Transcripts For CSPAN2 Norwich University Military Writers Symposium 20240713

Colonel is a special assistance to the North University provost. He integrates University Departments to expand expeditionary opportunities to students so that you may learn what is like to travel abroad into lead abroad. He has done a minus other things here at Norwich University and part of that is to do with him being rotc but also his hopes and helping each one of you to be better leaders and leaving here to be the moderator of this panel. His bio is extensive i could spend time reading but i will keep it short. As i mentioned he is retired, United States air force and air force academy and the university of north carolina. His military career include three commands and for those of you who will be aviators, 6000 flying hours in combat missions in for complex. Lets welcome the kernel. [applause] thank you, travis. Thank you for attending Norwich University writers symposium, panel of warfare in the 21st century. Future battlegrounds. My name is andy heard, you and i, we are privileged today in the peace and war center at norwich that organizes panel to engage with experts of the 31st century conflict. The experts on the panel are global thought leaders who are intimate with battle, both in planning and in direct action. They understand the evolution of conflict. How that conflict shapes policy. The contemplation of the future influences national powers, planning and decisionmaking through their careers of research, writing and debate. Today we are fortunate to join them for 90 minutes of their professional experience. Your norwich experience is to develop you to lead. Whether you lead in business, community, government or military service preparing you to lead in the 21st century is central to this universitys mission. This panel is part of that mission and these writers have spent years thinking about the evolution of warfare and how 21st century battlegrounds for impact society. From our conversation with them today you will learn unexpected insights about your future challenges and some of you may feel comfortable conversing about cyber or Artificial Intelligence, robotics, or data in todays conversation is not just about products you can purchase and you should already know that your personal data can be a threat. Your dna, your search preferences, your social posts can be used for great purposes but also they can be used to manipulate or threaten you. Todays conversation is about the future that you will live and work in the we are here to explore the future of warfare. Your phone is a powerful communication tool. Its also a potential method of tracking and exploiting you. Artificial intelligence is changing our lives and effects future jobs and impacts transportation in politics. Robotics have revolutionized industry already and war. Combined with ai, the data and instant communications, robotics is a 21st century change agent perhaps like none other in history. You cannot be on the technological sidelines as leaders. Whether you are a schoolteacher or a platoon leader you must continue to reflect what is expressed today by this panel. Your job, as leaders, is to be open to waste of thinking and be proactive confronting challenge and that is what today is about. The imperative to study the technological environment within you must read. Some of you must contemplate the direct threats from which you must defend us in battle. Today most of us are connected in realtime to the internet and immediate notification of an events is in your pockets and those students who registered their cell phones in the norwich Emergency Notification system received an exercise notification early this morning. Did anyone notice that . Im sorry if it will queue up. The rage system can direct you to act, hunker down, run, report in an alert someone and this is an amazing capability for our Safety Office to trigger actions throughout norwich. How would you respond to a directive to evacuate the building late at night and report in at that you be due to some threat . As you leave your dorm at midnight you see this drowned and you should ask yourself why is it there . Is it security intending to search the building for a suspicious package . Perhaps the local reporter getting media content for the tv news or maybe its Law Enforcement monitoring the safe evacuation or using facial Recognition Software to search for a suspect. Is a program to kill a target . What if there were thousands of these on the battlefield automatically seeking targets wearing your countrys uniform . How will you lead many women in that environment . Finally, what if this drones programming and completely analyzes the situation or has a coding error . What will you do or what will it do if you are standing in front of his target . These are the questions you should ask each time you get a suspicious email or a directive text message reveal your car automatically bumps the side of the highway or when a drone buzzes overhead and what do these technological advances mean beyond their purpose . How far has this tech already got in the governmentfunded laboratories . What capabilities are already fielded . How will you be ready to wield those capabilities . How will you lead people against threats who are faster, fearless or devoid of empathy . These are Game Changing technologies and yours is a leadership future that cannot rely on studying the past. This drone is a fraction of the capability that exists today. Tomorrows tech will be exponentially more powerful and for 21st century leadership you got to be immersed in the future. You all had to become futurists. Fortunately we are joined by three futurists today. You should have already read their biographies. If not, skin them now while im finishing these words. Plan to engage each of them after the panel at the book signing. Doctor bernadetta berti is the head of policy planning and the office of the secretarygeneral at eight oh. She is a policy advocate for human security, stabilization and peace building she has written extensively on the future of terrorism and nonstate actors and her contributions earned her the order of knighthood from the birth country of italy. Doctor peter warren singer is strategist and the senior fellow at new america. Leading expert in 21st century warfare advising the Defense Department industry and entertainment, including the software called call of duty. Hes written nonfiction and fiction on future conflict and the impact of cyber and robotics. He is listed by Foreign Policy is one of the worlds top 100 innovators. Paul scharre is a senior fellow and director of the Technology Security program at the center for a new american society. Previously he advised within the office of the secretary of defense in unmanned and autonomous systems. He served in the army third readers leading special operations reconnaissance teams in iraq and afghanistan. Bill gates named his book one of the top five books to read in 2018. He is also the sears colby award winner. Panel members, life is busy. We fill our days with work or studies or relationships and having time to contemplate the future is rare, especially when trying to think about battlefields. What is happening right now which may have Significant Impact on the 21st century warfare . Doctor bernadetta berti would you lead off on this topic . Surely. Thank you very much for the kind introduction and thanks everybody for being here today. I will start by saying that part of my job today is very much has to do with looking at future trends that fit in the office of secretary nato and one of our main jobs is to look at the future, five years, 20 years down the line and look at the trends we see in the world today with geopolitics, economics and security how it will affect our ability of an alliance to deal with the future. Thats a question that takes up quite a bit of our time and linking back in brussels where i am based. I will start us off the couple of points and know that i am here with paul and peter to very much talk about looking at how emerging technologies