1. BGen Willie J. Williams Assistant Deputy Commandant,
Installations and Logistics (Facilities)
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I am Head of Facilities and Services at Headquarters Marine Corps and would like to begin by thanking you for the invitation to speak with you as a representative of our nation’s 911 Force.
Before I begin presenting my views on the importance of optimizing environmental management and pollution prevention, in particular to mitigate risks to our Marine Corps and DoD missions, I’d like to share a video with you that, I believe, speaks to who we are and what our focus is.
Film please…
(The “Operation Enduring Freedom” film will be shown with a 6:45 running time…)
“Sustaining The Force: Optimizing Readiness Through Pollution Prevention”
Joint Services Environmental Management Conference
17 August 2004

2. “Be the most ready when the nation is the least ready.”
WARFIGHTING
THE Marine Corps’ focus
Current Operations:
Afghanistan - Operation Enduring Freedom
Iraq – Operation Iraqi Freedom
(1/3 of USMC)
Philippines – Global War on Terrorism
Horn of Africa
Amphibious Ready Groups are forward deployed 365
days a year
I share this clip with you so you understand what the primary focus of the Marine Corps is – WARFIGHTING. The film reflects, among other things, the warfighting capability of the Navy-Marine Corps Team in our present combat operations and involvement in Iraq. And this warfighting effort continues today in the current operations you see on this slide and will continue in the future with the Global War On Terrorism.
As the quote indicates, our job is to be “THE most ready…”
“Be the most ready when the nation is the least ready.”
House Armed Services Committee

3. WARFIGHTING = CAPABILITIES
Land, Sea, Air forces:
Achieved and sustained through training
Training requires adequate:
Land space
Sea space
Air space
America’s Marines stand ready to answer the call in the 21st century. Today, the Navy-Marine Corps team is the premier expeditionary “Total Force in Readiness.” These warfighting capabilities are reflected in the elements of our Marine Air Ground Task Forces (MAGTFs), integrated combined-arms task forces of air, ground, and combat service support units.
Gaining and maintaining these important warfighting capabilities takes training and the required land, sea and air space to do so. And these requirements have increased over time.

4. Land, Sea and Air Forces WORKING TOGETHER
MODERN BATTLEFIELD
Highly technical and complex weapons systems
Tanks, planes, ships, satellites
Harmonized coordination
Close air support, artillery, naval guns, mechanized
maneuver
RESULT - rapid, lethal, decisive effects that:
Defeat any enemy, anytime, anyplace
Absolutely minimize friendly and
non-combatant casualties
Require large training areas.
The modern battlefield has grown larger, more complex and more lethal over time. It now includes outerspace and cyberspace. Weapon systems are more advanced and highly technical. They can go and shoot faster and farther; are more lethal, yet more precise. It stands to reason that our training space needs have grown to accommodate these advancements.
There is also the operational challenge of coordinating these advanced systems to produce the desired effects using speed and lethality to defeat any enemy and protect our forces while at the same time minimizing friendly and non-combatant casualties.
In essence, our land, sea and air forces have to work together as a team to achieve this coordination. Which leads to increased training space requirements…
Land, Sea and Air Forces WORKING TOGETHER

5. BASES & STATIONS Provide training areas Where “working
together” is learned,
practiced, and perfected for combat.
Without installations, there is no readiness.
Marine Corps Bases and Stations provide the “platform” upon which our land, sea and air units develop, mature, train and deploy individually and as a combined arms team. Our bases and stations are the “fifth element” of the Marine Air-Ground Task Force or MAGTF because of their close link to the operating forces. Our installations assets and capabilities need to be available to support operations and training requirements.
Our vision is for Marine Corps installations to provide a high-quality training environment and be recognized as directly supporting “Total Force Readiness”, continuously meeting the needs of the warfighter. For without installations, there is no readiness.
This training equates directly to readiness and, for this reason, the training space provided by our bases and stations is an extremely important piece of the readiness process. So much so, our bases and stations and the training space they provide are Critical Readiness Enablers.
As with everything, our success has been directly attributable to many professionals, many of whom are inside this room today.
For this reason, our bases and stations are
“CRITICAL READINESS ENABLERS”

6. Challenges to Maintaining Readiness
Environmental restrictions and impacts
Urban sprawl; competition for land, air, sea use
Critical habitat and endangered species
designation
Wilderness designation
restrictions
Of course, with any opportunity, there are challenges. The ability to train as a MAGTF is a fundamental Marine Corps requirement – and one of the primary roles of our installations is to provide the training space a MAGTF needs.
We need to be able to train as we fight. We need to maintain live fire and maneuver capability…and with the modernization of the battlefield, our need for more maneuver and training space is increasing.
At the same time, the urbanization of our country continues, causing limitations to this training space. We find ourselves needing to constantly balance our training needs for land use with being excellent environmental stewards; a task that occupies much of our time and effort, and resources.
However, urban sprawl has had a negative effect on readiness. Like all the services, the Marine Corps deals with worldwide encroachment issues daily, caused by urbanization around our installations and training ranges.
This urban sprawl, when combined with critical habitat designation on our installations, results in significant training degradation challenges for the Marine Corps.
Each of you have had to deal directly with these challenges, whether it’s inside your fence line with you base and tenant operations, with your communities or state governments, or with you headquarters staff or higher.
Our challenges to maintaining training readiness are real, and they are many. And as I mentioned, everyone in this room, as a community, deals with this in one manner or another.
Result:
“SIGNIFICANT TRAINING IMPACTS”

