Andy hurd, United States air force retired. Colonel hurd is a special assistant. He integrates University Departments to expand opportunities to students so that you may learn what its like to travel abroad and lead abroad. He has done tremendous other things here and part of that has to do with him being stationed here for rotc, but also for his hopes and helping each one of you become better leaders. His file is extensive. I could spend a lot of time reading about some of the incredible things he has done, but i will keep it short. You tired really hundred United States air force. Military career include tree commands and for those of you that will be a v8 or thousand flying hours and combat missions and for conflicts. Lets welcome colonel hurd. [applause] thank you, travis. Thank you for attending the military writers symposium. Panel of warfare in the 21st century. Future battlegrounds. My name, andy hurd. You and i are very, very privileged today that the university and peace and war center have organized this panel to engage with experts of the 21st century conflict. The experts on the panel are global thought leaders who are intimate with battle both in planning and indirect action. They understand the evolution of conflict and how that conflict shapes policy. Their contemplation of the future influences powers, planning and decisionmaking through their careers of research, writing and debates. Today we are fortunate to join them for 90 minutes of their professional experience. Your experience is to develop you to lead. Whether you lead in business, the 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. These writers have spent years thinking about the evolution of warfare and how 21stcentury battlegrounds will battlegrounds will impact society. From our conversation with them today, you will learn unexpected insights about your future challenges. Some of you may feel very comfortable conversing about cyber or Artificial Intelligence, robotics or data, todays conversation is not just about products you can purchase and you should already know that your data, your personal data can be a threat. Your dna, your search preferences, your social posts, they can be used for great purposes. They can also be used to manipulate or threaten you. Todays conversation is about the future that you will live and work in. We are here to explore the future of warfare. Your phone is a powerful communication tool. It is also a potential method of tracking and exploiting you. Artificial intelligence is changing our lives. It impacts future jobs, it impacts transportation and politics. Robotics have revolutionized industry already and war. Combined with ai, 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 School Teacher or a leader, you must continue to reflect what is expressed today by this panel. Your job as leaders is to be open to new ways of thinking and be proactive confronting challenge. That is what today is about. The imperative to study the technological environment within which you must lead. Some of you, you must contemplate the very direct threats from which you must defend us in battle. Today, most of us are connected in real time to the internet. Immediate notification of events is deemed into your own pockets. Those students who registered their cell phones in the norwich Emergency Notification system received an exercise notification early this morning. Anyone notice that . I am sorry if it woke you up. The system can direct you to act punk are down. Run. Report in. Alert somebody. Triggering action throughout norwich. How would you respond to a directive to evacuate your building late at night and report in due to some threat. As you leave your dorm at midnight, you see see this droned. You should ask yourself, why is that it there. Is it security intending to search the building for a suspicious package . Perhaps it is is a local reporter. Media content for the tv news. Maybe it is Law Enforcement monitoring a safe evacuation or using facial Recognition Software to search for a suspect. Is it programmed to kill a target . What if there were thousands of these on the battlefield. Automatically seeking targets wearing your countrys uniform. How are you going to lead men and women in that environment . Finally, what if this droned programming and completely analyzes the situation . What will you do or what will it do if you are standing in front of its target . These are the sort of questions you should ask each time you get a suspicious email or directive text message or you feel your car automatically bump steer away from the side of the highway. Or when a drone buzzes over head. What do these technological advances mean beyond their purpose. How far has this already gone in the governmentfunded laboratories and what capabilities are already fielded . How will you be ready to wield those capabilities . How will you lead people against threats that are faster, fearless or devoid of empathy . These are Game Changing technologies. Yours is a leadership future that cannot rely on studying the past. This drone is a fraction of the capability that exist today. Tomorrow will be exponentially more powerful. 21stcentury leadership, you have to be immersed in the future. You all have to become futurists. Fortunately, we are joined by three futurists today to get you started. You should have already read your biographies. If not, you can scan them now while i am finishing these words. Plan to engage each of them after the panel at the book signing. The head of policy planning in the office of the secretarygeneral at nato. She is a policy advocate for human security, stabilization and peace building. She has written extensively on the future of terrorism and nonstate actors. Her contributions earned her the order of knighthood from her birth country italy. Doctor peter warren stringer is strategist at new america. He is a leading expert in 21 century warfare. Advising the department, industry and entertainment, including the Software Call of duty. He has written nonfiction and fiction on future conflicts and the impact of cyber and robotics he is listed by Foreign Policy as one of the worlds top 100 innovators. A senior fellow and director of the technology and National Security program at the center for a new american society. Previously, he advised within the office of the secretary of defense autonomous systems. He served leading special operations in iraq and i get a stand. Bill gates is named his book one of the top five books to read in 2018. He has also this years award winner. Panel members, life is busy. We fill our days with work. Our studies, our relationships. Having time to contemplate the future is rare. What is happening right now which may have Significant Impact on the 21st century warfare . Doctor bertie, would you please lead off on this topic. Shortly. Thank you very much for the kind introduction. Thank