Welcome to the hudson institute. Ein senior fellow at the institute of we are here to talk with Christian Brose whose new book, the kill chain, is in the future of hightech warfare that Christian Brose just released. Chris is a former staff director for the Senate Armed Services committee an and prior to that e Senior Policy Adviser for senator john mccain and previously held other positions in the government. Right now he is the chief surgeon to build capabilities for the military as well as for the department of homeland security. We can talk about that as we go through the interview. But thank you for being with us today. So, just to start off, what led you to do this but i know youve been thinking about these issues for a while and obviously something that you have encountered during your time onn the surface kennedy and senator mccain is the policy adviser. But what was the genesis of sitting down and writing the entire book . Guest its a great question i ask myself constant constantly. I would say basically it was two things. Both of these were kind of a product of the years i spent working on these issues when i was in the senate and just kind of thinking about the stuff on a daytoday basis. First it waat first it was juste growing realization. We had a fundamental problem that i felt this kind of underappreciated. People didnt appreciate that we were losing competitive advantage and we were not where we needed to be from a standpoint. It was mostly just the sense that i didnt think there was the urgency to get after a problem we needed considering how fast was closing and in some respects how far behind the problem we actually are. The thinking that i had been doing around what do we do about this. On the one hand, there is a lot of talk about the threats and the operational problems presented by a competitor like china and a lot to talk about technology and importance of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence to really being a sensual to kind of enhancing americas advantage from a military standpoint. It didnt feel that there were concrete answers coming together so its like what i do in this technology and how does it allow me to think differently and build new capabilities and operate in different ways that are going to create competitive advantage for the United States military. Sort of a sense that we were talking about these technologies like we are going to layer them and be able to do it better. From a technological standpoint on the hill looking at technologies, the dothetechnolot of the test and development, and then obviously kind of looking at the operational problems and discussions with the department of defense. So, my view was okay is there a way to sort of help bridge this divide where the gap between what we think it is we might be able to do and what are the things they are going to need to do or want to do from an operational standpoint and in a broader strategic context what is the next kind of air going to look like. Essentially that was the origin of it and it was more an attempt from me to get my head around these problems to say here is my contribution to what i think the answer looks like. Host i totally agree we are at a juncture where we make decisions as a nation into department of defense on how we are going to deal with the problems that pretty much any hightech competitor is going to post because we are still with a legacy military that isnt quite changed how it operates or changes how its posture to take advantage or exploit new technologies that are becoming available. So it seems like one thing that he focused on is the idea that its not just about building these new technologies because arguably they been around for a few years. Its about changing the way that we are going to fight and use the technology for the concept. You talk a little bit about the idea of the human command and machine control which is an interesting way of describing what the office characterized as manned and unmanned teaming and the advanced system abroad on par with one another and they are going to go out and act as a team and if they get separated they can act independently and they can team up again. Obviously it isnt a correct way to characterize or consider the introduction of the Autonomous System. So, how do you think of this new way of operating and that we need to embrace with the Autonomous Systems. Maybe we can talk about it as an added development to that. Guest to give credit where credit is due, the command of the team was your phrase that encapsulated the way that i thought about it very nicely which is why i gave it a place. The one reason i dont like the machines is the sense that they are somehow on equal footing, which i just dislike. These technologies are fundamentally new and different and the way that weve always thought about the controlled military operations, policies and norms and procedures for thathatsort of governance in tht will be thrown out the window because it is fundamentally different. My own view is it just sand. Its going to be moving along the continuum from where we have been that sort of brandnew era. And ultimately i think that it does come back to the question of command and control to get a familiar concept and its hopeful titshelpful to take the systemt of it and get to the question of what they are ultimately talking about in the performance of military tasks. Those are going to continue to be performed. The question is who or what is going to be performing. You are still going to have superior actors who are controlling subordinate factors. Traditionally that has been commanding human subordinates. But as the systems become more intelligent and autonomous and in these more mundane tasks we have tens of thousands of humans during processing censored information as one example. Increasingly more of those can be performed it doesnt