hosted this 90-minute event. now it's a pleasure to introduce my colleague and friend, paul springer, who is a senior fellow of the foreign policy research institute, but also from his day job at the air command and staff college in alabama. he also taught at west point. he's the author of many books and many coming out on cyber war, military robotics, the history of prisoners of war and a load of other topics. he's been on cnn, npr, history channel, discovery channel, national geographic channel, and he's one of our most popular speakers. we've asked him to speak on military affairs, which will give you a quick survey of military history from the 13th century, all the way up to today all in an hour, so i'm sure you will enjoy. please welcome paul springer. [ applause ] good morning. >> good morning. >> i'd like to extend a thank you to dale and allen, from the new york historical society and the foreign policy research institute, both wonderful organizations that i support and love working with and it's a great opportunity to come speak to all of you today. we'll see if i can leave you terrified for the rest of the weekend with some military robotics information for you here. but i'm a historian and that means i have to back up way too far to tell you the very beginning of the story. before i really get rolling, because i work for the air force, don't reworry about readg the small discloser. these are not my views of the air force or department of defense, these are not the views of the u.s. government. they are solely mine unless you really liked them, in which everybody else can take credit, too. all right. this is the only slide i'm going to throw at you that has an enormous amount of text and i don't expect to you read it, nor am i going to read it to you, but the point to this entire lecture, if you walk away with nothing else, my fundamental argument is that the world right now is in the middle of what's called a ref luvolution in mili affairs and that is going to change virtually every aspect the way human conflicts are pop you' populgated and change how we go to war and how we behave when we're in a war, all due to technological changes on the verbal verge of upsetting all human society. in the end there will be some countries that ad opted to new changes that take the technology and know how to use it, and these will be haves and have-nots when it comes to the conflict. there is an enormous conflict. if you have revolution change in the way conflict is occurring, it becomes possible to dominate your rivals in a very short period of time. the originator of the term, revolution and military affairs was nikoli argokoff. it slightly pains me to give credit to a soviet thinker, but he had a really great idea, and his idea was there are times where fundamental changes occur and they occur so rapidly that they essentially make everything that has gone before completely obsolete. it is my contention that is occurring before our very eyes. let me give you an example people are probably more familiar with. if you go back to the middle ages, this is what characterized war, castles and moats, and heavily armored knights and if you wanted to capture something, that was an undertaking that would take you months of siege craft unless you were somehow lucky enough to find them with the gates conveniently opened, the walls unmanned, the moat trained. as you can see each one of those was a major undertaking that really required all of the resources and all of the time of an entire campaign season. this is what characterized war in that time period. however, when gun powder became the norm in europe, it became possible to batter down the defenses of a tall, high-walled castle from a safe distance and the attacker had the advantage, because after all, the castle in its defenders could not leave their position while the attackers had a certain degree of mobility, could choose where to fight, could choose when to fight, and suddenly, being inside a castle was a disadvantage because you became an obvious target. as a result, here are some successful sieges and you'll notice we're still in the 15th century. but the siege duration is suddenly measured in days, rather than being a multimonth undertaking with no guarantee of success. but the situation didn't replain stable. gun powder had certainly changed the approach to warfare, but it also was possible to resign your fortifications to make them less vulnerable to gunfire and became possible to once again defend a static position. this is what one of those fortifications looked like in the 1600s, full of geometric designs, and it could not be approached on any side without the attackers coming under heavy fire from multiple angels from the defenders. the result, we're back up to really long sieges. and these are the sieges that actually succeeded. the vast majority of siege attempts in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were doomed to failure. it became once again a major undertaking and warfare shifted back to a static approach. but as you might imagine, those who had not adopted gun powder, who had not changed to meet the new situation, found themselves quickly overwhelmed. it became impossible for an army that did not use gun powder to withstand one that we wouldield firearms f. siege craft became almost impossible, it guaranteed you were going to have some battles from static positions and could not build a 40 kag fortification and sometimes armies were going to meet in the field. reloading a firearm in the 16th century could take two minutes and the effective range of a firearm was only about 50 meters. now i'm not exactly, shall we say a paragon of physical fitness, but even i can cross 50 meters in under two minutes. i can crawl 50 meters in under two minutes, which means if you're