Good afternoon. This hearing will come to order. I want to thank our witnesses for your service to our country. 13 people lost their lives, 30 people were injured. It underscores what we are dealing with here in terms of a threat environment. This is my ninth annual threat hearing that i have either chaired or participated in. I often say im not the most uplifting character. Those i could say that in nine years, i have seen tremendous progress being made and we have reduced these threats and all is well. Unfortunately, we face the same threats. If anything, the threats are growing. Nine years ago, we were talking about the blind use of drive drones or the use of social media. We face the same threats. They are evolving. Terrorist groups are metastasizing. They are spreading around the world. , it has happened is grown more complex and difficult. You have tremendous responsibilities on your shoulders. Really, i will turn it over to my Ranking Member and we will get to witness testimony.
Please join me in the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of america and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under god, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Color guard retreat. Color guard dismissed and audience may be seated. Thank you very much. Can we give our girl scouts a warm round of applause . [applaus [applause]. These young women are senior girl scouts, which means theyre in high school and they represent a few different troops that are working on learning how to interact with the world, to travel, to to do a lot of Different Things, but to explore the world and then to support younger girls, bringing them along. A couple of them i know are working on their leadership award, thats like the equivalent of the eagle award. So let me just introduce myself, let you know how were going to move through this town hall today, but first, i want to say thank you. Thank you for coming out, for participating in the process, for
Airspace security project here at csis and general raymond is going to speak first and then they will have moderated conversation following by audience q a. There are very few things that are considered bipartisan nature in washington by concern over space and space threats are one of those and so i hope you will join me in welcoming general raymond. [applause] thank you. Greatly appreciate the invitation and more importantly thanks for your leadership and wise counsel. I always enjoy coming to cis and had to apologize to the cas team because i always get more out of these engagement that idea. A great, id hope will get to that, have a really good conversation and are some things i could take away and continued to work on. I will tell you about three years ago just a little over three years ago before it took the air force Space Command as commander job csis held a dinner series, dr. Hamre hosted a dinner series what we brought folks in to talk about the challenges in space. I always m
Putting the chaos behind us. Putting the corruption behind us. Putting the tweets behind us. [laughter] mayor buttigieg but honestly, the reason i am asking you to picture this is not just to give us something to look orward to. The country will be better off when we no longer have a divider in chief occupying the office. That is beginning of the work that must come next. If you could picture what it will be like in this country on that day, the sun will come up over a United States that is even more divided than we are right now. Even more polarized, even more torn up over politics. With everything we have been through, with everything we are about to go through, that day our country will be exhausted from fighting, and more in need of unity than ever. And yet, Something Else is also going to be true that day, which is the problems we are up against as a country will be more severe. None of these issues that helped us get to this point are taking a vacation for the impeachment process
Watch live coverage of the Miami Book Fair saturday and sunday on cspan2s book tv. How many years of your reporting career other percentage have you spent overseas . I guess close to half. First with the boston globe, i worked for a number of years in latin america. So that was close to a decade and then off and on with the washington post, it comes out to be close to a decade. When you decided on journalism, how did you gravitate toward foreign reporting . My earliest interest in journalism was really about domestic issues. Poverty, drug addiction, social ills, you might say. So i did a lot of work on that in the early years. I traveled a little bit overseas as a tourist to unusual places and i began to think that some of these same issues were definitely there and more and the struggles and problems were deeper. And i just wanted to try that. Host what special skills does it take to be a Foreign Affairs journalist, as opposed to someone working domestically . Pamela i mean, there is