 Good morning and welcome to Warrior's Corner, our next presentation, Water Resilience for a Sustainable Army with presenters Honorable Rachel Jacobson, Mr. Michael Conner, Lieutenant General Omar Jones, and Dr. David Pittman. Good morning everybody, good morning and thank you very much for gathering to hear about a topic that you wouldn't think of when it comes to Army's mission and that topic is water. Water is critical as we all know and we all experience every single day, and our panel of experts who we've assembled here are going to tell you what we at Army are doing to protect water, to respond to water events, and proactively manage water. I'm pleased to be joined today by Michael Conner, Assistant Secretary of Army for Civil Works and my longtime colleague and friend. Dr. David Pittman, Director of Army Corps of Engineer Research and Development Center and Lieutenant Omar Jones, Commanding General of Army Installation Command. I'll start off with a sort of framing of the topics and then we'll get into it. Water security is under increasing threat worldwide, facing stressors that range from poor management to effects of climate change. Although these effects vary across regions, water security is becoming increasingly widespread. The United Nations Environment Programs International Resource Panel has estimated that almost half of the world's population will suffer severe water stress by 2030. That means within seven years, half of the world's population suffers severe water stress. It follows suit that therefore water security poses a national security threat. And DOD itself is not immune to the challenges associated with supply and demand on water resources. Managing water resources appropriately is vital to DOD's mission to provide the military forces needed to deter war and protect security of our country. Water shortages can significantly impact military readiness through reduced training and limited operational capacity. Installations and facilities with water shortages may not be able to supply basic residential and operational needs. We need to assess with as much accuracy as possible which installations are under threat of facing real water security challenge. Our installation strategy and our climate strategy have objectives to adapt to resilient systems including water systems and they're designed to make sure Army accomplishes its modernization strategy by also managing our resource. Obviously extreme weather events have tested the fortitude and resilience of infrastructure. We see it all the time recently from flooding in St. Louis to drought in the west to the collapse of Jackson, Mississippi's water infrastructure to the effects of Hurricane Fiona in Puerto Rico and Ian in Florida. Such domestic challenges tap Army's resources because of the need to deploy troops for disaster relief every time this happens. At the same time these severe climate change storms damage or destroy our valuable military assets. Drought and floods also impact countries around the world. Pakistan received more than three times its normal August rainfall, culminating in catastrophic floods which affected over 33 million people destroyed 1.7 million homes and nearly killed 1,500 people and Army provided relief there as well. Army approaches climate resilience because that is what this is from a couple of ways both mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation helps us react against including innovations in water and energy so that we are reacting in a preventively, it's a preventative management and adaptation is about being prepared to withstand climate shocks and we obviously will tailor our water resilience measures and investments to the circumstance of each installation based on geography, natural and physical and other cyber threats. Drought, I want to talk about drought really quickly. Drought is already changing the landscape of the west. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor much of the western U.S. is in drought. Most of California is in extreme drought where cities and towns are under severe water restrictions and we've heard alarming reports about the allocation of water from the Colorado river. Climate change will worsen drought in the U.S. according to the U.S. Geological Survey. For Army installations across the country, water conservation, groundwater and stormwater management will be increasingly more important to help guard against the threat of drought. We will be a good steward of what local water supplies and we will work with local communities for investment in water conservation measures and recharge measures. Just by way of example, Fort Wachuka in Arizona along with a host of partners including local ranchers has purchased water conservation easements to create buffers near the base that will promote drought resiliency and protect groundwater supplies but will also prevent encroachment near the base thereby protecting training areas and I know General Jones is going to touch on that in a little bit. There are a whole bunch of other things we're doing and I know I'm running out of time or perhaps I've already run out of time but many of our bases are engaged in incredible programs to conserve water and reuse wastewater and all sorts and enter into utility partnerships to help conserve water and reduce water consumption and find leak detection in water pipe systems. So I'm really proud of everything we're doing across the board and too many things to mention today. We're also using engineering with nature wherever we can. Long ago advanced by the Army Corps of Engineers this helps nature-based solution for water infrastructure and projects making sure we use native plants and trees to prevent erosion and soil runoff which helps to promote water and soil conservation to design more green