offer my sincere condolences to the families and the units of the fallen they're all in our thoughts and prayers unrelated today's anniversary the one thousand nine hundred three beirut bombing and i want the families of the two hundred forty one americans lost that day to know that will also never forget them after speaking to secretary mabus this morning i decided to address you because there's been a lot of speculation about the operation this year and has a perception that the partment offense has not been forthcoming and i thought to be helpful for me to personally clarify to you what we know to date intel on what we hope to find out in the ongoing investigation and secretary mabus should be here but as many of you know he's in asia our soldiers are operating in the jury to build the capacity of local forces to defeat violent extremism in west africa their presence is part of a global strategy as we've seen many times groups like isis and al qaeda pose a threat to the united states the american people in our allies there are global threat and they will buy the flow of foreign fighters resources and their narrative and they seek to operate where they can exploit weaknesses in local government and local security forces if you think of those enablers as connective tissue between groups across the globe  strategy is to cut that tissue well enabling local security forces to deal with the challenges within their countries and region well we can be proud of our progress today we have to acknowledge that our work is not done even with the fall of mosul rocca  inflection point in the global campaign not an end point and that's why tonight i'm going to welcome chiefs of defense and representatives from seventy five different countries to improve the effectiveness of our military network to defeat terrorism in our discussions over the next day or two will focus on improving information sharing between nations to detect and defeat attacks before they occur and to improve the support we provide to nations provided that confronted with extremism and that's exactly what our forces in niger were doing the united states military has had forces in this year off and on for more than twenty years today approximately eight hundred service members in that year work as part of an international effort led by four thousand french troops to defeat terrorists in west africa since two thousand and eleven french and u s troops have trained a five thousand person west african force and over thirty five thousand soldiers from the region to fight terrorists and affiliated with isis  forces on a civil military reconnaissance mission from the capital city of miami to an area near the village of tongo tongo approximately eighty five kilometers to the north was the location of that village on the fourth of october u s in th area forces began moving back south in route to their operating base the patrol came under attack from approximately fifty enemy using small arms fire rocket propelled grenades and technical vehicles and what i want to do now is  walk through for you the timeline that we have and kind of what i would categorize as what we know about the incident so early in the morning the third october as i mentioned u s forces accompanied that nigerian unit on a recognizance mission to gather information the assessment by our leaders on the ground at that time was that contact with the enemy was unlikely mid morning on october fourth the patrol began to take fire as they were returning to their operating base approximately one hour after taking fire the team requested support and within minutes a remotely piloted aircraft arrived overhead within an hour french mirage jets arrived on station and then later that afternoon french attack helicopters arrived on station  in the jury and quick reaction force arrived in the area were troops were in contact with the enemy during a firefight two u s soldiers were wounded in evacuated by french air tonight me and that was consistent with the casualty evacuation plan that was in place for this particular operation three u s soldiers who were killed in action were evacuated on the evening of four october and at that time sorry david johnson was still missing on the evening of sixth october or six october so on johnson's body was found and subsequently evacuated from the time the firefight was initiated until sergeant johnson's body was recovered french or u s forces remained in that area how many of you have asked a number of questions and those are all and many of them are fair questions and we owe you more information more importantly we owe the families of fallen more information and that's what the investigation is and is designed to identify the questions included the mission of u s forces change during the operation that our forces have adequate intelligence equipment and training was there premiss an assessment of the threat in the area accurate did u s force how did u s forces become separated during the engagement specifically sarin johnson and why did it take time to find and recover sarin johnson again these are all fair questions that the investigation is designed to identify and what i would say is i hope in this brief overview of outlined why our forces were here what they were doing at the time of the ensign of the thirty fourth of october what we know and again the questions that remain that we will work on over the next several weeks as the investigation unfolds and with that i'm happy to take your questions thanks very much we've reported that sergeant johnson's body was found some one mile away from the initial site of contact is that consistent with the information you have and is there any assessment at this point as to why that was the case back again what happened from the time to patrol went out on the operation to a timer he returned there's been a lot of speculation a lot of reports and that's why i want to baseline today what we know and what we don't know and what you're asking is a fair question but we don't know that definitively right now i can't answer it definitively and what what i'm trying to do today is to and be very candid in what do we know i'll share with you who are have seen speculation and then what are the fundamental questions we're asking and the questions that we're well you know this is a very complex situation that they found themselves in a pretty tough far fight and what tactical instructions the commander on the scene gave it a given time that caused units to maneuver and where they might have been one one star johnson's body was found those are all questions that will identify during the investigation and you had a fall you are aware i imagine that some of the administration when faced with quick tough questions about this operation and the information sharing from the operation intimated that perhaps members of the pressure didn't ask such tough questions particularly of people in uniform or recently in uniform and i'm curious if you have a reaction to that if you share any of that or you take any issue with those kinds of let me just speak for myself on sharing information with the media and i don't know exactly what you're referring to and so i'm not going to i'm not going to benchmark my comments against that i think first and foremost in this particular case we owe the family yes as much information as we can find about what happened and we owe the american people an explanation of what their men and women were doing at