you, everybody, for being here today. I will start by saying that part of my job today very much has to do with looking at future trends. I sit in the office of the secretarygeneral. I lead the team and one of our main jobs is to look at the future. Look at how the tread that we seem to work today will affect our ability of the alliance to deal with the worst. That is a question that takes up quite a bit of our time and thinking back at brussels where i am based. I will also start with a couple of points. I know that im here with paul and peter on looking at how emerging technologies and Music Technologies will affect the way we fight wars. I will not go there. Very important when thinking of the future. First, that point of order, nato was very much thinking about how to address conflicts of the future. Our first assumption is those conflicts will be unlike at least a few dimensions. We expect these to be multi domain. Not just air, land and sea. Operational domain. The information environment. We are taking a number of decisions so that we are ready to fight conflict. I would add another point, perhaps sometimes forgotten when we think about the future of warfare in the future of conflicts. More and more, we are pulled into a position where we have to even question where does conflict began. Where does it end. We will face more and more below the threshold. Mixing and matching to achieve maximum military effects. The tools in the toolbox from real politics. To foreignpolicy. To a number of tools that we traditionally separated from pursuing military and security qualities mixed and matched together. I think we still have a number of political devastation that we have to undertake to really be able to deal with conflict in the gray zone. The last point that i would make is that conflict also looks increasingly more unclear. Where does conflict began, where does does it end . Witnessing a number of no war, no peace scenarios. None of which are giving any indication to go away. If we look at the map of Political Violence today and we look at civil and humanitarian crisis, to iraq, to syria, to gammon, to somalia, i could go on. One of the on. One of the characteristics is political conflict in which the beginning and the end looks increasingly more blurred. This puts a number of really important dilemmas. How do we do development. When do we use the military more effectively. I think that that is a trend that will only increase. We will have a word where frozen conflicts protect and they will not go away. If anything, they will become more entrenched. That place is upon us a number of serious dilemmas in terms of how do we intervene. How do we act to mitigate the conflict. And then a lot of others by making this point. The battlefield is not one, but it is many. Looking increasingly increasingly more blurred. Increasingly more undefined. Which i think is a big dilemma Going Forward. Thank you. Doctor singer. A lot of complexities in that story. What of that story or what trends are happening right now. Already real time for these future leaders. I want to begin by thanking you and the organizers for having myself back here. Just a real honor to join you. Everyone has shown such spectacular hospitality. I think one of the other areas, in terms of the future of warfare that is a key driver is the emergence of a series of technologies. Think of different buzzwords. Sometimes their revolutionary technology. What we are talking about is technologies that change the game. Technology that a generation ago we would have thought about Science Fiction, they are now real and poised to change the world. Everything from Society Business to what plays out on the battlefields. Think of these, i was at the museum here earlier today and you have distinguished graduates, 150 years 50 years back who led the United States navy adapting to the new steam engine. A wing that shows the first graduates of the School Wrestling with the flying machine. You have, i visited a Cyber Security security course here. Computer circa 1980. You are not thinking about its weaponization. Moving forward, we can see areas that you can break down into something that both paul and myself have worked in. You see an illustration of the coroner. It is robotics. Increasingly, Autonomous Robotics of various sizes, shapes, forms. Inc. About the software space, Artificial Intelligence. Lots of different definitions of it. Machine intelligence that is either simulating human decisions or doing them better in some way, shape or form. Taking in more data. Et cetera. You have the change in the internet. Hardware, software, wave, wave where which is basically new energy sources, but also energy becoming a weapon itself. The ray gun is no longer something in Science Fiction. And then you have Human Performance modification using technology to change what we can do. It may be carrying on the body, exoskeleton, fit that, you name it, or it may be technology in the body that a student here who is doing their Research Project on brain machine interface technology. Basically using your brain to connect up to a computer. This was not a Science Fiction class they were in. It was then your engineering department. These are the kind of technologies that are happening out there. Real quickly, the first that makes them revolutionary is they give us new questions about what is possible that was not possible before. They give us questions of what is proper. It is debates of right and wrong that we were not having before. How do i best organize my military unit. The second one to ping off of what you brought up, it is not just that it creates in terms of battle, multidomain, but these technologies, unlike the ironclad or the aircraft character, they have character, they have really low barriers to entry. Multiple other actors will have them. A nonstate actor now has a little miniature air force. Saudi arabia just experienced this. The third Defense Budget in the world yet it got hit by a Cruise Missile attack. The other part that i would ping off of what you brought up, it is not just the idea of the gray space of conflict in knowing when it sort of begins or ends. It is the speed of conflict has changed. Ai, part of the goal is it that it moves quicker decisionmaking than humans. So much going on. We may not be able to weigh in the ways that we used to. It means conflict may be continual. To use the example of ukraine, and we played with this in the ghostly 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 war began because of what was happening in their networks months before the fight even began. There are people in this room that may deploy into battle years from now and yet the outcome of that battle may be shaped right now by what is happening inside of a Computer Network or even inside a microchip manufacturer. You mentioned speed. One thing that has not been traditionally fast as government policy. There