By Jim Garamone DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, October 8, 2015 — Navy Adm. Bill Gortney said he
has a mission set that ranges “from tracking Santa to thermonuclear war.”
Gortney commands both U.S. Northern Command and the North
American Aerospace Defense Command. Both commands are based in Colorado
Springs, Colorado, and are responsible for defending the continent from attack.
And while NORAD radars look for enemy missiles and aircraft, they also “track”
Santa Claus for children around the world each year.
But while there are whimsical moments, the missions Gortney
commands are deadly serious. The admiral spoke at the Commanders Series at the
nonprofit Atlantic Council “think tank” here yesterday.
Gortney said sequestration represents the most dangerous
threat to his commands. “I firmly believe that,” he said.
This is, he said, because Northcom and NORAD don’t own
forces. Most of the forces for the commands come from the services and are paid
and maintained by the services, the admiral said. Under sequester, the
services’ cuts come mostly come from operations and maintenance accounts,
precisely the money needed to provide combatant commands with the trained and
equipped service members they need.
Sequestration also affects the civilian agencies that
Northcom supports -- law enforcement, customs, and the Coast Guard.
Threats from State Actors
Gortney told his interlocutor -- New York Times journalist
Eric Schmitt -- that his commands agree with the intelligence community’s
assessment that North Korea has the ability and technology to put nuclear
weapons “on rockets that can range the homeland.”
His question is when or why would North Korean leader Kim
Jong Un use nuclear weapons. “No one really understands the Great Leader,”
Gortney said with his tongue firmly planted in cheek. “I look longingly for the
predictability of the Great Leader’s father.” His father -- Kim Jong Il -- was
only marginally more predictable.
“But we’re ready for him,” Gortney said. “We’re ready
24-hours-a-day if he’s dumb enough to shoot something at us.”
In the admiral’s aerospace defense mission, the big threats
are Russian long-range aviation and cruise missiles from submarines and surface
platforms. “It’s a bit of a challenge for us because for 57 years, NORAD has
been in a defensive crouch, where Soviet and Russian aviation would have to
come into our battlespace and we would deal with them there,” he said.
But Russia has qualitatively a much better military than the
quantitative military the Soviet Union had, the admiral said. “They have a much
different doctrine, and you are seeing that much better quality military and
doctrine being played out as a whole of government approach in Ukraine and now
Syria,” he said.
The quality is playing out in threats to the United States
as well. “They have read our play book and they are fielding cruise missiles
that are very accurate at very long ranges, to the point where they [don’t have
to] leave Russian airspace and launch conventional or nuclear warheads at
targets and critical infrastructure in Canada, the Pacific Northwest,” Gortney
said. “[This is a] very difficult mission set for us, as it forces us to catch
arrows instead of going to where we can shoot the archers.”
Ballistic Missile Defense
As Northcom’s commander, Gortney has responsibility for
ballistic missile defense. He said his command is prepared to deal with
anything that might come out of North Korea. “In 2017, we’ll have 44 missiles
in the ground, mostly in Alaska,” he said. “The problem is we’re on the wrong
side of the cost curve. We postured to shoot down not very expensive rockets
with expensive rockets.”
The bullet hitting a bullet scenario is very expensive,
Gortney said. The United States needs technology and capabilities that operate
at different parts of the cycle – to stop an enemy from launching, or to get
weapons in the boost phase rather than relying on the bullet-on-bullet end
game, he said.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
The most dangerous threat to the homeland is thermonuclear
war, the admiral said. It is something that must be prepared for, but it is
unlikely, he said.
The most likely outside threat to the homeland the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant. “The danger comes from their very sophisticated
social media campaign that seeks to radicalize young people in the West,” he
said.
Gortney said those people who try to contact the group for
advice on how to launch an attack give law enforcement an opportunity to detect
them and may be dealt with. But those who are “just in receive mode” cannot be
traced, he said.
ISIL motivates citizens to attack fellow citizens. He
surmised that was the case in Chattanooga, Tennessee, over the summer when a
radicalized young man attacked a Navy and Marine Corps recruiting station
killing five service members. Chatter on the network since caused Gortney to
raise the force protection condition at installations around the country.
ISIL is successful at radicalizing these people due to their
narrative and the perception that they are trying to bring about the Caliphate.
“It is a war of the words,” he said. “The fact is we have not yet been able to
counter that narrative. That someone actually believes that’s a better way of
life than the one that they have in the United States or Canada or Australia,
really confounds me.”
Countering the narrative must be done at the grass-roots
level, the admiral said. Parents, friends, clergy, schools, governmental and
nongovernmental assets must be used to defeat the hateful ideology, he said.
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