Thank you and hello fellow Airmen and welcome to the 14th annual African Air Chiefs Symposium. I didn't think we could outdo last year when were in Tunisia. We were in a room that was very large, but look at this room. This obviously took a lot of time to put this together, and I’d like to firstly thank General Nyoni and all your staff for the wonderful host that you are, for this beautiful atmosphere that you've given us, and a great, great rest of the week. We really look forward to it. And thank you to Zambia in general. I think we all owe them around of applause.
I know the Acting Minister of Defense has a lot of other important things that he could be doing today, but he elected to come here and share some time with us, so I'd like to personally think you for taking the time and your spending with the airmen here. Along with the Permanent Secretary of the Ministery of Defense, Mr. Chipakupaku. I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us as well and all of the nations.
It was mentioned, in 2015, we started off with four signatures for the Association of African Air Forces. That has grown to 29 signatures today, and then I think a little bit later it's going to grow to 30, with Angola being one who's possibly going to sign as well. I think we have a total of nearly 40 countries in attendance today, so there's 10 more people that could potentially be signing for next year. I don't want to make this a recruiting effort, but if you see the desire and you go back and talk to your countries and the leadership in your country, if you'd like to join the organization, we would more than welcome you.
All the air chiefs, I know you are very busy in your day-to-day jobs, and I really appreciate you taking the time to come out here. And I really like the fact that many of you also brought your senior enlisted leaders with you. I think we all know without our enlisted force our force would be hollow. They become our asymmetric advantage when we really need to get things done. We count on them, and the senior enlisted leaders get things together. That's why tomorrow's going to be so important, when I look forward to all the work that was put in a year and a half ago by our senior enlisted leaders, where they came up- the African senior enlisted leaders on their own - with an NCO handbook. That was African led and will be African followed, and it will really progress the progress of our NCOs within Africa. So thank you very much for doing all that.
We also have our women, peace and security representatives that are here. We voted them in last year and we’re grateful that that organization is still here with us today.
As we mentioned earlier, we are trying to operationalize the Association of African Air Forces. We did a great job of that with our great host up in Tunisia and put us on track to even make further steps as we come into 2025 here in Zambia.
As was mentioned, we're going to do a tabletop exercise. This is rehearsing a natural disaster. It doesn't matter what the natural disaster is, the steps are typically the same. This one we're going to assume a flood here in Zambia and then the relief efforts after we initially handle that. These things happen all the time. In my country, we recently had wildfires that were burning in California and took down hundreds of thousands of homes. Luckily, we had done some tabletop exercises on events like that. That's what we're going to do here, and I know you've done this real world a lot, and you do a great job of it. This is going to be all African led, and we will enable you where we can if you ask for our help, but otherwise we're going to just help you out and watch you lead as you go forward in the TTX tomorrow and continue to operationalize what we do within these exercises.
Increasing our interoperability together will help everybody. It will mean less suffering, we will be able to minimize that suffering, and we'll be able to get food where people need to get food, and we'll save people who are in bad shape.
I'd like to continue this dialogue and maximize our most precious resource, and that is our airmen. Another resource that we all have is loving spouses, and I was really excited when I heard that the general was inviting spouses for the first time to the Air Chief Symposium. So I look forward to meeting your spouses. I'm sure we'll do that a little bit later at the icebreaker this evening and see them throughout the time here.
I'm proud of the commitment to the operationalizing the Association. I'm proud to be here with each and every one of the air chiefs that are here present, as well as our senior enlisted leaders. I look very forward to a very productive conference as we move forward over the next four or five days. Thank you very much.