spaces on installations with permeable pavements to ensure water absorption and prevent flooding. In sum, the Army is adopting strategies to improve water installation resilience through conserving water, implementing alternative water projects and returning water back to the sources through stormwater and groundwater management. Now I'm going to turn this over to ASA Michael Connor, obviously who's the Assistant Secretary of Civil Works and their critical role in managing water resources to promote resilience. Mike? Good morning everybody. Six minutes to talk about water resilience so I'm going to talk fast. Rachel, great summary of not just the impacts but the actions being taken at military installations to address the issues associated with lack of water or too much water at some point in time. The Army Corps of Engineers obviously has responsibility for helping making that transition to water resilience at our military installation but it also has that responsibility for carrying that out across the nation in the many functions that the Army Corps of Engineers has which affect every sector of the economy and I'll just give you a brief example. Weekend before last I was discussing with Major General Graham the Army Corps' emergency response to hurricanes Fiona and Ian in Puerto Rico in South Florida. There he was giving me assessment of of course the Corps of Engineers carries out a lot of functions. It does the engineering assessments of damages. It carries out emergency power restoration for critical facilities. It has blue roof responsibilities to put roofs back on homes. It has debris removal responsibilities. But also we have all these coastal storm protection projects in Florida. 27 in place. 11 being studied. In Puerto Rico we have nine flood risk reduction projects that are in various stages of construction and we have three more being studied along with coastal protection projects down there. All told about eight to ten billion dollars with the damage to these ongoing facilities, ongoing projects. It's a huge effort to not only take care of the emergency response down there but then to take care of the projects that were responsible for. But at the end of that discussion General Graham said I've got one other thing to address with you. Mississippi River. We have a low flow situation in the Mississippi River based on drought which is causing saltwater intrusion from the Gulf of Mexico which affects the intakes for public water supplies along the coast as well as, you know, stymine barge traffic in that commerce that goes up and down the river. So we're engineering actions to address that emergency of too little water in the Mississippi River. And at the end of that conversation my response was just simply General Graham, too much water, too little water, everything in between. There is no one entity with the breadth of responsibilities of the Army Corps of Engineers. And it's all based on these challenges in the water sector. And that's a long lead to the bottom line which is we are in unprecedented times in water resource management. The extremes are now the rule that are no longer the exceptions. In addition to the power that we just witnessed with Hurricane Fiona and particularly Ian there's been at least, in the last three months, at least six one in 1,000 year precipitation events across the United States. And this is basically a 0.1% chance of precipitation happening at this level at any point in time in a year. In the West, as Rachel mentioned, we've got probably the worst drought in at least 1,200 years according to tree ring studies. But it's not just drought. Those people are looking at this as a ratification of our desert southwest. So obviously these same issues that we're looking at across the country are the same issues that are affecting our military installations in different locations. And the bottom line to all of this is that we have a water resource infrastructure network that was designed in the 20th century for a climate that no longer exists. That doesn't mean that infrastructure isn't highly valuable still but it needs to be reevaluated. And we also need to look at new infrastructure as addressing the challenges that we're seeing in water resource management. I'll give you a couple quick examples. Army Corps of Engineers has a climate action plan. As part of that effort we've screened over 2,500 of our projects depending on where they're located for sea level rise, for drought, for changes in hydrology in the river systems that are adjacent to those projects. And we're based on that vulnerability screening and we're now doing drought resilience strategies for those projects. In July I issued a drought resilience directive to the Corps identifying 10 areas where they could do additional drought strategies. Simple things. One example, forecast informed reservoir operations. We can operate our facilities differently. We can take in account new hydrology and we can perhaps address water supply issues in addition to flood risk reduction. And then lastly we need to develop multi-benefit projects in whatever type of project we're developing in the Army Civil Works program. We have to look at our flood control projects as also water supply projects. We have to engineer differently. We have to look at our dredging projects. Can they provide, take that dredge material, create habitat, create environmental benefits, but also those environmental benefits create opportunities to sequester carbon which we should all be responsible for. When you're in a hole you need to stop digging. These extreme weather events have happened with about 1.1 degrees celsius rise since pre-industrial times. We've got, the prospects are now that we're going to have an additional 2 degrees celsius rise by the end of this century. What's