Good afternoon, everyone. I am the director of the museum and staff director of the museum of Natural History. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the next pandemic. Hopefully its not the next pandemic right here. You might think that the Natural History museum is not the best placed at the meeting like this. This museum is the largest Natural Museum and has 145 million objects. I say that objects, whatever, but the reality is collecting the Natural World for the last frontiers in preserving preserving those objects in museums, and this is the place where we have what we know about planet earth, so the records have collect and over the years 300 years preserved at acceptable by research scientists. Last year over 400 species were described by scientists working the building. At the same time we welcome 6 million visitors. Most of those visitors are tourists which means the next years a different 6 million, the world plus largest collection, visit by the Worlds Largest is the audience,
It is inefficient and ineffective for military and general sublive i would like to bring us home to my state. Obviously we have the port that dates back to world war ii in terms of some of its buildings and we have temporary military construction dating back to that time and we are in an aggressive up dating of that facility which is such a key facility for our army and i notice that they even have the nerve to put military construction and to these at aces in the United States in the overseas Contingency Operating funds paid can you comment about how this impacts your ability on readiness and training when you are being put in a fund yeartoyear and not certain and you cant plan with it . Sure senator. You are exactly right you cant plan with it and you cant just go yeartoyear and things like multiyear contracts and having relationships with industries to upgrade your weapons and equipment etc. Specifically what you are talking about is infrastructure which is a key component. We have
I want to thank you gentlemen for being here and your service to our country, and the meeting is called to order. I apologize for bag few minutes late. Forget we changed the time until 9 45 until 10 00 so ben could go to a meeting at 10 30. Can you for accommodating both meetings. Obviously afghanistan continues to be something that is important to our u. S. National interests. We brokered a government, if you will, the United States did in 2014, that create both a president and ceo office that has not been confirmed, if you will, through and continued on. We had concerns about that process taking place, and you wonder about the support that government has realtive to not being confirmed in the way that it normally would. I have a tremendous respect for president began ghann and a warm relationship with abdullah. Theyre have muddled through it together as one might expect with the type of arrangements that have been, quote, create from the outside. I was glad to see president obama com
Who just aches to get back into some more theme where i can get shot at. I do admire those who do but its just not what i do. What im interested in doing is policy and ideas and where do these ideas come from . They dont just drop from the sky. They usually do not automatically appeal to everybody as a matter of logic. Where did the ideas come from . Who were the people and there were a lot of comp eating ideas. How did this particular set of ideas get transferred . Was there resistance . How was the resistance overcome . It usually isnt just one person. Its a community of people. How did this Community Form . Will was the basis of a . That is what history is all about. Its a story. That is what the stories are about. Its about the interplay between personalities in politics and policy and accident, coincidence. That is what im interested in and i am interested in how this applies to war because war and all of the arenas of human conduct, this is the most highprofile thing there is. I
T what im interested in doing is policy and ideas and where do these ideas come from . They dont just drop from the sky. They usually do not automatically appeal to everybody as a matter of logic. Where did the ideas come from . Who were the people and there were a lot of comp eating ideas. How did this particular set of ideas get transferred . Was there resistance . How was the resistance overcome . It usually isnt just one person. Its a community of people. How did this Community Form . Will was the basis of a . That is what history is all about. Its a story. That is what the stories are about. Its about the interplay between personalities in politics and policy and accident, coincidence. That is what im interested in and i am interested in how this applies to war because war and all of the arenas of human conduct, this is the most highprofile thing there is. I mean, its the difference between life and death for thousands of people. Its the difference between National Victory and nat