using firearms, and you shoot and miss, there is a reasonable chance that i'm going to run across the field and hit you with something really sharp or something really heavy. as a result, we get mixed formations. this is the spanish tercio. it comprises musketeers on the outside, and pikemen in the center. the musketeers open fire after they shoot, the pikemen come to the outside to protect them while they reload t. made it impossible for a calvary charge to over whelm a group of musketeers. it was very unwielding, and swept everything on the battlefield because it was infinitely better than anything else someone had come up with to that time to use firearms in the field. and it teaches us something. it teaches us that sometimes it's not the technology that matters, it's being the first one that figures out how to utilize it effectively, and that's what's going on here. the spanish wind up using the tercio to become the dominant land pour in if europe, but nothing lasts forever. this is one of the rare times where you're going to hear a historian talk to you about swedish military dominance. it's not really what they're particularly known for. but it was the swedes that figured out how to counter the tercio. they realized it was very un-wieldy because everybody was getting in each other's way, it was hard to move around. you could have thousands of troops within the hearing of one person who is screaming to be heard of them moving around, and maybe the pikes could protect the musketeers without standing amongst the musketeers. the idea was called the brigade, and when the brigade swept on the to battlefields of europe, under gastavus adolfus, is drove the tercio from the field. he entered the 30 years war knowing that it was one of enormous carnage, but he had this new idea that for a brief period, allowed the swedes to turn the tied of a war that had effectively engulfed the entire european continent, and this thing was a bloody mess. as much as 25% of the european population died in that war. a much higher percentage than died during world war ii. so this tells us that these new forms of weaponry, even though they seemed very arkayichaeic t today could be extremely effective when used in mass f. we fast-forward a few centuries, we reach world war one. once again, gun powder is the dominant weapon of the era. the difference now of course, each individual wielding a machine gun like this can fire 600 runs per minute and sustain that rate of fire as long as they have bullets, and they can fire relatively accurately for a distance of up to two miles. i cannot cross two miles in under two minutes. there's no way i'm going to be able to do it with a couple thousand bullets flying at me. and this caused warfare to once again become very static, to become very position-oriented, to for all spents and purposein, stagnate. world war 1 at the time was the bloodiest in history. millions of people died and there was a significant movement around the world to say, oh, well, we're never going to do that again. at one point leading nations attempted to ban the practice of warfare which did not last very long, though technically the united states has never repealed the kelon breon pact, where we shore we wouldn't use that as policy. a lot of which came out as a result of this gun powder revolution. so you had very prominent thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries that effectively said, there are limits to what you can do in warfare. there are things not septemberabacceptable behavior. you should not poison your billet before firing them at someone. you shouldn't deliberately kill someone, or shouldn't deliberately spread disease among yourenmes unless your objective is the complete and thor utter annihilation of your a opponent, annihilation is bad. so even though we're innovating these new technological ideas, we're building these new concepts, at the same time we're saying there's some things you just don't do. you don't invent weapons that are designed to mamim. you accept the enemy's offer, and becomes the thing if there are specific limits. these thinkers consider when is it acceptable to go to war and they come to the conclugsion there are times warfare is an acceptable policy option. obviously you have the right to defend yourself, to defend your territory, but there are other circumstances in which warfare is also an acceptable alternative to these thinkers. now as we move forward into the 20th century, after world war ii, there was a significant movement once again to never allow a conflict like that to happen. and when the united nations charter was written, a key component of the charter was that member states of the united nations shall not make war upon one another. if you violate that norm, the expectation is that all of the other member states will come to the aid of the victim. as you-all know, it hasn't always worked out that way in practice. but there is an enormous body of international law governing what you can and cannot do in war. most of it is in capsulated in the geneva conventions, in this terms of the ultimate warfare in terms of what cannot and who cannot participate and the geneva conventions make that clear. you must bear arms openly. you're not allowed to make war by pulling it out, attacking the enemy and hiding it again. two you must wear some form of uniform or recognizable device t. may be the uniform of a country with a flag on it, or may be something as simple as the green head scarves plausible to hamas, so i know you are representing yourself as a combatant and you are expecting me to follow the rules of war. third, you must be part of an organization with a higher arc cal structure where the leadership is responsible for the behavior ofsubordinates. there has to be a command of control, someone