Bravery in the Skies: The Nation’s Response to 9/11 and Its Impact on National Defense 25 Years Later

Watch the Video

---

Read the Transcript

---

Voiceover:

Please welcome two Airmen who courageously responded to the unthinkable on 9/11. Lieutenant General Mark Sasseville and AFA’s own Heather Penney.

Heather Penney:

Twenty-five years ago, our nation was attacked on our home soil. There are days in history when everything changes, and this was one of them. On that Tuesday morning, Lieutenant General Mark Sasseville and I were at the 121st Fighter Squadron, the D.C. Air National Guard, over at Andrews Air Force Base. Our unit had just gotten back from a Red Flag exercise, and on September 11, 2001, it was just a typical Ops Day. By the end of that day, we had witnessed countless acts of bravery and a nation unified with resolve. Sir, thank you for being here. At the turn of the century, the United States was the world’s sole superpower. We and our allies had prevailed against a Soviet threat and had crushed Iraqi forces in the Gulf only a decade before. However, our overarching defense posture was not prepared for that day and what we would then embark upon.

Sir, would you please set the context for America’s defense, what that looked like 25 years ago?

Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville, USAF (Ret.):

I will. First, let me acknowledge AFA and thank you for the opportunity for being here. I think the programs also say something about the Chairman being here. Obviously, the Chairman is not. I don’t know if we alibied that properly.

Heather Penney:

He might be a little busy.

Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville, USAF (Ret.):

He said something about having to run and go to a meeting or something. I’m not sure exactly what’s got him all bothered up, but you’re stuck with us for the next 30 or 40 minutes. And so talking about that day and the run up to it without going into a big history lesson, I am a bit of a history buff. So I’ll spend a little bit of time on the Cold War. I think in modern times we talk about we don’t want another Cold War. We’re slipping back into that. But to refresh everybody’s memory, the Cold War really was a Cold War. People died during the Cold War. It wasn’t a different form of peacetime. All that came about because two superpowers formed at the end of World War Two. And there was a lot of money, a lot of infrastructure, and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed from one country to the other. We fought each other in just about every continent except our own.

And by the time that the Soviet Union falls in 1991, the world looks very different. We, the country, start to take the peace dividend, appropriately so. We didn’t need all that infrastructure. We didn’t need all those radars. We didn’t need all those missile sites. By the way, I think people forget or never learned in the first place, there were Nike surface-to-air missile sites all around D.C. and Baltimore up until the ’70s. So all that went away over time. And by the time the 1991 hits, we’re already on the way down from the Cold War. 2001 is only 10 years after the Cold War ended. In retrospect, that doesn’t sound like a very long time. But those intervening 10 years, things looked very differently. We started to ramp down. We took the peace dividend, as I mentioned. The military got much smaller than it was. And we learned some lessons from Desert Storm, Desert Shield, about how we could be a smaller military and with superior technology still fight two regional wars. We didn’t adapt in those 10 years to the world that was changing around us. And so, on 2001, we have this aging infrastructure that’s pointed at the Soviet Union, no longer a Soviet Union, worried about bear bombers with our radars pointed outwards. And we didn’t put ourselves in a position to be able to address the threats that we’re developing. We’re not alone, by the way. The entire government was out in the same spot, especially the intelligence community. And that’s all in the 9/11 report. If you haven’t read it, it’s actually, the executive session’s quite easy to read. But, bottom line is, strategically, we were out of position as a nation on 9/11.

So, the “so what” for that is, this is a very difficult thing for any military, especially ours, to do, is to position ourselves to where we need to be. And that’s really what you see playing out in today’s defense structure leadership, defense enterprise. How do you position yourself for what’s coming next? It’s easy to arm for what already happened, but how much optionality do you build into your systems across all the services for what we think are the threats? One final thing on that, I’ll also say, throughout that 10-year period that I just talked about, the military didn’t really see terrorism as its job, which further complicated it. It wasn’t the military’s job until it became the military’s job. And then we had a lot of work to do and a lot to catch up on.

Heather Penney:

And what was relevant for us that morning is that as part of the peace dividend, the nation slashed the Air Force in half. So our combat air forces, our fighters, our bombers literally cut in half. The nation kicked out fighter pilots, banked new pilots, and shut down. They shuttered a number of, actually most of our alert units, which is why we were not armed on that day. There were really only five CONUS units that were sitting alert, and we weren’t one of them. And that was from a height of thousands of fighters. I think we had 20 some air defense sectors at the height of the Cold War, and that was a steady ramp on the way down. So it’s important to explain to the audience that you just came up through the ranks.

