MILITARY FACES ‘EXPONENTIALLY MORE DANGEROUS’ THREATS
Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier speaks
Photo by: DIA/David W. Richards
Mon, 05/08/2023 - 07:08
Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the Defense Intelligence Agency director who is soon to retire, told a Senate committee that the world has dramatically changed during his 39 years of Army service.
“In 1984, it was a bipolar world,” he said. “The United States and our partners [were] in a Cold War with the USSR,” he said, speaking of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that formed in 1922 in the aftermath of the Russian revolution to combine 15 republics into a one-party state. It was the world’s largest country until its fall in 1991.
In his first assignment, Berrier was a battalion intelligence officer in Alaska. “Our mission was to protect critical infrastructure from raids by Spetsnaz, elite Russian special forces, on oil pipelines. My 23-year-old self did not think much of that mission,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 4 in what is expected to be his final congressional testimony as an Army leader. “In retrospect, that was an important mission then, and protecting critical infrastructure is an important mission today.”
https://www.ausa.org/news/military-faces-exponentially-more-dangerous-threats