mean that they will just be off on their own. Its still going to be the same architecture and framework of the command and control where people set parameters for the control of military tasks. You are going to test significantly and trained significantly the actors that are going to perform those tasks, so there is a process of training to do the things you are giving them the responsibility to do. We talk about the Autonomous Systems. There is such a thing. The reality of autonomy and relationship in that respect its more a what are the standards for which we are going to be able to come to trust machines to perform tasks that are currently or previously only humans could perform. But i dont think the way in which we are going to do that is going to be any different than the way that we sort of evaluate humans in that respect were the kind of less Intelligent Machines that we have relied on for a long time. We have processes in place to do this, and i think that thats actually going to be something we should spend more time thinking through in the construct for how this can help us govern these new technologies in the future. Host absolutely. In terms of the Autonomous Systems of control over their action, theres a couple of different flavors you talk about in the book, essentially higher sophisticated systems and systems that are very inexpensive, relatively small numbers of them can upgrade and to some of their own Mission Planning to respond to stimuli ithestimuli in the environment d then you have the systems that are somewhat expendable, maybe even disposable and they operate sort of independently but very constrained. They are not able to make a lot of decisions by themselves. There is a role for both of those. But i am curious as when you think about the ways that exploit Autonomous Systems, how do you see the relationship, or you essentially trying to do the war of attrition and just overwhelm them, do you see that as a compliment that uses the episodically but the rest is pursuing these expendable robots that are just an element of that so i mean how would you see the different types of systems being employed and just throwing these robot waves of people. Guest its a great question. Perhaps what unifies the two is whether it is a global hawk or something we talk about them as Unmanned Systems that when you look beneath the hood and see all the different particular tasks that are being performed by human beings or remotely in the case of many of these Unmanned Systems in order to make them operationally useful, and i think that toomey the big change is going to be rather than having on unmanned system or one and a system that requires an amount of human beings behind it to make it operationally useful is the inversion of that command and control relationship where you can have a human being in command. Host so the real opportunity is getting on our side. For years theyve made a choice around kind of being qualitatively superior even in the face of kind of a superior adversary, and weve been able to do that because we have kind of exquisite technological that has allowed us to hide and penetrate into the enemies basis and fire a limited number of times that exquisitely accurately. So to me i think the opportunity of flipping this fact to say from an observational standpoint, hiding is going to become harder. I am going to have to confront larger systems coming at me, and i think autonomy opens up the possibility of being able to put masks back on our side and fight back some of these wars of attrition, smarter, cheaper then maybe we had been expecting to. In terms of how that allows us to also invite differently we are going to kind of grind each other down and the last person standing wins, which i think there is something to be said for that. The ability to update faster will be another critical component. You have written eloquently in terms of the decision model and that is kind of why i focused on the kill chain as a concept of the book which is its ultimately not the sort of particular platforms were the pieces of the system that is interesting. Its ultimately the ability to understand whats going on and rapidly make decisions and take action in florida increased the quantity and qualit the qualityt and the speed and scale by which you can operate whereas again, you create so many dilemmas for the adversary that if factors the ability to make decisions. I do think that is something Autonomous Systems are going to provide us keep the peace sort of separate and apart from basically we are going to grind each other down and have more systems on the battlefield than our competitors. Again, its nothing to scoff at. In looking at these kind of concepts, we found that they like the idea to do the attrition attack and throw something at the adversary and overwhelm their defenses, but thats what they like is having the ability to do that as well as these exquisite attacks while the adversary is busy dealing with the attrition battle thats happening elsewhere they can focus a smaller number of platforms that still might be autonomous, but they are going to go through the kind of pinpoint strikes and long range sensors and those capabilities that are the Game Changers in gs of the way the battle is going to proceed. Is getting bac getting backed us advantage in taking away simultaneously keeping his hands busy is something that in the wargames we found very helpful. To build on that, the point i tried to stress in the book is that what would be best is putting the focus on the outcome that we are trying to achieve, rather than getting overly concerned with whats going to be most relevant. I am prepared to believe the best answers to the problems and how you build a sort of effective model to solve these problems that could be all legacy systems used in new ways or a mixture of the old technologies and