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Gen. Langley ACHOD 2024 Opening Remarks

By U.S. Africa Command Public Affairs , United States Africa Command BOTSWANA Jun 26, 2024

START OF TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the African Chiefs of Defense Conference.

General Sohoko, we made it. We made it because we talked about this last year on the right thing to do. I'm bringing it on to the conference in the Republic of Botswana.

I want to put out thank yous and a special welcome, sir, to His Excellency, the President of Botswana, Dr. Masisi, sir, thank you for your words of encouragement and your valuable perspective. I always have a campaign of learning turned on, and receiving your message was inspirational for us all in this room as we embark on the start of this conference. Thank you, sir.

Ambassador Ben Rankin, thank you. Also, we have the USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development. The administrator is Bill Coleman. Thank you for being in attendance.

And the 21st Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General C.Q. Brown. It's been my mentor since I worked for him in the Central Command or the Middle Eastern Command.

Sir, thank you for being here today. I know you have a global perspective, but now it's time to concentrate on the continent of Africa. Thank you, sir.

And also, my good friend, Admiral Rob Bauer, also a busy man, the chair of the NATO Military Commission.

Rob, thank you for being here today. Thank you for your contributions in global and knowing the importance of the African continent into our global security and global stability and prosperity needs. Thanks, Admiral.

Honorable ministers, thank you for being here in attendance today. Thank you for welcoming us, all the chiefs of defense in this room, to your country.

We're going to get to work in the next 48 hours.

And all the things that, His Excellency, the President talked about, we're going to be able to collectively, in a collaborative sense, establish solutions in going forward.

Chiefs of Defense, General Officers, and Admirals.

Representatives and esteemed allies and partners and distinguished guests.

Yes, we're going to embark upon some hard work in the next couple of days.

Thank you for being here in attendance.

And also the media.

Thank you for being here because we depend on you to keep us straight and to tell the story. It's all too important. It's a collective team so we can get results.

Now, it's my pleasure to co-host this year's conference with General Sohoko here in beautiful Botswana.

And yes, Mr. President, I need to not just fly over to Delta, I need to get there. So I will try to talk to my staff on our way back to the continent of Europe where there are still indications of the first of mankind.

I'm going to be able to explore that one day if I can't do it on this trip. But Mr. President, I will take note of your recommendations.

Now, as we remember General Sohoko that last year we did hold this event and many of you chiefs did in Rome and we felt strongly that we should conduct this conference on the continent.

Bolstering the importance of our African partner-led and enabled by the friends that you have across the globe.

Because we have shared challenges.

Because there's one thing I did learn from our Secretary of Defense, the Hon. Lloyd Austin.

He's always said that the global environment has changed.

Things that were truism years ago may not be today.

The leading indicators that we depended upon as we tried to search for indications of warning have changed today.

A lot of drivers of that, whether it be the information space or misinformation or disinformation,

but it's true and that's what we have to contend with these challenges going forward.

And with these shared security challenges, that's why we made the decision to have this conference here.

So General Sohoko, I would like to recognize you and the Botswana Defense Force for co-hosting this week's conference and then also the staff in this great venue, the staff of Grand Palm Hotel, for providing this perfect venue for us.

Thank you also Ambassador Van Rankin and the U.S. Embassy of Gaborone for your assistance in putting this together. Putting this together was truly - it's going to be a world-class event.

We're going to take note of this and learn from it as we go forward, as we focus on the next conference.

Ambassador, your efforts support the relationships and the dialogue that occur here and ultimately support the prosperity of our African partners.

So as we embark upon this conference, we need to know that we recognize who our friends are and as we also know, in this past year, we did lose a dear friend.

So on a solemn note, we know we lost a great leader in General Francis Ogala from Kenya.

And this time I would like to give my condolences to his family and to the country of Kenya.

So please everyone, let's pause for a moment and observe a moment of silence for General Ogala.

Thank you.

General Kauriri, I know you're taking the helm now.

As the Chief of Defense in Kenya, we have great confidence in your leadership and your experience.