is a lot of that in your writing. Could you tell us a little bit about some 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 standpoint is we are just much slower than the pace of change out there in the world. We think about future conflicts. What do we need to know . In the last 30 years we have seen u. S. Military forces deployed to iraq, somalia, haiti, kosovo, afghanistan, iraq again. Syria to iraq again. To tamale somalia. We dont know where we will fight in the future. It has not been dependent on a lot of insecurity. What we need to know is what might war look like . The forces that we are trying to equipped are not grossly unprepared. We have felt the pain and the cost to soldiers and Service Members when we send them overseas. We fought this and prior wars and world war ii and korea. We certainly felt iraq and afghanistan where we fought a type of conflict that was very different than what the army had been focusing on. Wiest think of the military as a set of toolkits. We want to have the right tools in our else. That we are ready to address whatever conflict we are in. We are seeing these explosion of Digital Technologies that are fundamentally changing different ways in which we are fighting. One of the things that is interesting about this is, we are also seeing that the pace of this is so incredibly rapid. Interesting that it feels that way to people of a certain age. Looking at data and innovation, it is actually changing and proliferating faster than it used to be. We continue to see exponential growth in many of these systems. Our policies are really struggling to adapt. The u. S. Defense department has been talking about the challenge of adversary innovations in precision guided weapons, sensors, Battle Networks that will allow them to target all military forces. Things that basically render our aircraft carriers. Significantly less useful in future conflicts. Weve done very little to adapt. Both in congress. Also culturally. Things that might have to change how we fight. Shifting from that was a challenge. Lots of examples where adopting technology requires changing how we fight. Culture can get in the way. How we carry out a task rather than maybe the mission we are trying to form. That can hinder military effectiveness. With the base of change so rapid, you will be adapting in just the next few years to start leading across all fields. In just a little more than a decade, each of you will be deputies, officers and perhaps even business partners. To our panel, could could you please address what these men and women will face 10 years out when they are advising. Each of you has been an advisor in many sorts of ways. If you would first tell us to the future advisors of senior leaders, what should they be preparing for. One of the real fundamental challenges that was mentioned was this blending of what we traditionally think of war and not war. Nonconnecticut means of warfare information attacks, cyber attacks, there is a high degree of transparency that i dont think we are actually prepared for. U. S. Navy s. E. A. L. , that was reported on twitter. Now we are operating in a world where there is a great more transparency about what our military forces are doing. Could be reported, could go viral. All of this basically means there is so much to what we think of as war. Not just the kinetic aspect of it. I dont know that that is actually a change so much as it is that it will become overly narrow. Maybe it is because we watched too many world war ii reviews. History actually unbounded. Many methods of fighting other than simply a direct flash of arms. Many of these are actually quite effective. Guerrilla tactics or Information Warfare. Quite effective. We need to be able to adapt in these realities. Use some of these tools when they make sense to the United States. I think that we will probably just widen our concept of what war is. Instead of coming up with the Defense Community in the u. S. , regular warfare. Unconventional warfare. Maybe we just need to broaden our horizons about what war is. It will not fit into the neat tidy boxes that wed like. Thank you. Doctor birdie. What would you have this group focus on when their advisors to future conflict. I would like to continue with what is war and what is it. There are two, i think there are two challenges here. One is we really need to understand this multi domain gray zone. At the same time, we also have to be mindful. Much better. Great. Thank you. What i was saying for those that could not hear me, i completely agree with the point made about redefining and understanding what conflict may look like in the future. A big caveat. The problem when we describe something out conflict, our go to solution as if this is a conflict, we need to use the military as a tool. I think a lesson of the last few decades his military force as a role. An important place in a country broader, global power protection, protection, security policy. Not everything can be addressed by military force. The challenge of stabilization, and i think its something that we need to reflect very keenly, very carefully, a multichallenge that requires economic development. Reconstruction. Political representation. A series of measures that cannot be delivered by the military. The challenge is to know when force is useful. When force is the go to 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. The challenge is one of those. That is just to react to the point. We need to be more flexible. We need to be careful not to militarize the problems we have. They are required political engagement. The related point to that, in terms of what do we need to Pay Attention to looking forward, just again to build on the point that if conflict is looking different, a number of International Legal framework that have served us very well, for many decades, to try as much as possible to limit the damage of war, especially on civilians. Some of that is quickly becoming outdated or quickly becoming a less useful in a conflict in which it looks different than what it looked like in the past. They see many more states following aid different framework and often do not respect the International Legal principles. That is something i think we need to reflect very carefully Going Forward. How do we adopt, reform and make sure that our legal law principles are both solid and help us fight the wars we need to fight while staying true to our values. To me, that will be a key challenge to the future. Doctor singer. In terms of the question you are really asking is what will be different that someone in that role of a staff officer in the military or young executive in a business, what will be different for them when they are advising their boss on what to do . I think there are two things that stand out. One is the play off of what paul brought up. Thinking not just now, but 10 years years out, the task of that