the new technologies. It could be all brandnew things but at the end of the day it shouldnt matter how you combine these things but the point that you made so well you have to be able to combine them any more confidence and dynamic way so that you can sort of build these different Battle Networks that are not just entirely all brandnew things were kind of exquisite, but to be able to get those interesting synergies between a 40 or 50yearold platform and brandnew Autonomous System thats developed. Lets talk about where the u. S. Has a competitive advantage. You kind of talk about how you would implement this for us and what we would put in the ecological base but also, where do you see that kind of fundamental advantage where the u. S. Would be able to better exploit these technologies in a planned adversary like china guest in a lot of these technologies come as , as a nate still have considerable advantages and considerable difficulties. I think the challenge is just aligning the advantages and capabilities that we have with the actual military problem and this is sort of familiar conundrum of how you get companies and founders and others that are working in peace technologies that are focused on kind of commercial applications but not interested or actively opposed to working on the kind of military problems. I think that is going to be a conundrum for us. One of the biggest advantages the United States is kind of an operational expertise and excellence we have in the United States military sort of separate and apart from the technology area. Its hard to replace just the amount of time we spend solving operational problems and dealing with these types of challenges and combat. Its not something we should be overly reliant upon because a lot of the problems are going to be new and different, but i think in how to solve operational problems and bring the joint force together to do that, we have a lot of ability to d at the same time we need to be realistic that there are a lot of aspects of how china is going to develop and use these technologies that could get a leg up over us when it comes to scale and Data Collection and retention. Certainly when it comes to being shall we say less interested in some of the ethical concerns and i think we spend a lot of time rightly focused on that when we have a government thats founded on the distrust of its own people there will be a lot more willingness to delegate these type of decisions to autonomous machines. So i think it is going to be longterm competition where we will have to look for areas of advantage. We may not always be the leader but the question is how quickly can we bring these technologies in and integrate them to make them operationally relevant. I think that is something we have done quite well in recent years, but this is a very different type of challenge and we need to be mindful of the fact that much of what we have learned may not all be transferable to this Great Power Competition here. One interesting thing that comes out of the way you were describing how the systems or Autonomous Systems might get used and played out was that if you are going to use the Unmanned Systems to get a decision advantage meaning to be able to operate faster, operate faster in time and faster by operating at scaled if you can speed up the decision cycle and improve its quality and hopefully creating a perception and confusion on the side then it seems like one thing to rely on his Mission Command but the idea that a u. S. Force has been trained in such a way that they are willing to improvise and use their own initiatives when the communications are lost, they are going to accept tactics that might not ordinarily be what they returned to based on doctrine so it seems like the willingness to take advantage of their own initiative and ability to improvise might be an advantage if you look at the decision centric site where youve are having not a user on under command to come up with a tactic in the absence of a planning or some higher direction. That might be a competitive advantage as well. The United States military will have to relearn about this a lot as well. To your point, we are much better positioned to do that and an adversary that is topdown and disorders inherent distrust in the lower ranks. I think that is 100 kind of an advantage that we have that something that they also have to relearn after 20 years where we certainly practiced a lot of Mission Command in a lot of places but it wasnt necessarily the way that theyve restructured. Host that brings me to the point a lot of people would ask. How do we make this transition . We discussed that you dont have to transition to the robot force of Autonomous Systems right away. It could be an element of the force that gets built up over time and even a 10 contribution to the unmanned or Autonomous Systems is different in your operational outcome. But how do we other than going back to defense contractors and saying building a bunch of Unmanned Systems, are there better ways that the dod could try to take advantage of this enormous Industrial Base in the United States to try to yield the Unmanned Systems and ai command control management tools more quickly than it would if it goes through the normal acquisition pipeline . This is the 64 milliondollar question. Its certainly one thing to talk about all this. I think the much harder challenge is how to do it. That was something that hit hard for me and was on the opening and in the course of doing the book how so many of the things they are saying are things we have said over the past 20 to 30 years. The centric warfare rings true and is very similar to many of the things being said and written out. You have to ask why did we fail to do so many of the things that we said were important for so many years. Part of that i think is we havent gotten the incentives right and