Host you havent given a chance for our this is part of a program that is sponsored by the Science Technology and Innovation Program here at the Wilson Center that also sponsors other projects. General raymond is a native of virginia, but a prograduate of clemson university. He graduated in 1984 and was commissioned as an air force officer. His first assignment was grand force, north dakota, where he and his wife were recently both honored by the university of north dakota, where i was humbled to be a president earlier. His last assignment in the air force was the space, where i got to work with him when i was the president of the university of colorado. He became the first lead for the Space Command just three years ago. But soon after that, he was assigned to be the first chief of space operations. We are thrilled to have them with us here today and learn more about the great things space force is doing to secure our country. Lets begin, if we could, general, talking about, why was it important that we establish a space force . What are the threats out there that the president of the nation and the congress decided that we needed to have a new branch . Gen. Raymond first of all, thank you for the opportunity to be with you. It is always good to see you. I appreciate all the support you have given the Aerospace Forces over the years. It is a privilege to be here. Back in 2019, the United States decided to capitalize on an opportunity, an opportunity to elevate space to a level with its importance of National Security. Nothing we do as a nation or Coalition Force is not enabled by this. Over many decades, we have had many way been treating space as a given, that it is a benign, peaceful domain, and we can just operate there without any worries. Clearly, that is not the case today. We say that space has become more congested, more competitive, and more contested. The thought was, while we are still the best in the world in space, we elevate this to a service level, just like we have in all other domains. The United States army focused on the ground, the air force focused on the air domain, and the naval domain focused on the maritime domain. If you had a service that came to work everyday focused on this domain, we could elevate its importance and accelerate ahead of the strategic environment. Pres. Kennedy not everybody fully realizes how important space is to us. We get up in the morning and look at the weather, and we look at the time to commute. We dont realize how dependent we are on space. And in turn, how dependent all the other branches in the military are on space. How do you explain just how important space is to us as individuals, as well as to the broader effort for the department of defense . Gen. Raymond i think i will even broaden it beyond that to start with. It is really important for our nation. Space underpins every instrument in national power, whether it be diplomatic information, the military, or the economy. Again, as it underpins all of that, it is critical that just as you walk in a room and turn the lights on, the lights are always on, it is very important that space is always on as well. If you look at it from a National Security [no audio] pres. Kennedy we seem to have lost our signal from this line. 202 7488000 we will we hope to repair this issue and we will resume life coverage shortly. Live coverage shortly. Unfortunately, we are still having technical issues and we are not able to resolve this problem with our live feed from this event. We would love to have this for you in its entirety later in our program schedule. Host we will get to further comments from the president. We will hear some public response to the president s proposal and hear from you as well, as we open the morning with the president s proposal. It is called the america safer plan. He laid it out officially yesterday and it includes a 14 billion for hiring and training an additional 100,000 Police Officers over the next few years. One point 7 billion 1. 7 billion for hiring more agents and investigators. It would Push Congress to pass universal background checks. For all gun sales and advocate for banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines. The president s proposal laid out yesterday in pennsylvania. One of those policy speeches that often evolves into or changes into political stumping. Especially this time of year. Thats reflected in some of the headlines well see this morning. This one from the washington dimes this morning. Biden rips g. O. P. , antif. B. I. Talk and seeks Police Funding. President biden during a trip tuesday to the swing state of pennsylvania sought to blunt criticism hes soft on crime by calling for increases to Police Funding and depicting republicans as anticop for their antif. B. I. Rhetoric. The centerpiece of the proposal calls for 13 billion in spending over the next five years for local police to hire 14u7bd,000 new Police Officers. The times further writes the proposal has faced intense criticism from Racial Justice activists who say the proposal is just a repeat of his 1994 crime bill that he led as a senator which has been blamed for the mass incarceration of black people. Both the American Civil Liberties union and naacp have criticized the proposal to put more copses on the nations street. Called the safer america plan. Your thoughts and comments. 2027488001 for republicans. 