and music will affect the way we fight wars. Instead i will not go there for talk about nontechnology base that is also important when we of the future of conflict. First up, point of order, nato as an alliance was very much think about how to address politics of the future. Our first assumption is that those politics will be unlike the concept of the past and a few dimensions and one is the fact that we have complex to be multi domain not just air, land and sea but also operational domain like cyber and space and information environment and were taking a number of decisions that implement in those decisions so that we are ready to fight politics on the small operation. As a researcher, i would add another point that does for us we forgotten we think of the future of warfare and conflict and that more and more we are called into a position where we have to even question what is public begin and when does it end and what is complex in the sense that we will face more and more of activities below the threshold and mixing and matching known and non kinetic means to military tax were more and more based in a war in which we have these tools from geopolitics to humanitarian assistance to Foreign Policy and tools that we traditionally were separated from pursuing military and Security Policies that would be mixed and matched together but i think we still have a number of political and military adaptations that we have to undertake to be able to deal with conflict in the great zone. The last point i would make is that conflict also looks recently more unclear where conflict began and where does it end and we live more and more in a world where witnessing a number of no war, no peace scenarios and none of which are any indication that we are going away if we look at the map of Political Violence today track where humanity and processes are occurring from that to then to iraq to assyria to afghanistan to yemen to somalia and i could go on. One of the characteristics that were in protected complex in which the beginning and the end looks increasingly more blurred with a really number of important dilemmas in terms of how we peace building and assistance and development and when to be use the military more effectively and i think that the trend will only increase and we will have a word where frozen conflicts are resolved conflict protected political prices will not go away and if anything you will become more entrenched and that places upon us a number of serious dilemmas of how do we intervene and how do we act to mitigate conflict. Then theres other trends that i will start by making this point that the battlefield is not one but is many and the kinetic and non kinetic are looking increasingly more blurred and what is war and what his piece is increasingly more undefined. Thats a big dilemma Going Forward. Thank you dr. Berti. Doctor singer, there is a lot of complexities in that story that you wrote so what of that story or what trends are happening right now that they are already realtime for these future leaders. Sure. I want to thank you and the organizers for having myself back here. Its a real honor to join you and everyone shows his fantastic hospitality. I think one of the other areas in terms of the future of warfare that they key driver is the emergence of a series of technologies that you might think of different buzzwords and they are sometimes called revolutionary technologies or Disruptive Technology and basically we talked about technology that changed the ga game. They are technologies that a generation ago we would have thought of as a Science Fiction now real and poised to change the world but when i say to the world i mean everything from Society Business to what plays out on the battlefield. Think of these i was at the museum here earlier today and you had english graduates with 150 years back who led the United States navy adapting to the new steam engine and the idea that an armored vessel and you have a wing that shows the first graduates of the School Wrestling with the flying machine and you have i visited a Cyber Security course here that is about of the computer circa 1980 and not thinking about the web is a station. Moving forward, we can see areas of that and break it down into something that paul and i myself worked in in the hardware space and an illustration of the corner and its robotic and most importantly increasingly Autonomous Robotics of various sizes, shapes and forms and if you look in the Software Space is Artificial Intelligence and lots of different definitions of it but essentially Machine Intelligence that is either simulating human decisions or doing them better in some way and taking it more data et cetera and you got a change in the internet so you got hardware, software, wave where which is basically new Energy Sources but also energy becoming a weapon itself. The ray gun is no longer just in Science Fiction. And then you have Human Performance modification using technology to change what we can do and it might be tech that we carry on the body or a x consultant that you name it and it might be technology in the body. I met a student here who is doing their Research Project on brain machine interface technology, basically using your brain to connect up to a computer and this is not a Science Fiction class they were in. It was in your engineering department. These are the technologies happening out there and real quickly the first is what makes them revolutionary is they give us new questions of what is possible that was not possible before but also brought up in her introduction they keep questions of what is proper that is debates of right and wrong that we werent having before and it might be a legal, ethical right or wrong question or it might be a headlight best organized my military unit right and wrong question. The second thing to came off what you brought up is not just that it creates in terms of battle multi domain but these technologies, unlike the ironclad for the aircraft carrier, they have low barriers to entry so its the fact that multiple other actors will have them so a nonstate actor and Insurgent Group now has a little miniature air force and saudi arabia has the Third Largest Defense Budget in the world and yet it got hit by combined drone and Cruise Missile attack and then the other part that i would paint off of what you brought up is its not just the idea of the grace based conflict and knowing when it begins or ends but its the speed of conflict is changed so ai part of the goal of it is it moves it quicker decisionmaking in humans and theres so much going on we may not to weigh in in ways we use to but the flip side is it means conflict maybe continual so to use the example of ukraine replied with this and the ghost sleep book the cyber war effectively was lost by ukraine before the first armed troops crossed into their territory. They lost the war before the actual or began because of what was happening in their networks once before the fighting began and so an interesting thing there are people in this room that may deploy into battle years from now and yet the outcome of that battle maybe shape right now i was happening in our Computer Network or even inside the microchip manufacturer. You mentioned speed but what has happened traditionally fast is government policy and theres a lot of that in your writing, mr. Scharre, so could you tell us more of the realtime policy successes or things that we need to be thinking about right now that impact 21st century warfare . The real challenge that we face from a bureaucratic or policy standpoint is that we are just much slower than the pace of change out there in the world. It is think of future conflicts were thinking hard of what we need to know and now in the last 30 years at the end of the cold war with the u. S. Military forces deployed to iraq, to somalia, 280, two bosnia, to kosovo, to afghanistan into syria and iraq again and to libya we dont need to know where we will bite the future. We will not know that and thats heavily dependent on a lot of political uncertainties and specific events that may