that was kind of a main emphasis they put in the book. Im a big believer in incentives and i think to a large extent we have gotten exactly what we paid for. I think the way you begin to change that is you have to focus on the actual things you are trying to buy. Im a big baseball fan. Big fan of shifting where we measure teen outcomes rather than player input. I think in much the same way, getting into a position where we are actually competing out the things we are trying to do measure on the outcomes we are trying to achieve so that there is an actual processing and kind of a repetitive process every year with a certain amount of money held in reserve kind of at the beginning of the year by the Senior Leaders of the department of defense, congress and supports to say we are trying to sort of reduced the time to close the two chains and enhance the decisionmaking advantage of the u. S. Forces. We need to measure against the problems of the forces are going to have to confront. We have to get away from these words like command and control or multidomain operations where they cawe can have an informed e about what they would be that you have to boil them down to the specific military problems that you will have to solve under the conditions you have to solve them. Again it is real world adversaries with and not generalized editors. If you begin competing that out of every year, you have an ability to see what is performing best and i think that is the best way to navigate this transition where initially much of the force is going to be our legacy force and then the question is going to be a how can the technologies enable that to be faster to scaled more significantly and there will be the question of how Technology Enables the current obligations and current force. And eventually you start to see areas where the technologies and capabilities both replace legacy systems because they are capable of performing better as a part of that integrated Battle Network that unles but unless ye measuring the thing you are trying to do, then its just sort of everyman for himself and it doesnt really get you the kind of datadriven output that you want to you can direct what is going to be a decreasing amount of resources. Then to create the Defense Industry to understand if they put their own money towards solving these problems, they have a path to getting into to have a meritbased competition where if they go out and find a new Battle Management system or a aircraft or weapon, there is actually the prospect o the department of defense has a mechanism and congress has a mechanism and by the way if someone shows up with a better capability than you this year, dont worry because he will have the opportunity to come back next year. This wont work for everything. You are going to be limited with larger more capital intensive program like aircraft carriers and the like but there should be more attempt at the frontend and constant operational content to determine what are the systems we should be putting resources and man scaling down pretty considerably so that again, you begin to see that the department of defense is moving money towards the things they actually say are important, and i think thats the thing i look at and certainly from my time on the hill that Senior Leaders and senior members of congress say its interesting what they find money on is going to move the needle in terms of programmatic choices and Investment Choices on the part of the private industry and the investment community. Host when his requirements, they build requirements using a System Engineering approach where it determines how it thinks it is going to be configured in the future and it determines that it thinks the future scenarios are going to look like and then they do a essentially an analysis to figure out the capability gaps, given the assumption followed the thread looks like and the assumptions for what they available courses will look like in 20 years from now. So theres a bunch of assumptions written into it but its to come up with a point solution. What you are talking about is different. Its not a point solution thats more of a bottomup attempt to improve Mission Outcome to establish missions that we think are important and heres outcomes we want to have happen and a range of environments in which those outcomes are needed comes to china, the south china sea, baltic or something. Guest that is exactly right. You said it very well. Unless they are actually focusing on kind of the joint outcome that we are trying to achieve, w we will end up buyina bunch of things that may or may not achieve those outcomes and i think part of my problem in the requirements process, closedoublequote is the hubris that is weak into its 30 years postcold war. But i dont think that is going to hold up for us in the future. If i had to let my own requirements i had the best flip phone in america right now. Weve got to get beyond this idea that a citizen to defend the defense establishment ar orn the department of defense there are no good. I would be much more interested in every year being able to say i have to be able to defend forward bases for the large quantities and incoming weapons. I dont care how i do that, the question is can we field a better solution that reduces the likelihood of a. Focusing on the outcome and the capability to come together as the things that are going to drive the expensive resources expense of resources. But it will probably require that, to back. And just iterating the nuts of every year some of his understanding of whatever wins is going to get covered and we will come back and figure out if theres a way to do thi better s next year and its going to significantly move to the money that we are spending. That raises the question of intellectual Property Rights and how we define software so that companies can have that opportunity