this particular time when i say that i mean men and women in harm's way anywhere in the world that they should know what the mission is and what we're trying to accomplish when we're there and so those are all fair questions in my judgment i mean you know words that's why we're out here today is to take your questions and provide as much information as we have the only thing i'm asking for today is a bit a bit of patience to make sure that what we provide to you when we provide it is factual and the other thing i think that's also important is when this information is finally available the first thing we're going to do is go visit the families in our homes should they welcome us and we will have a team go  have experts and i've done this personally myself several times a team of experts going to the family and share with them all the facts they're available as a result of the investigation and give them an opportunity to ask questions in a soon as we're done with that we'll come back in here in we'll share exactly that same information that we share with the families and so when i tell you today we don't know it will be a fair answer we don't know and i'll tell you everything we do know definitively you know tell you what the key elements are of the investigation that we hope to find out in the coming weeks but but again with regard to being transparent i think we do all the families any american people transparency in incidents like this and and we intend to deliver just that but if i can just  follow up on the timeline you said that they didn't call for air support an hour until an hour into contact with the french came so that would make the arrival of the french ninety minutes a good two hours after the initial contact which conflicts with what we've been told ok so let me let me walk you through the timeline the best we know now and so you know when i have a degree of confidence i'm sharing it about an hour after the initial contact was made they requested support when they requested support it took the french aircraft the french were ready to go in thirty minutes and then it took them thirty minutes approximately thirty minutes to get on the scene so from that i think it's a fair conclusion to say that about two hours after initial contact was made the initial french mirage has arrived overhead but it's important to note that when it when they didn't ask for support for that first hour my judgment would be that the unit thought they could handle a situation without additional support and so well we'll find out the investigation exactly why it took an hour from the call we shouldn't conclude anything by that one hour it may very well have been and have been in these situations myself where you're confronted with enemy contact you initial assessment is you can deal with that contact with the resources that you have and at some point the firefight they concluded they needed support and so they call for additional support the confusion of the thirty minutes which is always the danger of coming out and sharing information right so there's what i'm trying to do is clear up today i think what you were told in the past that the french were there in thirty minutes they responded within thirty minutes and they were overhead of this unit within thirty minutes and so that's where the thirty minutes came from and i'm making that clarification operational clarification you say they were ambushed when they were coming back to their outpost previously we've been told that they were ambushed when they were leaving a video which is they're just going see there is no there's not a discrepancy when i describe that they're leaving a village where they go in at that point they go on back to their operating base and to moving stuff from the village i don't have the exact details of how far that the investigation again will go out there you know these investigations for those that have been involved in the past they'll be people on the ground that will actually go and look at where this took place in measure the distances and get the details and we will be provided so we can provide the family with detailed graphics of exactly what happened and how this how this unfolded so i wouldn't want to talk about numbers or meters from the village but the initial report was that the contact and they were the enemy was outside the village south of the village as they were heading back to their operating base just in their opening for the very day you said that they did not offer support that that's kind of putting a lot of pressure on those team members so you can you say without a shadow of a doubt that within that hour they did not try and call out for support look what i can tell you is the timeline that we have is the first first indicator that the unit called for extra support was one hour later now we'll tell you the information i'm providing to you today is the complete information i have available we may very well find out this is the difficulty in the dressing these before the investigation is complete and i'm not i tell you what the one one thing i would push back on hard is i'm not putting any pressure on that unit i made it very clear that i make no judgment as to how long it took them to ask for support i don't know that they thought they needed support prior to that time i don't know how this attack on folded i don't know what their initial assessment was of what they were confronted with what i do know is that our logs indicate that an hour after the contact approximately they requested support and then i talked about the timeline of the french response that's just what i know right now i'm not going to tell you that in the investigation we won't find out that they attempted to get support and it didn't come i'm just telling you what i know here clearly he doesn't have insurance and if the french have to come and help out doesn't that you know raise the question of is there enough america you're there number one and again the general secretary mineta said he wants we're expanding lean forward more and what missions are being done with the equipment available and i would tell you that while general wall garza may need more capability to do more mission or a more expansive mission the responsibility of commanders is to employ the force within the answered in this battell absolutely any i mean look there's two reasons to do the investigation one reason is to make sure that we inform the families the american people caught in the in the congress course the second is every time something like this happens we do an internal look at ourselves and we find out what is it that we did what could we do better in and then make changes based on what i would consider an after action review so i think that's fair right the other issue is there are so many in other words what what do their orders say i don't have any indication right now to believe or to know that they did anything other than operate within the orders that they were given that's what the investigation is all about so i think anyone that speculates about what special operations forces did or didn't do is doing exactly that there is speculation general special operators in africa or maybe taking too many risks that's the sense that some people in this building and also  don't i don't it's not my assessment of taking too many risks i mean let's keep in mind although i talked about enemy contact being an unlikely in this particular mission the reason why