happen and that is okay. What we need to know is what might work look like. It will not we need to get close enough that the forces we trained to equip are not grossly unprepared and we felt the pain and the cost of soldiers and two servicemembers when we send forces overseas that are not we fought this certainly in prior wars ended world war ii and in korea but we certainly felt in the early faces of iraq and of guinness and where we fought a conflict that was different from what the army have been focusing on in the 1990s. We think about the military as a set of toolkits for National Security division makers want to have right tools in our belt that were ready to address what complex we are in. As peter talked about were seeing these explosion of Digital Technologies that are fundamentally changing different ways in which we are fighting but one of the things that is interesting about this is we are also seen the pace of this is so incredibly rapid and it feels that way to people who may be of a certain age but when you look at data and innovations it is changing and proliferating faster than it used to be. We continue to see exponential growth in many of these digital systems. Policies have struggled to adapt for 20 years and u. S. Defense department has been talking about the challenge of adversary innovations in precision guided weapons, sensors, Battle Networks that would allow them to target all military forces with precision and legality. Things that render our aircraft carriers shortrange Fighter Aircraft or basis is significantly less useful in future conflicts. Weve done very little to adapt. Thats because theres a lot of locking in our system in both in congress within bureaucracy and culturally where there are things that might have to change how we fight and you mentioned the shift from sale to steam and that was a challenge inside the navy of shifting to horses to tanks in the army. Lots of historical examples where adopting technology requires how we fight thats the real issue so we see cultural in the way because we have and sometimes is attached to how we carry out a task rather than the mission were trying to perform and i can hinder military effectiveness. With the pace of change so rapid you will be adapting in just the next few years to start leading across all fields and in just a little more than a decade each of you will be deputies, field officers and perhaps even business partners. To our panel could you please address what these men and women will say or face ten years out when they are advising in each of you has been an advisor in many sorts of ways so mr. Scharre if you would first tell us to the future advisors of Senior Leaders what should they be preparing for . I think one of the real fundamental challenges that ben mentioned was this blending of what we traditionally the gulf war and not war not only within the complex but that non kinetic means of warfare information attacks, Cyber Attacks and theres a high degree of transparency in military operations that i dont think we are prepared for and we saw for example the u. S. Navy seal rate that had been long reported in realtime on twitter so that were operating in a world where his rate more transparency about what our military forces are doing that could be reportedly going viral and all of this basically means theres so many factors to success that are not about what we think of as war. Its not just the kinetic aspect but i dont know that thats a change so much as its maybe that our concept of war has been overly narrow. Maybe we watched too many world war ii movies but from the perils of history war is unbounded and there are many methods of fighting other than simply a direct clash of arms. And many are effective. Guerrilla tactics or Information Warfare is quite effective and we need to be able to adapt to these realities to use the tools when they make sense and to be prepared for that. More broadly, why did our concept of what war is that instead of coming up with the defense communication in the u. S. It turns with Unconventional Warfare and unrestricted warfare and maybe we need to broaden our horizons about what war is because its not going to fit into the meat tight boxes we might like. Thank you. Doctor dr. Berti what would you have this group focus on when they are advisors to future conflict . I would like to continue with this point about what is war and what isnt because i think that is two questions and i think there are is it working . I think there are two challenges there. One is we really need to understand the small amount hybrid type of activities and at the same time we need to be mindful that okay. Much better. Great. Thank you. What i was saying is that i completely agree with the points made about redefining an understanding what conflict may look like in the future but with the big caveats and that would be the problem when we describe something as complex is that our go to solution is if its a conflict that we need to use the military as a tool. I think less of the past couple of decades its military force as a role and purpose and as an important place in a countrys broader protection but not everything can be addressed with military force. The challenge of stabilization and we need to reflect very keenly and very carefully about is fundamentally a multi pictorial challenge that requires economic and development reconstruction, Political Representation and measures the result cannot be delivered by the military or even by the military at all. The challenge is to know when force is useful when force is the o2 policy tool and when our military needs to be given the chance to do what it does best and other parts of government need to step in and the challenge of stabilization is one of those so thats just to react to the point that we need to be more flexible but be careful not to militarize all the problems we have because many of them have no military solution for require political engagement. The related point to that in terms of what do we need to be to do looking forward just again to build on the point that the conflict is looking at different under a number of International Framework that serve us well for many decades to try as much as possible to limit the damage of war especially on the civilians and some of those Work Convention and frameworks are quickly becoming outdated and quickly becoming a less useful in the context in which wars look different than what they used to look like in the past. They see much more states who follow a different framework and do not respect those International Legal principles. That is something we need to reflect very carefully Going Forward until we adopt reform and make sure our league or international lopez are both solid and grounded in reality and help us fight while staying true to our values and to meet there would be a key challenge of the future. Doctor singer. I was thinking through it in terms of the question that you are really asking is what will be different that someone in that role of the staff officer in the military or a young executive in the business what will be different from them when they are advising their boss on what to do and i think there are two things that stand out. One is to play off what paul brought up his its not just the element of the information but not just now but in particular ten years out the task of that staff officer and that executive is not going to be got out and give me the information on ask rather it will be help me to figure out which of this information is important and which of it is actually true so we will move from a space where you have to find the data which is what a lot of people are in it now to know that there is so much of it what is the relevant part of it and what really matters and then we move into ten years out a world of everything and ill talk about this later everything from deliberate disinformation to ai generated deep fake so what is true or not and whether you talking about a battlefield operation to what are my customers thinking to did this crime happen or not or who did it and the