you will need to introduce your capability and you want to incentivize the companies to do this but not to give up in the process of computing in this effort to try to provide systems for the u. S. Government. So theres lots of opportunities to try to create an environment where a mother fighting on a regular basis. Have you been thinking about this . In terms of bringing in other peoples systempeoples systems o integrate those with your own. This is one of the problems we are going to have to solve. The department is right to criticize industry and criticize itself. For too often in recent years, kind of becoming beholden to proprietary solutions for the ministries whether theyve been locked in black boxes and on capable of sort of updating themselves and moving u at the Speed Technology is allowing them to come of it is true and valid. My concern is that the backlash is going to lead toward the belief that it should be government owned as if we would say our experience has been a downer so they are going to build their own highperformance aircraft and so on. It is just nonsense. How do they ensure that you do have a sort of openness scalability in the future for a certain extent those are things the government will have to define but also allow the industry to become entrepreneurial and creative about how they bring the solutions to their. Otheir. The way we saw this play out you had a handful of major movers get together and figure out the standards and then sort of iteratively to improve as we go which is why i have an Apple Computer right now that i think is running a google application while im writing microsoft word documents. Nobody mandated that have to be so. Its creating the incentives for people who play together in a way that people can develop applications on top of it. These new things can be developed to know exactly what the future is going to look like a it hasnt worked well for us and its only going to get worse if we keep trying to do that in the future. Its mostly trying to determine what are the things the government has to define two turn industry and the private sector loose on these problems in a way that you get the best capability and rapidly evolving capability at the end of the day can still have confidence. It is totally doable. These are things the United States military are doing everyday. For no reason we can do this in defense and yet we are two years behind where the commercial system intersects. To kind of close out here, to incentivize the industry and also the financial perspective we can make it easier for the new players to enter the military problems that they are used to getting return to support the extra terms and if you are getting 10 return, thats probably not a very Successful Use of money for the companies that are in that world are going to have difficulties to compete for the dod dollars. Is there a way that the dod or the government can better incentivize the companies that are using the commercial returns on the higher side . Guest i think the reality is working in the defense space, you will not get their return a commercial startup is going to get so i think to be certain extent, theres going to need to be kind of a baseline set of expectations that maybe you can do better than the two or 3 of the sort of traditional industry returning, but youre not going to get to the 20 returns the commercial software is going to get. They need to get out of this mentality that they so value cost certainty and controlling the industry that they would rather pay a billion dollars for something 400 million getting 20 profit. At the end of the day we need to be a line towards what is important here. But from the standpoint of creating those incentives, you will see a lot more companies and engineers and technologists and inventors interested in being involved in the defense of the government is buying the technology that they say is important that the companies and founders and investors want to build. They overthink a lot of this from the standpoint of why is Silicon Valley or the community not doing more and i think a lot of it boils down to if you are buying and deploying the Technology Scale you would see more engineers who thought they could make a successful career and Companies Getting founded and a lot more private investment going into modernized the National Defense as opposed to optimizing advertising algorithms. Theres a degree of supply and demand here and the government needs to create a demand. And i think that if they do is whaifwe put money behind what is important and you would slowly but significantly see the industry respond. Part of the thing i raised in the book you look at these earlier attempts at aircraft weapons and things struggling for years and they get canceled prematurely it doesnt send a strong tradition of that they should be prioritizing this in their portfolio and the traditional offerings are getting funded at a considerably larger increments. Absolutely. Thank you for being with us today. Christian brose most recent book the kill chain defending america and future of the hightech worker available right now im sure many places in addition to amazon which is where i got my copy. Thank you for being with us today and good luck on the book. Guest thanks for having me and for everything you are doing. It is a pleasure to chat with you and i hope as you saw in the book there is a lot of it that has your fingerprints all over it. I will give you credit where credit is due and take blame for the things i got from that its a pleasure and i appreciate the opportunity. Host its great having you on. Thank you for being with us today. For the hudson institute, signing out. Stay safe. Thanks. Im the codirector of the center for international studies. We are honored to have William Perry and tom
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.