Training Command Commanding General delivers remarks for 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks

LtGen Swan, MajGen Lukeman, Pres/CEO of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation; our other distinguished Generals, guests, speakers; and the historians, organizers, and professionals who made this necessary event possible-I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be a small part of this important occasion.

Most especially -thank you -for the gift of this anthology.

25 yrs after Sept 11th, it'd be easy to tell stories about how that day changed us-the nation and the Corps.

And, of course, it did - in so many ways.

But as I read this anthology earlier this month, something else stood out to me in a glaringly obvious way.

The Marine Corps changed Sept 11.

Not because Marines knew what was coming. No one did. As a nation, we discovered we suffered from a "failure of imagination".

Marines altered the course of that day because when the unimagined happened, Marines fell back on something that had been engineered into them long before that morning: an ability to act amid uncertainty, to exercise initiative when orders were incomplete or nonexistent, and to adapt when the problem in front of them suddenly changed.

Those ideas resonate with all Marines. They are woven throughout our warfighting philosophy- MCDP 1.

And when you read this anthology- you'll see that they are woven throughout it as well.

Consider the account of (then) GySgt- now retired SgtMaj and with us today- Jamie Deets.

He was a Btty Gy in 1/12 at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.

That AM, his mom calls from VA and tells him our nations is under attack. He watches the 2d plane strike the WTC & soon thereafter, his CO tells him to get to the barracks, wake the Marines- and stand by.

I tried to imagine ALL that he didn't know.

He didn't know the size or scale or objective of the attack- what the enemy's plan was- he didn't know whether Hawaii was next.

There was no perfect intelligence picture - and none was coming.

But he did know one important thing - his Marines still needed leadership.

And soon those Marines were drawing weapons and establishing a perimeter to protect the base.

This is exactly the picture our warfighting philosophy paints: friction, uncertainty, disorder- a space and place in time where reality refuses to behave as expected -and the imperative to act anyway.

5000 miles away, Tom Armas faced an entirely different problem.

Tom - now a Brig Gen - was a Marine Reserve officer and a Secret Service agent working in NYC.

There was no Marine unit ordered to Ground Zero -but there were Marines there.

The anthology describes Marines being drawn - even compelled to ground zero by duty and love for their fellow Americans rather than orders - You'll see in the anthology -one Marine -headed the "wrong way" said " As a Marine, I knew I could not go backwards- we always go forward."

Armas began helping people escape the North Tower and made a judgment: "there must be others inside who need help". So, he and another agent "peaked in" - as high as the 44th floor- serving others.

No HHQ could have understood his immediate situation as well as he did.

No staff could have written an order quickly enough. No PLA algorithm could predict his actions.

Yet - when it mattered - Tom saw what had to be done - And he just did it. Disciplined initiative. Decentralized action. That's why Marines do not simply follow instructions but understand purpose-and act in accordance with it.

233 miles south of the North Tower - at the Pentagon, CMC, Gen Jones confronted still another problem.

Flight 77 had struck the Pentagon and destroyed the Navy Command Center. The normal mechanisms of C2 had been disrupted. The problem was changing.

He and ACMC decided to relocate HQMC to a Continuity of Operations location - (COOP Site) -the old Navy Annex. CMC contacted the CNO & offered the Marine Corps' functioning facilities to the Navy.

In just a few hours, Navy and Marine Corps C2 capability had been reestablished.

He didn't try to restore the morning's plan - He recognized that the situation had changed-and adapted to the new one.

Friction and uncertainty. Initiative. Adaptation.

Those qualities were not "dusted off" on Sept 11th. They were already manifest in generations of Marines beforehand - present and exercised daily - before the chaos arrived.

On Sept11th, Marines simply carried those qualities into the situation that no one had imagined.

That matters to us today b/c we don't know the precise character of tomorrow's uncertainty.