officer, that is accurate it is not going to be go out and get me the information on acts, rather it is going to be help me to figure out which of this information is important and which of it is actually true. We will move from a space where you have to find the data, what a lot of people are in now, there is there is so much of it. What is the relevant part of it. What really matters. And then we move into 10 years out. A world of everything. Everything from deliberate disinformation to ai generated deep thanks. What is true or not . A battlefield operation to what my customers think to did this crime happen or not or who did it. The second challenge is coming from opportunity. In a world where there is more Artificial Intelligence, the decisions will be made and be more guided by ai. The one sifting through all that data and either taking the decision itself or providing recommendations. We already see this in everything from which way should you go, the ways mapped to get to the destination to it is used to advise who is eligible for a loan for their house mortgage or not. To give you the military version, i was at a Marine Landing exercise where they were testing one that was a military version of a route recommendation. It did not tell you the route to go based off of time savings. It recommended it based off of expected casualties that you would take. Again, you could see all of these different recommendations going on around you, who gets promoted or not, etc. The question you will be advising on is, when do you actually listen to the recommendation or not. When your gut tells you, it is saying take a left turn. I know that is wrong. I ought to go right. This is saying that this person should not get a loan. There is something about them. They seem trustworthy. Maybe algorithm bias. One of the things to hit what paul brought up about the different experiences of war, and the military, challenges training challenges training our ai off of data from iraq and afghanistan which is great, except, will that actually create, will it be suitable for a major state conflict against china. The way that we process decisions, will they, will they always be appropriate . Those two elements, helping people sift through information, what is real or not, when do you listen and when do you not . The kind of decisions that you will be part of. Now, the the good news of this is, the batman movie, you grew up in the dark. This is what what you know. You will be, in some ways, better suited better suited to help advise then say the current generation with all of these issues of fake news, disinformation, etc. That is a great point. It is never as good or as bad as first reported. Now it. Now it could be terrible. We need a confidence level against every fact that the commander or the decisionmaker sees. To the panel, and 25 years, these people will be our Community Leaders and our elected politicians, Business Owners politicians, Business Owners and military commanders. In that future context, when this audience will have their greatest influence on the world, i ask each of you an individual question. Certainly we will have followup from the other two as desired. First to doctor bertie. U. S. Champions human rights and written extensively on mitigating complex impact on civilians. Today, human rights violations, visions from me like homeless refugees, noncombatant casualties and resource deprivation, we have rapidly changing Tech Knowledge he. What will characterize human rights issues in this century in the future that are new considerations that our leaders will have to struggle with to manage impact on civilians . Thank you for that question. Certainly something ive spent quite a bit of time thinking about with no great answers, admittedly. I will give you my 0. 02 anyways major challenges to deal with. We need to deal with them today to make sure the situation in 25 years is not as bad as it could get. There has been over the past few years led also by the herring example of the Syrian Civil War where violence has been used as one of the key tactics by the regime and its supporters to gain a military upper hand over opposition. That conflict and other conflict along similar lines i think it is eroding some of the basic principles that we have fought so hard for to establish over the previous decades. A key example is a prohibition against the use of chemical weapons. We should have sought after world war i, we have pretty much establish one of the key principles in the conduct of warfare. We see chemical weapons used with relative impunity. That is weakening that particular norm. With a great deal of urgency looking forward, one of the challenges that we have is to establish, reestablish and reaffirm the key principles. This will be harder to do as more and more we see a derive of political competition. A world in which a rise in china presents a different political model from the one represented by the United States and europe. Wanting to Shape International order and the legal system according to its own values which may not necessarily coincide with ours. I think that is a great challenge. The second is domestic. We all have to especially as democratic countries. What does the democratic open digital, ecosystem look like. That involves a number of ethical and legal dilemmas from the regulation of ai to what do we do with the weapons. How do we deal with fake news and misinformation. A number number of momentous challenges that could amount to threats and some of the principles of our democracies. These are key challenges that we need to get right today if we want to make sure and 25 years our job is not to try to rebuild after its been destroyed. The time is now. Do you have any followup on that . I think that one of the other interesting aspects, it is the new challenges that the institutions that protect human rights face from new types of threats. Playing off of that example of chemical weapons used in syria, the resistance to try to create accountability of it took place everywhere from within the united nations, sort of of the classic way. It also entailed a massive campaign. Pushed over social media tried to reach into the different body of politics of the nations deciding whether to intervene. No, the chemical weapons attack did not happen or it was fake news. It was planted by the insurgents themselves. You saw the near perfect alignment. Literally, the same players that were pushing this information in the 2016 election where the same ones push a knot. The means Information Warfare that made it harder to build respect for human rights. If we cannot even agree on whether the atrocity happened or not, how do we then get to what do we do about it . How do we build up resilience to those kinds of attacks. Not just our politics, but human Rights Groups attacked. A human rights rights group in sudan had its emails hacked and then false information