Thank you all very much. As a member and good standing of the Society of After-Dinner and Conference Speakers of England and Wales, I am contractually required as the final speaker before the drinks are served to have a joke about being the final speaker before the drinks are served. This is that joke. Thank you. We live in a world made out of computers and by that I don't mean the kind of roller ball, curvilinear, internet of things, promotional video world made out of computers. I mean that we are literally presently living in the world made of computers, that our buildings are computers that we keep our bodies in. When you remove the computers from modern buildings, they rapidly become uninhabitable, whether that's because they have such a high specification of insulation that without computer controlled respiration they fill up with black mold and you have to scrape them down to the foundation and start over again or because they are one of those willowy stark attack super towers going up in all the big cities of the world that use computers to dynamically allocate their load stresses against seismic and wind forces and when you take the computers out of those buildings, they fall over. The most salient fact about those buildings isn't what color they are painted or how much the condos cost, it's what software they are running. And it's not just our buildings. Increasingly, we ride around in cars that are computers that we put our bodies into that go 80 miles an hour unless you are on the 101 in which case it's 10 miles an hour. And I don't mean that these are Google self-driving cars, I mean that if you go to DEF CON or CCC or any other big security conference, you will see every year monotonically one after another like some kind of horror movie where Freddy Krueger's hand just keeps coming out of the grave, you will see presentations from people who figured out how to get into the car's informatic systems using such innocuous things as the Bluetooth interface for sound and can use the informatics to take over the steering and the brakes. The most salient fact about your car is the computer in it. The Boeing 747 that I'm flying home to London in tomorrow night, that is a flying Sun Solaris workstation in a very fancy aluminum case connected to some tragically badly secured SCADA controllers. And it's not just that we keep our bodies inside of computers, increasingly we keep computers inside of our bodies. I mean there's a reason that when Dick Cheney had his defibrillator implanted, he had the wireless interface turned off even though that means all of his firmware upgrades now involve a scalpel because not long after Cheney made that decision, Barnaby Jack, the security researcher, gave a presentation showing that from 30 feet away he could rewrite the firmware on implanted defibrillators using their wireless interfaces, cause them to seek out other implanted defibrillators to reprogram them and then to deliver lethal shocks on his timing.   It's going to be a computer that lives in your body and depending on how it's configured it will either tell you what's out there to be heard or it might tell someone else what you're hearing or it might stop you selectively from hearing some of the things that people say or it might even make you hear things that aren't there. And I'm a science fiction writer by trade and so I sometimes think that when I talk this way people think I'm being metaphorical about some futuristic world in which you will have computers in your body. But this is really our contemporary reality. Like many of you, I'm a very frequent traveler. I'm changing the climate. Ask me how.  And so one day I had arrived at an airport lounge and I was feeling very smug because I had seized the lone electrical outlet and I was charging my laptop before the flight and a man came up to me and he said, do you mind if I use that electrical outlet? And I was like, this is not on, right? So I looked at him over my glasses and I said, I'm charging my laptop before the flight. And he rolled up his pants leg and he showed me that attached to the stump of his amputated leg was a robot leg. And he said, I need to charge my leg before the flight. And I said, the electrical outlet is all yours. So in a world where we keep our bodies inside of computers and where we fill our bodies with computers, there is nothing more important than information security than computer security. And we have in that regard a great deal of luck because although there are many subtle and difficult things about information security, we have a nearly unassailable bedrock upon which to build our information security practices. And that's cryptography. And cryptography has this amazing characteristic to it that most people don't grasp until they begin to practice it, which is that it's all public. We tend to assume that if you're going to keep something secret that you also keep how you're keeping it a secret, a secret. And in fact, that was the practice until World War II when all of our messages that were sensitive began to fly around on public media on on airwaves that anyone who had a receiver could receive. And once it became the norm that your adversary could see your messages in transit, we had to start developing security methodologies that could withstand knowledge by our adversaries of what we were doing. And in this regard, we were actually recapitulating some of the history of technology and science as we know it today. After all, before we had science, we had a thing that looked a lot like science called alchemy. And the major difference between alchemy and science is that alchemists understood that once one of them had discovered how to turn lead into gold and had flooded the market with gold, that there would be no money in pursuing alchemy, right? The first one takes all. And so alchemists were really committed to not telling other alchemists what they thought they knew. And as a result, they fell prey to the ongoing tragedy that is the boundless capacity of human beings to kid themselves about what they think they know. Alchemists would design experiments, run the experiments, and then blindly assert that their experiments were successful, which is why every alchemist discovered for himself in the hardest way possible that drinking mercury is a bad idea. And the 500 year period during which alchemists didn't tell each other what they thought they knew, we call that period the Dark Ages. And we call the period when alchemists started telling each other what they thought they knew when they started publishing, when they started submitting themselves to the punishing and often humiliating practice of adversarial peer reviews when your friends point out the mistakes you made and your enemies tell you how stupid you are to have made them. We call that moment the Enlightenment, and we call what came out of that science. And thanks to the efforts of early cryptographers and code breakers, notably the folks at Bletchley Park where Alan Turing worked with the Polish mathematicians who were living in exile, who had fled Nazi occupied Poland. And to the scientists at the Princeton Institute who included the Hungarian mathematicians in exile, particularly Johnny von Neumann, we developed this practice of cryptography that involves telling other people how our crypto works and so that they can wrinkle out the problems that we've made, our blind spots, and help us shore them up and make our crypto better. Now, there's another legacy of Turing and von Neumann, of course. It's not just crypto, it's computers. Because the way that they invented modern crypto was by inventing modern computers. First, von Neumann not only invented the von Neumann architecture, he had time left over so he invented the non von Neumann architecture too. And what they developed for us was the general purpose computing architecture, which is a single machine that can run all the programs that we can express in symbolic logic. So no longer did we need to build a special computer to calculate our ballistics tables and another computer to tabulate our elections, now we could run a single computer that could execute all the instructions that we could write down that made sense, which was an amazing, miraculous thing. A thing we're still in the first years of understanding and making sense of, I believe, even though it's half a century later. But one of the things that we are very slow to realize, once we got to our incompleteness, once we got universality, was that it was kind of nice to have machines that only did a few things, instead of machines that did everything.  