second challenge is again comes from opportunity is in a world with more Artificial Intelligence the decisions that will be made will be more and more guided by ai and be the ones sifting through that data and essentially either taking the decision itself or providing recommendations. We already see this in everything from which way should you go, the ways a map, to get to the destination to its use to advise who should or who is eligible for a loan for their house mortgage or not and to give you the military version of the ways a map i was at a Marine Landing where they were testifying a military person of a route recommendation but unlike it did not tell you the route to go time savings but red the route based off expected casualties that you would take. Again you can see the different recommendations going on around you who gets promoted or not et cetera and so the question you will be advising on is when do you listen to the recommendation or not . When your gut tells you a ways map is telling you take a left turn and i had to go right and this is saying this person should not get a loan but theres something about them that sees trustworthy or theres an issue of algorithmic bias and its the wrong data set into it. One of the things to hit what paul brought up about the different recent experiences of war is in military challenges that we are training our ai off of data from iraq and afghanistan which is great except is that going to create or be suitable for a major state conflict to get to china will the ways we process decisions in iraq and it isnt always be appropriate . Those two elements that helping people sift through information and what is real or not and two, when you listen to the ai is the decision that you will be a part of that the Staff Officers 25 years werent now the good news of this is you are like pain from the batman movie. You grew up in the dark. This is what you know. You will be some ways better suited to help advise and say the current generation who are being flummoxed by all these issues of fake news disinformation et cetera. Great point. Like a derivative of its never as good or as bad as first reported and now it could be terrible and accurate and we need a competent level against every fact that the commander or decisionmaker sees. To the panel in 25 years these people will be our Community Leaders and elected politicians, Business Owners and military commanders. In that future context when this audience will have the greatest influence on the world is a context i now ease attribute and certainly we will have followup from the other two as desired. First dr. Berti, you have championed human rights and written extensively on mitigating complex impact on civilians. Today Human Rights Violations conjure of vision like homeless refugees, noncombatant casualties and resource deprivation. We are rapidly changing technology and what will characterize human rights issues in this century in the future and that are new considerations that are leaders will struggle with to manage impact on civilians. Thank you for that question but it is certainly something we spent time thinking about with no great answers admittedly but i will give you my 2 cents. We have two main challenges to deal with and we need to do with them today to make sure that the situation in 25 years is not as bad as it could get. Number one i would say there has been over the past few years led also by the example of the Syrian Civil War where indiscriminate violence against has been used as a key tactic by the regime and its supporters being russia or iran to gain a military upperhand over the opposition. One of those big complex fought along similar lines are doing around the world is eroding some of the basic intervals of International Humanitarian law that we have fought so hard for to establish over the previous decades. Key example is the prohibition against the use of chemical weapons which we should have sought after world war i we very much established a key principles of the conduct of warfare and with the chemical weapons used with relative impunity and that is weakening that particular norm and so i would say the great deal of urgency looking forward one of the challenges we have is to establish or reestablish reaffirm the key printable of humanitarian low. This will be harder to do as more and more we see the rise of geopolitical competition with the world in which a rising china represents a different political model from i would say the one represented by the United States and europe wants to Shape International order and International Legal system according to its values which may not necessarily confide with ours. Thats a great challenge. The second great talent is domestic. I think we all have to grasp with it especially by the countries and that is what is the democratic open human rights respectful regional ecosystem look like and that involves a number of ethical and legal dynamos from the pegylation of ai to what to do with weapons. We also deal with fake news and disinformation. There are a number of challenges that could amount to threats and the principles of our democracy. These are key challenges that we need to get right today if you want to make sure in 25 years our job is not to try to rebuild internationally after its been destroyed with the time is now. Doctor singer, any followup on that . I think one other interesting aspects about its the new challenges that the institutions that protect human rights face from new types of threats so one of chemical weapons use in syria the resistance to trying to create accountability of it took place everywhere from within the United Nations in the classic way but also entailed a massive Disinformation Campaign pushed over social media trying to reach into the different body of politics of the nations deciding whether to intervene, basically saying the chemical weapons attacks did not happen or it was fake news and it was planted by the insurgents themselves and you saw a near perfect alignment and when i say nearperfect literally the same players that were pushing disinformation targeting the United States 2016 election with the same pushing that and its a mean of Information Warfare and made it harder to build respect for human rights because if we cant even agree on whether the atrocity happened or not how do we get to what we do about it. One of these interesting things is how do we build up resilience to those attacks not just our politics but also we seen human Rights Groups attack and other good examples with a Human Rights Group in the sudan had its email hacked and then false information planted in it and then it was spread viral through a mix of pots and sock puppet accounts. Sound familiar . It was the whole part of the way of damaging that Human Rights Campaign to prevent it from operating effectively so until we get a handle on this digital threat it will be poisoning different parts of everything from the method politics to global respect for human rights. Mr. Scharre, any thoughts on the human rights impact . Yeah, theres a longrunning contest of force between democracy and authoritarianism or liberalism and we got to the end of the 20th century and Democratic Values won that contest for 20th century. A free nation defeated totalitarianism and now theism and communism and that was at the end of history or the end of the story but were seen new forms evolve in the new century that are quite dangerous and if you dont stand up for these values they erode over time. Certainly in syria the gross abuse of human rights by the asad regime and the International Committee to affect ineffectively to anything is degrading military complex but we all also see the set peacetime. China is engaging in horrific human rights abuses detaining over a million of its citizens and the world is basically silent. Its deeply troubling and we know this is happening in there plenty of ample information about it and china successfully basically bought off other countries. Europe is largely silent and because of all large part with countries getting money from china and