planted in it and then it was spread viral through a mix of spots 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. It will be poisoning different parts from domestic politics to global respect for human rights. A a longrunning context between democracy we got to the end of the 20th century. And democratic values. Three nations defeated an nazi is him and communism. It was not the end of the story. We are seeing new forms evolve. They are quite dangerous. If you do not stand up for these values, they wrote over time. Certainly the abuse of human rights and the inability of the community to do anything about that is degrading military conflicts. China is engaging in horrific human rights abuses. Detaining over 1 million of its citizens. The world is basically silent. It is really deeply troubling. We know that this is happening. Plenty of ample information about it. China basically bought off other countries. Europe is largely silent on this late 1990s and early early 2000s. A history trending towards progress. I dont think that that is supported by reality. The u. S. Engaged closely with china on the assumption. More liberal. Not worn out. It is a very different view of the world in the United States. I think it is a real challenge. We think about how to adapt to this. Many countries that would love a world where human rights do not matter. I dont think thats the world we want to live in. Thank you. Contains characters who consistently express honor. They seem to struggle with the technological change that produces or eliminates it from the battlefield. The Staff Sergeant profess that empathy is what makes the military so much 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, typically in the military, even blame the laws of war for some kind of outcome they did not like. They will say, you know, it was Like Fighting with one hand behind my back. You had general tommy franks after he let bin laden go, blamed his lawyers for not allowing him, this was in the early part of 2001, right after 9 11, there was a convoy that bin laden is in. Frank chose not to air strike at. He blames his lawyer. I am the son of an army jack officer. It is blaming a code of honor. Honor is about following a code. Following a set of rules of right and wrong. Either normative rules or written down one. Written down in the little book that you all get or the geneva conventions. Essentially, two things to know here. 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. A fascinating thing to see how we have amplified the word warrior. History shows professional consistently beat warriors. Professionals consistently beat barbarians. Those that follow a code are the ones that win. You literally are taking a listing of wars won and lost. What you see here, those that follow a code can organize, train and equip in a way that those that do not follow a code camp. They can win hearts and minds and trust of the local civilian force in a way that the barbarians cannot. We often kind of blame casted. We will continue seeing this moving forward. Whatever the technology we are talking about. If you are using it in a matter that is barbarian like it will create blowback upon you. That is one of the interesting things we have been wrestling with. You can have all of the great Unmanned Systems that you want, but if it is causing greater civilian casualties, it will not deliver you the victory that you want because it produces more people volunteering to join that adversary group. People are not delivering you the targeting intelligence that you want to go after the bad guys. To go back to it again, when we blame the code for our losses, we are usually blame casting our own bad decisions. History shows professionals went. Va professional. Thank you. In your book you touch on honor, empathy, how we integrate that a lot. I dont recall getting the answer. [laughing] perhaps you could give us your answer to this. I think a world where we dont have empathy is probably a scary one to be in. This question about do you trust the math guy telling you where to go. I think a central question that the military will face Going Forward is where do we use automation, where do we use people. Where do do we use Artificial Intelligence to be more effective. Thereve been some studies that say roughly half, half, of all could be automated to date using existing technology. That is not all jobs, less than 5 of jobs could be totally eliminated. A lot of things that people do could be automated to some degree. We have people manually landing planes and taking them off or manually driving vehicles or manually actually aiming rifles, we are probably doing it wrong. There are lots of things, and war, there is not a right answer. Depending on context or judgment. Could we train a machine to know better than a cumin whether someone is holding a rifle in their hands or a break in their their hands . Yes. Probably. We could figure that out. That does not tell you whether that person is a combatant, they could be holding a rake or holding a rifle and not be. They could be a family force. They could be a civilian protecting themselves. What is the smart thing to do . You lined them up, giving away your position and you compromise yourself. Maybe that is not the right tactical thing to do in that instance. There is of course this ethical component that you mentioned. Saying what we think about the use of force in war. It is a tricky thing because there is a cost to having people involved in these decisions. A cost that people have to bear that moral burden. We have increased a lot of awareness and the force about things. Not only ptsd, but moral injury. Having to make very difficult choices. Choosing between two different wrongs. Having to live with that. I think that it is a really interesting dilemma. We would rather have somebody do that. It is not fair of 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 carry that burden for the country and make those choices. Every segment of small population does that. What would it look like if no one cared. No one waived those choices. No one waived the value of human lives. Doctor bertie. I agree with everything thats been said so far. So many ways to go about it. We must not forget that the main point, the main principle is reciprocity. They were designed so that armies would have a code of conduct that would be reciprocal. The first rule we were able to agree to as an International Community was about prisoners of war. A clear interest keeping that convention. If your 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 sources. Withholding a lot of these principles. Trying to do something very difficult which is to mitigate the impact of war while still allowing states to use force if the situation demands to do so. There is an effectiveness argument. If you are involved in an operation, part of your mission is to try to pacify that area. It