that ultimately can be held responsible for the behavior of troops in the field. and fourth, you must follow the laws of war. if you don't follow the laws of war, you cannot claim their protections in any form of combat. now why does this matter? well, the united states is currently engaged in a fight. we're fighting the islamic state. we're fighting al-qaeda, we're fighting terrorism as a concept and the organizations with which we are in conflict do not bear arms openly, do not wear a recognizable uniform, do not have a command structure where the leadership is held accountable for the behavior of subordinates and certainly do not follow the laws of war. so they're outside of our trade i gue igzal understanding, and who is protected by the laws of war, and if the united states and its allies choose to extend additional privileges, such as accepting surrenderers accepting surrendererurrenders, restraining ourselves, that is our option. but we really effectively have to follow the rules of war even though we're facing an enemy that doesn't and that can be an incredibly frustrating situation as this cartoon illustrates. we have to follow the rules of war for one fundamental reason. if we don't follow the laws of war, then the laws themselves become irrelevant and the enyem we are currently facing has its primary goal, the destruction of the existing world order. you can conceive of the islamic state and alki-qaeda as a glob sale insurgency. its goal is to not bring down individual governments. its goal is to destroy the entire international system. it's time to pull down this system that we have with the united nations where there are nations that are considered haves, and nations that are considered have-notes and none of the haves resemble the organizations pushing it down. consider the permanent members of the un security council as the ultimate international relations tool. a veto over u.n. presideuse of e and those are the united states, russia, britain, france and china none of them are muslim, none of them are in the mid eastern region. so imagine if you will if we were to redesign the permanent security council, if we were to choose new membership, would you put the same five countries in this there? not on the basis of economics you wouldn't, not on the basis of population size. probably not on the basis of geograp geography. now, imagine the islamic state achieves everything that it claims to be pushing for. it creates a pan-islamic caliphate that stretches from north africa all the way to the pacific ocean. would they have cause to claim membership in this most elite of fraterniti fraternities? they might. or, they might instead choose to simply pull down the system because they believe that chaos and anarchy will more effectively serve their end goals. so that's our starting point here. now when it comes to 21st century conflict, and military robotics, which is the heart of what i want to discuss for you today, i need to establish a few definitions for you first. the media is a big fan of the term "drone," and drone has a specific meaning. a drone is a pre-programmed machine. it does whatever it's told to do. it doesn't think, it doesn't react to its environment t doesn't choose from a host of different options. it simply does what it's told. you preprogram a route t fliers the route. it's not a thinking machine and a drone, by definition, is not been driven by any other intelligence. you fire a cruise missile, it flies off. you don't control it on its route. you might have the ability to stop it to abort its mission, but there's no intelligence guiding its actions. it's already been done. a robotics system, a robotics system incorporates some degree of the ability to sense in an environment and make decisions on the basis of it. you're probably familiar with a predator. a predator is being flown by a human operator, but it has some functions it performs automatically on its own, which makes flying the system a lot easier. it does not choose to kill. a human being chooses to fire a missile from a predator. it does not choose where it will fly. a human being choose where is it will fly. but it does some things on its own. some of these other devices here, this is called a pack bot. it has become most well-known as an explosive ordinance disposal robot and allows you to avoid putting humans in the worst of harms way. it does not disarm bombs on its own. it gets close to the bomb and tells us what to do, in c ecrey useful if you're trying to reduce destruction . it gets rendered into smaller pieces. on the right, this is a little more terrifying. this is the larger uglier cousin. it's called a talon . it weighs about 200 pounds. this thing is not driving itself around and shooting off guns and causing chaos wherever it goes. there is an operator that is driving it from a distance using a camera. as you can see, this thing can be armed. you can put rocket launchers, you can put grenade launchers, you can put machine guns on it, and it doesn't suffer from a lot of the problems that trigger inaccuracy in humans while using weaponry. it doesn't have a pulse. it doesn't breathe. it instantly calculates the wind. it has a laser range finder. it doesn't care what it's shooting at. it doesn't feel bad if it's shooting at a house full of children. it just does what it's told. now there's human operator telling it to do that, but the human is a little further away from the intimacy of killing. a true robot, as you can see i've used a lot of pop culture references here. and the reason why is for all intents and purposes, robots don't exist yet, not in the way the military means when it uses the term "robot." it makes decisions on what it's going to do on the basis of the environment it senses. and right now there are no weapons that are true