And as we go forward, take heart.

We will go together.

We've seen what your country is doing as far as being able to export security.

I've seen it across the regions in Somalia.

You are a framework country. So sir, as you go forward with this, know that all the Chiefs of Defense in this room, we're all going to go together.

I have to say that this event that I look forward to each and every year, yes, a capstone event and someone has told me, a football fan, NFL fan, said this is your Super Bowl.

Matter of fact, it was Deputy Minister Coleman.

You're right.

This is our Super Bowl as we come together, our World Cup, and put it in the sports analogies.

Coming together just cannot be replaced by Zoom calls or Teams network or whatever virtual medium. No, we need to sit together. We need to sit in the same room. We need to recognize the value of having engagements and sidebars in a continuum sense being in each other's physical presence.

So the key things for the 2023 conference included people as our greatest resource,

leading discussion into action and friendship as our most important enabler. We learned those lessons and it propelled us into this conference of 2024.

I remember I took notes. Like I said, I'm always on the campaign of learning.

And I remember, Lieutenant General from the Gambia, Lieutenant Dromay, he said peace without stability is not even sustainable.

But really what really sunk in with all of us, if you remember, he said security without peace is not meaningful.

Security without peace is not meaningful.

That was powerful.

That resonated with me as you know, as we broke camp in 2023.

Now here at AFRICOM and a lot of those in the room here involved, there was crisis in Sudan and Hmedti and Burhan started a civil war in their country. We had to get our respective citizens out of it, but we worked together.

And then you see all those instabilities across the Sahel in West Africa.

And then as President Hassan SheikhMohamud tries to affect his vision, as President of Somalia and embarking upon the great fight against al-Shabaab, it only continues. But he knows the enduring solution.

So every time I'm confronted with a crisis on the continent working with our African partners, I start thinking about those phrases.

Peace without stability is not sustainable. Security without peace is not meaningful.

So as AFRICOM with our partners, when we sit down and start planning how to achieve stability, how to achieve peace, we do that step by step and we're all here listening to everybody's enduring solution to get back to stability.

So yes, as I look across the globe, as General Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our global integrator, who has a global perspective of all the instability across the globe as we have combatant commanders reporting our perspective of our respective areas of responsibility,

we know that the environment has changed. What was true decades ago is not true now. But we do know that security without peace is not meaningful.

So this year we look to understand a bigger picture and how we expand our cooperation and how we share our values. We discuss how we bring all the instruments of national power together and put them on the table and also the importance of civil-military relationships in closing that gap.

I sat down with USAID and I sat down with field agents just a couple of days ago in Somalia, those were back from the regions that are contested, that the shadow of governance of al-Shabaab are trying to retake and our trained units and how they need to work together with civil society for an enduring solution in fighting terrorism or violent extremism. I learned that every day. I say we are a learning institution. I listen to USAID. I listen to the Somalis on the ground. We listen to the communities, how to gain favor and faith in the truism of peace and stability and rights and freedoms that everybody should enjoy.

So having that opportunity needs to be understood.

I also engaged last weekand addressed the Conference of European Armies in Garmisch,

Germany, and they asked a question.

When I addressed them, because they know about the challenges but also the opportunities on African continent and how we partner with the African countries, that was the main topic of conversation, was how can they better synergize efforts here in Africa.

I say that, ladies and gentlemen.

Go back to the definition of partner, true partner, work with the African countries,

listen, learn, and understand.

That's the best thing that you can do.

That's why when I was at Munich Security Conference, Admiral Rob Bauer came up to me, head of the NATO Military Commission, and said, "I want to come down to the conference. I want to come down to the African Chiefs Conference," because he wanted to listen, he wanted to learn, and he wants to understand.

So we're going to go forward the next couple of days under the theme of listening, learning, and understanding together.

We know that no one organization can successfully address today's global challenges alone. We must leverage the unique resources, capabilities, and experience that our allies, partners, and other government agencies bring to bear, bring to the table.

