Source on cspan. Unfiltered, unbiased, word forward. From the Nations Capital to wherever you are. The opinion that matters the most is your own. This is what democracy looks like. Cspan, powered by cable. Next, discussing force integration in his tenure as an enlisted advisor to the joint chiefs of staff he talks about quality of life for military families, recruitment and threats from china. This is hosted by the air and space force association. Thank you to all the people joining us online and from across the globe. Its a real honor to be here with the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, susie colon lopez. They are the only airmen to serve as see agut since the position was created. He advises the chairman on all issues that impact enlisted force. That means his focus is ensuring the enlisted force is properly trained, postured and sustained. They are a true and proven warrior, who has served in every operating theater over the past 33 years. All that comes to an end when they will be succeeded by sergeant of the marine corps, troy black. I wanted to give a moment to give special thanks to our special sponsors listed on the screen. We are grateful for their support in making war fighters in action possible. C ac thank you for joining ust, its an honor. A question just to get a question to nick rowland. After nearly 40 years working primarily for general millie as the joint chiefs of staff, youve seen a lot. Covid, the afghanistan pullout, a pivot to the specific. A pullout to the pacific. We have seen changes from the force and the need from the force. How has it changed your understanding, for what it takes to support the joint work vices the joint work fighters and be decisive at the merge . A lot of the things that we factor are based on historical needs historical deeds. Our successes and failures, we kept on with 20 years of combat in the middle east and before that, we had other engagements that we learned from but as we look at the enemy, the way that we see it in the near future, we look at great and Strategic Power competition, i believe that we need to condition our forces not only to be technologically advanced but also intellectual and resilient enough to withstand whatever the fight brings to them. We know technology is a doubleedged sword and it can help us a lot when it comes to advantages on the battlefield but what happens when it gets shut off and we have to rely on flesh and bone to make that Decisive Action take that Decisive Action to continue to bring the fight to the enemy . We need to strike a balance somewhere between there between intellect and courage to make sure we have the best people on the about field. I am with you, it is exactly what it takes in this generation of work fighters shows that to the world. Cz, what do you think is your biggest success . Beyond that advice beyond that, advice for the next generation for leadership at your level. What is your advice and what do you think . You went through a long list of things we have experienced over the past four years, covid, civil unrest, withdraw from afghanistan, the fighting in ukraine and so on. One of the biggest successes we have had is in the middle of the narrative that accompanies every single one of those situations, is to maintaining the troops focus on what were here to do and that is war fighting. It has been my duty to make sure i go back and counter with facts to keep them focus on what they are there to do and making sure the nation is in good hands when it comes to National Security. You had a little bit on and do you reference the threat, a different set of threats, where dangerous than any time in our nation across the National Security apparatus so can you talk about what you share with the troops and your own view of threats . You have a joint war fighter level of experience. You have faced threats directly and obviously prevailed. The nature of the enemy that we can face in the near future is different from what we got accustomed to fighting over 20 years. Counterinsurgency is different than dealing with a followup dealing with a foe that has nuclear powers. The stakes are higher and what we used to refer to as being outside the wire, when you think about it, against a strategic competitor, everyone is outside the wire so we need to take that into the calculus and decisions we make when it comes to escalation and the use of power to inflict that will on the enemy, to either stop or get what International Laws. It is more critical now than ever because we are not only fighting an enemy, we have to deal with the cautions of what happened with our counter actions and how is that going to affect our families and our people back in the homeland. That is the main concern that i have when it comes to Strategic Power competition. We share in that view that Family Readiness is combat readiness. Can you share with us in the audience a bit you are advice really on the top number, 1, 2, three, or five challenges that families face today that Senior Leaders across the National Security apparatus from congress that we need to get our arms around so the public better understands those needs for our families in their own selfsacrifice to support the nations security . Advisor colonlopez i will be the first to say that our families are the foundation of our courage and ability to project the instrument of war worldwide. I know from personal experience. One of the Biggest Challenges that we have when it comes to them is misinformation. We all know, we used to say in communities, happy wife, happy life. That applies to every single dynamic of the families today because if they are not fully waiting to accept our responsibilities, our service members, they think the institution is rotten, they will lose the and mechanism and no longer believe on what they are to do when we deploy. I was quoting quoted by saying that misinformation is the hypersonic weapon of selfdestruction and everyone is vulnerable to