Remarks to Visiting Chiefs of Staff of Latin American Air Forces.

General, gentlemen:

I want to express a very warm welcome to all of you here to the United States. We are very honored to have you visit us, and I am particularly glad that you are having an opportunity to see some of our Air Force and some of our installations.

One of the greatest reassurances that any President of the United States has is the strong ties which bind the people of this hemisphere together and the cooperation which has been developed between the military forces of the countries of the hemisphere including the United States. On many occasions that cooperation in World War II and at the time of Korea was most helpful. And we were the particular beneficiaries of that strong sense of hemispheric solidarity last October during the immediate crisis in Cuba, and we continue to be the beneficiaries, all of us, of the common strength of the military forces of this hemisphere.

It seems to me that the Air Force of the United States and all of our air forces have three major missions. One is the strategic mission which is encompassed partly by missiles and partly by long-range bombers, and then the major conventional type of military activity which we might still see in our time which would not involve the strategic forces but would involve tactical forces and more limited strategic forces but not missiles.

And then the third--which we might have expected to fade away but which I think is probably or may be one of our greatest challenges in the sixties--is the paramilitary or guerrilla struggle, the kind we are seeing in South Viet-Nam, the kind which we may witness in this hemisphere, the kind which Mr. Khrushchev in January of 1961 endorsed, the so-called war of liberation which is actually a subversive war and which requires, even though it is a rather ancient kind of struggle, requires sophisticated techniques to meet it. This presents special challenges to the Air Force, and it has been a source of great satisfaction to me that the United States Air Force under General LeMay has worked so hard to develop new techniques for meeting this old kind of warfare. It is the kind of effort to which I hope the armies of this hemisphere will devote their attention, because it may be our challenge in the 1960's.

Gentlemen, we are very glad to welcome you here. If you have a minute we would like to have you visit the White House and perhaps come into my office and just make yourselves at home.