Being posted to Alert is considered a deployment conceptually the same—obviously not exactly the same—as being deployed to Afghanistan, Kuwait, or wherever. We rotate people in and out of there not on three-year terms but on three-month or six-month terms, depending on what their job is. While they're there, we try to give them the same type of communications to back home that they would get if they were deployed overseas somewhere. It's deployment, but within our own country, because they're as far away there as they are in Europe, or farther, actually.
On February 18th, 2015. See this statement in context.