7. Degraded Combat Readiness
Readiness Threatened
Cumulative effects of Environmental Restrictions and Impacts, Encroachment, and Urbanization…
Cause operational & training restrictions that …
Create less realistic training…
Here is the way we see these challenges if left unchecked.
There is a cumulative effect from environmental restrictions and impacts, and encroachment upon our Installations. One new environmental legislative change, or the designation of one species as endangered, or one parcel as critical habitat, may not readily appear to be inhibiting to the ability of the Installation to provide realistic training opportunities to the Warfighter. However, the cumulative impact of these inhibitors, with the combined affects brought on my more elements associated with urban sprawl, will severely impact the installation’s ability to provide usable facilities to the Warfighter, and, will result in a degradation of combat readiness.
Degraded Combat Readiness

8. An ORDERed Approach to Overcoming these Challenges
“Operational Readiness Depends on Environmental Responsibility”
Requires:
Excellence in installation environmental mgmt
Participation by:
All USMC installation, tenant, and operational commands
All Headquarters Marine Corps advocates
Navy and other DoD partners and tenants
Strong support from all stakeholders provides excellence in training space management to our Warfighters
Mitigating the risks from these inhibitors to our installation’s missions to provide bases for realistic military training is a big challenge that requires a systematic and ordered approach, in which all installation, headquarters, and other stakeholders work together to identify, assess, and manage those risks, at all times focusing on the warfighter.

9. USMC Effort Philosophical Evolution: Risk to mission focus
Continual improvement
Environmental compliance
as everyone’s responsibility
Environmental staff as teachers
Controlling risks to mission from potential environmental
impacts of what we do requires awareness and training
This systematic and ordered approach requires a continuing evolution at how we look at our environmental programs in relationship to serving the mission of each installation in the course of and perhaps in addition to complying with environmental compliance requirements.

10. USMC Effort Environmental Management System (EMS)
Systematic, coordinated approach to identifying, prioritizing, and controlling risks from potential environmental impacts, requires:
Shared vision – working in partnership
with all installation, tenant, and
operational commands
Leadership, communication, and
coordination
TRAINING!
Systematic EM must be part of day-to-day
decision making and planning processes
This systematic approach is otherwise known as our Environmental Management System or EMS. And as we all know and as reflected by the numerous EMS briefings to be given this week, this is a subject and approach of great interest at all levels of the federal government and private industry.
In implementing our Marine Corps EMS, we do so for the opportunity and platform it provides to focus our environmental efforts and programs better and better on the mission of each installation, as well as for the potential for it to further improve our environmental compliance and performance postures. As such, every organization whose mission-supporting functions or Practices have the ability to impact the environment needs to participate in the EMS, and that participation and cooperation must be championed by the leadership at all levels.
At the heart of getting our EMS to be the mission-enhancing tool we need it to be is Training... Training of senior leadership on the benefits of and their role as a champion in EMS... Training of those whose Practices can impact the environment... Training of the respective EMS Teams and environmental staffs. The bottom line is that for systematic environmental management to be part of day-to-day decision-making and planning processes to the extent it needs to be to ensure that risks to mission from impacts or potential impacts to the environment are appropriately mitigated, training needs to happen at all levels and in a deliberate and ongoing fashion. Or to put it another way, EMS success starts with and continually relies upon training!

11. USMC Effort EMS ACTIONS: Build on existing Pollution
Prevention Opportunity
Assessments, et. al.
Use P2 wherever possible
to mitigate risks and meet
installation goals
Look for opportunities to
mitigate risks through behavioral
and management process changes
TRAIN!
Of course and as we all know, we are not starting from scratch or otherwise revamping our environment programs, rather we are building on all of the good things all of you already do today in the course of maintaining compliance and covering your commander’s backside. And as all of you environmental and pollution prevention professionals in particular know, you already have documented much of the information from which you can identify those Practices where in those potential impacts to the environment lie.
You have Integrated Natural Resource Management, Cultural Resource Management, Spill Prevention, and a host of other plans that contain valuable information on those Practices that you can draw from without additional assessment. And of those other Plans, your Pollution Prevention (P2) Plans and the Opportunity Assessment you all did in advance of developing your P2 Plans, are an excellent, primary source of any and all of your Practices that are industrial in nature and/or that use hazardous materials or generate hazardous waste and that otherwise necessarily require an exceptional amount of time and energy to manage properly and that pose potential risks from simply having to handle, use, manage, and dispose.
Also, not only do our plans and assessment provide terrific reference material upon which to baseline and prioritize actions to mitigate risks associated with many of our high risk Practices, our Pollution Prevention Program and its supporting philosophy serves as a template for how we want to be prioritizing our risk mitigation actions. What I mean simply is that we prefer to use behavioral and management process changes as the tool of first choice for mitigating risk, and dollar and other resources-based solutions only when necessary, much like source reduction then recycling then treatment then disposal within the P2 heirarchy of preferred solutions.
Again, we need to train and perhaps retrain ourselves and our practice owners on the importance of our pollution prevention programs and P2 philosophies as our tools of first choice in mitigating mission risks.

12. An Evolving Vision
P2 as tool of choice for mitigating risks to mission
EMS as enabler for using P2 as tool of choice for
mitigating risks to mission
Stakeholders working together,
understanding their shared responsibilities
This vision if you will though is a still-evolving vision, and along with it EMS as an enabler for P2 as well as P2 as the tool of first choice within our EMS for mitigating mission risks, all the time keep focusing our efforts on enabling our warfighters to be able to train as they fight, and thus fight as they train.