Speeches

Navy Ball Speech 2004

October 9, 2004

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Thank you for your kind remarks Admiral Quinn. I am happy to be here on this 229th birthday of the United States Navy, and I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to speak before you tonight.

Let me thank our sister services, the Army, Marines, the Coast Guard, and the Air Force. Let me thank the representatives of allied and friendly navies, and let me thank the Navy League, which does so much to support our ships.

I would like to express special thanks to Rear Admiral Ronnie Tay, Chief of Navy of the Republic of Singapore, and his wife Leah for attending our ball tonight. It is our good fortune to count the Republic of Singapore Navy among our friends.

And finally, we are grateful for the presence of spouses and family members tonight. Our wives and husbands and children provide the love and support that allows us to do our job. Navy personnel aren’t always noted for extravagant expression, but I can tell you from my talks with officers and sailors that there is not a person here who is not better for the love of their family.

The theme for this year’s Ball is “Presence with a Purpose” and there is not a more fitting theme to express our work in Singapore and our relationship with our friends here. Singapore is such a vital Navy post that my job as Ambassador is to a large extent a Navy job. I mentioned to Admiral Fargo that I was doing more Navy work now, as Ambassador, than I had ever done in the Navy Reserves. He asked me if that was a comment on the value of my Reserve work.

But in a sense it doesn’t matter whether you are reserve or regular navy. It doesn’t matter what your command is or what your specialty is, and with all respect to the brass in the room, it doesn’t matter what your rank or rate is. As long as there is a potential for war, we will need the Navy to help keep the peace. We can look at the challenges our nation faces in this region, and with every one, the Navy is part of the solution. Having a strong Navy does not mean we necessarily get the outcome we want, but without the Navy we can’t even get to the starting line. Presence of the Navy does not guarantee success, but absence of the Navy guarantees failure.

I’ll talk about those challenges in a minute, but first consider the Navy presence here in Singapore. We have the Military Sealift Command, the Fleet Technical Support Center, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the Naval Oceanographic Office, and the Customer Service Desk. We have the Navy Regional Contracting Center, under Captain Dave Fitzgerald, which has responsibility for contract management throughout the Seventh Fleet.

And the largest command in Singapore, under the command of Admiral Quinn, is the Logistic Forces, Western Pacific, which direct the supply of the “beans ‘n’ bullets”… the food, ordnance, fuel and parts for Seventh Fleet ships deployed across 51 million square miles of the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

It is due in no small part to the efforts of the men and women of the Sembawang community that our Navy has been able to support combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past three years. As we dine tonight, there is a Grunt on the ground in Afghanistan who has what he need to do his job because of an sailor in logistics in COMLOGWESTPAC. There’s a Corpsman in Baghdad who is able to save a life because of the work done by a sailor in the NRCC. Further afield, in a smaller city in Iraq, lives are being transformed because of the power supplies and clean water made possible by an MSC mission. Closer to home, we have people from Bosun’s Mates to the occasional Rear Admiral working on CARAT and SEACAT.

In short, there is just about nothing that happens in CENTCOM or PACOM that is not in some fashion shaped, facilitated, or initiated by someone in Singapore. That’s a heck of a presence, encompassing a majority of U.S. Naval forces worldwide. Let me turn to purpose for a moment, and mention three potential flash points in East Asia that bear watching in the year ahead.

The North Korea dictatorship remains a concern with its pursuit of nuclear weapons, its willingness to proliferate weapons and missile systems, and its involvement in smuggling, counterfeiting, and other criminal activities.
The cross-straits relations between China and Taiwan is an area we watch closely. We have a peaceful, if imperfect, status quo, but both sides of the Straits occasionally suffer a domestic political impetus to challenge this delicate situation.

But our most important reason for maintaining a presence in the region, for staying engaged with Singapore and our other friends, is for counter terrorism, including maritime security and dealing with extremist groups like Jemaah Islamiyah.

The Jemaah Islamiyah, or "JI" is the largest terrorist group in the Pacific, responsible over the past two years for the tragic bombings in Bali and Jakarta. Nations of the region have made good progress against the JI, arresting over 200 members and disrupting many attacks. But it remains a lethal threat.

Anyone serious about countering terrorism must also be serious about maritime security, because of the ability of terrorists to use the seas. In 2000, Islamic militants in Yemen blew a crippling hole in the USS Cole, and in 2002, they attacked a French oil tanker, the Limburg. Terrorists from the Philippines-based Abu Sayyaf Group bombed a ferry in Manila Bay earlier this year, causing the loss of more than 100 lives.

The combination of terrorist groups such as JI with open waterways of Southeast Asia creates a dangerous mixture. It wouldn’t take much for the JI to hijack a ship, perhaps to block a channel, perhaps to spill or detonate dangerous cargo, perhaps to deliberately crash it into another ship or a commercial port. Countries are working more closely together to secure the waterways of the region. The recent agreement between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore to launch coordinated naval patrols represents a step forward, but we have more work to do.

Our command structures represented in the room tonight gives us a powerful presence across PACOM and CENTCOM. And the challenges we face on the Korean Peninsula, The Taiwan Straits, and in Southeast Asia give us a compelling purpose.

Let me relate a story in closing. Not too many months after 9/11, you might recall there was a JI plot here to blow up my embassy, along with other targets in Singapore. The Singapore police were thankfully able to thwart that plot. Afterwards, a friend commented, “You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” “No,” I replied, “I’m in the right place at the right time. Because I have the chance to make a difference. The chance to provide leadership. The chance to deal with a crises.”

I can build on that thought tonight. We are, those of us stationed in Singapore, all at the right place at the right time. We might be away from our family and many of our friends, and we deal frequently with an uneven environment in the region. But political turmoil has subsided, economic growth is back, and terrorism has declined markedly in the region. This year has brought more good news to us, and we will work together to bring more bad news to our enemies. We have every reason to believe the year ahead will be one of peace and prosperity.

The President, the Nation and I are grateful to each of you and your families, for your presence and your purpose. God Bless all of you for your service to our Navy and to the United States.