 I had a number of reasons for being grateful for the opportunity to do this. I think that the air and space forces are crucial to both strategic and conventional deterrence and that I think the mission is obviously the first reason. The situation we have in the world with regard to the threats that we face I think makes it very challenging for all the services but I think that the air force and the space force in particular have crucial jobs to do that we absolutely have to get right to protect the nation and I think given my background in national security that I was posture to hopefully help make that happen to make us more secure. The threat that runs through my career if you will perhaps more than any other is dedication and passion for protecting the American way of life and for protecting human rights more generally. The reason I was inspired to go into the military in the first place and to attend West Point and serve in the Army was the desire to defend freedom and after the Cold War ended I thought we had an opportunity to extend civil society if you will the rule of law more broadly and to be more effective at leading the world in that in that regard. I got involved in some human rights work and some human rights organizations because of that and some people see that as inconsistent I see it as totally consistent I think that that's why we have a military that's what our men and women in uniform our airmen and guardians in particular now for me that's what we're that's what we're trying to protect that's what we fight for and I think that's a noble undertaking you know I'm an engineer among other things and I believe in using data to understand problems and help you get to a good solution and make good decisions so if you look at the metrics for our performance of our systems and the adversaries what they're building to try to defeat us it's pretty clear to me and has been for some time that we need to invest in some advanced systems that are going to sustain our capability to defeat our adversaries. There's been a big emphasis on speed recently but if you're going in the wrong direction going fast doesn't help you and if you're going at a speed that's going to cause you to fall down and and not be able to get up that's not going to help you either. We're not in a sprint we're in a marathon and we need to we need to make sure we're going at a pace and a direction that's going to get us to where we need to be overall and the innovation we're looking for has to come from the operational community and is how they think about how to fight in the future as much or maybe not even more than it does from the technical community in terms of the technologies that they provide. We are in a national strategic long-term contest with a formidable adversary and what you do every day is important to that struggle and I'm very grateful that for all of our airman and guardians for volunteering to come into our military and help us in that struggle and I'll do everything I can to give you the tools you need to do your jobs as effectively as possible.