the climate going to look like at that point in time? So finally I will just mention to affect this transition and this integration of resilience into everything that we do we need better tools to assess risk, to improve our forecasting capability and to use nature not to fight against nature all the time. Rachel mentioned that. The better we can assess risk, the better we can assess vulnerabilities, the better we can engineer and design to address those challenges and that's what our goal is. From that standpoint, the Army Civil Works Program's priorities are the same as Secretary Warmouth has identified for the Army. We're going to commit to innovation in new ways of operating. We're going to embrace emerging technologies and we're going to be resilient in the face of climate change and that requires change on our part and I think that's a perfect segue now to Dr. David Pittman. Thank you. Thanks sir. Well good morning everybody. My name's Dave Pittman. I'm director of research and development for the Army Corps of Engineers. You heard a lot about the Army Corps of Engineers and also director of the Engineer Research and Development Center. That's the labs for the Army Corps of Engineers. That's headquartered in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Yes, I'm from Mississippi. That explains the accent right there. And I invite all of you to come see us at ERDIC if you've never been there before. I call it Disney World for Engineers and Scientists except at ERDIC, the magic is real. We do a lot of great stuff there. So Ms. Jacobson talked about the Corps of Engineers installation mission, so we've got R&D going on there. Mr. Connor talked about a Civil Works mission, we've got R&D going on there. We also have Operation and Warfighter mission, we've got a lot of R&D going on there and I'm going to focus on the water resiliency R&D since that's the focus of this warrior's corner. If you look behind me, we've got a new strategy. So we've only been around since 1775 and we never had an R&D strategy before right now. So General Spellman said, hey, we can't keep engineering solutions the same way but we've got to have new technology to deal with these huge challenges nationwide. So we came out with a brand new R&D strategy, just Google it, USACE R&D strategy, you can pull down a digital copy and it features these top 10 R&D priorities. If you look at them, mitigating that climate change, you know, Secretary Austin talks about that as the existential threat to the whole country. You know, if the country goes away, nothing else matters. But look at them, win future wars, look at smart resilient installations all the way down to protect and defend the Arctic. So with this plan, just like the mission of the Corps of Engineers, we have to do better R&D and better technologies to deal with these crisis that we're facing going forward from military to civil purposes. If you go to the next slide, let me give you just a few examples in each one of those lanes. So if you look at our military installations, a couple of projects we've got thousands of them by the way. Here's just two examples. What is we're developing a tool for installation managers? Hey, they got water supply issues. You saw Miss Jameson talk about, you know, 40% of the water supply on installations come from the private sector. You know, how secure is that, right? It gets on installations, we got water demand issues coming, you know, for whatever the people need and whatever the mission needs, and then you got to connect them with the distribution systems. All sorts of vulnerabilities, you know, what's the water security position for the installation going to be going forward? That's the tool we're developing. Slide that into the enterprise level. So NDAA just asked us last year in FY21 to come with a risk-based tool for the whole enterprise. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. So the Army's taking the approach to saying, hey, we got 26 different installations. We're going to look at the enterprise approach, use a risk-based framework to assess that over the long term, look at the impacts of climate changes we just spoke about. Developing both of those tools. Now we slide into Civil Works. If you notice, we have a lot of acronyms in the Army Corps of Engineers. We love acronyms. So Mr. Connor talked about FIRO, forecast-informed reservoir operations. It tells you exactly what it is. And normally the way we manage reservoirs is we got a book and it tells, hey, lower the gate here and let water out here when this happens with water on the ground. General Spellman says, we need to manage that water before the first drop ever hits the ground. And that's exactly what FIRO does. So it harnesses these atmospheric rivers that come in from the Pacific end of the West Coast. It dumps a tremendous amount of rain in a short period of time in very direct areas. How can we take advantage of that? Working with NOAA, we're not the weather forecasters, but we manage water on the ground. And by doing this on just one lake, by the way, we were able to save enough water for 22,000 more homes than we otherwise would have had on one lake. Imagine if we do this with all of our lakes in the West and across the country. That's what we're going to do. Mr. Connor and Ms. Jacobson also talked about engineering with nature. Another concept developed by Dr. Todd Bridges at Ernic. By the way, he's got international partners, national partners, industry, private sector, and really going like gangbusters. He's testified to Congress on this before. It's an amazing capability where we're engineering with nature versus engineering against nature sometimes with concrete and steel. We're going to use green-based solutions to help solve some of our water resilience problems. This particular