You’re a lieutenant general, retired now, but you were on that day just the director of operations, the number two in the fighter squadron. But the leadership demanded of you was far and above just running typical squadron operations. What should today’s Airmen take away from your experience, what you were challenged with doing on that day? Because I think as we move into ACE operations, disconnected operations, contested environment, EMS, all of that, we will all be required to rise to the level of leadership that may be beyond our ranks.

Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville, USAF (Ret.):

So what I would say to that is that I think fundamentally, the system that the Air Force had built worked. So as a product of the Cold War, again, not to keep harping on the Cold War, but back then, and some folks here in the front row remember that, it was centralized command, decentralized execution. That was the thing, because we knew we wouldn’t be able to fight the Russians, the Soviet Union, because we knew we would lose comms. We wouldn’t be able to produce an ATO and get that out there. So everybody knew the plan, and the expectation was everybody would execute. Now it’s called mission command, but it’s basically the same thing. That only works if you do the following things. You train, you equip, and you educate in the right way. And on the training side, you know, JV talks a lot about sorties and flying hours, right, how there’s a continual need to continue to practice. I think we extrapolate that. We can. We should extrapolate that beyond the fighter-pilot domain into any kind of domain, no matter what your AFSC is. You have to continually train on your craft. And it’s not really much more complicated than the old adage. How does it go? Amateurs train until they get it right. Professionals train until they can’t get it wrong. That’s exactly the same thing that we did during the Cold War and we need to be doing now.

Now, OREs and ORIs, this is probably not a very popular thing, but those exercises and every MAJCOM calls them something else. PACAF has their terms. UCOM has their terms. USAFE, right? And so it’s about putting a bunch of people together in a pressurized environment with a script to provide some kind of a high-pressure scenario where leadership needs to be practiced, where you cap the leader, quote, unquote, right? Squadron commander has a heart attack. We all know those scenarios. And then everybody else needs to fall in. Those are tremendously valuable. I don’t know if that’s still happening now. I think we went to a different inspection system, and that’s all great. The four graded areas, those are all valuable and necessary. But stressing the system on a regular basis is also tremendously important. The experience, getting people, moving people around to learn new things, and then finally the education, the PME, all the opportunities that we presented, all that put together in a volunteer force–thank God we have one- is what you get. It delivers that kind of ability for leadership to rise to the surface. And there’s nothing special about what we did, but that’s the environment that we grew up in, and that was the product.

I’ll add one more thing–commitment. We, everybody in my orbit at the time, was committed to the cause. I grew up overseas as a child, and so I knew I had experienced what life in other countries was like. By the time I left the academy, I had a good understanding of what America has to offer, the ideals, the principles that we’re based on. So my view was probably a little bit more developed, I think, than the average American’s. So I was bought in. I still am, obviously. And then the commitment, when you sign on the dotted line, is also something that we took very seriously, right? The understanding that this is a tough business. You’re signing on the dotted line. This means that you may need to do a very unthinkable thing at some point. You may need to give your life for the country, or an unplanned crisis scenario like this. So I think those are the things, those are the requirements, those are the pieces that, when you put it all together, makes that scenario work.

Heather Penney:

So on that morning, we were not an alert unit, as I mentioned, because of the peace dividend, because our nation had removed that posture to be ready. So we weren’t part of NORAD, and so we weren’t receiving any information about the battle space. And I remember our intelligence officer, David “Nuts” McNulty, doing what we now call open-source intelligence, right? He was literally calling airline counters and airport operations desks and tallying flight numbers on a yellow legal pad, trying to account for what aircraft could be airborne and which ones had been grounded by the F.A., so they’d been diverted and landed. And this could very well be a situation that our Airmen face in the future when they have to fight without perfect information, when sensor sites have been targeted, when orbits are destroyed, and when comms goes down. What wisdom would you offer to our Airmen as they look forward to that potential of having to make decisions and take action with incomplete or imperfect information?

Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville, USAF (Ret.):

That’s really a given, I think, and all of you who have been in combat know or in leadership positions understand that you’re going to have to make decisions, you’re going to have to act with an incomplete picture, and you have to be comfortable with that. You can’t put yourself in a position where you expect to have or you wait for data information to come in that’s not going to come in. So you have to mentally prepare yourself to understand what decision process you’re going to use when to be able to account for this idea of a lack of information, because you don’t know, especially in a crisis environment, what that’s going to take. So back to the previous discussion about training and equipping and being an educated Airman or Guardian, it’s extremely important that you prepare yourself mentally for a tough scenario.