robots in the classical sense wondering around and causing headaches for everyone. they don't exist yet. but they are on the immediate horizon, and i'm going to show you some examples of how close we're getting and what we could do if we chose to when it comes to fielding this type of device. final definition, a siborg, a human, or any other kind of critter, but usually a human that has incorporated robotic elements into themselves, usually as a form of enhancement. rush limbough is a siborg. he has an implant that has restored hearing, which makes him not deaf, which is a problem for a radio host. there are other ciborgs out there. you may be surprised some of the things we can do now with mind-controlled implants. artificial intelligents. artificial intelligents is the notion you could create a machine that would be capable of processing information in the same fashion as a human. to a certain extent, artificial intelligence is a red herring. there's not a particularly compelling reason to create something that's artificially spell gen intelligent. we can design them. there's not a particularly compelling reason to produce a humanoid robot with all the fra frailties and weaknesses. if i was designing the next human being, this is not the shape i would choose. if i was designing this human being, this isn't the shape i would choose either. i'm a very picky guy apparently. now, allen touring right here was a british crypt analyst during world war ii, and deposited now the touring test. tourings tourings' idea was if you could query a human being where the sound of it would not tell you which was which, so if you were using a keyboard to ask it questions, you could determine whether you had created artificial intelligence by having a human being question the machine and other humans and if they couldn't determine which was which, you would have created artificial intelligence, according to touring. now, microsoft a few weeks ago thought, let's run a little experiment. they created an artificial intelligence and what they did was they created a twitter account and turned it over to a computer and hypothetically, they programmed this computer to act the way that microsoft thinks a 15-year-old girl would act on a twitter account. within 24 hours, this thing was tweeting racist responses, essentially it had been trained by the internet in all of the horrific things that internet can bring to life and microsoft quickly shut it down, didn't know 15-year-olds were quite that racist, let's try again. about a week later, they brought it back out, this time it took six hours before it was announcing "lhitler was right." so microsoft shut that down. however there were other companies that had done better. maybe you're familiar with a machine called watson, to play jeopardy against human opponents, and playing jeopardy requires a lot more than an enormous knowledge of trivia, because most of the questions are written in such a way they require abstract reasoning. they require you to think through in ways that previous to now, only humans could do. watson won the game against the best jeopardy champion that had ever played. this came as a major shock to us. now, we had a machine that appeared to be capable of very quickly reasoning through very challenging questions. but what do you do with a machine like that? what's the practical use of something like watson? it turns out the thing is phenomenally helpful in the medical field. watson has been built by ibm and copies of it turned over to some major medical centers. and what we're finding is, this machine can read virtually every medical research item that has ever been produced in every language. and as a result, it's able to make conclusions that would never occur to a human doctor. so your left big toeish itches you taste peanut butter in your mouth, you have liver cancer. but watson takes these strange symptoms, puts them together and spits out what it thinks is the most likely answer. and what it's doing is it's looking in very obscure medical journals for the individual strange cases that get written up by doctors, that often resulted in the death of a patient. they did an autopsy and said, itchy big toe, and peanut butter in the top of their mouth, clearly that was liver cans terturte cancer is turns out. this is revolutioning our approach to medicine and that could be a wonderful innovation. we're going to see some dark sides coming up in just a moment, as well. now, when it comes to military robotics and artificial intelligence, there is some things that machines do infin e infinitely better than humans do. feel free to run a race with just a basic calculator and see when you're fast are than little on arithmetic. it is a far-harder process to do things like immediate calculations of ballistic tables and determine whether or not what might be a threat. and that's what these devices are down here at the bottom. you may be familiar with the patriot missile system, an air defense system. you may not know that it has a fully all autonomous zone. it will fire on anything that it perceives as a threat. hopefully you have correctly e predefined what it should consider a threat. unfortunately, on a number of occasions, patriot missile batteries have opened up on coalition aircraft fighting on the same side as the united states, and on at least two occasions, they have opened fire on american military aircraft despite the fact those american aircraft were actually using a transponder code that should have told it, did not shoot at me, i'm an american. so the systems don't always work perfectly, but when it comes to something like air defense, sometimes you have to accept the possibility of failure, because it's too dangerous not to turn on the system. in the center here, this is called a close-end-weapon