And, as an icon of the Information Age, I believe you are in a unique position to help engender greater understanding of this central role of our armed forces in our national life. Few appreciate more than you the interdependence of our global economy. Your products are sold the world over, and an incident in Jakarta or Dublin affects your business, as surely as events in Jacksonville or Denver. Indeed, peace and stability are the very cornerstones of prosperity. When our diplomats and military forces combine to help create stability and security in a nation or a region, that same stability and security attracts investment.
Investment generates prosperity.
And prosperity strengthens democracy, which creates more stability and more security. There is only one nation with the power and reach to fill this role. So I ask you to use your prominent voice to remind your colleagues and contemporaries of the service and sacrifice of the 1.4 million military personnel serving across the globe, keeping a fragile peace in the frozen hills of Bosnia, standing watch at on the tense Korean Peninsula, on station in the waters of the Persian Gulf and living without the comforts and freedoms we take for granted, always prepared to offer the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the freedoms we cherish. Today, those men and women in uniform face a landscape of new and diverse threats. The menacing instability of Stalinist North Korea launching new and powerful missiles over Japan.