[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15524-15525]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               MAJ. GEN. WILLIE B. NANCE, JR., U.S. ARMY

  Mr. COCHRAN. Mr. President, very soon one of our Nation's finest 
soldiers will retire from active duty after more than three decades of 
dedicated service to our country. Major General Willie B. Nance, Jr., 
will retire from the United States Army on November 1, 2002, after 
serving for 34 years. During his distinguished career, General Nance 
served in a remarkable range of roles, from buck private to two-star 
general, from foot soldier to the manger of one of the most 
sophisticated weapon systems our nation has ever built. General Nance, 
I am proud to say, is a native of Mississippi, and I believe it is 
appropriate that the Senate take note of his distinguished career as 
his retirement approaches.
  General Nance entered the Army in 1968 as a member of the Mississippi 
All-Volunteer Company, a group of 200 Mississippi volunteers who 
enlisted at the same time under an Army volunteer enlistment campaign. 
Having proven himself early as a soldier, he was recruited directly 
from Basic Training into Officer Candidate School, from which he 
graduated as the honor graduate in 1969.
  Commissioned into the Infantry as a second lieutenant, General 
Nance's early assignments included duties as a rifle company platoon 
leader, reconnaissance platoon leader, and battalion assistant 
operations officer in Korea. He also served twice as an instructor at 
the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, GA. As a young captain, 
General Nance was a communications officer, battalion adjutant, and 
company commander in the 3rd Armored Division in Germany. Between these 
assignments, he completed Airborne training and was an honor graduate 
from the demanding Ranger course.
  After 13 years of infantry service, General Nance was assigned to the 
Army Acquisition Corps. In repeated assignments to acquisition 
leadership positions, he developed expertise in every area of 
acquisition management. After serving as an Assistant Product Manager 
for three years, he became the Executive Officer to the Commanding 
General of the Department of the Army Research and Development Command, 
Europe. As a lieutenant colonel, he managed the Bradley Fighting 
Vehicle TOW missile subsystem. As a colonel, he managed both the Army 
Tactical Missile System and the Brilliant Anti-Tank munition programs. 
Between command assignments, General Nance taught acquisition strategy 
as a professor at the Defense System Management College.
   In his first assignment as a general, General Nance served for two 
years as the Deputy Commander of the U.S. Army Space and Strategic 
Defense Command. In this position, he oversaw with efficiency, 
innovation, and compassion a significant reorganization and reduction 
of the technical element of the command.
  From 1996 to 1998, General Nance served as the Army's Program 
Executive Officer for Tactical Missiles. In this position, he was 
responsible not only for managing many complex missile programs costing 
several billion dollars annually, but also for creating a strategic 
vision that would guide all army tactical missile programs through the 
Army's transformation process.
  In 1998, General Nance undertook perhaps his most challenging 
professional task when he became Program Director and Program Executive 
Officer for National Missile Defense, and he took that post at a 
particularly difficult time. He inherited a program that had for years 
received inadequate funding, and although the missile threat to our 
nation continued to grow, there were still sharp disagreements among 
political leaders about how to respond to this threat. Every aspect of 
the program was under intense scrutiny by the administration, the 
Congress, and the media. General Nance directed a team of government 
and contract workers that stretched from Alabama to Alaska, from 
Massachusetts to the Marshall Islands, and from Colorado to California 
to Hawaii. Under these difficult conditions, General Nance not only put 
the National Missile Defense program on sound footing, he guided it to 
dramatic successes. In October 1999, his team--on its first attempt--
achieved the first successful intercept of a reentry vehicle in space 
by a missile defense kill vehicle. That feat has since been repeated 
three times. It now seems almost routine. But there is nothing routine 
about such complex technical accomplishments, nor the extraordinary 
leadership that made them possible.
  In 2001, the Bush administration undertook a strategic review that 
opened the door to more capable missile defenses, and General Nance 
helped lead an intensive effort to develop and evaluate new approaches 
to defending the United States against missile attack. This effort 
resulted in a fundamental change in the nation's missile defense 
program. General Nance was selected to turn this new vision into 
reality when he became the first Program Executive Officer for the 
Ballistic Missile Defense System. In this role, he implemented the 
Secretary of Defense's guidance to create a single, integrated 
Ballistic Missile Defense System out of ten disparate missile defense 
programs already under way. That effort required a careful balancing of 
new concepts for missile defense with already ongoing technical work. 
Under General Nance's leadership in this, his final assignment, the 
missile defense program continued to make extraordinary progress toward 
protecting our nation and its armed forces, with the Ground-based 
Midcourse, Patriot PAC-3, and AEGIS missile defense systems all scoring 
successes in flight testing.
  General Nance's vision of a single integrated missile defense system 
is becoming a reality today and it will be a lasting legacy of his 
service to our country. But his legacy goes far beyond even that 
important contribution. It extends to the soldiers he has touched

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throughout his career, to the example he has set, to the sacrifices he 
has made in long, distinguished, and selfless service to our nation.
  I am very proud that General Nance is from Mississippi, and that his 
wife, Jonnie is also a Mississippian. We are very proud of both of them 
and we wish them much continued success and happiness together in the 
years ahead.

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