system, a radar-guided, very powerful machine gun. it is used as the last line of defense on american naval vessels and has been used as such for more than 30 years. if somebody shoots a missile at one of our ships, this thing is the last chance to shoot that missile down before it hits our ship and potentially sinks it. it might kill thousands of lives if it strikes an aircraft warier. you're willing to use this in full autonomous mode to save lots of lives and over the ocean so the possibility of collateral damages relatively low. in this regard, alltutonomy is r best chance to save sailors so it's perfectly acceptable to use this in autonomous mode. it's not acceptable to use it in autonomous mode where collateral damages infinitely likely. you're probably not willing to use this in the middle of new york city. you can only imagine what happens to every round that misses the missile and this thing can fire 6,000 rounds a minute. that is an awful lot of projectiles through the air. now, when it comes in to computerized warfare, we've seen some fundamental changes. in case you hadn't heard, israel doesn't always get along well with its neighbors and does not like the idea of any of its neighbors obtaining nuclear weapons. the israelis got word the irra k kwurks quis, and quietly worked out a dpeel with the saudis, that allowed them to fly over saudi aerospa air space, and attacked over ausorak and ended the iraq nuclear program and made it clear the israelis would launch a strike any time they were close to achieving a weapons capability. in 2007, the israelis got wind the syrians built a new prong lam. th . th they didn't want to ptolerate a nuclear program with a hostile neighbor, but the syrians had purchased a first-rate defense system and the israelis were not confident their aircraft could penetrate syrian air space, and retreat back to israel without paying enormous cost. so the israelis inserted a comma commando team, managed to dig up a portion of the fiber optic network controlling the radar sites that controlled their air defense network and uploaded a virus, and they have ruvirus ca radars to be consisted it was a nice placid night. the first syrians had was the explosions striking the nuclear program and essentially wiping it out. this is what cyber had enabled the israelis to do. it worked with their kinetic platforms to destroy major threat. but if we fast ford a few years you may have heard of stucksnet, a virus that required, at the minimum, the resources of a nation in order to potentially create it. it used an incredibly sophisticated system in order to effectively seek out a very specific type of machine and that machine powers centrifuges that are used to separate uranium. somebody -- and nobody has taken credit for it yet -- but the leading candidates are the united states and israel. i'm not revealing any classified information. i don't know have a clue, whether it was united states or israel but they're the most likely because it was an iranian nuclear facility that had us so nervous. somebody wondered around the parking lot of that facility and dropped a couple of thumb drives, just dropped a couple flash drives, and somebody else came along and went, huh, flash drives. they picked it up, plugged it into a computer, tried to figure out who it belonged to, and the moment they did that they uploaded stucksnet into their otherwise divorced system and searched out the centrifuges and made a tiny change in their programming and caused the centrifuges to spin up and spin down, spin up, and spin down, and induced just enough vibration to cause the centrifuges to start to fail. the iranians weren't sure what was going on. they didn't know they weren't the victim of a seen acyber att. maybe this meant they didn't have the know how necessary to create a nuclear program t. really started to erode their confiden confidence, and weaken what they were doing. it wasn't until a couple years later when an antivirus firm located the existence of stucksnet, we allowed the centrifuges to fail. without committing a single act of war, somebody shut down the iranian nuclear program for about three years. at about the same time, somebody -- and it may have been the same somebody, i don't know -- started assassinating iranian nuclear scientists. that was a little bit more overt. a computer virus is one thing. shooting people is a little more obvious what you're up to. and i don't know who was responsible for that. i just know there's an awful lot of people that are not excited about the idea of an iranian nuclear program. and here we have this technology enabling the possibility of shutting it down without having to do the classic attack that would be caharacterized as an at of war. when it comes to military robotics, they are not new. you can go back almost 100 years to have a very rudimentary system, the kentering bug, also known as a flyingtory p torpedo airplane designed to have its engine shut off, which will cause it to dive on whatever target is beneath it. this was innovative by charles kettering, and never fielded in time for world war one, which is probably a good thing it didn't work very well, it was just as likely to come down on your own forces as it was to come down on your own enemy. on the verge of world war ii, the so fviets came up with a remotely driven tank. everything about the tank was normal expect it had no human beings inside of it. the human beings that controlled it sat in another dang a couple miles away and control today via radio signals they sent through line of sight. it didn't work very well. it was rather clunky, the vast majority of their teletanks, they had to destroy themselves, when the people they were finished realized they could climb up on top of the tele tank, and get a brand-new tarveg. t