so as a view at the late 1990s and early 2000 that it was this broad waft of history that turned to progress and obama used to talk about that. Its optimistic but everything gets supported by reality. The u. S. Engaged closely with china on the assumption that over Time Engagement would be to get more liberal and is not worn out. We now face a very serious competitor in china that is a different view of the world than the United States. Military sports better than everybody else. Honor and empathy remain essential in conflict . Or is it going to be a liability or perhaps both often you hear people clearly in the military even blame the laws of war some kind of outcome they didnt like. They will ever you had general tommy franks after he let a lot and go abhe blamed his lawyer some of army officer. Space jacks dont tell the fourstar general what to do. Blaming the code of honor because honor is about following a code its about following a set of rules of right and wrong either normative rules or actual written down, whether written down in the little book you will get written down the geneva conventions. Essentially there are two things to note, first as we often blame that for outcomes that have nothing to do with it. The second is history shows professional forces professional is defined by those that operate by a code. As opposed to barbarian forces, which are warriors. Fascinating to see how we were here but its actually the professional forces. History shows professionals consistently beat warriors. Professionals consistently beat barbarians. Those that follow a code are the ones that when and if you literally are taking a listing of wars won and lost. The reason is because of what you see here are those that follow a code can organize train and equip in a way that those that dont follow a code cant. Those that follow a code can win hearts and minds and trust of the local civilian force in a way that the barbarians cannot. We often blame cast it and i think we will continue to see this moving forward with whatever the technology were talking about whether managerial systems for cyber, if you are using it in a manner that is barbarian like it will create blowback upon you. Thats one of the interesting things we have been wrestling with in afghanistan yes you can have all the great systems you want but its causing greater civilian casualties, its not going to deliver you the victory you want because it is producing more people volunteering to join the Adversary Group means people are not delivering you the targeting intelligence you want to go after the bad guys. Go back to it again when we blame the code for our losses we are usually blame casting our own bad decisions and history shows professionals win. The professional mr. Shari, you touch on honor and integrate that into a. [laughter] you give us your answer to this. Our honor and empathy going to survive . I think a world where we actually dont have empathy is probably a scary one. Peter had mentioned the question about do you trust the map guide telling you where to go. I think a central question the military is going to face Going Forward is where we use automation were to be his people . How do we use Artificial Intelligence to take over various tasks where it will be more effective . There been studies by consultants and analysts that say that roughly half of all a and the u. S. Economy could be automated today using existing technology. Thats not all jobs is actually less than maybe five percent of jobs could be totally eliminated. A lot of things that people do could be automated to some degree. After the beach with the military as well. If you go forward 30 years and we have people manually landing planes and taking them off or manually driving vehicles or manually aiming rifles we are probably doing it wrong. Those are all things we can automate with higher degrees of rescission and reliability. Theres a lot of things there isnt the right answer. What the right answer depends on context judgment. Could we train a machine to know better than a human whether someone holding a rifle in their hands or break in their hands . Probably. Over time we could do that is enough data and Machine Learning we could figure it out. But that doesnt tell you whether that person is combatant that they could be holding a rake and they could be combatant or holding a rifle and not be. They couldve surrendered. They could be abjust a civilian. Thats protecting themselves. Doesnt tell you what the smart thing to do. Could be they are evaluating if you like them up your giving away position. Maybe thats not the right tactical thing to do in that instance. Those are things we want people involved in but theres also this ethical component you mentioned that i think is particularly salient when we talk about the use of force in war. Its a tricky thing because theres a cost to having people involved in these decisions. There is a cost people have to bear that moral burden. With increased a lot of awareness in the force about things not like just ptsd but moral injury the thing fact that both have to make very difficult choices in choosing between two different wrongs have to live with that. I think its a really interesting role. We rather have somebody do that. Its not fair as a society that we make a decision as a nation to go to war and we send off young men and women to do that and carrying the burden for the country and make the choices. In a very small segment of the population does not. Also asking what would the world look like if no one cared . If no one waives those choices and waive the value to human lives and im not sure thats the world we want to live on. I agree with everything thats been said so far i think theres so many ways to go about it. Utilitarian argument if we wish. We must not forget that the main principle of the rules of the law of war is reciprocity. They were designed so that armies would have a code of conduct that would be reciprocal so the first rule we were able to agree to as International Community was about prisoners of war. Theres an interest in all sides of keeping that invention. It means if you are men and women in uniform are captured they will be treated with dignity and not tortured and not subjected to degrading treatment. The compromises you will have to do the same if you capture your enemy forces. There is a reciprocity saying utilitarian value to the law to uphold the principles. It makes it tries to do something very difficult to mitigate the impact of war while still allowing states to use force if the situation demands to do so. There is a utilitarian argument, there is effectiveness argument like like as we mentioned already meeting if youre involved in a counterinsurgency operation part of your mission is to try to pacify the area. Its much easier to do so if the population is not fighting against you as much as if they see someone i can trust or rely upon as opposed to if you give them reason to sign the surgeon. Its also more effective and i would say theres a political cost. Our armies and armed forces are very important part of our society. The way they fight tells us a lot about who we are, about what we stand for and what type of society we want to live in. Thats not just about what we do abroad reflects on what the values are at home. In that sense its absolutely vital for democracies to continue to obtain honor and empathy and respect international law. Its about us and how we want to live with ourselves in our society. What values define us. I certainly hope ab im very hopeful after those three answers. Honor will survive. Mr. Scharre abbill gates and is very positive as a measure of comfort that he doesnt lose sleep but when i imagine 2040 value fields it worries me because i think of the tireless fearless robot allknowing ai combined with great power capabilities that ends in some sort of global armageddon. Whats the worst case in your future . I think the good news is, the kind of things we see in Science Fiction i dont think are real risks. Terminators turning on us. We have yet another terminator movie coming