Gen. Carden: Hey, I’m Tom Carden, and I cannot tell you how honored I am just to be in the same room.
I know as I walked in today I saw many representatives from the defense industrial base present today. I just want to tell you how thankful I am for what you all do every day.
I know there’s a lot of talk about the defense industrial base these days, and I’ll tell you, you’re not the problem, you’re the solution. We’re certainly thankful for everything that you do to help us get better each and every day.
As I prepared to come here today I took a look at the agenda and all the people that were talking and all the technical topics that they were talking about and I’m a little bit intimidated – to tell you the truth.
But I’m going to talk to you a little bit about people today. They couldn’t have – the panel couldn’t have teed it up any better, and I want Mr. Grochol [Michael Grochol, VP of Technology, GDIT] to know that we’re still hiring – so if he wants to continue his service we will certainly enable that opportunity in your National Guard.
So, I’ve only been doing this for 40 years, and having started as a private of infantry I know better than to come in here and start talking to you all about some technical innovation or some gee-whiz vision about what the future battlefield looks like. Again, it’s going to be a little bit more basic.
But what encourages me by looking at your agenda and being in this room is that you all understand one fundamental thing – and that is that evil never takes a day off. It doesn’t even take a lunch break, right? And you all understand that and you’re a part of the solution.
So the National Guard represents – I’m just one of 435,000 men and women that serve in the Army and Air National Guard – across the 50 states, the three territories, and the District of Columbia.
Now here are some things you probably don’t know about the Guard: we’re 20% of the Joint Force, 42% of the operational Army, 30% of the operational Air Force, and we’re about 4% of the Department of War’s budget.
We call that a value proposition even where I come from down in south Georgia.
Many of you here have probably, and we’ll get a little participatory here – I want to make sure you are awake after lunch. So, how many of you have heard the term “Weekend Warrior”?
That’s not who we are, and that’s not what we do. I want to go ahead and get that out for the record. We are actually a strategic hedge. We’re an operational force.
And I’ll give you a couple of examples. Absolute Resolve. Midnight Hammer. Epic Fury. 20 plus years of GWOT. Right?
There were a lot of days that were not “weekends” and two weeks in the summer involved in all those operations. And you’ll still hear it. You’ll hear things in the building.
If you talk to anyone in the Pentagon they’ll tell you, “well, the Guard and the Reserves they cost more”. No actually, we’re actually significantly cheaper – you actually have to pay for us when you mobilize us.
And so sometimes it looks like an additional bill to a comptroller and then some people will say, “well, you know it’s a little challenging to access the Guard”.
And I will tell you, if you just look at Epic Fury – again, I’ve been doing this for a very long time – I’ll often say “it takes more than a minute to get a Minuteman”…but it doesn’t take a lot longer than that.
In Epic Fury it was days we had people out the door – and in some cases hours. Obviously I’m an advocate for the Guard, I’ve done it all of my adult life. I’m very proud of what our men and women do to protect our way of life.
So, before I came here in January to be the vice chief of the National Guard Bureau, I had the honor of serving with Gen. Greg Guillot, who’s the commander of U.S. Northern Command and I served as his deputy for almost two years protecting the homeland.
And if Gen. Guillot were standing here right now he would talk to you about protecting the homeland from every threat vector from sea floor to space and in cyberspace.
So, super tall order. Lots of equities in this room across industry and the interagency to enable us to be able to accomplish that very complex mission.
The homeland is a decisive theater. You all understand that projecting power to the forward layer involves the homeland.
The calculus – the risk calculus – that our adversaries are doing every single day, right, has a lot to do with how we comport ourselves day in and day out and our ability to scale relative to whatever threat they might present to us.
And what we want them to do is look at the United States of America, pull out the abacus, and say “today’s not the day” – and tomorrow I want them to pull the same apparatus out and decide it is even worse than it was yesterday.
Right, and that is what making the homeland as impervious to a threat as we can possibly make it.
So if you think about the Guard being forward deployed. That’s kind of our decisive advantage in the homeland.
We’re literally forward deployed in almost every zip code in the 50 states, the three territories, and the District of Columbia, and having done this my entire adult life – when I got to NORTHCOM in 2024 I was blown away.
If you think about aerospace warning and aerospace control in North America – with rare exceptions – those are Air National Guard fighters.
If you think about ground-based missile defense, protecting our homeland, those are manned by the National Guard.
So the National Guard’s got a lot of human capital – we say “skin in the game” – to make sure that every American wakes up a little bit safer every single day.
I was heartened to hear the discussion about the Reserve component when it comes to cyber protection.
We have 3,900 cyber professionals in the Guard. Well it was pretty interesting to me when I was the Adjutant General down in Georgia, we stood up a Cyber Protection Team, and I said, “man we’re really gonna have a hard time manning these organizations” and we manned that organization quicker than I ever dreamed we would be able to man it.
And as I spent time with them, I would walk in the room and say, “Hey, what do you do in your day job?”
One young lady raised her hand and said, “I’m in charge of cyber security for the New York Stock Exchange”.
And the other young man raised his hand, “I’m in charge of cyber security for Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program”.
And I went around the room and that story replicated itself with some really big names over and over again.
And being a private of infantry, at the beginning I was like, “What happened? Did you guys get off at the wrong exit?” You know, what happened?
But they were just fired up about being able to serve their country.
And when I asked their employers, “Hey, we’re sharing talent here…how does that work for you?”
And they’d say, basically, “I don’t know what they’re doing behind the fence, but I’ve got a feeling that on some occasions they get to play offense and that is going to make them the best defender that I have at my company”.
And they incentivize their service in many many cases to the Guard.
So the points made by the earlier panel was just exceptional and it fired me up quite a bit, so thanks for that.
I don’t follow a lot of sports outside of the University of Georgia’s football team, but I did want to note that five out of the last six years the Sands Institute had a cyber competition – and the National Guard won it five out of six times.
Winners win. Winners win, so I’m pretty proud of that.
You know, the other thing – and this sounds like a commercial for the Guard and I apologize for that but I gotta take the opportunities where they come.
You know the National Guard – I use a seatbelt analogy – you don’t think much about that seatbelt day in and day out. You don’t think about the shock that it has the potential to absorb for you in a time of crisis.
And we like it that way, you don’t really think about us a whole lot, but when things go bad you’re gonna hear about the Guard pretty quick.
I used to tell people when I was the TAG of Georgia, “If you turn on your television and I’m standing next to the governor, its probably not a good thing”.
Right?
So we do lots of things that bring industry, academia – brings in local, state and federal professionals together.
We just had CYBER YANKEE exercise up in Connecticut, they actually let me in the room.
You know, when my computer don’t work I just get a bigger hammer.
But I’ll tell you, it was just impressive to see all the things that your National Guard is doing every single day to get a little bit better and make it safer for our fellow citizens.
So I just want to thank all of you for what you do every single day.
The capability and capacity that you provide to the Department of War to our Guardsmen, to our Airmen to our Soldiers, bending the odds of our maintaining our way of life.
You are standing with us between freedom and tyranny.
That makes you super important and it makes me super thankful just to be in the same room with you today.
Thank you all for allowing me to be here and thank you for what you do each day.