is much easier to do so. Much easier to do so if you have someone that you can trust as opposed to if you give them reason to side with the insurgent. Finally, i would say that there is a political cost. Our armies, armed forces, are a very important part of our society. The way they fight tells us a lot about us. About who we are. What we stand for and what type of societies we want to live in. What we do abroad reflects what our values are. In that sense, i think it is absolutely vital for democracies to continue to maintain honor and empathy. This is about us and how do we want to live. With ourselves and our societies. What values define us. I certainly hope it will be the same. I very hopeful after those three answers. Your exploration of the future employment of ai and robotics was fascinating. Bill gates and his very positive review, he provides a measure of comfort that he does not lose sleep. When i imagine 2040 battlefields, it worries me. I think of the tireless fearless robot allknowing ai combined with great power capabilities that ends in some sort of global armageddon. What is the worst case in your future . The good news is, kinds of things that we see in Science Fiction, i dont i dont think they are real risks. Isnt there another terminator movie coming out . Not a real problem that we face. The things that worried me the most are a slow movement over time towards more automation that slowly peels away human control from warfare and crosses some threshold that we may not even realize we are doing at the time where humans have much less control over what is happening. Scholars have talked about a battlefield singularity. The piece of automation and machine german warfare on the battlefield. It could just be the decision making. Now we want to use automation to get in. To react. To observe the environment faster than them. Automation raises that your military forces are inside your own. That could be okay when you have people making these decisions. Hey, be flexible. Be adaptable on the ground. We dont want our subordinate units calling up for everything. Ideals like commanders intent. The machine will not understand commanders intent. A risk of you get this at machine speed. I think that that is really quite dangerous. Most of this is quite significant in cyberspace. There is the potential for harm. Rapidly in its scale. Not really prepared. Lacking the resiliency and the current structure and of the internet against some sort of intelligent malware that could be quite destructive. Thank you. Doctor bertie, do you have a worst case when you think of the future . I certainly have a number of worstcase scenarios. I am going to answer the question, but in a roundabout way. I think that we have mentioned so many important factors that can shape our future. Rightfully so with technology. If we are talking about the future and potential worstcase scenarios that will affect our army, before the time is up, i think i have to have to mention Climate Change. Otherwise we are kind of ignoring a huge elephant in the room. Thats not to say i agree with everything that paul said. There is also a chance that Something Else well. Something will be Climate Change that is something that certainly is a threat multiplier. Certainly make some of our existing, existing challenges more complex. A world in the future where ongoing this certification, lack of drinkable water will create more humanitarian emergencies. What essentially our climate crisis. We will have our military think very carefully about how do they respond to severe and frequent extreme weather events. Something we are already taking substantial work to respond to. If you project yourself into the future, it will become a much more Important Mission because the need will be ever so greater. Just to say that of course there is a number of, a number of potential worstcase scenarios evolving technology, and we should definitely prepare ourselves for that. We should also prepare ourselves and adapt for the fact that our planet is giving some signs of distress and that will affect every sector, including our military. I find it very interesting that just last week the chief of defense has announced a new initiative aiming to make the british army fossil fuel independent in the next few decades and to go into really work on what we call green defense and i think that is very important as well. A whether its the Climate Change issue and all the craziness of yesterday in the news you may have missed that a new report came out over 100 scientists from 36 Different Countries essentially concluded and its actually turning out to be much worse it is going quicker than we thought and essentially we only have until the year 2030 to take action that could appreciably turn things around. That links to the nightmare scenario for me which when i say we are living it the essence of russian Information Warfare is not to make you love putin or the like. Thats how americans think of propaganda. Going back to its origin in the 1920s it is to make you distrust everything and it takes a long time to build and its almost impossible to bring back and we have seen a systematic attack on the institutions that we trust and that are crucial to a thriving american democracy and that is true whether we are talking about healthy Civil Military relations to trust independent courts and judiciary and freedom of speech. We are seeing each of these institutions that democracy means under threat right now and asked the pledge that many of you will take from those both abroad and domestic ivory we are shrugging off and you can see it in the data its almost impossible to bring back into the challenge whether we are talking about warfare, what happens if you have a highly politicized military, highly partisan military we know that as a militaris a military that s likely to win the war. What happens how do you affect Climate Change. Its our institutions are so core to the democracy are under threat right now did not happen when i was your age we are just passed out to be our point which is often the time to think about stretching go ahead and remain standing while the authors have this last question. You can keep standing while i am addressing this, but you cant talk. Your purpose is to be leaders ready for the future, so how should you prepare, thats one of the Key Takeaways today and after the Panel Addresses the final topic, we are going to open up to questions so you can begin to stand and make yourself identified ayourself identifiedt would like to ask a question. I suspect that each of you when you envision your future role in life from their side of the stage you didnt predict the developmental path that you would take with much precision and the unexpected often makes us more prepared to lead so what in the three of your experience is unexpectedly prepared you for the influential role which today you have