out im sure it will be entertaining but not a real problem. The things that worry me the most are slow movement over time toward more automation that slowly peels away human control from warfare. And crosses some threshold that we might not even realize we are doing at the time where humans have much less control over whats happening. This is been expressed in different ways. Chinese scholars have talked about battlefield singularity with his automation and machine driven warfare on the battlefield clipped the dispute of human decisionmaking. We want to use automation to get inside the loop of adversaries. Automation raises the prospect that your military forces are inside your own. We have ideas what commanders intent but the machine is not can understand commanders intent is a risk you get these accidents at machine speed and i think its really quite dangerous. I think the most significant in cyberspace. Theres a potential for harm rapidly and scaled and we are not really prepared for. We lack the resiliency in the current structure of the internet against some sort of intelligent adaptive malware that can be quite disruptive. Doctor bertie, do you have a worst case when you think of the future . Do you think of how or robocop . I certainly have a number of worstCase Scenarios. Im going to answer the question but in a roundabout way because i think we mentioned so many important factors that can shape our future and rightly so we focus a lot on technology. We see a world in the future where ongoing certification lack of drinkable water, we create more millions of refugees escaping what essentially our climate crisis. We will have our military think very carefully about how they respond to ever more severe and frequent extreme weather events which is something we are already taking substantial work to respond to that i think if you project yourself into the future would become a much more Important Mission because the need will be ever so greater. Just to say there is of course a number of potential worstCase Scenarios involving technology we should definitely prepare ourselves for that. We should also prepare ourselves and adapt for the fact that our planet giving signs of distress and that will affect every factor including military and to close on that, i find it very interesting just last week abannounced a new initiative aiming to make the british army fossil fuel to work on what we call nato green defense. I think its very important as well. Thats not to say Everything Else is not important but we should also keep an eye on those issues because they are going to affect our future very significantly. Thank you. Doctor singer you had a worst Case Scenario in your story we had our butts handed to us in ghostly. You are asking someone who wrote a book about world war iii. [laughter] the dark thing to say is, we are living it. Whether its the Climate Change issue and all the craziness of yesterday in the news you might have missed that a new report came out the un report over 100 scientists from 36 Different Countries that essentially concluded member how bad you thought it was going to be its actually turning out to be much worse. Its going quicker than we thought and we essentially only have to the year 2030 to take action that could appreciatively turn things around. That links to the nightmare scenario for me when i say i am living it, the essence of russian Information Warfare is not to make you love putin a thats how americans think about propaganda. Make you love us, apple pie bluejeans rock n roll. The essence of russian Information Warfare going back to its origin in the 1920s is to make you just trust everything. And what in trust is something thats interesting it takes a long time to build and once lost its almost impossible to bring back. Weve seen a systematic attack on the institutions that we trust in and are crucial to a thriving american democracy. That is true whether we are talking about healthy military relations, to trust in an independent court in judiciary. Trust. We are seeing each of these core institutions that democracies need under threat right now and you will take from abroad and the mastic. I worry we are shrugging you can see it in the polling data and the lack of trust in institution that losses almost impossible to bring back. The challenge of these periods, whether talking about warfare, what happens if you have a highly politicized military, highly partisan military . You know it is likely to thank you sir. We are just past about an hour point which is often the time to think about stretching. I want everyone to stand up for a minute and stretch when you sit back down, those of you that will have questions, go ahead and remain standing what the authors have the last question. You can keep standing while im addressing this. But you cant talk. Your purpose as in other words graduates is to be leaders ready for the future. So how should you prepare, thats one of the Key Takeaways today. After a Panel Addresses this final topic, we will open it up to your questions so you can begin to stand make yourself identified as someone who would like to ask a question. To our Panel Members, i suspected each of you when you envision your future roles in life from their side of the stage you didnt predict the developmental path that you would take. With much precision. In the unexpected often makes us more prepared to lead. What in the three of your experiences, unexpectedly prepared you for the influential roles which today you have and our audience can consider that when they are thinking about planning out leadership development. Doctor singer, would you tell us a story . This is that i sound like i was kissing up to the concept of the conference itself but the advice i would give that links back to experience is all of the issues that we are talking about whether robotics, Climate Change, human rights and conflict, Cyber Security, they are inherently multidisciplinary. Whether youre an engineer working on a robot, we are now learning, paul can attest to that, were pulling from the fields of biology and design or meeting with the cybersecurity class earlier we were talking about the keys to Network Defense involved not just the coding of zeros and ones but an understanding of economics and what it incentivizes best behavior. Its the multidisciplinary nature that i think is going to be key to whatever role you take on and for me doing the work i do on writing and advising dod and other entities on the future of war i keep coming back to history. I grew up with a love of history of military history so when im speaking to military audiences on always bring up how do you adapt to change . Im referencing the new ua asked but im also talking about how the navy adjusted aircraft carriers and they are need to do the fleet problem exercise. Or we have a marine officer sitting in the front row as some of you heard from before and they are looking at the examples of the arena the 21st century but looking at how the marines explored amphibious warfare as a concept back in the 1930s. For me personally that love of history has been something that im constantly applying in future ology. Thank you sir. Mr. Scharre your thoughts on your unexpected develop mental path. One of my drill sergeants in basic training on his last words to us as we marched off to school was him screaming at us to never quit. You can actually get a lot done in life by perseverance. There is a lot to be said for living a fulfilling life through being entrepreneurial, being bold, just simply doing things you want to do. The military setting is a little different because theres poor constrained opportunities. It was more like you got great advice for the military volunteer for everything. Seek opportunities everything you can, volunteer for everything and take advantage of whats out there and then in the civilian world there something you want to do just do it. Find excuses to do it rather than not doing. That requires focus, it requires very much deciding, these things are not important. We were all chatting over lunch of how hard it is