New York State Of Mind

During a visit yesterday to Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station in New York, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made sure to emphasize the administration's commitment to "maintaining this base for the future," according to a Pentagon transcript of his speech. Further:

We're counting on this base. It's important geographically, it's important to the mission that we need to forward to. One of the things we're going to be doing is making investments here. We're going to upgrade eight C-130s and replace them over five years with the C-130H3s. We're going invest 6.1 million dollars, in order to create a C-130 flight simulator here.

Our goal is to maintain, obviously, a -- strong reserve force here. Our goal is to work with Niagara Falls and the community to do everything possible to try to support this base, including lowering energy usage facility costs and investing in infrastructure and education. You have kept strong retention and recruiting numbers high and that’s important, and you want to continue to do that.

And as I discussed in a meeting I had before coming here, I also want to look to the future, look at some of the missions that you're going to have to have for the future, whether it's ISR, whether it's intelligence, whether it's working with new technologies. And I’m committed to exploring those new missions for this base for the future.

View Panetta's entire speech.