Heather Penney:

So a key action as leadership that you took was we had to generate weapons. I remember Razin calling down to our ammo troops and saying, “Hey, we need to get live missiles, live AIM-9s to the flight line.” And of course we didn’t have an air-tasking order, we didn’t have 72 hours, none of the paperwork to follow it up. So this was a serious choice that you made. Can you walk us through that command decision? After all, as I mentioned, no air-tasking order. What lessons can Airmen and Guardians take today regarding how you had to make decisions, improvise, and manage that risk?

Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville, USAF (Ret.):

So that was actually quite an easy series of decisions, of starting to move in the direction that we all knew that we needed to go. By then everybody knew we were under attack. We had the ability to respond. We had the responsibility, I thought, the duty, to respond, to put up some kind of fight. You know, we talked about the parallels with December 7, 1941, and how all that unfolded. And by the way, it’s going to happen again. We’ll get to that a little bit here in a few minutes. But this whole idea of decision making, we could probably spend three hours on decisions that were made on that day, tens of thousands of decisions, some big, some small, made at all levels, strategic, operational, tactical, all across the government, not just the military.

But you’ve got the first responders at the tactical level that are making a decision to go up the steps, right, not down. You’ve got Flight 93 making decisions real-time with the information that they had in complete picture, as we talked about. You’ve got NORAD at the operational level making decisions to scramble certain assets. There’s a technique on what you get in the air at what time. You hardly ever put everything that you have in the air at once. So those are important decisions that you make. And then at the strategic level, one that comes to mind quickly because I just reviewed the piece that was done when Vice President Cheney goes and says, “Hey, weapons free,” right, which had never been done before, and the weight of that decision on him.

I think in a crisis environment, which we should practice–I don’t know that we do enough of it- I think the ORIs kind of help with that. And ORIs, I use that term loosely, Operational Readiness Inspection. But those kinds of training opportunities help us make decisions, help us learn how to make decisions in times of crisis. I think that prioritization is key. You’ve got to start with a prioritization to understand what the job is in the heat of the moment. I think it’s important to know whether your decision is reversible or irreversible.

I think a quick risk calculation is important.

And then, finally, the idea of what’s the cost of not making a decision? What’s the cost of not doing this? So when you’re in a position like that, you have to take the initiative. You have to put some kind of response together. You put all those aspects together, and it can be done pretty quickly. It’s easier if you have experience, and you end up with a decision, A or B, that maybe you bounce off of your deputy or somebody else, and then you execute. I think the worst thing you can do is hem and haw and wring your hands about, “Is this the right thing? Do I have the authority to do this? Do I not have the authority? Am I going to get in trouble?” In a crisis situation like that, that makes it actually a little bit easier when you say, “Okay, we are under attack. I’ve never seen this before.” You’ve got a lot of latitude to maneuver. If it’s something short of that, I think that’s a bit more of a challenge, but I think the rubric on how you make decisions is still the same.

Heather Penney:

I think there’s two pieces that I’d like to draw from what you just said. One was the risk mitigation. If you take action, is it reversible or irreversible? As you move forward, how do you continue to manage that action to ensure that unintended harm or consequences don’t happen? When I think about it, building up the AIM-9s, we could take them to the flight line and not load them up. We could de-load, we could load them up, take off, and not hit the pickle button. So there were many ways that we could risk mitigate the decision to arm up the jets with weapons, which you and I did not get.

But then launching, we really had to wait until we had that authorization to launch because the airspace was so confused. There was so much fog and friction throughout the National Decision Command authorities that if we had launched, we could have made the fog and friction worse. Moreover, we’d seen the videos. We knew what the target would be–an airliner with innocent Americans on board. And so we could not afford to take that decision and buy that bomb, if you will. And so there were levels at which, as I watched the decisions that you and General Worley and Razin went through, that I took away about why we took certain actions and why we didn’t. And as you mentioned, hemming and hawing and not taking action can be the worst thing that we do, but we have to understand what the potential consequences could be. The other thing that I really saw on that day was how well the team worked together.

