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Tom Quinn on the service provided by the Special Operations Warrior Foundation ~\n\n"So whenever today, if you\u2019re a Navy Seal, or Army Special Forces, or Ranger, or Air Force Combat Air Control, or a Marine Special Ops, you know that you have our enduring promise that we will educate your children if you don\u2019t come home. And it gives them a great deal of confidence going in to the hotspots that they go into."\n\nTom Quinn - Former Director, Federal Air Marshals Service and Ret. Secret Service with host Andy Ockershausen in-studio interview\n\nAndy Ockershausen: This is Andy Ockershausen, this is Our Town, and I have a great pleasure to talk to the great Tom Quinn today. For those of you who don't know, he is a man, the first one started with the Air Marshals. Tom Quinn led that effort to put air marshals on airplanes. Is that right, Tom?\nTom Quinn Re-enters Government to Head Up New Federal Air Marshal Service\nTom Quinn: That's right, Andy. I came back into government to stand up the Federal Air Marshal Service as a federal law enforcement organization, based on the National Transportation Security Act that was passed after 9/11.\nAndy Ockershausen: And so you had to start from scratch to hire people, to provide protection on American aircraft. Did you do any foreign aircraft too, or just US?\nMandate to Grow Service from 33 to Several Thousand Security Officers\nTom Quinn: Just US-flagged air carriers and there was a small federal air marshal contingent that was ... they were security officers in the FAA, very small number. On 9/11, there were 33 and that's all.\nAndy Ockershausen: In the whole flying industry, 33 marshals.\nTom Quinn: 33. And the mandate was to create a Federal Air Marshal Service of several thousand to provide a deterrent on US-flagged air carriers, both domestically and internationally. It still is a robust organization today.\nAndy Ockershausen: How many marshals would there be today?\nTom Quinn: The number's classified, but suffice it to say, there are several thousand operating from field offices that we created, all over the country. And their mission is essentially to promote confidence in federal aviation through the deployment of federal air marshals to detect, deter, and defeat hostile acts on aircraft, airspace, and airports.\nAndy Ockershausen: It must be one of the more successful ventures ever attempted by the federal government because, and maybe I'm wrong, but I don't recall any hijacking since these marshals have been in place.\nMonumental Task - Six Months to Get the Job Done\nTom Quinn: Well, there certainly hasn't been any hijackings. They are a significant deterrent along, with the rest of what TSA does in terms of the screening. None of us like it, but it is a fact of life if you're going to fly. And the Federal Air Marshals really is the law enforcement component of that.\n But if you can imagine standing up an organization with a time certain. The commitment to that was made to the president, President Bush, 43 at the time, was that they would be stood up by the end of July of 2002. So from the time TSA was created, the Federal Air Marshal Service was essentially being stood up. You had roughly six months to select, hire, train, and deploy several thousand into offices that didn't exist around the country, with no leadership to speak of in terms of the numbers of- \nAndy Ockershausen: Nobody's ever done it before, correct? You didn'tt have any model to follow.\nTom Quinn: And, you know, how do you go about ... Most federal law enforcement agencies, the Secret Service, for example, the FBI, if they had a thousand agents to hire in a year, it would be a monumental task for an established organization. We were a new organization with little or no management,