So a new challenge this year may be the prevalence of disinformation and misinformation.

I see that recently in the last couple of years, and how a direct correlation, a direct connection to an instability across the continent, our shared values are increasingly attacked through disinformation and misinformation.

The weaponization of social media, our image intentions are being warped, and the people across Africa are paying the price.

It tears at the very fabric of what we believe are the necessities for enduring peace and freedoms.

In the last year alone, we saw over 180 disinformation campaigns targeting at least 39 African nations,

leading to deadly violence, corruption, changes to national relationships, and detriment to civil society.

Ladies and gentlemen, we must reset our approach.

We must come together on the strategic messaging.

Not only strategic messaging, but strategic communication, and here's what I mean by that.

I need to match my narrative. As I go around and I spew my narrative in what we believe in our approach of effective partnerships, I need to back that up with Assurance Actions. We do that all the time from our security force assistance brigades through the state partnership programs, through the exercises that we execute from theObangame Express to African Lion, and all the expressseries in the maritime, and in our conferences, whether it be the Land Forces Conference or the Maritime Conferences.

Those are indications of - indications and warnings that we want to work an African-led solution and whereas we can enable.

That's how I can approach to counter misinformation and disinformation and telling our true intentions of wanting to partner, our true sharing of ideals and values, and to work together towards those ends of rights and freedoms, rights and freedoms for all.

So we must work together to highlight or illuminate and advertise or amplify the positive things that we do each and every day to better the lives across the continent. You must stay in step ahead of the changes that we are seeing in the information space.

Now I know at AFRICOM I often talk about the campaign of learning.

In the past two years of my tenureship of command, my stewardship of command, extending from August of 2022, when the Honorable Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, handed me the flag.

He said, "You go out there and learn. You embark on this campaign of learning."

In that time, I traveled to over 25 African countries and spoke to many of the leaders - many of the leaders that are sitting in this room.

My goal was simple.

My tasking was simple - to listen, to learn, but moreover to understand the challenges.

We understand that there's just as many opportunities.

So as we deal with these pressing challenges, together we're going to chart a way forward for shared solutions. I learned that Africa is affected by more than just violent extremists, organizations, and terrorism.

There are layered threats that stoke instability.

The African people suffer for local conflicts, and they must endure changes in economic prosperity and stability, sometimes fight for the representation within their own governance and manage the effects of climate change and natural disasters.

Those are layered threats, and we need to look for proper intervention levels in which we can engender solutions going forward. That's what we're going to be doing at this conference, because the enduring solution is a whole-of-government approach - civilian-led governance, as we learn from all our security constructs in our military.

So we need to build resilience and adaptation to these complex problem sets. There are conditions that lead to insecurity and exploitation by nefarious actors across the globe. I get that.

I also get that it's not just our governments and resources, but as military professionals, we need to be able to lay it down. We need to understand across the inter-agencies or departments that there are solution sets, and they depend on our best military advice to achieve those objectives.

So to that end, AFRICOM's value proposition is not just partnering to combat insurgency. It's about institutions.

That's why we are a 3-D organization of diplomacy, development, and defense at AFRICOM, and we're working to build enduring relationships to stand the test of time.

I employ the whole-of-government approach that leverages each instrument of national power.

Now most of you heard me talk time and time again about the 3-Ds.

The military is only one tool employed by the government to address drivers of instability, but the military cannot provide long-term solutions without stable institutions and good governance.

So ladies and gentlemen, in conclusion, I cannot stress enough how important events like this are as we embark upon this conference. Yes, this is the Super Bowl. This is the World Cup for all of us in this room.

Getting together and having candid conversations is critical.

There's no other venue like this where senior defensive leaders come together on the continent and have real conversations, hard conversations.

This conference is my most important event of the year.

Let me just say it again. I'm grateful to sit among the talent in this room today and the next couple of days.

U.S. AFRICOM hears you, and the U.S. hears you, and I look forward to what you have to say. So please, let's have a very productive conference. Thank you very much.

END OF TRANSCRIPT