I guess people still keep making social networks. And you may think that the way that you will help your audience express their awesome individuality is by giving them glittery unicorn gifs, it's pronounced GIF, across the top of their pages, and then you can give them a little toy scripting environment, like five instructions that they can use to make the unicorns dance. And that seems like a great idea until the next DEFCON or CCC or other big security conference when some researcher shows up and says, yeah, you had five instructions, so I kind of added them together and figured out how to gang them up until I had a fully tour and complete computing environment in your glitter GIF unicorn language, and I wrote a virus and it's now infected all the pages in your social network. Sometimes we want printers that just can execute the code to convert vectors to bitmaps and instruct a little actuator to drop some ink on some pressed vegetable matter and not printers that can run all the instructions in the world, because it turns out that when malware gets into your tragically badly secured computers and on your printers, and they're all tragically badly secured, that once it's there, it can start crawling your network for machines that are unpatched against known bones and then infect them and then act as a bridge to exfiltrate them out of your corporate network. Again, one of the horrific things you can see every year if you go to a big security conference. You know, touring completeness is so ubiquitous, we find it so hard to get away from, that it turns out that collectible card games like Magic the Gathering are touring complete and with the right deck and enough time, and in this case, enough time to run a very sophisticated program might exceed the heat death of the universe, but with the right deck and enough time, you can run all the programs. You can run the firmware for your Lockheed Martin jet and you can run Pacman on your Magic the Gathering technology. So the amazing thing about crypto and general purpose computing, these two legacies, is the principle of end-to-end cryptography. Because end-to-end cryptography means that if you can write cipher that you believe to be secure, because you've subjected it to rigorous peer screening, you've indulged in the only security methodology we have, which is to ask other people what mistakes you might have made, and you know what computer you're encrypting on, it doesn't matter if you don't trust the end points between you and the other side. You can send messages to the people that you trust and not worry about the people in between that you don't trust. They can't read your messages on the wire, so long as you can see the code and you know about the end points, you don't have to trust the middle. Ultimately, though, if you can't see the code that you're using to encrypt, if you don't know about the machines that you're running on, you can't ever really have that certainty. Someone can tell you that they've implemented the cipher that is well understood, but you can't know whether or not they've added a backdoor or made a mistake unless you can audit it. You need the adversarial peer review or you're back in alchemy land. And this really matters when it comes to the Internet of Things, because as our world is made of computers, as our computers are inside of our bodies, we're starting to get an inkling of what it means not to be able to trust those computers because they are black boxes, they are designed by vendors who treat the fact that you can't see inside of them as an existential matter. If you can, you might be able to do something that would affect their bottom line, and so they go to enormous lengths to stop you from seeing how your computers work. And going back to those videos about the Internet of Things, where everything looks like rollerball, if you've ever noticed, the first thing that happens when someone walks into their video Internet of Things house is they wave their hands and all the lights come on, and then they speak to the house. They say, uh, house, tea, earl, gray, hot, and the machine just sort of hops to life in the kitchen, and they get their tea. Well, what is the implication of a house that you can wave your hands at and talk to anywhere you happen to be? That's a house where everywhere you are, you're on camera and you're on mic, and if you can't trust that networked camera, microphone, panopticon that you share living quarters with, you are in potentially a lot of trouble. And there are plenty of companies, and there are plenty of governments, who have what they see as good reasons to stop you from seeing how those computers work, and they have powerful tools to accomplish this end, tools that have their origins in the old days of the copyright wars. So in the early days of the copyright wars, the American government adopted a statute called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the U.S. Trade Representative encouraged countries all over the world that trade with the U.S. to adopt their own versions. The DMCA has got lots of complicated provisions. One of the most pernicious, though, is section 1201 that says that if you put a lock on a device, that it's against the law for someone else who owns that device to unlock it, or to tell people information that they might be able to use to unlock it, or to point out vulnerabilities that can be used to bootstrap a jailbreak that might unlock it, or to publish the keys if you can recover them from the device so that other people can unlock them. And this was used in the early days of the copyright wars to accomplish all kinds of business objectives. Like, for example, you may have noticed that if you stick a CD which doesn't have a digital lock in your computer, your computer will automatically wake up a piece of software whose slogan was rip, mix, and burn, and it'll offer to rip that CD for you so you can get more value out of it. You can rip it, you can mash it up, you can put it on your mobile player, you can put it in your car, you can stream it, you can turn it into an alarm tone or a ring tone. All that value is unlocked from your CD because there is no digital lock, and so vendors can make interoperable products. And all the things that are legal to do with the music on a CD are legal to do with a video on a DVD, but the DVD has a digital lock, and because it's against the law to remove the digital lock, you can't accomplish the legal things that you could get out of the DVD if you unlocked it. So if you want to watch the movies on your DVD, on your phone, you have to buy them again from a store like the iTunes Store or from the Amazon Video Store, and you can see why this is a great deal for the people who made the CD and the DVD, but as the owner of that product, that latent value was confiscated from you, and you were never able to realize it. So firms really liked this because they realized that they could, instead of having an ecosystem where their competitors and other companies came in and unlocked new value in the things that they sold you, they could capture 100% of that value and decide what of that value you can have. I think of it sometimes as the urinary tract infection business model. With a CD, all the value flows in a kind of healthy gush, but with a DVD, if you want to add a new feature to your video, it comes in a kind of burning, painful trickle, and it costs you a little extra every time. But the problem isn't just that we have this consumer rights story where some of the stuff that we own can't do as much as it should be able to do. It's that this model has proven to be a very valuable tool for other people who have other objectives. So I live in the United Kingdom, as you can tell by my accent, and we've just re-elected a guy named David Cameron, and one of his election promises was that if he was elected, he would ensure that nobody would have crypto that the government couldn't listen in on, that the government couldn't break, and that's not just an Anglo madness. That's something that FBI Director James Comey is called for, and many other people in other countries around the world in positions of power have said that this is one of their goals. Now, we don't know how to make a computer that can run all the programs, except for the ones that execute good crypto, but what we do know how to make is computers that only run signed code, and we can imagine government saying, well, we're only going to sign the code if it has a back door in it that we can use, and because we already have this legal structure that says if there's a digital lock, like a thing that checks to see whether your code has been signed before it can run, that rule will protect our technology, even though the technology isn't hard to break. The combination of that technology and felony convictions for people who unlock their devices will allow us to start putting back doors in everything. Of course, there's the walled garden world, which got really, really big on this digital lock stuff, so Apple doesn't use digital locks to stop you from pirating iOS apps. If you want to do that, you just download an illicit jailbreak, but it does stop you from running a commercial store that competes with the Apple Store that might offer ISVs a better deal instead of taking a 30% VIG on every piece of software sold through the App Store. Maybe you want to start one that takes a 15% VIG and offers ISVs a better deal and starts to eat Apple's lunch. The lack of the ability to break a digital lock and do so lawfully means that Apple can prevent that kind of competition in the market, and Sony and Nintendo and everyone who makes those game consoles, as well as the burgeoning ecosystems for things like Nest. They all rely on being able to extract rent from customers and from suppliers by using this law to stop people from knowing how they work. After all, an iPhone isn't a phone that is incapable of running software that hasn't been blessed by Apple. An iPhone is a phone that's been designed to refuse to run software that hasn't been blessed by Apple. It's the, I can't let you do that, Dave, phone. In the Internet of Things, we're seeing that investors really want to know what your ecosystem play is before they'll give you any capital. They want to know that your smart thing isn't just a single purchase that your customers make, that it's locked into an ecosystem that requires your customers to buy their interoperable products from you or from firms that you have a commercial relationship with, partly because that lets you extract rent from them, you can charge them for the license to run inside of your Internet of Things, and partly so that you can make covenants, right? Like you may want to promise a carrier that none of the apps in your mobile ecosystem allow the kind of tethering that they can't detect in the middle and shut down. And so that deal with a carrier is worth more if you can make that promise, and you can only make that promise if you can lock third parties out of your store when they don't play nice with you. And although nobody wants this in their devices, it's a thing that keeps recurring in our new devices. You may have seen that Courig, the people who make the K-Cup, brought out a new model device with digital rights management in it for their coffee so that you can run third-party pods through their coffee machines. And the CEO just did an investor call where he blamed the 25% drop in their sales on DRM, but he didn't say that they were going to get rid of the DRM.  