to decide where you spend your time. In the things you agree to do and the things you turned down. I think its important to let yourself that your own priorities because the world will tell you the things they want you to do, society, your parents, your boss, things they want you to do but ultimately its your life. Deciding, this is what matters to me. Carving of the time for that you can do really great stuff. Doctor berti you bounced around very many Different Countries in your career. I dont expect that was completely expected. What in your career has been drive you toward where you are today . Definitely was not expected. I grew up in a small town in the north originally and didnt really travel much growing up. The fact that now i spent my weekend an average of two or three Different Countries is certainly something i never expected. I think i would relate i would bring up two points, abto be able to find what gives you a sense of purpose. And that would drive a lot of career choices. How to shift from one to the other and take up a lot of very different experiences. I have worked in academia, the policy work in the field with the un, now at nato, it might sound disjointed but to me its coherent because the purpose is im interested in how do we mitigate the impact of conflict on civilians. The context of civil war. For me thats what does it. Thats my purpose. Thats what drives my choices. And its quite a good thing to fall back to what im undecided whether to take one path or another essay is this furthering what i think is my contribution . My two cents. He very much goes in line with the idea of focusing. It goes along with the International Experience to be open to have your ideas challenged. I think its not something we welcome enough in our society. We tend to be reassured to stay in our own cocoon, listen to people who agree with us. Thats easy but i dont know if it brings us to make the best type of decisions and i dont know if it really allows us to relate to each other as human beings the best possible level. To me my experience one of the best place to challenge my preconceived notions, ideas and biases has been to travel. The more different the culture and the more different the place before being back in europe i spent 10 years in the middle east and i can say that was a crash course into challenging so many notions that i had brought up with. Some of which i got reaffirmed and some of which i revise. I think its a very useful exercise. I heard as part of this Program Students also have International Experience and i think thats incredibly invaluable, especially in this globalized work we lead into today. Thank you maam. We have time for questions fortunately. I like to start here with the students and colonel convey you will be next. This is a question for anybody. In the world today we see a lot of warfare, also narco Drug Trafficking a lot of what we see in impacting civilians and causing civil wars. Can i know you answer what you think and where that sort of area of fighting is going to today and how can be prevented in developing in third world countries . Doctor singer . I was going to suggest someone else. [laughter] doctor berti. Great question. I think its very important to tackle the issue of organized crime because its something we underestimated for very long. Indeed cartels today are must more sophisticated and able to protect our and have an impact on political dynamics. I think its a key challenge for us. In terms of how you do that, i think most of the strategists have this component of multi proud approach. To try to undermined the model, find ways to make it harder for them to profit. So theres a financial aspect is important but then there is the root causes discussion which i think we should never forget that is what drives people to join the organization . What drives this dynamic and often has to do with poor governance. The point is we also have to address the political context very carefully. I would just close because i know theres other question by saying its especially important in regions of the world with strategic interest to the United States like the middle east. For example, in north africa we see more synergy criminal organizations and terrorist groups. It transcends the Public Security if it becomes a National Security i think its a very good question. Do you think that future battlegrounds will be impacted by narco trafficking . They are. We must not forget that for example in the case of isis which for a while was the terrorist groups with the biggest territorial and population control and also the Wealthiest Terrorist Organization before our military operation put an end to that. A substantial portion of the revenues they made was out of that took twoabthe link between terrorism and crimes makes what happens in the criminal world very relevant to operations all around the world. Thank you. Doctor convey. As my students know im very old i started programming in 1965. I follow developments in Computer Science all my career. Im here to give you a warning, there are two factors i did not hear mentioned. Number one, Neural Networks develop algorithms that are incomprehensible to the human beings who are depending on those algorithms and there is evidence of that. For example, one of the earliest Neural Networks in around 1988 was tasked with developing an integrated circuit for particular behavior and it worked. And none of the electrical engineers could figure out how it worked. Until they tracked it in detail for a couple of weeks. Thats number one. Number two, back in the 1930s a aarticulated a principal theorem of incompleteness includes a prediction that all felt residential system are inherently chaotic. Our chaos in mathematical terms having having disrupted responses to changes in input. Those two factors should worry the hell out of us. I leave it to you to comment. Anyone worried . I think on the first one lets take it even further and actually connect back to what paul brought an relevant to the chinese approach and hope for a terms of the battlefield breakthrough. In discussions of Artificial Intelligence on the u. S. This moment where people, it always comes back to games. Theres two moments in our discussion around Artificial Intelligence its when the computer first beats the top human chessmaster and then the next stage is when the human a awhen the computer beats the top human at trivia on jeopardy, ibm, thats what we talk about. For china and in particular counterparts of the pla, it was when the machine beat someone at the game of go. If youre not familiar with it, go is a game of strategy that is thousands of years old relevant to the comments you brought up, it was not merely that the breakthrough happened in this game that a lot of people thought it wouldnt happen for about 10 years. But it was the way that the machine won, it came up with moves that humans who had been playing this game for over 2000 years never thought of on their own. Thats that sort of potential of it being a battlefield breakthrough the equivalent of a blitzkrieg, but the machine that no one has thought of before. Thats whats excited the pla. As you lay out, its not just this possibility. You can see we have medicines that are being discovered by ai by bringing together information the way the human doctors and research would not have thought of. Its a wonderful positive but you also layout out and that is the negative of it. I was referencing the advice the machine is giving you part of why that advice is so good is you never would have come up with that on your own and you dont understand it but that is also the challenge of when do you go contrary to the machine because you can understand why did it recommend this. Why did it recommend that this person doesnt get a loan . Because it sifted through all the information and has such perfect information that i never could have done on my own . Or is it because the data that was plugged into it was inherently biased against africanamericans . I didnt make up an example there. Thats a true story. Or who gets selected for promotion