First, once again we talk a lot in the Army about how we have an Army family. We have lost young people who are part of our Army family and we take that incredibly seriously. For me, this hits close to home. I have spent a lot of time at Fort Hood personally. I was a brigade commander, division commander and the corps commander at Fort Hood. I understand the resilience of that community and the resilience of the people there and how proud the Soldiers are of what they do. We will do everything we can to ensure they continue to move forward. I would just say that I believe some of the procedures put in place following the incident four and half years did help us yesterday. The alert procedures that were in place, the response, the training that has gone into the response forces I think contributed to prohibiting this from being something that could have been much, much worse. We will continue to monitor the force of the Army and the resources of the Army will be behind Fort Hood. We are very confident in the leadership of Mark Milley and I think as many of you know just returned from Afghanistan as the commander of the corps over there. He is a very experienced commander and we will continue to support them.
The only think I would add to the facts that the Secretary provided is that this was an experienced Soldier. He actually spent nine years in the Puerto Rico National Guard before coming on active duty, so he is a very experienced Soldier. He had a one year deployment to the Sinai with the National Guard and then had a four month deployment in Iraq. It was the last four months at the end of 2011, from August to December. We will continue to work through this issue and continue to investigate and as we do that, we will continue to provide information to all. I would also add we have had great interagency cooperation. The FBI has provided significant assistance, as well as the State of Texas, as well as the Department of Veterans Affairs. We will continue to work this. We have an incredibly talented and resilient Army that will continue to be incredibly resilient and move forward. But we will also reach out to our family, the victims and the family of our victims of this tragic incident.
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