Blog Posts tagged with "Stuttgart"

Last Friday I flew to my U.S. European Command (EUCOM) headquarters in Stuttgart to conduct an “All Hands” with the military and civilian personnel assigned to the headquarters at Patch Barracks. The flight from my NATO headquarters in Belgium was an airborne “sleigh ride,” and the landing a bit of a white knuckle experience. However, I really wanted to meet with the team and talk about the “way ahead” for 2010, share with them my perspective, and solicit their feedback.

Here I am addressing EUCOM military and civilian personnel during the All-Hands call.

Events like this are traditional throughout the military, and they afford the commander the chance to "reach-out" to colleagues and troops. Realistically, a command like EUCOM– with 200,000+ Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, civilians and family members – is too big to meet with everyone personally at once. But there are ways to use modern media to move the commander’s message, and this “All Hands” represented my first such engagement in the New Year.

We held the event in the Patch Fitness Center; it was a packed house, standing room only. I spoke from a boxing ring; it was the first time I’d been in a ring since Annapolis, which by the way was not an altogether good experience for me! However, this time my “ring experience” was much better.

Without going through everything, I covered four basic areas:

How pleased I am with EUCOM's performance over the last six months, and how happy I am with our general approach of civility, collegiality, coordination, and creativity.

The key activities ahead include continuing support to Afghanistan, improving relations with Russia, furthering cooperation with Turkey and Israel, strengthening relations in the Balkans, and continuing our focus on unexploded ordnance, missile defense, and counter-terrorism.

Some new (and not so new) ideas I want to focus on include strategic communication, social networking, establishment of a center for unexploded ordnance, and the creation of a task force for counter-narcotics cooperation.

And finally, along the lines of improving staff efficiency and effectiveness, I’ve asked our leaders to take a look at reorganizing our staff for better interagency and private-public cooperation, and above all, new approaches to international military partnering.

An important part of my message was partnering with NATO allies via my “other hat" of Supreme Allied Commander. Clearly, our NATO allies are working well with us in Afghanistan, the Balkans, on counter-piracy and counter-terrorism issues, and on Russian relations. EUCOM is an important part of making all of the above effective, and I talked about that as well.

I also had a chance to discuss the Behavioral “Bill of Rights,” which simply tells everyone in EUCOM that if they are having personal problems, please come forward – without fear of stigma or discrimination – to receive help and treatment from our colleagues, leaders and friends. I also recognized our wonderful Department of Defense “Teacher of the Year,” Susan Morris for her amazing award.

The most interesting question I received was from a shipmate who said, “You’ve told us what we’re doing right, and we appreciate it, Admiral. But where do we need to do better?” Great question. I said, “The two key places I am trying to improve personally, and where we all could improve to some extent, are simple: creativity and taking care of ourselves.”

In terms of creativity, the next decade will demand we think in unusual and new ways in order to combat the known and unknown threats and to meet the challenges we undoubtedly will face. In regards to improving personally, we all have a tendency to overdrive ourselves – so it’s important to take some leave and down-time, and hopefully use it to recharge and come back with a brand new idea we can pursue

All in all, it was a good session and the experience “in the boxing ring” was a big improvement over strapping on the gloves at Annapolis in the 1970s. However, that story is for another time. I flew back to Belgium pleased to have had the opportunity to reach-out to the command, and I look forward, more than ever, to a wonderful 2010.

Adm. James Stavridis
Commander, U.S. European Command and
Supreme Allied Commander, Europe