we're in west africa is because of the area of concentration of isis and al reason why our special operations forces are operating in libya is because there is a threat of isis attacks from libya and the reason they're in an east africa is because there's an qaeda and a smaller isis presence there so to the extent that they are taking risk we have sent them there to operate in areas within which there are extremist elements that if we weren't conducting operations our judgment is that they would plant b have the capability to plan and can do operations against the homeland the american people or our allies so are they taking expect resistance on this particular patrol at least when they first planned it again what happened subsequently will be the investigation because the rules in that part of west africa are that we will only a company  forces when the chances of enemy contact are unlikely so so with that they were equipped with machine guns small arms and obviously had the ability with communications capability to reach back and get greater large was that was the first report now they would have received an initial report probably simultaneously to me the way it works with our option or is that we had reported through we killed in action and i know we made some specific calls when we had a soldier that was missing which of course we didn't report publicly because in the process of trying to recover him so i know that i spoke to general all those are that night when we got the initial report it was probably around nine or nine thirty washington d c time the night of the fourth and at that point knowing that we had a missing soldier we made a decision then make sure that all of the resources to include national assets were available for the recovery that operation and of course we maintain operational security to not put at risk our operations to recover sarin johnson at that particular time with regard to congress i've heard a criticism of when i provide enough information and in a way i have taken that is to  say if the congress doesn't believe that they're not getting sufficient information then i need to double my efforts to provide them with information so you know without going through what people may have known at any given point in time about this operation or operation i mean the one thing i can tell you is that secretary madison committed to make sure that we satisfy the needs of the congress for the information they need to provide oversight and so we were looking in the mirror saying ok we thought we were doing all right which most important  cell of congress feels about that and so we need to double our communications efforts and we'll do that thank you general you mentioned it was a reconnaissance mission there have been some conflicting accounts have you seen so far any indication to suggest that that nature of the mission changed from original intent no here's what we know it was planned as a reconnaissance mission what happened after they began to execute it you know the words did the mission change that is one of the questions it's been asked it's a fair question but i  can't tell you definitively the answer that question but yes we've seen the reports we've seen the speculation given what happened it's a fair question to ask because the enemy situation was unlikely we obviously lost four soldiers had two others wounded in a pretty significant firefight so at some point did the intelligence that was available to them change that have other intelligence available did they decide to do something different than the original patrol with their partner forces those are the quick those are some of the key questions that the investigation is looking to uncover leader general are you satisfied with the response times including the fact that it took two days to recover sergeant johnson's body and more broadly what does this suggest to you about how you go about things going ahead is this a more dangerous area than perhaps either intelligence or something may have indicated and changed things as you go ahead you increase the assets overhead do increase i think all the questions that you asked the answers to those are going to be informed by our reading in the investigation i mean we'll ask every single question you just asked we will ask ourselves and make adjustments and keep in mind i mean i think it's an important point this area is inherently dangerous the judgment of contact with the enemy was made about a particular operation at a particular location at a particular time so so is this a dangerous area yes that all have have the team come back and just make sure that you know just just take a look at all the countries but that is and it also is a high in this particular again we've been there off and on for over twenty years we established a joint special operations task force in two thousand and eleven two thousand and eight and we probably had you know five or six hundred forces there some months ago this was this happen to be a high of a hundred quick are going to wonder is this mission creep remember two what we're trying to do in our judgment we're dealing with global threats and al qaida in isis and other in other groups and the theory of the case of our strategy is to be able to put pressure on them simultaneously wherever they are and as importantly to anticipate where they will be into make sure that where they are and where they will be when they get there they're confronted by local security forces that have the ability to meet the challenges associated with isis in other groups and so we are working with partners on the ground in west africa we are working with partners on the ground in other parts of africa it's the same thing we're doing in iraq in syria and it's what we're doing in afghanistan but if you look at the numbers we have eight hundred americans we have four thousand french and is over thirty five thousand local partners that are operating there if you look at the numbers in afghanistan approximately eleven thousand americans on the ground three hundred thousand afghans so what the american people need to know is with a relatively small footprint we are enabling local forces to deal with these challenges before they become a threat to the american people and help them to deal with the challenges so they don't further destabilize their local area or region there's a big contract information about the enemy were there any enemy k and you know how many i don't know that would be happy to soon as the investigation is over be happy to provide that detail to you i don't have any information or any additional what we did but i would point out that we did information available right now to tell you what's happening today but but our intent is to continue operations there and continue to train advise assist our partners in changing force protection for those patrols given what happened oh every every unit that goes out every patrol that has been conducted assessment of the mission and then the operating environment within which that mission is going to be conducted and then they prepare themselves accordingly so i just expect that that's continue that's continues to be what channel waldo's or his leadership are doing do you have any more information about who the attackers were you were local tribal fighters that are associated with isis you go after them like you locate where they are i think will enable our local partners to go after him as a matter of priority