 The primary responsibility to Northern Command is to provide Army forces for the Northern Command Commander in the execution of some of his missions in support of Homeland Defense, civil support, and theater security cooperation missions. So what does that mean? That means that the Army formations that come out of the Department of the Army, the combative command, in this case the Northern Commander, has an obligation to perform a number of missions. Like with our partners in Mexico, we build partner capacity. To do that, we need soldiers to partner up with our Mexican partners down there in the form of their Sedena, which is their Army. And we do mission training with them on patrolling counter-IEDs. A lot of the things that we learned in theater, for example, as lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, we take those particular lessons learned and we train our partners so that they don't have to learn those same lessons if they encounter that same type of adversary. From a civil support perspective, we support, we're dense defense support to civil authorities. Similar to what you saw in our recent vibrant response exercise, where we have both a local, a state, and a federal partners. And we are in a partnership. Here in this particular theater, we are not the principal federal agency. Somebody else is. And so we're in support of, in this case, FEMA. And we bring a lot of unique capabilities. We have a lot of resources. But in the homeland, with the national response framework, we work within a construct with our other federal partners in order to provide those resources to the states. Where do you want to see the command go? What's your vision? Having served in the capacity as the deputy commanding general, I have had a valuable opportunity to sit back and kind of think about that very question. I think personally for me, where I see the organization going is really expanding on our partnership building here in the homeland. It's critical. It's how we do business. So I want to do more with regards to going out and engaging our state partners and our federal partners. And I also want to go work with our Mexican partners and our Canadian partners. Is this exercise a good example of how Army North would respond to a catastrophic event? It's important that we work together. Nobody can do this alone. And I think these types of exercises, the most important thing that comes out of it is really the partnership and the friendships and the relationships you build that hopefully will serve you into the future. As a citizen, I find it hard to get my county to work with my city to even just clean the streets. How do you work this inner relationship with other federal agencies? I think primarily the big challenge in a catastrophic disaster that you have to overcome is the ability to communicate and share information both horizontally and vertically. When you roll into an event like this, local officials are already in place. They have a great deal of information. And so trying to build a common operational picture of the incident site to me is key. And that's one of the hardest things to do because you have to grab and gain that information from all the entities that are operating in the infected area. And that means a whole of government approach and a whole of government common operational picture. And that's difficult. We're just one small part of that. That's scary. It is scary. It is scary, but I will tell you, we got some great folks as identified during this exercise that work hard to build that. And we had a sharing of information between the state and the federal and FEMA and ourselves during this exercise. And we got fairly close. And I feel absolutely encouraged by the fact that through our efforts here, we're better prepared. And I think closer to getting at a rapidly developed common operational picture should a catastrophic disaster happen. I've talked to people out in the field and they all indicate that there's a lot of detail here and that there's devil in the details. I think some of that's correct. I think meticulous attention to detail is important. I think not being late to need in this particular type of environment is probably one of the most important things of all. The American people have an expectation that when you show up, you're going to be able to deliver. That's part of what this exercise is about as well, is putting a mindset in our formations and in our leaders that understanding the commander's intent is probably the most valuable thing to understand when you're in this environment. Because no plan is going to survive first contact. And so you need those leaders out forward at the tip of the operation that can make decisions that can support the American people. And that's very important. Just out of curiosity, an exercise like this, a vibrant response, is being built around a terrorist attack. From your perspective, do you consider this to be a what if or a when if? Just recently we had Japan impacted by an earthquake followed by a tsunami that destroyed one of their nuclear reactors. If you take a look at that natural disaster, it created some of the effects that we have here today. As a matter of fact, the Japanese responded with over 100,000 soldiers. And many of those soldiers actually responded into the hot zone and had to put water into the reactor in order to cool it down. That's a real world event that requires the same technical expertise that we have that resides in this particular enterprise that we're exercising here. We hope that a terrorist situation of this magnitude never happens. But I think it's important to serve the American people to be prepared for this type of thing. And for the American people to have confidence in their military that we're going to respond with the same tenacity that we did the past 12 years in persistent conflict to something that happens in the homeland. As a matter of fact, probably more so. Because this is our homes. This is our states. These are our families. So I think it's important for us to train to the top and the highest and the most dangerous course of action so that we're prepared. And I think the American people expect that. You talk about this exercise as a critical learning tool for your soldiers, but it is half the size that has been before in the past. And I think that's due to budget cuts. So what's the impact? I look at it as really an opportunity for us to take a look at both virtual, live and construct type of training. We have all that going on in this particular