And car companies have really latched on to this business model, not because they are worried that their competitors will steal their ABS code or their other informatics, but because if the only way to fix a car is to do software diagnostics on it, and the only way to do software diagnostics is to license a tool from them, because otherwise you would have to break a digital lock on the car's engine, then they can say to the mechanics, if you want a license from us to read informatics off of the diagnostics off of the car's informatics, you have to covenant to us that you're only going to buy parts from us, and that you're not going to buy parts from third parties who might sell you cheaper and or better parts for these cars. This model has been so powerful that now you have venerable automotive companies and industrial companies arguing that you don't and can't own your car. So every three years, the copyright office asks if we should make any exemptions to this rule. This year was one of those three years, and one of the petitions was to let mechanics create diagnostic tools that will let them read cars even if they don't have a license arrangement with the manufacturer. And John Deere filed reply comments saying, oh, you own the engine, but because you can't own the software, you're really a licencer of the whole package, right?  And the car companies aren't looking at this to get the high end, the people who've bought really expensive cars, but also the low end, the people who don't have any money at all. So there's this exciting new subprime car loan industry. There's a million cars on the road in America that were bought with subprime car loans, which are just what they sound like. People who don't have enough money to qualify for the loan or enough credit to qualify for the loan, but are given a loan anyways. Those loans are securitized and packaged up. So you want to make sure that their coupon returns well and that the thing is worth as much money as possible. The way that they get there is by fitting the ignition with an override that's networked and location aware so that if you miss a day's payment, first of all, it's got its own speaker. How obnoxious is this, right? It's got its own speaker. If you miss a payment, the car starts saying, you're late on your payments. You're late on your payments. You're late on your payments. But also, if you drive out of the area where your car is allowed to drive according to the terms of your lease, the ignition won't start again. So when the New York Times profiled the use of this technology, they talked to one woman who had crossed a county line without realizing it when she took her family out for a walk in the woods. And at the end of the day, alone in the woods with no one else around and out of cell phone range, her car refused to start and get her home again. It didn't end well, although there weren't wolves or anything. So there's a guy named Hugh Hare who runs the MIT Media Lab's prosthetics lab and he gives a much better presentation than I do because I'm a words guy and he's got pictures. So instead of, you know, a picture of him on the screen, there's pictures of all the awesome ways that they figured out to put computers in people's bodies while he walks through them, legs, arms, feet, neural prostheses for people with untreatable depression and on and on and on. And then the last slide, it's a killer, is him climbing a mountain all in Gore-Tex, stuck to the mountain, super ripped and he has no legs below the knees. He's got robotic prostheses to help him climb the mountain. He said, yeah, I'm a mountaineer and I lost my legs in a mountain climbing exercise to Frostbite and he's been walking around like this the whole time and he pulls up his pants, legs, and there he is, he's robot from the knee down. He starts charging around and leaping like a mountain goat. So the first question when I saw him do this that anyone asked was, how much did your legs cost? And he named a price like you could buy a nice townhouse in Noe Valley or a brownstone in New York or like a Mayfair row house. And then the second question anyone asks is like, well, who's gonna buy those legs? And he said, well, everybody because if it's a 60-year mortgage on your house or a 60-year mortgage on legs, you'll take the legs. But imagine in a world of where owners aren't allowed to know and interrogate and change the software on their devices, imagine what subprime leg loans look like, right? Imagine what happens when you miss a payment. Your legs walk themselves back, right? And imagine what lawful interception overrides look like on parts of your body, right? Where the cops can pull your legs over and where anyone who the cops have leaked the authentication keys to can also pull your legs over. And when the cops in countries that we think of as being less democratic like our own like Syria or Russia or Iran can also exercise the same facility. Moreover, the whole model rests not just on a prohibition of telling people how the software works but also telling people what its vulnerabilities are, right? If you know what mistakes the programmer's made in making your device, then you know how to jailbreak the device and trick it into installing code of your own design that overrides these anti-features. And when you're not allowed to tell people about mistakes that they've made in their security model, we are back to alchemy. We are drinking mercury. We are designing things that we keep our bodies in and that we put inside of our bodies whose vulnerabilities we are literally not allowed to tell one another about. So I've gone back to the Electronic Frontier Foundation after 10 years absence to work on a project called the Apollo 1201 project. 1201 is the section that prohibits changing code if there's a digital lock and the Apollo project obviously is the project that put a man on the moon in 10 years. We within 10 years are planning to end all digital lock laws everywhere in the world.  Thank you. Now, thank you very much. Now, none of us is pure in our technology decisions, right? We want to watch our movies even though Netflix invagled the W3C into putting DRM into our browsers that our browsers are now long live reservoirs of digital pathogens that can attack this in every conceivable way. We need to get our internet from companies like Comcast and AT&T and Time Warner even though they are enemies of network neutrality and want to have the right to decide what you can and can't watch on the internet and to turn the internet into a glorified cable TV system. We may have to work for firms that as part of their remit supply the government with weaponized vulnerabilities that they use to attack people that they don't like and so it gives them an incentive to keep those vulnerabilities from being discovered and patched and therefore puts everybody at risk. So none of us can be perfect and I'm not asking you to be perfect. You know, every smug vegetarian eventually meets a vegan. It doesn't matter how perfect you think you are. But I am going to ask you to think about all of the organizations that are working to mediate the harms that I've talked about today and the harms that are coming down the pipe and it's not just the Electronic Frontier Foundation although that's one of them. There's the Free Software Foundation. There's Creative Commons. There's Public Knowledge. There's Fight for the Future and so on and so on. There are dozens of organizations of every political stripe that work on these issues of technological freedom and that is itself an amazing thing because 10 years ago there weren't dozens of these organizations and I want you to add up all the money you spend every month on firms that are trying to destroy the nervous system of the 21st century and turn it into a system of control instead of a system of liberation and then decide what percentage of that you think you want to use to hedge your bet on the future on giving your kids a world where the computers say yes master, not I can't let you do that Dave and make that decision and follow your conscience. Thank you all very much for coming.


Can mushrooms build muscle like meat consumption? A study from the University of Exeter tried to find out. If you're grappling with the morals of meat consumption, you're going to love this. Mycoprotein, a mushroom derivative, and the time-honored animal protein were both served to young gym-going adults for a 10-week period. The outcome? Both groups saw similar gains in muscle mass and strength, with an interesting edge going to the mycoprotein group in certain exercises, specifically the bench press and deadlift. But it wasn't easy. The mycoprotein group found it more challenging to reach their protein goals, meaning they had to consume more for the same amount of protein. So while meat remains a strong player in the protein game, this research indicates mushrooms could be a worthy opponent if, you don't mind feeling constantly full. Read the study or learn more at lifespan.io and by subscribing to Lifespan News.


