JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas –
U.S. Army North (Fifth Army) hosted a town hall meeting at the historic Quadrangle Jan. 16 with Gen. Lori J. Robinson, commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command and United States Northern Command.
Before starting the town hall, Robinson first presented challenge coins to selected members of ARNORTH for their key roles during the hurricane season.
“I want to give a sincere thank you for everything that you did from Harvey, Irma, Maria, the wildfires – pick something from this last year and thank you,” Robinson said. “At the end of day, you all delivered. What you did, took care of our nation.”
USNORTHCOM was established Oct. 1, 2002 to provide command and control of Department of Defense homeland defense efforts, and to coordinate defense support to civil authority. As the commander, Robinson has oversight of NORTHCOM’s specific missions.
"Gen. Robinson's leadership contributed greatly to our success in Puerto Rico, responding to Hurricane Maria,” said Lt. Gen. Jeffrey S. Buchanan, commander, U.S. Army North (Fifth Army) “She trusted and enabled Army North to handle all the tactical and operational missions on the island. At the same time, she took on all of the requirements to keep the national-level leadership informed, which allowed us to focus on the response efforts."
Each natural disaster is different base off location, category and other factors. Army North continues to learn from each event and exercise and apply lessons learned to future events.
“We’re going to talk about things in the upcoming weeks and we’re going to discuss lessons learned and then I discuss that with the new Defense of Homeland Security secretary,” Robinson said. “We’re going to figure out how do we keep moving forward because we can always learn, we can always make things better, but that doesn’t mean that we did things poorly.”