exercise. Everybody is feeling the crunch of the economic and the budget cuts. And so I think to be honest with you, we got to take a look, a hard look at how we do business. And we got to leverage technologies to get at the training. But I think it's also important for commanders to be able to look eye to eye with their subordinate commanders, especially in this environment, and be able to exercise them as well in a field training exercise. Yes, we would like in a perfect world to exercise with all our formations. But we understand that reality is everybody is going to be impacted by the budget environment that we're in today. And through, fortunately, through our technology and our advancements and simulation, we have been able to incorporate many of our formations, although be in a virtual construct for this exercise. You talk about cooperation with the other federal agencies. You mentioned FEMA, you mentioned the FBI. Who else is out there? There's many others. I mean, we work with the U.S. Secret Service in some of the events that we have here in the homeland. They are also great partners. You know, they are impacted as well, I might add, by the budget environment. And so what is amazing to me is that here at Vibrant Response, you actually had FEMA come in a pretty big contingent of exercise members. And then you also had a state emergency management agency that brought upwards of 100 people to be a part of this exercise. Because they also see the importance of being able to respond to the American people in this type of really horrific type of event. In a catastrophic event, like what's staged here at this exercise, there's 40 to 50,000 dead. What about the emotional impact that your soldiers will be facing? It's hard. It's hard to replicate really the true environment that our soldiers are going to encounter. But we try in some small part by building scenarios. We actually go to great lengths to train our role players and actually go through the moulage piece in effect so that they see, at least in some part, the horrific effects of somebody who detonates a nuclear weapon. But we'll never be able to really truly do that. I think, to be honest with you, the physical destruction that's going to be done in this particular environment or this particular event is going to pale to the psychological effect it's going to have, not only on the citizens of the affected state or states, but also on our soldiers. So we've got to prepare them for what they're going to see. And we've got to do as best we can to replicate that environment. So that ain't the first time they really experience it, and that's a difficult process of this exercise. I personally think we've got at least a little bit of that, but nowhere in the extremists that it would actually be. Are you satisfied with this exercise? I'm never satisfied with an exercise. I always think we can build on it and do better. And as a matter of fact, as soon as we end this exercise, one of the first things we'll do is sit down and we'll run an after-action review and determine where we can improve. We call it wire brushing, removing the warts, but in a lot of cases, a number of the things we did in this exercise are first. And it's a first. It's not perfect. So we've got a long way to go. We'll continue to push to improve. We'll continue to invite other partners in, because we think there's a strength in having partners here. We call it the real-life opposing force. When you have an actual state coordinating officer or an actual federal coordinating officer, you really can't replicate that. And so to improve upon what we have here, I think we've got a long way to go. But it's not from a lack of trying, but I think the next time you see this exercise, it'll be even better. Bottom line, what should Americans like me know about Army North and what you're doing that's going to make us feel good about our continued quality of life? I think personally what I like the American people to know about U.S. Army North is, you know, back when I was in the 82nd Airborne Division, there was a saying, sleep well at night. The 82nd Airborne is standing watch. I like to say that U.S. Army North is preparing for something that we hope will never happen. And we don't want the American people to be concerned about it. Just know that there are men and women in uniform from all branches of service that are working hand-in-hand with our federal partners to take care of them and to make sure that we do everything we can to serve the citizens of the state and to the nation. That's what we're all about. We're all about partnering and we're all about serving the citizens of this nation, defending them if we have to, working with our partners in the civil support to provide them the necessary requirements should they need them, and working with our partners both in Canada and in Mexico and in Bahamas to build their capacity so that we can work hand-in-hand to defend not only our nations but to defend them as well. So I think that's what I'd like to get out about Army North. We're pretty proud of our soldiers. We're pretty proud of our organization. I like my mission. I think the soldiers that serve in our ranks like our mission because we're all about serving our nation and most of the time we do it 9,000 miles away. It doesn't get any better than to serve right here in your home. I consider myself extremely fortunate to be leading these great men and women, and I look forward to the next few years where we'll be able to get at a lot of these issues that were raised not only at this exercise but really what we're working on every day. That to me is exciting. It's a challenge. It's an opportunity. Just like working in a constrained resource environment to me, in some cases people look at the negative side of it and say, you know, that's a challenge. For me sometimes it's an opportunity and we're going to grab on to the opportunity. We're going to go out there and I think next year I invite you to come back out and visit our exercise and I think you'll see that we'll build upon it and we still won't be perfect but we're still going to be getting after things that serve the American people and probably one of the most, I think, horrific things that can affect the American people. We just hope that it never happens, but hope's not a good method. Personally, I really appreciate what the men and women that came here for this exercise have done. I think the American public can be proud of their sons and daughters who were standing on point for the homeland.