At least 11 people died and four others were injured when a building collapsed during a massive fire that broke out at a paint factory in the northern part of India's capital New Delhi.  Fire officials said that the blaze started on the ground floor of the factory, trapping the victims on the floors above with no way out. The building, which also houses a chemical warehouse, is located in the Alipur area in northern New Delhi. The charred bodies of the 11 victims were recovered from the rubble after fire engines doused the flames after battling for more than five hours. According to the Delhi police, the fire was preceded by a blast, probably caused by chemicals kept in the factory due to the blast, some nearby houses and shops also caught fire. Some of the injured persons were residing in those places, fires are common in India, or building laws and safety norms are often flouted by builders and residents.


The guided-missile frigate USS Carr was decommissioned Wednesday, March 13th, at Naval Station Norfolk, following nearly 30 years of service. This ship, like so many others before it, is passing into another stage of history. And we will continue to move forward as survivors must, holding the past in our hearts and sharing it with those who come after us. The ship was named for Gunners Mate 3rd Class Paul Henry Carr, awarded a posthumous silver star for his heroism during the battle off Samar. I think we can always look back with a tremendous amount of pride at having the opportunity to say, I sailed on USS Carr. So thank you very much for coming out today, and God bless all of you. God bless the Carr and her spirit. Reporting from Naval Station Norfolk, I'm Petty Officer Scott Pittman.


Ladies and gentlemen, the spouses of the official party, Mrs. Annie Berrier and Dr. Susie Cruz are now being escorted to their seats. Good morning. Welcome to today's ceremony. Please stand for the arrival of the official party, honors, and the presentation of the colors. Please remain standing for the singing of the National Anthem by Mrs. Maria Gordon, Mrs. Wanda Lawson, and Mr. David Lawson, followed by the invocation. Ladies and gentlemen, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Cornike, chaplain of the Defense Intelligence Agency, will now give the invocation. Please join me in prayer. Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for this gathering today as we witness this historic event, the change of directorship of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Lord, we acknowledge your faithful provision of intelligence professionals serving tirelessly around the world, committed to excellence in defense of the nation. Surrounded in this hall by decades of our rich history, we are thankful for our unique role in preventing, and when necessary, decisively winning our nation's wars. Today, surrounded by our past, we look to the future in a new chapter in our mission, and we humbly invite your presence. Lord, we give you thanks this day for the faithful and sacrificial service of Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, our 22nd director. For the last three and a half years, General Berrier has stood the watch and answered our nation's call for a heliotropic leader to give vision and empowerment to our civilian and military personnel. He modeled the principle of leading with love, taking an active interest in the lives and careers of those he led, setting an example for leaders at every level to do the same. Most notably, on this point, he invited the physical well-being of those of us blessed to embrace the pain in Team 22's morning workouts. He had the courage to constantly move to friction, knowing that problems don't simply go away by ignoring them, but must be addressed head-on. We are thankful, Lord, for this example that you have given us, and I pray that all of us will embody these principles as a legacy to General Berrier. We stand thankful as well for the sacrifices that Annie, Cole, Connor, Micah, Amanda, Jack, and Maeve have had to make. The long hours, the extensive worldwide travel, and the burden of leadership often meant delays, detours, and even cancellations of those things that are most important to the family. We invite your richest blessings on General Berrier and Annie and the entire family as they move to the next chapter in their mission. And Lord, we welcome Lieutenant General Jeffrey Cruz, along with his wife, Susie, to the DIA family. Lord, he is no stranger to the mission that we provide our nation's leaders, and we are honored to have him as our 23rd director. And I pray you give General Cruz divine wisdom, strengthen his mind and his body, and protect his home. May he take to heart the words of the prophet Isaiah, who said they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint. Lord, in all that we say and do today, may you be honored and glorified, and in your holy and matchless name we pray. Thank you, Chaplain Cornie. Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated. Our host for today's ceremony is the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Honorable Kathleen H. Hicks. We extend a warm welcome to Lieutenant General Berrier's wife, Annie, their sons, Cole and Connor, their daughters-in-law, Micah and Amanda, as well as their grandchildren, Jack and Maeve. Also in intense day are Lieutenant General Berrier's brothers, Mark and Matt. A very special welcome to Lieutenant General Cruz's wife, Susie. And representing his extended family, his sister and brother-in-law, Joe and Fred, their children, Justin, Toby, Brady and each of their families, as well as their plethora of friends, family, neighbors and mentors, both here in person and joining virtually. This morning you'll witness Lieutenant General Scott D. Berrier relinquish the directorship of the Defense Intelligence Agency to Lieutenant General Jeffrey A. Cruz. Today's event is rooted in military history, dating back to the 18th century when organizational flags were developed with colors and symbols unique to each unit. The passing of the colors from one director to another is significant in many ways. The history, traditions and accomplishments of a unit are embodied in the colors you will see past before you today. The colors record the glories of the past. They stand guard in the present and ensure inspiration for the future. At this time, Miss Annie Berrier is being presented with a bouquet of red flowers symbolic of the loving support she has shown her husband in his commitment to excellence as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. At this time, Dr. Susie Cruz is being presented with a bouquet of yellow flowers to welcome her into the DIA family. Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you the director of National Intelligence, the Honorable Avril Haynes. Thank you so much and really just it is an honor to have an opportunity to say a few words at this ceremony. It's so wonderful to see so many among other things of our past and our current distinguished leaders of the intelligence community. But General Berrier, Annie, I feel compelled to use first names because I feel as if this is part of our family, Jeff and Susie. And of course, Kath, you know, Ron, Chris, the Chris Colise is here I heard as well, like Christy and Stacey is here. There's so many people and I think it's part of just all of us coming together, honestly, to celebrate and to support in this moment, in the history of DIA, but also in the history of the intelligence community. And there are also a number of very special international partners here, which I think has been characteristic of DIA's work, including the Ambassador of Ukraine, as you saw. And with them, the family, the friends, colleagues of Scotty and Jeff, who are here to celebrate this transition. It's truly a privilege to have the opportunity to be here and to really thank Scotty sincerely for his extraordinary service to our country for over nearly four decades. Both as an Army Intelligence Officer and as the leader of the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. To Scotty's family, Annie, Cole, Mika, Connor and Amanda, and also the grandkids, Jack and Maeve, who are clearly the stars of this entire show. Thank you so much for sharing Scotty with us. We know how important you all are to Scotty and by extension to us. And none of us would be able to do our jobs without the love and support, sacrifices, understanding of those closest to us. And I know Scotty is no exception to that role. And Scotty, it's been a gift to call you a friend and a valued colleague since I came back into government a little over three years ago into this position. And I don't know if you're going to remember this, but our first call was in my first week on the job. You remember this, right? Yeah. It was one evening. I got out of a meeting late one night at the White House. And when I made it back to my car, guys told me I've received two secure calls. One was from the chairman and one was from the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. So I thought, okay, I