 Who's going to win readiness challenge in front of the stage? You don't have to be formed up unless everyone moved right here. My distinct honor to introduce Colonel Stanford, who is going to give opening remarks. All right, before we get started, we got to do a little test run here. If chief here, who's got better lungs than I do, shouts out the word engineers. There's only one proper response. What is it? In the way. All right, you guys think you can do that? All right, let's do a little practice round. Chief. Engineers. Please wait. All right, awesome. Hey guys, Scott Stanford director writing us here at Air Force Civil Engineer Center. We have got a absolutely tremendous week lined up for you here. So this is readiness challenge eight. Some of you flew from halfway around the world or halfway around the country or wherever you came from. We're excited to have you here, excited to host you. If you don't know what it looks like, don't worry. There's almost nobody in uniform that has actually seen this thing go down before because it's been over 20 years since we did writing this challenge. Okay, so what's it all about? Well, it's about building a war fighting culture among engineers, among civil engineers. It's about assessing readiness. It's about giving you a chance to come out here and show us what you got. So I hope you brought your A game and you're ready to show us what you got this week. It's going to be a tremendous competition and we're looking forward to seeing what you guys can do. Okay, so I'm going to ask four things of you this week. Try to remember four things. I know it seems like a lot, but let me run through them real attitude. Okay, attitude is going to be essential for you to one have fun to learn and three compete this week. Something's probably going to go wrong. Right? We haven't done this a long time. The weather, maybe we got the weather out of the way, but the weather won't cooperate. A piece of equipment might not work one day. There'll be a miscommunication or something. Having that positive can do engineer attitude is going to get us through it. Okay, so I asked you to bring your positive attitude. All right, let's test that out again. Chief. Engineers! Lead the way! All right, that's a good start. All right, so if attitude is essential, then safety is my next point. Safety is paramount. Okay, you guys knew I was going to get up here and say this, right? We want you to bring your A game. We want you to compete hard, but at the end of the day, there's one thing that we would have a hard time recovering from. We can recover from the weather. We can recover from bad equipment, but we certainly don't want to have to recover from sending somebody home, you know, with a serious injury or worse. Okay, so let's take care of each other. Your red hats back there, your cadre are going to be watching out for safety points, but I need each of you guys to do the same. Look out for your own, look out for your neighbors. Take care of each other. If you're getting asked to do something and you don't remember how to do it, you haven't done it in a while, or maybe you've never done it before. Take a break. It's all right. Ask for help from your team, from your cadre. We'll figure it out and move forward. It's not worth getting anybody hurt over. All right, so that's two points. One was, anybody remember? Attitude. All right, so bring the right attitude. Okay, number two, safety is paramount. Number three, I had to make my own notes here. All right, we need your feedback. Okay, we haven't done this in a long time. If any of you get to come back here in four or five years, I can almost guarantee it's going to look different. We already know that our training for engineers, our contingency training is going to evolve as we get ready for this high-end fight. So along with that, writing this challenge is going to evolve. And so, in order to make it better, to take it to the next level, it's going to be awesome this week, but to take it to the next level we need your feedback as the first participants in 22 years to help us make it better. Okay, so when you see things go down this week, make a mental note like, so maybe we can do it a little bit differently next time, and then give us your written feedback at the end of the week. It's going to be absolutely essential and vital to the future of this program. All right, and then the fourth thing, so I mentioned three so far, one's attitude, two's safety. Three is give us your feedback. It's going to be vital to the future of the program. And fourth and finally is you guys get to make history this week. I'm not being overly dramatic. This is the kind of stuff we put in our Air Force history books, in our Air Force civil engineer history. This is the eighth time we've done it, right in this challenge eight. Let me give you a few numbers to set the stage here. Okay, so 51,000, all right, 51,000. That's how many engineers we have total force, active, guard, reserve, and civilian. Next number, 312. That's how many of you there are. So out of 51,000, we picked 312 to come here and compete, and that's you guys. I hope that gives you a sense of how special it is to be here for the first time in over two decades helping put this event. Next number is 100 plus, okay? So when you turn around and look at the cadre behind you, you look at the members of my team and a whole bunch of others that helped put this on for the 312 of you. It took dozens, over 100 people to pull this thing off. It's a huge lift. So as you go about this week, please thank the folks that have helped put this on and do so much work to bring this event back. 22, that's the number of years since we've done this. 22 years. Eight, that's the number of teams we have here, each one representing a different match come, okay? So eight teams, final number for you is one. Eight teams, there can only be one winner. I hope you're envisioning getting up here and taking that trophy home. The trophy, I understand, is pretty big. It's a Meredith trophy. It's like 40, 50 pounds or something. So I hope each one of you comes out ready to compete and a vision is taking this thing home. It's exciting to have you guys out here. First events start in just about 30 minutes. It's 7.30. You guys know where to be, know where to go. We're looking forward to seeing you do things safely with a great attitude, giving us feedback and making history. Ladies and gentlemen, engineers, challenge eight is back. Chief, take us away. Good job. Don't you have any handy?