2027488000 for democrats. For independents and others 2027488002. As we mentioned we welcome comments of current and former Law Enforcement officials. That line is 2027488003. This is the coverage of the washington post. Their piece, headline of their piece says, biden urges assault weapons ban. Hits g. O. P. Over january 6. In that piece that the post writes the spirited address was the first of bidens three visits in the next week to pennsylvania where democrats face crucial race force governor and u. S. Senate. Biden plans to deliver his prime time address in philadelphia on thursday and visit pittsburgh on monday to recognize labor day. Hear from michael sterling, virginia, independent line. Good morning. Caller hello. Im very concerned host you are on the air. Caller hello. Host you are on the air. Go ahead. Caller ok. Why dont we target the perpetrators of so many of these crimes of the stimulus cost from entertainment violence and we have to talk directly with the repeating history. Appreciate the time. Thank you. Host michael in virginia. The president yesterday praised Law Enforcement officials in his speech and repeated his call for 100,000 new cops over the next five years. He also criticized republicans for their voting against these measures previously. Heres what he said. President biden im old enough to remember when cops used to walk the beat in wilmington and scranton because they knew everybody. They knew the kid. They knew whose house to knock on the door and say mom your son just did. Im not being facetious. They knew the neighborhoods. As part of the American Rescue plan i signed into law last year which they voted for, we setaside 350 billion, with a b, billion dollars for state and local governments all across america. And urged them to do like your governor did to make communities safer. Here in pennsylvania Governor Wolf was using 250 million of that money to reduce crime and violence across this state. And mayor brown just described how its helping Fund Community policing here. Guess what . Every single republican member of congress, every single one in this state, every single one voted against the support for Law Enforcement. They talk about how much they love it. They voted against the funding. Flat out. Flat out. Every republican in the house. Every republican in the senate. Every single one. I know we expect so much more Law Enforcement officers, so we need to support them. Thats why my crime plan to help communities recruit, hire, and train nationwide more than 100,000 additional officers accountable officers for community policing. And i mean it. Folks, when it comes to fighting crime, we know it works. Officers on the street who know the neighborhood. Not a joke, who know the neighborhood. Who know the families they are protecting. Who get the training they need to be able to do their jobs well. Who work to earn the communitys trust. As we hire more Police Officers, there should be more training, more help, and more accountability. Without public trust, Law Enforcement cant do its job serving and protecting all the communities. Host President Biden yesterday in wilkesbarre, pennsylvania, on twitter. Senator ted cruz regarding the criticism of the president of f. B. I. Of g. O. P. Criticism of the f. B. I. Agents and the search of maralago. Heres what he said. Lefty twitter is going to lie. Its what they do. Every word i said is true. The f. B. I. Raid was horrific abuse of power, there needs to be a complete House Cleaning of f. B. I. Real oversight from congress. All absolutely true. Congressman eric swalwell, democrat from california, threats against Law Enforcement are at an all time high. As lawmakers we can can either support Law Enforcement and condemn the threats or what ted cruz just did double down about lies of Law Enforcement and ensure there will be more threats. This is what cruz wants. Headline this morning in terms of that story and a filing of, federal filing late yesterday in washington. Feds cite efforts to obstruct probe of documents at trump estate with pictures allegedly from the search at maralago. The Justice Department they write, associated press, said classified documents were likely concealed and removed from former president Donald Trumps maralago estate as part of an effort to obstruct investigation into the discovery of government records. They also seized 33 boxes containing more than 100 classified records during its august 8 search of maralago and found classified documents stashed in trumps office. According to a filing that lays out the most detailed chronology today of months of strained interactions between Justice Department officials and trump representatives over the discovery of government secrets. Our conversation with you this first hour is on sorry about the technical issues. We will take you back to the Wilson Center, with the chief of operations of space force life coverage here on cspan. Gen. Raymond both on the officer side go through the roof. We just had our first ever direct assessment from industry, where we brought a young officer, who is now an officer, into the space force and brought her in as a First Lieutenant based on experience she had. We have identified five others who will come in, all the way from First Lieutenant all the way up to lieutenant colonel. We will do more of that as we progress forward. Pres. Kennedy besides those great partnerships with our allies and commercial actors, to get that talent and make sure we are staying ahead on innovation, youve also done a great job of partnering with universities across the land. Gen. Raymond we have. That is something we are really proud of. We have strong University Partnership program that we have established. We have about 16 University Partners that have signed mlas this year. Everything from universities like the university of north dakota, which is our first one, to m. I. T. , stanford, and others. Theres a strong University Partnership program. That is allowing us to do two things. One, it is allowing us to develop talent in those schools that have really strong stemrelated attributes. Although we are not exclusively