should call the chairman back first, right? So I called him first. I couldn't reach him. And then I called Scotty. And after we introduced ourselves for a moment, you warned me that I'd probably be getting a call from the chairman. And he said, he's a great man, carefully explained, but he's very upset and he's not good at hiding it. I call that good intel. You then proceeded to tell me what had gone wrong and prepared me for the moment and we fixed the problem. But I knew right then I was going to be calling you first the next time that happened. But truly, your extraordinary warmth, your passion for the workforce, for the mission, your commitment to solving problems, really to strengthening our partnerships, our alliances just make you exceptional. And you wear your heart on your sleeve and I love that about you. And I could not be prouder to have worked with you and I'm so grateful for all that you've taught me during the time that we've had to work together. This is clearly a period of great challenges for our country. And honestly, what gives me optimism for the future was what I think of as sort of our secret weapon, is the institutions that we've built made up of such remarkable people who are guided by our common values and our fundamental belief in self-governance. But to work as intended, all of it has to be grounded in an ethical culture. And leaders like you safeguard our country by safeguarding our institutions and inculcating that ethical culture, which enables us to pursue the American dream, a country that is governed by the people, for the people, pursuant to the values that we were founded on. And you've done this during times of crisis and turmoil from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine to the crisis in Gaza and the surrounding region to the ever-present strategic challenges posed by China to the widening scope of our mission sets that now address non-traditional national security threats such as climate change, global health security, and the challenges presented by new and emerging technologies, navigating the shifting landscape together, has depended greatly on our ability to remain flexible, to learn and to adapt quickly and all while focused on what is actually best for the nation, our partners, and our future. And through it all, you've ensured DIA and its more than 16,000 officers worldwide were well-positioned to not only tackle the challenges of today but to stay ahead of those for tomorrow. And on a personal note, whether in excoms or during our regular check-in calls or in prep for hill briefings, I've always counted on you for your frank, insightful, trusted advice and perspectives. And as you depart, rest assured, you leave a stronger, more responsive, more capable DIA than before. Leaders are in many ways defined and remembered by their legacies and after an exceptional career in public service, Scotty, your legacy is cemented. As DIA director, you stood up to the China mission group to help America better respond to our strategic competition. With the PRC, you also expanded DIA's footprint in the Indo-Pacific, building the systems, knowledge, relationships that were required in that region. And under your leadership, DIA has prioritized investing and modernizing its systems capabilities by fostering a culture of innovation through tools such as AI and machine learning. And you promoted diversity in your workforce, pulling down barriers, setting new standards for the rest of the community. And your efforts, DIA's efforts, have helped to ensure the best insights are delivered to the warfighter and that our analysis in the IC benefited from the warfighter's own insights so as to inform our products and policymakers. And Scotty, put simply, across your exceptional career, you've embodied the core values that define so much of what we do in the intelligence community. DIA's own values, teamwork, initiative, integrity, accountability, and of course excellence. And you deserve all that life has to offer in retirement and I hope you actually take it. And on behalf of the entire intelligence community, I want to sincerely thank you for all you've done. You will be missed. I also just want to say a few words about General Cruz. Scotty, I cannot think of a better person to carry forth the work that you've done here than Jeff, who is one of those truly rare leaders who is capable of dealing with intense detail and still thinking strategically. As you move to lead us in other arenas, you're leaving DIA in truly good hands under the direction of Lieutenant General Cruz. And Jeff, I want to extend the warmest welcome to you and your family as you take on the helm of DIA today. And Scotty, you have my highest respect and admiration and my full support. And while I've been so grateful for the opportunity to serve with you at ODNI, honestly, I'm so excited for the opportunity that you have before us. As you well know, DIA is an absolutely extraordinary institution with some of the most exceptionally talented, innovative and patriotic people in the country. And I cannot imagine anyone more uniquely qualified than you to build on Scotty's work into the future. And to the DIA workforce, Jeff embodies everything this agency represents, and you will quickly learn that he has a steady hand in times of crisis, is a kind but action-oriented leader with integrity who will be a source of empathy, of optimism, and of laughter when you need it most. And Jeff, I cannot wait to see what you will accomplish in your new role and how you will inspire DIA's current and future workforces. And I look forward to our continued partnership across the defense and intelligence communities and with our officers and partners worldwide. And Scotty, I also can't wait to see what the next phase of your piece looks like. Thank you so much. Thank you, Honorable Haynes. Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Honorable Kathleen H. Hicks. Good morning, everyone. Good morning to Director Haynes, Lieutenant General Barrier, Lieutenant General Cruz, the many distinguished guests, members of the diplomatic community, family, and friends of DIA. And finally to the people of the Defense Intelligence Agency, thank you all for joining us. It's great for me to be back at DIA. As I said last time, I was here. The intelligence that you collect, analyze, and disseminate is indispensable and a vital tool that Secretary Austin and I use every single day. The Defense Department is smarter and stronger thanks to the hard work of DIA's professionals, military and civilian, who work day and night around the world. And please join me in a round of applause for this workforce. We rely on DIA and the entire Defense Intelligence Enterprise for insights on all the challenges we face. From the People's Republic of China, which is today America's most consequential strategic competitor on the global stage. From Russia, which presents an acute threat to the international system, as illustrated by its ongoing cruel war of choice against Ukraine. From persistent regional threats like North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations, and from borderless threats like pandemics and climate change. Most of these are areas DIA has focused on for a long time, but over the last three plus years, this entire agency and its leadership has made a concerted effort to better posture DIA for enduring strategic competition with the PRC. That's been a good thing because it's what the nation and our military need. And I know it isn't easy to reorient an agency like DIA with its over 16,000 personnel. There are many obstacles to overcome, operational and organizational. For example, our competitors have increasingly shut off their own people and the world from the free flow of information, making them what you in the Intel community would call denied territory. That requires shifting our approach and mindset. Even as we shouldn't forget the lessons learned over the last 20 plus years, it's also true that collection and analytic techniques for understanding a closed society like the Soviet Union was are becoming more applicable again. There's also the workforce dynamic of combining old hands with new blood, the challenge of learning from long time subject matter experts while benefiting from new perspectives. Bringing the two together can be transformational, but it requires active management, mutual respect and leadership at all levels. In many ways, adapting to confront a decade's long strategic competition with the PRC as our pacing challenge, requires deliberate disruption and discomfort, not unlike the pendulum swing toward counterterrorism that the national security community experienced after 9-11. It requires doubling down with confidence and urgency, recognizing that we're in a persistent generational competition for advantage and we have no time to waste doing more of the same. It also requires sharing more and partnering more, as DIA has done to great effect in recent years, operationalizing intelligence to provide crisis support for Ukraine since Russia began its