Lloyd Austin, secretary of the Department of Defense and a 2021 Wash100 Award winner, said he believes the U.S. is now safer than in 2001 given the capabilities it has acquired and developed when it comes to collecting, analyzing and tracking threats worldwide, Voice of America reported Sunday.
“Our ability to strike has increased by orders of magnitude. What's most important is that as a government, we operate a lot better with any interagency in terms of our ability to share information, our ability to coordinate and deconflict,” Austin told VOA in an interview.
“So, because of all of those things, I would say, yeah, we are safer,” he added.
Austin talked about evacuation efforts in Afghanistan, the counterterror war and his top priority.
“We know that we have to maintain a focus, in order to defend this country, which is my top priority, we have to maintain a focus on countering transnational terrorism and preventing terrorists from exporting terror from any place on the globe to our homeland, and we will remain focused on that with a laser focus,” he noted.