and our audience can consider that when they are thinking about planning our Leadership Development . This is going to sound like i am kissing up to the conference itself but the advice links back to the experience as all of the issues we are talking about whether it its robotics, climae change, human rights and cybersecurity, they are inherently multidisciplinary, that is whether you are an engineer working on a robot we are now learning and paul can attest to this we are pulling from the fields of biology and design or i was meeting with a cybersecurity class earlier and we were talking about the keys to Network Defense and not just the coding that the understanding of economics and what it incentivizes as its best behavior so that is going to be key to whatever role you take on and for me doing the work that i do on writing and advising dod and other entities on the floor i keep coming back to history. I grew up with the love of military history and so when im speaking to military audiences how do you adapt to change, i am referencing and also talking about how the navy adjusted to aircraft carriers and their need to do that sleep problem exercise or we have a green officer sitting in the front row and they are looking at the examples of the marine in the 21st century but healthy how thy explored amphibious warfare as a concept back in the 1930s so for me personally that love of history is something that im constantly playing in the futurology. Your thoughts on your unexpected developmental path. One of the last words to us as we marched off with him screaming at us never quite and you can get a lot done in life. I think theres a lot to be said for living a fulfilling life through being entrepreneurial and just simply doing things that you want to do. In a military setting its a little bit different because there are opportunities for that. Its great advice for people, take advantage of whats out there and then just do it, find excuses rather than not to do it but requires focus and very much deciding these things are not important and so we are all chatting over lunch about how hard it is to decide what to spend your time on and what you would agree to do and what you turned down. But i think its important to yourself since your own priorities because they will tell you the things they want to do, society, your parents, but often this is what matters to me and the carving of the time for that you can do really great stuff. Youve bounced around many Different Countries in your career. I dont expect that was completely unexpected. What has been driving you towards where you are today . Definitely not expected. I grew up in a town and didnt really travel much going there so the fact i spent my weekend average of two or three Different Countries is certainly some and i never expected would happen but i think that i would bring up two points. One is to help you shift from one field to another. It may sound a little bit disjointed. But that is my purpose and its quite a good thing to fall back to when i am deciding to stay in one part or another and what i think is my 2 cents worth, so it very much goes in line with focusing and the additional point goes in line with what you mentioned about International Experiences to be open to the ideas. It isnt something that we welcome in our societies we tend to be reassured and listen to people who already agree with that and that is easy but i dont know that it brings us to make the best type of decisions and if it really allows us to relate to human beings at the best possible level so to me one of the best ways to challenge my preconceived notion into the more different the culture and the place i can say that was a crash course to challenge so many notions i had been brought up with some of which i reaffirmed and advised and i think it is a useful exercise so i heard a part of this Program Students also have International Experience and that is incredibly valuable especially in this globalized work. Thank you maam. I would like to start over here with the students. And you hope the next. This is a question for anybody today we see a lot of warfare and infecting civilians and causing civil wars, so any of you can answer what do you think and where that service area of fighting is going today and how it can be presented at developing those countries. I suggest doctor singer starts with the bath. I was going to suggest someone else. [laughter] great question. Its very important to tackle the issue of organized crime because its something that weve underestimated that it curtails us much more sophisticated and able to project power and to have an impact on political dynamics so iisthe key challenge for us andn terms of how do you do that, i think that most of those strategies have this component so im the one han on the one ho try to undermine the fundamentals and find ways to make it harder for them to profit so there is an economic financial aspects but then again there is the root cause discussion we should never forget and that is what drives people to the organization with poor governance of the state is one of my mantras i always go back to address the political context very carefully and i would just close because theres another question to say this is especially important in the regions of particular interest to the United States and the middle east for th example in nh africa we see more and more criminal organizations so it transcends the public security. Do you think that future battlegrounds will be impacted by narco trafficking . Yes and they are. We must not forget that in the case of isis which was a group with the biggest territorial population and wealthiest organization that to allow a substantial portion of the revenues they made to be involved with criminal organizations so the link between federalism makes what happens in the criminal war very relevant to the operation. As my students know, im very old. I started programming in 1965, but i followed developments in Computer Science all of my career. Iem appear to give you a warning that there are two factors like it out here mentioned. Number one, Narrow Networks develop algorithms that are incomprehensible to the human beings who are depending on those algorithms and there is evidence of god. For example one of the earliest networks around 1988 was tasked with developing integrated circuit for a particular behavior number two, back in the 1930s, they articulated the principle that includes a prediction that all systems are inherently chaotic where chaos in mathematical terms means having disrupted responses lets take it even further it connects back to what paul brought as relevant to the chinese approach and kind of hope for in terms of a battlefield breakthrough. It always comes back to the games and his two moment these n our discussion around Artificial Intelligence is when the computer first beats the top human chessmaster