower. So by then we knew this was not an accident that this was a deliberate attack on the United States and on American people. We went back over to the US embassy one so we could have a secure room to talk about the negotiations we just had but also so we could sort of assess what was going on back in the United States because I was there with some fairly senior State Department and Department of Defense officials including a Defense Undersecretary for Policy. While we were I was sitting in the office of my father an Army General Kevin Ryan who was the new Defense Attaché the phone rang and it was the chief of the Russian General Staff General Kvashnyin. Now I had been in Moscow for two years and I had certainly met with General Kvashnyin particularly when I escorted very senior American military officials to meet with him but never once did he ever call me in my office and what he did so that was already a signal event so what he did was to extend the same offer that I understand President Putin had extended to President Bush at roughly the same time which was whatever help the United States needs either in humanitarian support to the people of New York and to the people in Washington DC they were there to help and they do have some very substantial capabilities in that regard but also to extend the offer to help find out who the bad guys were who had done this and to help us track that down so it was kind of a unique period. It was a period quite frankly when we were still talking with the Russians we were still hopeful about what would be produced by these types of arms control negotiations by military to military contacts it was a very optimistic period at least in terms of US-Russian relations now that's all water under the bridge it's all past history we do not talk to the Russians now in any meaningful significant way about arms control or military to military issues such as avoiding incidents at sea or incidents in space we just don't talk to them now there's a reason for that part of it has to do with Russians invading occupying and annexing Crimea and fomenting violence in the eastern parts of Ukraine in the types of actions they're doing in support of Saddam Hussein I mean not Saddam Hussein of the regime in Syria etc etc etc but my great hope is at some point we as a country will find a way to engage in conversations with the Russians again on things like strategic stability and the regulation of nuclear arms between the two of us we own 90% of the nuclear weapons in the world and General Chilton is absolutely right the one thing I did glean from my time in Moscow is we may not think of the Russians as the enemy but they certainly think of us as the enemy and they think of NATO as the enemy and so anything we can do to sort of ensure that there any crisis that develops between us does not escalate into a full scale conventional war which could ultimately lead into a full scale a small scale or even a full scale nuclear war is negotiations and talks worth pursuing good question thank you thank you sir one more question in the back sir thank you so much for talking to us today my question is as a warrior with a PhD what are your thoughts on continuing your professional education and its connection to developing as an officer well I grew up as many of the Eagles did with parents grandparents great grandparents who many of whom were immigrants to this country many of whom were poor my father's side of the family were factory workers my mother's side of the family were were tenant farmers and they used to believe that it was important to get as much education as you can possibly get because if you run into another depression they can repossess your car they can foreclose on the mortgage they can fire you from your job but the one thing they cannot do is take your education away from you you will always have that we work in a very complex strategic, political military environment and it's our job as military people and former military people to make sure that the United States through its foreign policy can achieve what's in the best interest of the United States in that very complex environment so any education that you can get to better understand and then communicate to civilian leadership how the military contributes to U.S. foreign and national security policy is a plus now I also believe exactly what General Chilton said it's also important even in continuing education to develop skills technical skills, STEM skills if you will I was a political science major where roughly 45% of the curriculum was a core curriculum which included a lot of math and basic science and engineering but in the Air Force and in the other services that are represented here you're going to receive a lot of technical education that you need to really focus on and master so education is not something you do for a year at ASA just to have college and then come back four or five years later and do it at a war college it's something that you need to be doing all the time and it doesn't necessarily have to be sitting down and reading a book you can learn an awful lot just by taking the time if you're an operator to talk to the maintenance people who work for you or the security people who work for you or the administrative professionals who work for you one of my good friends Roger Brady who was at the time was the chief of Air Force personnel the A1 and the air staff and he told the story about how new action officers were always coming to him with some suggestion about how you could change the OPR system or the promotion recommendation form or the assignment system and they were enthusiastic about it and his first response always was you know what you may want to do you may want to go down the hall and talk to that GS 14 who's been doing this for a number of years and understands both the process and the procedures very very well and then come back to me and tell me whether you still think this is a good idea it may be, it may not be but wealth of information in the various specialties that have been doing this for a number of years they can also be a great source of learning and continuous learning but you have to make the effort to get out from behind the desk go where they're working and then listen very carefully to what they have to tell you Well, General Klotz we want to thank you for being here with us today for your experiences and leadership insights so thank you again sir Thanks