it and that weapon is being actualized right now. We need to make sure families have the resources they need to retain resiliency. We need to make sure they have the right information to make decisions on which direction their family needs to go, number three, we need nations supporting mechanisms to the people within the department of defense to care for them and make sure we have the best interest in mind and to make sure that when something goes wrong, put our best foot forward to help them out. That is really at the core of my position as a Senior Enlisted Advisor to the chairman. We take immediate action because we do not have time to dance around the subject. If this impacts someone elses life, it is affecting thousands of others and we need to do right by them. There is no doubt in my mind that our secretary of defense, secretary austin and you are about trying to take care of our families. Are there specific issues that are you are working on childcare to schools, education, spousal Employment Opportunities . Advisor colonlopez all of the above and just this afternoon, the Service Center advisors and i are meeting with personal readiness on the taking care of people in the moment and the memorandums the secretary has rolled out and engaging the gauging the progress of every single one of the initiatives we have put forward, whether it is childcare, health care, many things on the table right now. We are taking and a static approach to make sure that we are gauging the progress and continuing that to message that to the force. We no longer live in a place where we can wait until everything is done before we tell people. People want information but people like progress and if it seems stagnant, it doesnt sit well with the force. We are doing everything in our power to inform them on the progress we are making and the things we are doing to make their life better. Would you like to build on that . Talk about for the audience to our three points on where you have made progress at the inner level . Again, pick one. Childcare, medical support, educational opportunities, spousal Employment Opportunities. On the spousal Employment Opportunities, we have been working with the white house on making sure we have better record better reciprocity when it comes to licensure and better opportunities where they have a place to look for jobs as they move along and the services and taking opportunities to make sure they prolong assignments so families have more stability. On the education side, we have expanded the way we educate officers and enlisted. This is what we needed to do and this is the knowledge we are giving you right now and that knowledge is dynamic because we know something that is relevant today, next week, may be relevant so we need to have the flexibility to change the course of instruction to fit the situation we are dealing with. Lastly, on the health care, the joint chiefs and the chairman and secretary of working with dha and the department of veteran affairs to make sure we collaborate better to provide better care for our people. Those are just three examples of initiatives. Those are great examples and thanks for the leadership. No silver bullets, it just takes constant hard work and leadership like i know you and general millie and secretary austin bring to the fight, so thank you. We talk about retention as a National Security imperative. How about recruiting . I know you can talk at length about how you are interacting across the army, navy, air force, marines and across the space forced to recruit. We know there is a recruiting crisis and i know there are opportunities. Can you talk about recruiting . Advisor colonlopez i think if we are going to speak about recruiting, we need to go about accessions. It is separated from retention because its a totally different dynamic. When it comes to attracting the talent in the nation right now, we need to do better job of putting the narrative of the purpose and value of a generational commitment to National Security and i dont think we have done everything that we can to be able to be as aggressive as we need to be with that particular messaging. In parallel to that, we are saturated in highly negative environments to where every topic set up by the department defense, nine out of 10 topics are negative in nature. Whether it is that our soldiers, marines, and guardsmen are rapists, whether somebody is saying we are woke, whether somebody is saying our focus is on Everything Else other than war fighting. All of those damaging narratives are impacting the way people think and if you look at the composition of the armed forces, it is less than 1 of the population. Even that 1 , their families, they do not really understand what we do on a daytoday basis. So what about the other 99 of the society that has no clue what service is all about . But all they hear is the negative narrative. I think that as a nation, we can help each other and talk about the value of service. I can tell you as a poor kid , growing up with nothing, to being the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and having access to opportunity to help people, we will never i would never dream this would happen to my life but it happened when i joined the air force. We need to Start Talking about those stories instead of the one offs. While they are horrible, the same things happen in society. Nobody is highlighting the stuff happening at our colleges, certain parts of our country. They zero in on the military and i would like for people to take a pause from that and take it for face value. There is accountability. We have different laws to deal with these things and we just need to continue doing that. On the other side of that is that we need to have a lot of the people that have benefited from the actions of our war fighters to be able to tell the stories about i remember september 12, 2001. I remember the pride i had when johnny, susie from my neighborhood ended up going