the germans are going to create the golliath, a vehicle designed to be driven underneath enemy tanks and detonated. think of it like a land mine that moves around. it's big vulnerability, and wire guided. if you cut the wire, it doesn't move anymore. the vast majority of their go i goliaths went unused. and the buzz bombs, these things proved to be fairly effective, much like the kettering bug, you have an airplane engine attached to a bomb. you launch it and hope you can target a city the size of london and have a reasonable chance of hitting the city. you cannot target a specific address and have any chance other than dumb luck of hitting it. a city the side of london suddenly faces a bombardment to where they have no response. when the british try to shoot down these particular items they discover they're a lot harder to shoot down than you would think and wind out the easiest way to take out a v-1, fly next to it, put your wing tip up to its wing tip and flip it over. thra that'll krauz cause it to crash. not the best idea to spend an afternoon. moving forward into at least my lifetime. there was used for artillery spotting, in particularly, the navy liked to use it since they fired projectiles 20 or more miles over distance. they could tell them how to adjust their fire. pretty effective, pretty easy to use. this is a target drone from the vietnam era. somebody came up with the brilliant idea you could put a television camera on it, fly over hostile space and no longer have to use human pilots on reconnaissance missions and started flying these things over china, since china was intervening in the vietnam war, we wanted to see what they were to. the which i need start shooting them down and can't figure out why they can never capture a pilot. apparently american pilots are really good at hide and seek. it's because there is no pilot, but there are an awful lot of these things on display in chinese museums as american fighter aircraft they shot down. this is kevin warwick, and in my opinion, a very creepy guy. kevin comes up with this idea and says i'm going to get a microchip implanted in my wrist and using that to measure the electrical impulses of the human nervous system, to figure out what frequency, and whatta amperage, how the human body configures itself, and they decided they can let him do it to himself. he figures out which nerves in his wrist control which muscles in his hand. he then maps it to an artificial hand, which he is then able to control with his mind. he closes his hand into a fist, it closes into a fist. a mind-controlled prosthetic 16 years ago. that's kind of neat. creepy is when kevin's wife has a similar microchip implanted into her wrist and they're able to control each other's hands with their own minds. and that was almost two decades ago. so you can imagine where this is going. getting close to the modern era here. the repa is a much more powerful version of the predator. instead of two missiles, it can carry up to 14. this man right here has a cyber nettic hand, which is controlled by his mind. it has since been implanted on to his arm. he is capable of picking up an egg with one hand, not his how many an hand, and cracking it. i can't do that. i have two perfectly good hands, make a mess every time i try. but this guy has such good fine motor control, and it has a force feedback system, which means he can close his eyes and tell you when he's touching something and what it feels like, all through the signals going back to his mind. the israelis took our patriot missile system and built iron dome, a much larger, much more sophisticated system capable of tracking inbound projectiles, rockets and missiles and choosing whether or not to shoot them down . it doesn't just engage everything ahead. instead, it calculates, where is that going to come down, is it a popular area, in which case i should intersept, or is it unpopulat unpopulated, and i can let it fly off into nowhere, let it strike where it's going to be perfectly safe. this has massively reduced the number of casualties the israelis are facing out of gaza and the northern regions from southern lebanon. big dog, this is from boston dynamics. this company essentially has built a robotic mule. it can carry 300 pounds of gear and move at the same speed as a human on foot and move up slopes of up to 30 degrees, which i assure you is a very high slope t. c it can walk on ice and be programmed to follow a human being and will follow them wherever they go. the idea is, american troops that are dismounded moving through urban areas tend to be loaded down with up to 100 pounds of gear. it would be incredibly useful if they could off load that to some form of machine they could assume could keep up with them, that's the idea, and finally the atlas robot. the atlas robot is designed to be able to go into dangerous locations. the first thing we saw this into action, it went into the fukashima reactor in japan. and wound up destroying the robot, but that's much better alternative. the radiation levels are so high, it would have killed anybody to see what was going on. this machine is designed to be able to go where humans go. it's one of the rare cases where you actually want the machine to have roughly the same humanoid design so that it could use theoretically the same types of vehicles and it could move in the same areas. now in case you're wondering, the c-ram, this is the close version of that close-end weapons system. we put this into bases in iraq that were being shelled by artillery and nottmortar fire. it is capable of locating projectiles as far as 60 meters. the dod, we like to think of ourselves as environmentally friendly, and when those projectiles come down, they're designed to do no collateral damage and not to harm the environment. so no more