example is the lost conscious wildfire at New Mexico 2011. At that time, the largest wildfire in New Mexico had ever seen. That was 10 years ago. Now it's the fourth largest wildfire in New Mexico has ever seen. But we worked with the locals in coming up with nature-based features to help protect against the debris flows that we see and the devastation to the vegetation and restoring that with thousands of different little nature-based features across the area. Then finally, I'll talk about the warfighter themselves. Soldiers have to have water, too, when they're on the battle space. It's absolutely necessary. So a couple of different projects. One is called Heat Dog, another acronym. It's actually taking advantage of heat given off by our generators. Wasted heat, by the way, about half the energy from our generators is wasted heat. We take that heat, we capture it, and we condense water from the air. It's not rocket science, but we've never done it before. So we can reduce our water footprint significantly in the theater and reduce the heat signatures at the same time. So it helps protect our soldiers, and it doesn't matter if it's a desert environment or a jungle environment, it works either way. We have that capability straight into another one called All-H2O, working on the logistic side of things. So now we're looking at gray water. So after you use the water, when it goes down the drain, from a shower, from cooking, or whatever, we're going to recycle that water, okay? And if you can just recycle that water, now, for non-potable reasons, we're not asking you to drink it, but we can significantly save about half the water demand that we're going to have in theater. So those are just a couple of them. We've got hundreds of these ideas. We need you to help execute this strategy. So whether you're a private sector, academia, other government agencies, international, we need you to help execute this for the warfighter in the nation. Now I'm going to turn the mic over real quick to General Jones who's going to talk to you about how we do this on installations. Thank you. So we have two assistant secretaries and an engineering PhD from Mississippi, and they turned it over to an infantry officer to talk about how we do it. That's a little dangerous, I think. Good morning, everybody. I appreciate you coming. I've heard about 10 times the amount of people I expected to hear a conversation about water and resilience, but I think it's actually a really good news story. So as you heard in the introduction, Lieutenant General Omar Jones, I command the Army's Installation Management Command. So I'm responsible for the 75 regular Army installations around the world. You heard the challenges that we're going to see, we're seeing today. We're going to see the next five, ten years, and deep in the future. But what I'm going to tell you is that from an Army perspective, from an Army installation perspective, where we are right now and where we are headed is actually very exciting. I'm going to tell you a couple of good news stories and tell you why. So as you can see behind me here, all the strategies and policies that have come out from the headquarters part of the Army over the past 18 months, with the capstone being the Army climate strategy and the implementation plan. And what that has given us is the strategic direction where the Army senior leaders want us to go. Execute that, which is what we do at Installation Management Command, a series of programs, whether it is using appropriated funds or working closely with community partners, working closely with industry partners to move forward to make our installations more resilient and achieve those goals across the board. So where we are now and the progress we've made in the past year and where we're going, it's exciting. And I will echo David's comment that for all the partners that are out there in this space, we look forward to working with you. We need your expertise and we look forward to making the Army more resilient, affordable and efficient as we go forward together. So you heard those three words and those really are the lines of effort, the avenues that we focus on. Resilience, affordability and efficiency when you look at all those strategies that are out there. Resilience, our installations have to be resilient to do what our nation needs us to do. We already talked yesterday about the Army's core mission is to fight and win our nation's wars. We cannot fight and win our nation's wars. We can't go where our nation needs us to go if our installations are not resilient. And that is energy resilience. That is water resilience and that is the hallmark of our energy and water programs across the command and across the Army. We've got to make sure that we are efficient. We look hard at our energy use intensity, our water use intensity and make sure we are getting the greatest effect out of all of the energy that we use out there, all the water so that we are able to contribute to the readiness of the Army for all the formations that train on our installations, all the formations that deploy off of our installations and then finally efficiency. We've got to make sure that every dollar the taxpayers trust us to use that we're being good stewards of that. And again we are using that money to the greatest possible effect to support our installations, support the quality of life of Army people and support the readiness of Army formations. So as I'm getting the time card and we're almost going to run out of Q&A time, let me talk a couple of good news stories for you here if we can go to the next slide. Okay, so up here we've got Fort Carson. If you've been to Fort Carson, beautiful locations, a little arid, we used to use potable water for all the athletic fields, the golf course, everything at