and then when the computer beat the top human on trivia for china and in particular your counterparts plus when they beat someone at the machine of go into this sort of a game of strategy relevant to the comments brought up that isnt that the breakthrough happened in this game that a lot of people thought it wouldnt have been for ten years, but it was the way the machine one. It came up with moves that people that have been playing it for a thousand years never thought about their own and that is that sort of potential of its being a battlefield breakthrough that no one has thought of before. Thats what has excited the pla but as you layout it is in this possibility you can see that there is medicine being discovered so to speak by bringing together information the way that the human doctors and researchers wouldnt have thought. So as you layout is also the negative and that is kind of referencing the advice the machine is giving you and part of why that advice is so good as you never would have come up with it 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 cant understand why did it recommend this, why did it recommend that this person doesnt get a loan, was it because they sifted through all the information and have such perfect information that i never could have done on my own or is it because the date of that was plugged into it was inherently biased against africanamericans . I didnt make up an example there. That is a true story. Or who gets selected to a college weevil take more data than ever before. Its going to sit togethe sift n ways a human being never occurred before. I think it was the young white men who played lacrosse or the best for college. Its not just about the inability to understand it, that is what is good about it and by the way the other problem brought up in a position hell does the military by something that holds the prospect of advising you better and on the other hand no one can tell you how it works. History shows us some weapons are too violent or dangerous or unfair. Do you think that could sometimes be outlawed in the future or are we to stop in our mindset to consider that . That is the question that track record of trying to regulate weapons its a real mix thereve been some successes might efforts to move away and other musical failures. If something is effective than okay. The real issue is reciprocity and when we see that it largely has to do with military is a great do not use weapons others will use it against you and it might make it more portable in some other way but even to achieve that kind of restraint it gets clarity. There were attempts to restrict and it shows up where. Where do you see this application came. The states and scholars are working to figure that out. We will all be sharing the microphone here. I think there is first the aspect of a technology that is neither inherently civilian or military sometimes you will see people say there is a movement of damning increasingly autonomous use within the military that can simultaneously to that, the civilian world is using not a technology. Lets move forward ten years and its our proposition that a pilot whale, and maybe there is someone in this room interested in going to the air force for the suburbs of las vegas and a drive or be driven to the base by the increasingly autonomous cause. Its not on the technology but potentially where you use it there are autonomous weapon systems in the land domain and urban environment in the city versus undersea warfare. So in the urban environment you get it wrong whether it is a tank or bus the scores can die ancan buyinto the embassys envt it is already motivated to beat coke audited. It isnt like an enemy submarine. Its actually a computer recognizing the algorithm, the torpedoes that are fired or actually motivated anactually me way if you get it wrong there is no such thing as an underwater cruiseship. In the undersea warfare but maybe not within land warfare as an example. Im representing but finding the important and true information and how you see that coming in the future how do they decide what is true with so much data coming out and that is only increasing. There is a ei tha ai that isg used to distinguish that. Its generated hyperrealistic false imagery and as i becomes more anit becomesmore and more e will rely on Artificial Intelligence to sift underneath it for the tales of the human body may not see. Going back to where you were talking about the line between the conflict. They think that it was needed for this technology to be targeted the data shows that it is insufficient and what we really have missing in the United States is Digital Literacy. Besides being taught the regular studies which all of you were taught on hygiene, wash your hands and the like you would have also been told how to defend yourself online, how to distinguish between what is real and fake and how to manipulate people with the tales going after you it is an open territory so its a great example of how you a line National Security issues with education and by the way if we have Digital Literacy inside the United States that would not just help you be better citizens, it would help public health. Youre dealing with the diseases we didnt have to because of the conspiracy theory. It would help you be better consumers, so it is a multiple good thing and yet it is strange it is missing within our system. I agree with everything i just want to add another layer of complexity. Give me another microphone. We can get Better Technology to help us but that applies for a relatively small amount of the information. As we look at more and more one of the main players at the moment it is much more of a manipulation of the truth which is much harder not just for humans but Artificial Intelligence. As our Technology Gets better and even if we have a Perfect Technology so that is to add another layer of complexity. So clearly we need a lot more time for your questions and there will be a core that over at the book signing so i am to send you back to your seats for the end of this. Thank you, to the audience and the panel. You were all very fantastic. [applause] important aspects of your leadership problems and students, i appreciate your willingness to embark and i want to take this opportunity especially to thank those of you that are going to defend freedom and ensure our security. Please join the Panel Members as well as carla, ian brown and Staff Sergeant in the hall room right after the book signing event where books are available for purchase. And finally tonight, youre all invited to continue parts of the discussion in the lecture at 1900 where doctor singer will discuss organization of social media. I hope to see you all there and over at the book signing. Thank you, panel. [applause] [inaudible conversations] good evening. Can everyone hear me . Welcome. I am the executive director of the leavy center f