stem, a significant proportion of our force is. It is allowing us to develop talent. The other thing it is allowing us to do is partner for research. We now have a consortium of universities that can help us solve some of our problems that we are working on through Research Partnerships to be had as well. On both of those fronts, People Development and research, we think this partnership and network of universities that we have that spread across the country is going to be something that is going to deliver for our nation. Pres. Kennedy i am pleased that the university of colorado is also part of that grouping as well. Gen. Raymond so i my. Pres. Kennedy another thing you have done is set up spaceports in the beginning. You had a key force a key focus on making sure that it was flat and responsive in a digital service, but you also focused from the beginning on the talent piece and established your guardian ideal to center that on. Maybe talk a little bit more about how talent was sort of at your center of attention as you established space force. Pres. Kennedy 3 gen. Raymond we were given a significant opportunity to establish, to move at speed, to make sure we can compete and win in the space service, just like all other services do. One thing, if we didnt think bold enough, and number two, if we had trouble getting forward, and we have been successful on both fronts. What i have learned is that you bring one person into the space force or if you have one Million People in the space force, you have to have the machinery to be able to do that. You have to be able to recruit and assess and develop and promote and retire folks. All of that had to be built for this new service. At the same time, we didnt want to just do business the way we have always done business, we wanted to take an opportunity to build this service for today. The guardian ideal was our way of putting out a vision of a unique and fresh approach to talent management. One of the things we have an opportunity on is that we are a small service. Today, we are just coming up on 8000 guardians. By the end of this year, we will have 8400 active duty guardian spirit we have an equal number of civilians, a little less, but about an equal number. We have a force that has 16,000 folks in it, both active duty and civilians. You can apply a little more art than science when it comes to policies and professional development. Because you have the luxury that you are small enough and the machine doesnt have to take over to deal with it, to manage that talent pool, so we are looking for innovative ways to have a connection with each and every guardian, give them more choices, and attract talent that traditionally might not have been attracted to come into the military. I get that a lot. I hear a lot from folks that, i would never join the military, but i will join the space force. I remind them that we are the military. But we have a vision that allows us to apply that part and develop our posts in a way that we think is critical to the success of our service. We would like to give people opportunities to work in the commercial industry and combat, to work with other industries of space and come back. We want to offer up opportunities if they are in certain times of their life where they go parttime for a while, then come back to full time. We are laying all that out in this vision that we call the guardian ideal. We are in the process now of working through the implementation of that, each and every day, to provide all of those guardians, every one of the guardians that came into our service that volunteered. Whether you are a space operator, you are the air force, you had to volunteer to come in, if you are an acquisition professional or intelligence professional, or an engineer, you had choices of whether you are going to stay in the air force or come into the spaceports. Space force. We are now coming up on 700 or 800 transfers and they have a choice. They made the decision to transfer from the services they been part of into the space force. We want to make sure we live up to the expectations of those guardians that have volunteered to make a transition from what they are doing in space force, and give them the opportunity to be part of something new and built from the ground up. Pres. Kennedy as part of building that talent and moving it forward, you worked hard on the corgi . On decor . You are the youngest, starting out from the ground. It begins with the low row on the flag and the uniforms, but what have you started with you . Started with . Pres. Kennedy gen. Raymond i dont know how much we have done. Its not something you can order on amazon prime and get overnight. We know that there are some significant First Principles that we are trying to get after. Number one, we want to have an awardwinning culture. Number two, we want a culture that is old and innovative and can move at speed. Three, we want to have a culture that is connected. With this small force, there is a connection here and we can take care of our guardians because of our size. We looked at that and started bringing in people from other services. We want to get them on board as well not that the air force had a bad culture, but we want to take the best of each one of those services and bring them into mold this culture for us. One of the things were going to do here in an upcoming conference we have in october, i think now that we have the teams assembled and all the major muscle movements in place, and we know some of the First Principles that we want to get after, now we are going to look at how to engineer that culture. What types of steps can we take to make sure that we dont just of this on autopilot and arrive somewhere, that we purposely move . We figure