We’d just gotten back from Red Flag, and so we had gone through standard training, right? I mean, we had been through the reps and the sets, and we were at the top of our game. But what was required from us was improvisation. We had to do things differently than what we’d been practicing at Red Flag, and this was very different from our normal CT operations, our continuation training. But we were able to do that not only because everyone was at the top of their game. They had practiced so much, they were professionals, they couldn’t do it wrong. That you were able to improvise and do so with a level of competence and trust in their ability to execute, but also trust in each other. And that’s really a high-performing team, because once you identified what the new mission was and what the new mission would require, everyone did what they needed to do to get it done, and they did it well.

Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville, USAF (Ret.):

And that’s repeating itself throughout the entire country, right? We’re talking about our experience here, but across the entire nation, people are sending fighters and pilots into the sky. I remember on our second sortie seeing the E-3 in a tanker above the Capitol. Never so happy to see an E-3 airborne that we could talk to and give us a whole picture. And the picture was clear, but we didn’t know that at the time. So, yeah, the same decision-making process, I suspect, played out Texas National Guard, North Dakota National Guard, all across the nation, out in Las Vegas. Everybody was getting stuff in the air and taking risk, which is exactly the right thing to do, I think, in that scenario.

And because of the training, the discipline, the professional forces, we didn’t make things worse for ourselves. We didn’t shoot anybody down accidentally. We didn’t crash anything. And so I think that part of it is also testament to what a great Air Force we have.

Heather Penney:

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the weapons-free. And in that situation, as individual pilots in our cockpits and others who were airborne, we could make the decision that an entity was hostile and use lethal force. I truly think it’s a testament to the professionalism and judgment that nobody got trigger-happy. And in that situation where, you know, tensions are high, stakes are high, it’s a very uncertain, ambiguous environment, that kind of human judgment, I think, was crucial to our ability to secure the airspace and not make a tragic mistake.

So after we returned from our initial sweep, Billy Hutchison is actually the first individual to take off. He had been doing basic surface attack at Air Force DARE, had come back. He does a quick sweep up to Great Falls, and then he returns because he was out of gas, right? SAS and I were seconds behind him. We head off to the northwest, being vectored by Potomac Approach, the air traffic control that manages the low airspace around D.C. So we return from that sweep, and we spent the rest of the day securing the airspace over D.C. You know, what, 20, 30 minutes later, Razin and Brandon Rasmussen, IGOR, they get airborne, they have missiles. And then we begin to normalize operations as the quits, the F-16s from Langley that were sitting alert, they come on board, and they bring a lot of the NORAD assets as well.

But would you please explain how we did this and how it evolved? When we first took off, we were really only talking with civilian air traffic control. And there was no playbook. There was a lot of teamwork. And as we began to integrate the civil airspace and NORAD assets and turn what typically is separation sequencing across, you know, standard arrivals and departures, the Potomac airspace had to really focus and shift into a battle manager-type mindset. Would you please share, you know, how you managed this to integrate those civil agencies with military operations?

Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville, USAF (Ret.):

So I didn’t do that part very well. We needed Razin to figure all that out. So, yeah, on the first sortie, it is really just mayhem trying to get air traffic control, who, as Lucky said, is really in the business of keeping people away, keeping airplanes away from each other so that they don’t hit each other, to really putting them in a position where they can help us get close to anything that’s airborne so that we can help it get away because, obviously, it’s not on the right frequency.

So we spent a great part of the morning chasing down where there was a hit, and, you know, the FAA is telling us, “Well, they’re over this airport.” Well, I don’t know where this airport is, right? And these are strips, right? These aren’t airports, actually. So they’re over this strip. And so I was not familiar with the local airspace to that level. They weren’t familiar with our lingo. And so it took a while before we realized that we needed to get on a common sheet of music, and that’s one of the things that Razin really honed in on was using the skills from Red Flag and developing a bullseye system with the civilians and saying, “Okay, National Airport is bullseye, and we’re doing radio and DME off of National, and if you see something, tell us that radio and DME, that way we can actually get to it much more quickly.”

So I think the point there–and you already mentioned it–is about the improvisation. So when you’re in this crisis environment and you’ve never seen this before, part of the training should be that we’re going to have to do things differently than we have in the past. You’re going to have to come up with new processes, whatever that might be, to figure out, to communicate with your new teammates that you didn’t expect to have earlier that morning, maybe, on how to achieve the mission objective, which is, in this case, obviously, defending, but it could be different in the future. I think a new pace plan, not only just for communications, but a tactical pace plan is important–primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency- and paying attention and spending a little bit of time on that up front to get through the initial shock, through the initial wave, until things stabilize.