latest invasion two years ago this month. And as you know, we can't surge trust, which makes it so important to strengthen collaboration with all of our allies and partners early and often. For over three years, the DIA team has done just this under the leadership of one of our most experienced military intelligence professionals, Lieutenant General Scottie Barrier. Before I go on, I want to share a few words about Scottie from Secretary Austin. Here's what he had to say. Through every assignment and deployment, your analytical expertise protected American and allied warfighters and defended our national security interests. Your vision and measured leadership under pressure provided our country's leaders with decision advantage and made America safer. The Secretary of Defense is speaking from the heart here, based on years of working with Scottie, going back more than two decades from the 10th Mountain Division to U.S. Central Command to here at DIA, and notably as his former CO. Scottie's career began during our nation's last period of strategic competition, and he rose through the ranks amid the transformation and turmoil of the post-Cold War and post-911 eras. Those experiences gave him a unique perspective that shaped his leadership of DIA in this new era of strategic competition. It's a perspective we must maintain, knowing that even as we focus on the pacing challenge, there are many threats out there. We need strong I&W in every region of the world. We can and will leave no stone unturned as we defend America and her interests. Scottie, your time leading DIA caps off almost 40 years of outstanding service in the U.S. Army, during which you commanded intel formations from the company size to this agency. You served as the two at all levels, Battalion and Brigade S-2, Division Corps and Army G-2, and J-2 for U.S. and Allied Forces in Korea, Afghanistan, and at SEDNCOM. And through it all, you've had the support of your wife, Annie. Over 25-plus moves and eight deployments since your Army journey began together up at Alaska's Fort Richardson so many years ago. I'm told that Annie, a dedicated equestrian, even joined in the soldiering at times, like at Fort Wachuka, where she rode with B-Trupe, 4th U.S. Calvary Regiment Memorial, a ceremonial unit that keeps alive the 150-year-old heritage of the U.S. Army in the Southwest. Together, you've raised two sons who continue your commitment to public service, Cole, who served on Capitol Hill in the office of Senator Brian Schatz and Connor, or as the Defense Department calls him, Lieutenant Commander Barrier, who is an active-duty naval officer. Like all military spouses, Annie has served and sacrificed, so have Cole and Connor and their wives, Micah and Amanda. To them, to Scotty's grandkids, Jack, who is really enjoying that lollipop, I have to say, excellent, and made, and to the whole Barrier family that supported him throughout his career, America thanks you. And Scotty, we're also grateful to you and Annie that you delayed your well-deserved retirement until your relief could get in place. The fact is, last year's unnecessary hold on general and flag officer confirmations had a real impact on leaders and their families, and DOD continues to repair the damage caused by its cascading effects. While we hope the worst is now behind us, make no mistake, that must never happen again. The good news is today, even though it is Groundhog Day, Scotty's relief is here. And as DIA's colors pass to Lieutenant General Jeff Cruz, we know he'll keep up the great work. Like Scotty, Jeff was an intelligence officer from his first assignment after commissioning out of Roxy. After his junior year in college, he stayed on campus to recruit new freshmen into Roxy. It's unclear how many he recruited, though, because that was also when Jeff met Susie and ended up engaged. A truly great summer, he later recalled, and we are grateful to Susie for her service and sacrifice ever since. Spanning nearly three and a half decades, Jeff's career has well prepared him for this moment. From being the Indo-Paycom J2, he deeply understands, pardon me, what it will take to continue deterring PRC aggression, and also why we can't take our eye off regional threats like North Korea or Iran, because we're a global force with global responsibilities, we must always be ready for anything. From being the Pentagon's Director of Defense Intelligence for Worthfighter support, and the first year-long embedded J2 of the Counter ISIS campaign, he knows what it means to get your clients the actionable intelligence they need to accomplish their missions. From his nearly 10 years long serving in continuous joint assignments since 2014, his entire time as a general officer, leading DIA will be his sixth joint assignment in a row. Jeff knows the value of bringing together intelligence from across the services, across domains, across the ints, to meet the strategic and operational needs of America's joint force. And as Director Haynes noted, he knows from serving at ODNI why it's so vital that DOD and the IC keep working well together. Now I will assess with more than moderate confidence that today that partnership is pretty great thanks to the many leaders in this room. But if anyone thinks that they can take our collaboration to even higher heights, chances are it's an Air Force general. Jeff is more than ready to continue strengthening the DOD-IC relationship. He'll be served well by the steady hand and the sense of humor that Director Haynes mentioned, and all of DIA will be too. Jeff, as you and your fellow intel professionals know well, even if it's not said nearly enough, intelligence isn't just a product, it's a relationship. You've got to be proactive on behalf of your clients, trust your people, and inspire them to meet the moment. And I have high confidence that you will. So to Jeff and Susie, welcome to an exciting new adventure. And to Scotty and Annie, thank you for everything you've done for DIA, for the Army, and for America. We wish you both and your family the best. Thank you. Thank you, Honorable Hicks. Ladies and gentlemen, the Honorable Kathleen Hicks will now officiate the change of directorship ceremony. Lieutenant General Berrier and Lieutenant General Cruz, please join Honorable Hicks in a stage for the Defense Intelligence Agency change of directorship. Sergeant Major Perry, POST! By direction of the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Honorable Kathleen H. Hicks, Lieutenant General Scott D. Berrier, will relinquish the directorship of the Defense Intelligence Agency effective to February 2024. Lieutenant General Jeffrey A. Cruz is hereby appointed Director of Defense Intelligence Agency effective to February 2024. Ladies and gentlemen, Lieutenant General Scott D. Berrier. Wowzie. Hi, Mom. You're not here with us. We love you. Jack and Maeve are being very well-behaved, as are Colin Connor. Well, good morning, and thank you for attending today's change of directorship ceremony. Many of you have traveled a long way to be here at great cost and inconvenience. Alaska, that's right, Alaska. California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, and other places within the National Capital Region. And we are oh, so grateful that you made it. Thank you. Madam Secretary, thank you for presiding this morning and thank you for your support. When you visited DIA last, you challenged us to stretch the limits of intelligence support to strategic competition. The team responded to your rally, and I'm proud to report that the team is well-postured to support the Department of Defense and the nation. Under Secretary Moultrie, thank you for your leadership and guidance. Our Defense Intelligence Enterprise is stronger than ever and more coordinated than it's ever been. You gave us what we needed. You vectored us on target when it was required. You allowed us to explore risk and you let us run. Thanks much, sir. Really appreciate it. D. and I, Haines, I often tell my colleagues if the intelligence community were a syndicate and we were all gangsters, you'd be the best Mafia boss ever. Thank you. Thank you. For both Avril and Ron, the U.S. intelligence community is perhaps our greatest national asset because you both encourage dialogue, you both listen, you both move to friction to solve problems. It's been especially fun and rewarding to have been in the arena with you both these last three years. To my fellow intelligence community leaders, a special thank you for attending and for the camaraderie. Director Ray and Director Burns, thank you for helping me perfect and patent my trusted congressional testimony technique. I call it Pouty Masculine. Pouty Masculine. Pouty Masculine is where you truthfully, of course, answer the questions with as few words as possible. Preferably yes or no. But the trick is no smiling and to look irritated with the members for even asking the question. That generally deflects follow-on questions to you guys and to Avril. Jeff, you might want to consider Pouty Masculine as you get ready to go in a couple