forward. Susie did not come back. She sacrificed her life or her country but she took an oath to do that. She fully understood what that was all about. And that message needs to be ingrained into our population and our youth to be able to understand really this is a generational commitment that all of us need to do this at one point or another, because someone is always looking in to see how they can disrupt our way of life. Our democracy. And go against the ideals of what being an american is all about. I am right where you are. The joint war fighter ethan oh that is still deeply embedded in todays war fighting forces, so im going to tell a quick story. A war fighters story. Then i would like you to tell one because you are out there, youre seeing with the young men and women do. So thinking about a good example of just how good our soldiers, sailors, airmen and guard our. Alden started. I was at an air force base. In the 91st icbm wing. I met a Second Lieutenant and staff sergeants who were defenders and as defenders, fully equipped, very capable with a whole range of weapons, being the Second Lieutenant, we met. When i asked her in her responsibility for protections, security of the most lethal weapons in the world. Her responsibility and accountability for the most lethal weapons in the world. I said would you shoot me if i crossed a redline . She said absolutely. She cant wait to be upgraded to a convoy commander. That would be responsible for convoy, icbms rolling on public roads across north dakota. Average raised average age, less than 25 years old and responsible and accountable for the most lethal weapons of the world. So that is my story, over to you. Advisor colonlopez that story is common because what we find out is for whatever reason, the young men and women joined the service. That flips when you understand what their roles and responsibilities are. I will give you one story, i will give you two because i think we need to bring the total force into this. The first story is when we were doing the retrograde from afghanistan and the United States transportation command was looking for a better tracking mechanism to be able to track the flags and ships coming from different places and if you put that up for bid, that will cost you millions of dollars. Here comes this crew led by an that says we are programmers. They said we will do this less than a week. I may be misquoting, but very fast. They pushed it forward and put it in place at the cost of commendation medals. That is the talent we have in the department of defense. Americas sons and daughters that are given an opportunity to go ahead and do something, whatever that may be, based on their specialty. And they do it well. The second example is in Somalia International airport. We are training the special forces there and there is a lot of equipment coming in but the accountability of that equipment was horrible. Here comes this Army Staff Sergeant from the reserves and in one deployment, he ended up programming an entire system of accountability that got everything down to the single weapon and where the weapon was located. When i talk to that staff sergeant, i asked what is your background, who are you, what do you do . He said i am an m. I. T. Guy and in my reserve time, i do the soldier stuff. I just took whatever i do on the outside and put it in here. So when we talk about the total force of active duty, that is our youth coming in to do something greater than the purpose they had on the other side of things and they are serving their nation. Those are my two stories. I would just like to ask you if youve got an experience as you were deployed all over the world, the business, what you did to defend our nation is remarkable in many ways. Some of that you can share, some of that you cant share. But as you are talking to a future dj is pj is there a story you would share with them on how to handle the reality of a combat operation . Advisor colonlopez there are many scenarios, clearly there are far many more valiant pjs then i have ever been. So i always consider myself in the company of remarkable warriors. And when i gauge my actions in combat and the things i have to do, it is the necessity. Its just really what we trained to do. The one thing i will pass on to any young paire rescue man or special operator is that complacency will be the biggest killer you can ever face. When you start getting comfortable doing certain things because of repetition and expertise, that is when you fall on your face so i encourage buts when you fall on your face flat. I will encourage every single one of them not to do that. When it comes to their skills, it is something you have to continue the muscle memory to make sure you do it and i have a quote that says amateurs train until they get it right and professional training until they do not get it wrong and that is what we do every day. It is not checking a box and getting the form filed so you can get paid. It is because that is the expectation on the battlefield. When all the variables are working against you and you have to take action at that moment. That is probably the best advice. Lt. Gen. Wright training and prepare, not just to get it right but to never get it wrong especially given the responsibilities we have for the most lethal forces in the world. Some 17 plus deployments that you and janet is your spouse and your family, when you are together, no doubt it took a toll on you personally and professionally. You made this Statement Public that you lied on Periodic Health assessments over 17 years. How did that personal experience as you got to the Decision Point shape the way you as a leader faced challenges like suicide in the marines . Advisor colonlopez i rely on humility as the foundation of my approach to anything we do. A lot of that because i grew up with nothing i came from nothing , and the air force gave me an opportunity to do something with my life. It was the same attribute that