Heather Penney:

Yeah. I mean, a lot of folks don’t realize that even though the FAA had grounded aircraft, those were primarily commercial airliners or aircraft that were on instrument flight plans. And on that day, there were a lot of private aircraft that were flying by visual flight rules that were not required to talk to anyone or be under any kind of positive control. And so part of what Razin did by really working with air traffic control and their mental agility to be able to adapt to what is typically sequencing and separation to then begin to speak fighter pilot battle manager language was phenomenal. And so by designating that bullseye system, they were very rapidly able to adapt and use that language because, you know, in our F-16s, we didn’t have GPS. We didn’t have any of those navigational sites.

Our radar did not — they just showed us contacts. And then Air Traffic Control Potomac began to quickly help us filter that information because there was a tremendous emergency response between medevacs and military airlift and sheriffs and law enforcement. So we could identify which radar contacts were known and friendly and which ones were unknown that we had to go identify and then turn around from the airspace. So getting to that normalization of operations, when you’re improvising, you’re using what you know to adapt to something that’s unknown, but the sooner that we can get that unknown back into something that is closer to what we’ve been trained to, what our procedures, what our TTPs are for, helps us then begin to smooth out and reduce a lot of that fog and friction.

And so what Razin did by teaching Potomac and their professionalism and agility to be able to adapt to that helped us to begin to normalize those operations and better integrate the airspace from the low element, where we still had civilian air traffic controllers helping us out, with the high element where we had the E-3 and the AWACS doing a lot of the identification as well. So we were sent on that suicide mission because our nation was unprepared, and not only had we not taken the warning of Al-Qaeda, that threat, seriously, but as a nation we’d become complacent after the fall of the Soviet Union. Today, as General Caine had mentioned, the global security environment is far more dangerous and complex, and the Air Force and Space Force have been the lead services in military operations, yet the Air Force is smaller and older than we’ve ever been, and we face readiness challenges as a result.

So as we look back at 9/11 and that lack of imagination and preparedness, it’s not a perfect analogy to today, but I think it’s close enough to be a warning.

Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, absolutely. This environment that we’re stepping into is- and the chairman said it perfectly–it’s getting faster. The unknown is even more pronounced than it was then. We, as I mentioned before, have a habit of fixing the last set of problems: AI, cyber, the usual culprits, big problems. We don’t know what that looks like. We do know that our enemies are still out there. We do know that they want to do us harm, but we don’t know how it’s going to come.

And so that’s really what we need to focus on. What if the next attack, what if the attack on your watch, is something that we haven’t even thought about yet, just like happened on September 10th? Nobody in uniform was thinking about airplanes running into towers. Intelligence community might have thought about that. They might have had some tips. Nobody in our orbit was even remotely concerned about that. So what if the next one is something even more complicated that we haven’t even thought about yet? How will we handle that? How will we respond? How will you respond? That goes back to the thought that we will never be able to prevent a surprise attack.

What we need to orient, and I thought we might be able to after 9/11, DHS, reorganization, TSA, we might be able to prevent an airplane incident, but we won’t be able to prevent a surprise attack. So the answer has to be to position ourselves to respond quickly in crisis to get back up on the step and then to turn back into a position where we can counter to get back on the offense because things will happen so fast in the next iteration that unless you rapidly restore your capacity to do some kind of response, it might not be enough.

Heather Penney:

Well, I would say a major challenge that we face is how do we hedge risk as we transform the service? So we heard from the Secretary about the need to be able to lean into advanced technologies, but today our service, the Air Force particularly, is the oldest and smallest we’ve been. So we still have E-3s. We’ve retired the J-Stars.

The bulk of our tanker fleet still is from the Eisenhower era. The backbone of our bomber fleet predates the Cuban Missile Crisis, and most of our fighters are still from the Reagan era transformation. So how do we continue to hedge risk with the forces that we have as we lean into future technologies? And that will require, I think, each and every one of us to do what we can at our individual level. And we also need more resources to do that recapitalization program. In addition to, for example, Sentinel. Sentinel is also a necessary must-do to replace the Minuteman. So we are in a situation where it will require everything that our Airmen and Guardians have to not only deter, but then do that kind of rapid response that can be decisive in our nation’s interest. So your leadership was put to the test on that day. I’d say you passed it. You passed the test.

So you rose to the occasion and a challenge that we couldn’t imagine then. But I believe our Airmen and our Guardians will face challenges that we can’t even imagine. How does your 9/11 experience impact your approach to service and leadership? And what advice would you give Airmen and Guardians today?

Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville, USAF (Ret.):

So is this the closing one?

Heather Penney:

Okay.

Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. All right. Because I want to close on a strong note. So to answer the first part, 9/11, a cauldron of stress and chaos combined with our deployment in 2003, major combat operations, for me personally as a leader, I came out of that experience with much more compassion than I had going into it.

And I’m not sure exactly why. I think I saw so many different examples of challenges that people are going through. I saw so many challenges, so many examples of bravery and heroism, all while they have families at home. I saw the family support, and it really struck home to me that, as we were talking about a second ago, the response is really going to be a human response. We’ve got machines. We’ve got kit. We’ve got software. That’s nice, but that’s not what will get you through the next conflict or the next surprise attack. It’s what’s up in here, what you’ve trained, what you’ve learned. What I think are some important takeaways from this session and from what we’ve talked about before are Flight 93.

Those are the real heroes. Those are the real heroes of that day, and there are some articles out. You can read them online. They don’t surface really to the top, I don’t think. But if those four people on that airplane–and it wasn’t a full–the load was probably 50%, maybe. It wasn’t a full airplane. Beamer, Bingham, Burnett, Glick–those four names. If those four guys hadn’t pieced together the picture and understood that the nation was under attack, they might not have stormed the cockpit, but they did, right? They are the ones who stopped an even bigger catastrophe from unfolding in front of us. If they hadn’t taken down Flight 93 and it had hit the Capitol or the White House, God forbid, we would probably be in a different country today. I think I can pretty safely say that. So those are the real heroes, those that perished and those families that are left behind. So that’s a huge takeaway for us whenever we talk about that, and the chairman says the same thing. The next attack will require a whole-of-government response. The military can’t do it on its own. And so in addition to what we’ve already talked about, the need to continue to train and educate yourselves- and the education piece, by the way, that’s not PME anymore because the throughput isn’t there, the bandwidth isn’t there, the touchpoints aren’t there. This generation, your generation, needs to take responsibility — I presume you already do — for educating yourselves on what is quantum like, what’s quantum about. It is happening so fast that the service can’t do it for you. So you need to take responsibility and understand all the technology, understand the geopolitical impacts to put yourselves in a position to be successful.

But the next wave is going to take an all-of-government response just like the last one did. We don’t talk about it in those terms. But the federal, state, local, territorial, tribal response actions need to be put together. They need to be exercised. They need to be tested. The intelligence community has to do some things. But right now, when you look backwards on the past 25 years, I think we did a lot of work to prevent. I think the next couple of decades, we really need to work on our ability to respond quickly, under crisis, with teammates that we haven’t worked with before necessarily. DOD, DOW rather, has a tendency to focus inwards. I think we need to do a little bit of work to expand that out and to make sure that we’ve got the right teammates lined up ahead of time with the rest of the interagency.

And then for all of you in the audience, again, this is your challenge. I encourage you all to lead. I hope you lead boldly. I hope you lead decisively. And I thank you all for signing on the dotted line just like we did, just like your predecessors in the front row and those behind you. It’s not an easy business, so thank you for signing up and keeping the nation safe.

Heather Penney:

I’d like to also echo your words regarding Flight 93. I was told that none of the passengers on Flight 93 were veterans, service members, first responders, law enforcement. They were just ordinary Americans, and they rose to the occasion. They truly were the heroes of that day, sacrificing themselves and confronting danger to save our continuity of government, to protect our nation’s capital.

And that’s what gives me hope today, because as ordinary Americans, I see the DNA of the greatest generation alive and well, because we call the greatest generation of World War II the greatest, because they were ordinary Americans, lawyers, teachers, the soda fountain kid, answering the call to serve and protect our nation, to protect our free world. For those of you that saw the Jimmy panel this morning, Jimmy Stewart was a true hero. And we need heroes like Jimmy, like General Caine. He was my weapons officer when I was a baby wingman. That man was my hero, still is today.

Because they inspire us, because they help us believe that we, too, can rise to the occasion and serve in that selfless and heroic kind of way. But I’ll tell you, Jimmy Stewart did not win World War II. It was the nameless Airmen of the 8th Air Force who every day swallowed their fear into their gut and went and did the job anyway. So when the chief yesterday gave his keynote with a few names, they’re just representative of the greatness that we have within the Department of the Air Force, our Airmen and our Guardians. Because although you may seem nameless, you are the real heroes because you will be what helps us win the wars of the future.

Godspeed, and let’s roll. Thank you.