Fort Carson. Over the past couple of years I've used a combination of appropriated funds, a combination of Department of Defense, not Army, funds, and then bringing in a third party partner to work with them. And now all of the irrigation that's done on Fort Carson that used to be potable water is now treated water and we have saved that potable water for the people that live and work on the installation. The next two pictures here, both of these are Aberdeen, up in Maryland. We've saved over 3 million gallons of potable water up in Aberdeen through these two projects, again by treating water here. I bring it in making sure that what we are doing here for the boiler supply and what we are doing here for all the chillers, for all the IT equipment up at Aberdeen, again, used to be potable water. Now it is treated water. And again, through that we used a combination of third party financing and also appropriated money to significantly reduce the amount of potable water that was going to these projects are critical of the missions that happened in Aberdeen. Down here, Redstone. So the infrastructure at Redstone is over 80 to 90 years old when you look at the water utility all the piping that is here. 4 million or 4 miles of piping across Redstone arsenal significant water leaks. Again, brought in a combination of DoD money, Army money, third party money there to upgrade all that infrastructure we were losing 1 million gallons a month just through leaks in that infrastructure. Saved all that by fixing the infrastructure again, making the base more resilient going forward. Hon. Jason already talked about what we are doing in Fort Wachuka with our local partners so the last one I will highlight here is Fort Irwin. Utility privatization. We privatized water treatment at Fort Irwin and we went from having to treat over 50% of the water that was remaining coming out of the treatment plant to down to 1% back to that efficiency goal that I talked about significantly improving what we are getting for our investment for all the water out there in the Mojave Desert at Fort Irwin. So again, I am excited, I am excited where we are when it comes to our water and energy portfolio across the Army but I am really excited about where we are going but for all the partners out there we need your help and we want to work with you to continue to make the Army more resilient so we can use all the resources we have more efficiently and make it more affordable as we continue to go forward. So I think the rest of the panel is going to join me up here on stage and we are going to moderate with Ms. Jacobson our question and answer period. Over to you ma'am, thank you. Thanks to everybody. Now your turn. Who's got questions? Come on. Of course, John. So I am John Cogger formerly OSD Installations and Environment. My question is on Quadjolin. So SIRT have funded a study a couple of years ago saying that the aquifer in Quadjolin was going to get because of sea level rise it was going to get salinated and there was not going to be potable water on Quadjolin after we had spent over a billion dollars in infrastructure there. Can you comment on what we are doing to address the problem? John everybody is looking at me so I guess I am going to answer that question. John when you look at all of the challenges the panel just talked about and you know this and only hard questions from you I realize that but all the challenges we talked about are amplified at Quadjolin as you can imagine. I don't have the answer for you right now today but what I will tell you is across the board this team and particularly Corps of Engineers as well as the team from Space and Missile Defense Command looking at how do we make sure the critical capabilities of Quadjolin supports we have that long into the future and is the infrastructure piece but it's also the water and energy etc. We've got some work to do there as an Army and we're not there today but I think the white folks are working on it. Hello Shout out to Dr. Pittman, Jason Kirkpatrick from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Props sir My question is how are you integrating remote systems, uncrewed systems into your resilience plan for installations? Yup yup that's for me So yeah we got a whole UAS program that you helped develop for the Corps of Engineers by the way and we're doing that across all of our spectrum from warfighter support to civil works we got to take, if you saw our strategy you know revolutionized decision making that's all about using artificial intelligence machine learning and robotic systems including UASs to help gather that information very quickly to understand what's going on out there so we can predict what we need to do with that and then shape solutions to address them. So thanks for that question. I'll just add a little bit more to that with respect to these remote systems specific application is one that recently happened post-wildfire in New Mexico. Based on the airborne assessments that were able to be done and the modeling that had already taken place that was then added to based on the most recent assessments of the situation post-wildfire the Army Corps came in very quickly with the resources it had from the bipartisan infrastructure law to design a whole bunch of structures to prevent a second disaster from happening after the first disaster which was the destruction of the water resources infrastructure based on the monsoon season coming in and so we helped engineer those protective systems in place something that we got to do a lot more of given the propensity for wildfire in the West now. Looks like we are out of time so that's a good place to stop to hear about some of the exciting innovations that are taking place for water resilience. Thank you all so much for your time and attention.