or admission to a college . We are going to take more data than ever before then just your sat scores its going to sift together in ways that human never could because of a neural net and found i think it was young white man who played lacrosse were the best for college. They actually work, its because it was drawing biased data. The sting of bringing in Neuro Networks is not our ability to understand it thats the good of it thats the problem of it. The other thing paul brought up in acquisitions, how does the military by something that is on one hand holds the prospect of advising you better, on the other hand no one can tell you how it works. Thats good. Good afternoon, history shows us that mankind is often asome weapons to violence or dangers unfair during warfare. Do you think ai that acts on its own could sometimes be outlawed in the future . Or are we too stuck in our mindset of progress to consider that . That landed squarely with you mr. Scharre. The track record of trying to regulate adate back to ancient india in abits a real mishap. [inaudible] there been some successes or things that were largely successful like efforts to move away from chemical weapons there have been other miserable failures. So i think its a real abif you violate. [inaudible] the real issue is reciprocity. You see effective restraints that largely has to do with military agreeing to either explicitly or passively. Do not use certain weapons. There is not an advantage to that. It might make horrible or unrestrained some other way. But even in that kind of restraint its clarity on what is the thing youre not agreeing to do . It turns out where you locate factories . Over time that line blurred and led to massive abi have a real problem with ai because where you draw the line . You say this is application of ai and this is not. There are a lot of discussions underway among states and scholars looking try to figure that out but it looks like a tough problem. Thank you. Good question. We will all be sharing your microphone shortly. I would weigh in and i think theres particularly to ai there is first the aspect of it to technology that is not inherently civilian or military. Sometimes people say theres a movement of increasingly autonomous use within the military but simultaneous to that our civilian world is using that technology. I always use the example of lets move forward 10 years so is our proposition that a pilot well, maybe theres somebody in this room. I met a student earlier today interested in going to the air force and operating on aerial systems. They will wake up in the suburbs of las vegas and drive or rather be driven to Creech Air Force base but there increasingly autonomous car. Not just a tesla, but then in war we still operate its 2008 you have to hand control everything the drone does. I dont think that happens. The first is that nature of the technology. What i think is possible is that we will see certain restrictions on not the technology but potentially where you use it and how you use it. For instance, to your concerns, there are very different civilian casualty concerns with autonomous weapon systems in the land domain and urban environment of the city versus undersea warfare. In an urban environment you get it wrong as to whether its a tank or a bus scores can die at the undersea environment its mostly already automated. Its not jonesy with a really good ear, that sounds like a submarine, its a computer lab recognizing all the algorithm. And if you get it wrong theres no such thing right now as an underwater cruise ship. I think we might say, we are okay allowing autonomy and undersea warfare but maybe not within land warfare as an example. Great. Over here. Thank you for coming. Im representing the mens lacrosse team. [laughter] you mentioned earlier about finding the Important Information at the true information. How do you see that coming in the future . Is that your simple Google Search . Throughout vr . How does ai decide for what is true and what is with so much data coming in and out . Especially with all of it increasing. Thank you. The first is, there is ai that is being used to try to distinguish that. For example, as we see in the creation of whats known as the fake, which is ai generated hyper realistic but false imagery, as becomes more and more sophisticated, we will rely on Artificial Intelligence to sift underneath it for the bowels of the human eye might not see. Whats fascinating, going back to this you are talking about the blurry line between war and conflict is the groups that are researching that type of technology to identify that its fake are both the facebooks of the world and darpa. Facebook because they think they needed for their platform, darpa because they think that technology might be used to target u. S. Military, u. S. Democracy. That technology is for the good but all the data also shows that its insufficient. And what we really have missing in the United States is digital literacy. If you were growing up in finland or estonia, from elementary junior high high school, you would have, beside being taught regular studies, beside being taught hygiene, you wouldve also been taught how to defend yourself online. You would have been taught digital literacy. How to distinguish between whats real and fake, how to manipulate people. What are the emotional tiles they are going after you. Thats why the estonians and felons of the world a more resilient against the threat that the United States, which is just like open territory to it. Its a great example of how you align National Security issues with education and by the way, if we enter into literacy in the United States it would not just help you be better citizens, it would help public health. You are all dealing with the return of diseases that we didnt have to because of antivax conspiracy theory. It would help you be better consumers. Its a multiple good thing and yet its strange that its missing within our system. I just wanted to add another layer of complexity. Give me another microphone . Another layer of complexity is that we can look at Better Technology that can help us detect abbut that actually accounts for relatively small amount of the most effective informational operation. As we look more and more with russia for example, one of the main players at the moment, a lot of it is not necessarily deep fake as much as an manipulation of the truth. Which is much harder to detect and certainly much harder to detect let alone for human let alone for Artificial Intelligence. As our Technology Gets better also the information gets more sophisticated. Even if we had a Perfect Technology to detect deep fake it would not help us with a lot of this. Thats just to add another layer of complexity. Thank you. Clearly we need a lot more time for your questions and there will be a chance for that over at the book signing after this. Im sorry to send you back to her seat for the end of this. Thank you audience and panel, you are all very fantastic. [applause] we have covered a lot of important aspects of your future leadership problems. Students, i appreciate your willingness to embark on the norwich experience and i want to take this opportunity especially to thank those of you who are going to defend freedom and ensure our security. Please join these Panel Members as well as scarlet ascii, ian brown and Staff Sergeant bell the in the milano ballroom right afterwards for a book signing event where books are available for purchase. Finally, tonight you are all invited to continue parts of this discussion in the todd lecture at 1900 in backhaul where doctor singer will discuss weaponization of social media. I hope to see you all there and over at the book signing. Thank you panel. [applause] next on booktv, gordon chang talks about the possibility and consequences if north korea were united with south korea. Then naomi klein discusses her latest book on fire the burning case for green new deal. She will take your calls tomorrow live on indepth 12 pm eastern. Later, Brigham Young University Professor heidi klum lewis offices response to