weeks. Seriously, Jeff, to you and your family, congratulations. I'm really excited for you. You know better than most what a unique and special organization the D.I. truly is. There will be days when D.I.A.'s reach and complexity brings chaos. But more often, days when the clarity of our analysis exposes truth and clears the pathway for senior leaders to make decisions. I recommend you spend 10% of your time dealing with chaos and 90% of your time leading the team to clarity. They will thrive under your leadership and I'm anxious to see the progress in the coming weeks and months as you settle back into the D.I. family. Congratulations, my friend. I'm going to come back to this D.I.A. family in a moment. But before I do that, a refresher for those who may not know what makes D.I.A. so special. What is D.I.A.? It's awesome, Jack. Keep it up, buddy. What is D.I.A.? It's not only the beautiful building we're in today. It's not simply the foundational military intelligence we provide or the situational awareness and trust that we build. It's not solely strategic competition or even our 60-plus year history. D.I.A. is an organization comprised of consummate professionals, the people who work around the clock to deliver intelligence and insights to the Department of Defense and beyond. We are about using authorities granted under Title 50 to support the department's most perplexing Title 10 problems. Using those authorities to conduct clandestine activities, collection, and all-source analysis to help understand what's happening in every warfighting domain. On the collection side, D.I.A.'s robust human intelligence program runs full-spectrum operations every day. These highly trained professionals carefully and persistently engage for truly unique insights worldwide every day. On the technical side, D.I.A.'s vast sensor network covers everything from seabed to space. Our technical officers, scientists, and engineers work around the clock to improve our collection posture and ensure the right people get the right information on time. Our analysts, thousands of them, no matter where they are assigned, fuse all that collection and other all-source intelligence 24-7 to ensure our customers and leaders have what they need to understand and make decisions. All those collectors, technical officers, and analysts need care and feeding. I'd be remiss not to mention D.I.A.'s enabling force. All those who run the organization from behind the scenes, making sure that we are paid, trained, secured, supplied, talent managed, legally protected, and ready. We must also communicate securely, and we did, and we do. We are modernizing our top-secret network, expanding it and making it the most reliable communications platform for almost every federal agency. Likewise, we are enhancing our signature foundational military intelligence database. Formally known as MIDB, the MARS program of record is profoundly changing the way we do our business and how the entire department will receive and digest military intelligence. So how do we pull all that together to gain clarity? Here's how. We recognize the posture for strategic competition, and we prioritize China as our number one and our only number one. We double down on partnerships to ensure that we are making the most of opportunities, and we focus on operationalizing intelligence. The days of collection, analysis, and delivering bad news to senior leaders are gone. We must do more with our capabilities and authorities to help deliver the right effects. And that's exactly what we're doing every day and every theater. Now let me come back to this DI family to reflect on the fabulous professionals that make up this unique and global organization, civilians, military service members, and our contractors. From our newest officers who just arrived many fresh out of college, to our most seasoned and experienced leaders who've been at it since well before 9-11, DI's diverse workforce is committed to excellence and defense of our nation. You saw those words boldly imprinted on the portico when you walked past our, and then you walked past our DIA creed in the hallway. That creed is our guidepost, why we are here and what we are for. It speaks to commitment, integrity, accountability, and excellence in all that we do. We are here to defend the nation. We are for all-source foundational military intelligence. You ask and demand us to be the master sense makers of the strategic, operational, and tactical military environments, and we are. You need not look far to find excellence here. We are sitting in the middle of the Lieutenant General Vince Stewart Museum. Our history is all around us and our historians have created this space for you to learn about DIA's past. From the earliest days back during the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Cold War to the Vietnam War to the global war on terror and to this current era of great complexity. DIA has been the middle of it and quite frankly on top of it. Beyond DIA's history, the real story is about the people who made it happen. Those DIA officers caught in the gears of history who did the right thing in difficult circumstances, in some cases making the ultimate sacrifice. In all cases, doing so excellence committed to the nation. As I reflect on the last three years, every component of this agency has excelled. Through the pandemic, during the crisis of the Afghanistan withdrawal, through the horrendous Russian invasion of Ukraine, and now the conflict between Hamas and Israel. Our collection and all-source reporting significantly contributed to the understanding and decision-making for our government. We also learned a few things. We learned that even though we are right most of the time, occasionally we aren't. After action reviews and self-assessments are the hallmarks of great organizations. I've sat in those AARs and we've come out much better on the other side. Our posture today in two major regional conflicts is well-informed by lessons of the past. We also learned that partnerships are key and must be nourished every single day. A study of my calendar in the next three years and a study of Jeff's calendar in the next three years will reflect our high priority that we place on conversations with key partners. It's the only way we win and where DIA has an exceptionally high stature. Finally, we learned hard lessons about doing less with less. In a budget-constrained environment with surging inflation, you can't do it all. It seems easy, right? Stop doing those things that don't matter anymore. The reality is those things do matter to some and that's when cards and letters will flow in. Jeff, you'll be making some of those decisions soon. Give me a call. Happy to talk about it. I am proud and grateful to have had the opportunity to serve alongside all of you and thankful to the many leaders and officers who have touched me over my tenure here. To my DD4s, to my DD4s, the most senior leaders in the agency, you are a lively and wonderful bunch.  You never locked the gate and the stallion never had to jump the fence. You never told me what I wanted to hear. I'll say that again, you never told me what I wanted to hear, but you always told me what I needed to hear. Thank you for your advice and support. For all of DIA, remember why we are here, what we are for and whom we serve. I know that you will remain committed to excellence and defense of our nation. And finally, to my bride and best friend of 37 years, Annie, thank you for your strength of character, your daily support. Don't, don't, don't. Your daily support. Thank you for your behavioral health counseling and testimony feedback. Testimony feedback is always critical when you get home from the hill, you'll hear about it. Sometimes those are very hard conversations. You raised our amazing sons to be better, you raised our amazing sons to be men of character and you make me a better man, husband, father, grandfather, and general. For everyone, Team Barrier has a date in a few hours over at the bowling club where the director of the Army staff, Lieutenant General Laura Potter, will retire us. All of you are invited. I might just do some slam poetry, but you'll have to, you'll have to attend to find out. Jeff, I wish you the best. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, General Barrier. The 23rd Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Jeffrey Cruz. All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Let me start simply by conveying to the incredible professionals of the Defense Intelligence Agency, it is so good to be home. I acknowledge you will not see in my biography anywhere an assignment to DIA. But like many things in the intelligence business, there's often more than meets DIA. A few of you know, I spent my first tour in the Air Force, actually attached to the Army, and the 18th Airborne Corps went off to an F-16 squadron and an Air Operations Center. At that point in my career, I thought I was the most tactically and operationally proficient Joint Intelligence Officer there was out there. And then I walked through the doors of this campus. Over 12 months, I literally received a graduate level education in Joint National Intelligence. At that time, DIA ran the Joint Military Intelligence College. It developed a curriculum. It provided all of the faculty. And in that one year, DIA exposed me to a much larger intelligence world. It gave me the skills and the networks and the accesses to apply that vast intelligence capability to directly support combat operations and national level policy makers for the entire rest of my career. And while over many years, I have been dependent upon or actually interdependent with DIA, particularly when deployed, or when in combat and command of J2 assignments, I always go back to my formative days here. And again, after 28 years walking out the door, it is truly good to be home. Secretary Hicks and Director Haynes, former directors, current heads of the intelligence community, congressional representatives, diplomats, fellow flag general officers, family friends and international partners, thanks for joining us today. As Lieutenant General Barrier has already mentioned, many of you have traveled a long way to be here, and many of you are taking time away from just your vast responsibilities here in the nation's capital. We are both, both of our families, are extraordinarily grateful and humbled by your presence. Madam Secretary, thank you for your kind remarks today, and thank you for your and Secretary Austin's and Chairman Brown's trust in me to take the helm of this great organization. More importantly, thank you for your leadership at the Department during this important complex and defining moment in our history. The world is in the throes of several concurrent challenges, geopolitical, technological, military, economics, and increasingly in the information space. And your insightful, steady and proactive leadership continues to be instrumental to the nation. My pledge is to ensure DIA remains an irreplaceable source of those insights and a tailored action arm for you in securing the nation's future. Director Haynes, I am not sure I'm quite ready to equate you to a mafia bust. A little too early. Bold moves, Scotty. Retirement must be liberating.  The intelligence community has absolutely thrived under your leadership. You've built a sense of trust and confidence with the American people and drove national security outcomes that are repeatedly determinative of this nation's future. And you do it with a grace and a sense of humor and an energy that actually knows no bounds. So thank you, ma'am. To the partner in crime for both the Secretary and the Director, my thanks to the Honorable Ron Moultrie, who has been an indispensable partner and a trusted advisor across both the DOD and the intelligence communities. Sir, I look forward to continuing the relationship in this new role, and I look forward to your leadership as we renew our collective focus to integrate and synchronize the entirety of the Defense Intelligence Security Enterprise. I know that many of you know former Director Vince Stewart, who lends his name to this great museum. He used to say, if you recall, that we are able to stand where we are because of those that stood before us, those that stood with us, and those that stood by us, and I cannot agree more. To those that came before me, the former directors of DIA, several of you are here today, thanks for advancing DIA and its mission during your watch and making it the world-class organization that it is today. I am humbled to take the baton and carry on your work. To those that stood with me over many years of service, mentors, supervisors, peers and subordinates, thanks for your guidance and your friendship and your education. Well, I can't mention them all. A few probably truly stand out after 33 years. Brigadier General Calcopic and Lieutenant General Bob Otto, Mr. Brian Fishpaw and Mr. Mike McGee, Chief Gary Smith in Master Guns, Joe DeVila, Admiral's, Harry Harris and Joe Ellis, and General's Fingers Goldfein and Phil Breedlove. You'll notice that really does span the officer, the enlisted in the civilian corps, as well as multiple services. I think that is illuminating, and for the mining team that I'm joining today, perhaps in sight, into how I am wired, and how I think. These are those that stood by me every step of the way, family, friends, neighbors from all across the globe, and in particular the fabulous Susie Cruz, who's been with me since day one. I'm not sure if I'm a general officer because of her, or if she is a doctor because of me. Okay, we all know what the answer to that one is. But we seem to be a great team, and I cannot wait to continue the journey. So looking forward, I want to build on what Lieutenant General Stewart's philosophy is by adding that we will only be able to stand where we are as a nation if we choose to stand together. So to those with whom I get to stand together going forward, let me say how committed I am to our deep partnership. Just in our midst today, as you heard during the introductions, we have IC and defense partners representing the military services, the combatant commands, OSD, the joint staff, world-class agencies like NGA and the NRO. We have the directors of FBI in the National Counterterrorism Center, representatives from CIA, the IC elements of the State Department, and Homeland Security. We have congressional representatives. We have Ambassador, the Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S., Ambassador Mark Robe, and we have foreign counterparts in defense attache. Our success will be a collective success, and you will have no better partner than the Defense Intelligence Agency. So let me circle back to where I started, the DIA team. The nation calls at a uniquely challenging time. We face a set of adversaries who are committed to seeing the U.S. in decline and their own star ascend. The national security environment will only get more complex, more technical, and more difficult to predict and to navigate than just a few years ago. To add to the challenge, the portfolio we are accountable for, as General Barrier has walked through, is large, it's diverse, and it's never finished. There's always more to know and there's always more to do. It spans the globe on every continent, and it's in every domain, land, sea, airspace, cyberspace. It supports and drives every aspect of operations and planning and strategy and policy and warfighting. It requires partnership and innovation, risk-taking, and a strong bias for action. Most of all, it takes respected, trusted, and world-class professionals at every level and in every function in every corner of DIA. So fortunately, DIA has an unbroken record of defending the nation and the nation's defenders from day one in 1961 to today, thanks to that unbroken string of professionals that I first followed and now I get to lead. It's really a privilege to join this team. And one DIA warrior in particular, Lieutenant General Barrier Scotty, you have led this organization through one of its most challenging transitions and during some of its most impactful work, actually. You were trusted to simultaneously operate and remodel an agency in the Air Force. We would call that building, maintaining and flying the airplane all at the same time, which, by the way, you never want to do. But it's one that you did, and you should walk out of here knowing that you were a leader of consequence, at an agency of consequence, during a time of consequence, delivering outcomes of consequence. Your legacy will also be not just living but ingraining a value system that actually values the people in the system. Susie and I just wish you and Annie the very, very best. So let me close with one final thought. Robert F. Kennedy once said, few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the sum total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. I am thrilled and honored to be the 23rd Director of DIA, and to those I joined today, I remind you, you hold the pen, and I cannot wait to join you in writing the next chapter of this agency's and the nation's history. May God bless each and every one of you, and may God continue to bless this great nation. Thank you, General Cruz. Ladies and gentlemen, please stand as Chapter Lieutenant Colonel Joel A. Cornicky gives the benediction and remains standing for the playing of the Armed Forces Medley and the departure of the official party. The word benediction is a combination of two Latin words that essentially mean to speak well of or to wish someone well. So let us all receive the well-wishing words in the blessing of Aaron in the Hebrew Scriptures Numbers Chapter 6, Verses 24 to 26. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Amen. The defense and service agency workforce is proud to have served with Lieutenant General Scott DeBurrier and thanks him for his service. We wish him well and his family Godspeed in their future endeavors. This concludes today's ceremony. A welcome reception will be held in the James R. Clapper Leadership Hall. Thank you for attending.