depleted uranium being thrown around. it's nice, right? it's because we care. okay. where we're is wearing a mind control exo skeleton that allows him to walk and move. he's not moving at normal human speed. it is a heck a lot better than the alternatives. this individual is wearing a leg, that is controlled by his mind and allows him to move in regular walking speed. research was highly advanced thanks to all the casualties we were taking from explosive devices in iraq. there is awfully a lot of americans and service personnel lost a limb and the dod is putting in research and giving a better quality of life to our people. the direction we are going with those things are full awe taxono autonomy. that starts to make me nervous. >> you can program those things to engage in human target without human interventions. you can equip them with effective lyanly an audio detec system that picks up the sound of gunfire and pivots to return fire. if you have a problem with snipers in the urban area, you can deploy some of these. if the sniper takes a shot, you have the ability to immediately shoot back on the sniper's position. on the one hand, this is a good thing. it rebduces coalition casualtie. on the other hand, it is not going to take very long. this is a way they're going to potentially take advantage of our ethics and morality and our superior technology. a few years ago, a facial recognition system came out. that camera compares up to 30 million faces in a minute and it can do so in high angle profile. about 20 years ago, the u.s. air force came up with the low cast system. this was designed over a battlefield and looking for targets and firing over human interventions. i want you to take a moment to take a look at what happens if you pair it together. you fire it and it loiters over a city for up to four hours looking for the individual who he is pictures you uploaded and it starts to fire small missiles. when it runs out small missiles, it crashes itself. these are the things that's starting to keep me awake at night. where we are going? >> swarms all the rage. you can have complex behavior out of very simple devices. the defense of research project agency came out of what's called a center box. these are small ground robots that have simple programming. number one, move around and look around and number two, stay away from other robots and number three, report back to what you see. >> simple program. they are capable of mapping the city of a size of new york of identify every building and street and just a hundred of robots in a matter of two weeks. all their doing is wandering around and mapping as they go. this is assuming they are not running over by angry new yorkers, but you know the principles. if it is just an empty city, they can map it quickly. >> this is where we are going in terms of shooting and not thinking about anymore. >> one of the problem for us is who's responsible? >> if this thing makes a strike on a target that we consider to be illegal, who do you blame? >> you cannot punish a rob robor violating the rule of law. you cannot punish a robot. in theory you can punish the commander or whoever wrote the software for it. the history of mill industitary prosecution would indicate that's not going to happen. william kally who was responsible for the deaths of 400 millions, his punishment was six months house arrest. what are the chances if we hold somebody responsible and what are the chances that we write it off as a malfunction in unfortunate situations. this one is going to come from the news and you are familiar with this individual. not a pleasant individual. alocke was born in the united states and he became radicalized and became the leader of al-qaida and aribia peninsula. >> some of his known associates include hassa inclu include nindal hassan. she was associated with three of the 9/11 attackers and a 15-year-old boy who tried to detonate a car bomb at a christmas tree lighting ceremony in portland oregon. >> he was a busy guy. he spent a lot of time recruiting individuals for what he saw is the essential fight against the west against the united states. >> his last few years of his life are spent in hiding. he's on the run. he's living in yemen and he knows that he's been placed on the united states designated targeted kill list. effectively, the list that's maintained by the treasury department that is the kill or capture but heavy emphasis on kill list. >> as a u.s. citizen thinks that he ought to be constitutional protection. he has effectively been judged and sentenced to execution without a criminal trial. his father sues a federal court to get him taken off the list on the ground that he's an american citizens and that he's not done anything that's technically against the law. it is a gray area whether or not what he did, technically violated u.s. law, something the court will probably decide. the case gets thrown out because photojournali his father does not have a legal standing to bring that case into a court of law. only him himself can file the lawsuit to get himself off the list. of course, filing that lawsuit would require him to come back to the united states, to file that lawsuit. which he's not willing to do. so he made his peace and living on the run. she knows he's being stalked. on a number of occasions, he's killed by american, remotely piloted aircraft. it turns out he swapped vehicles with a couple of al-qaida operatives and he managed to escape. on the 14th of october, 2011, another american and him and some shown here were killed by a predator firing missiles. to a center extent, i am okay with that. i am not sad that he's not part of this earth anymore. however, the precedent had me a little bit nervous because at least in theory, article 3 of the u.s. constitution defines tree so treason. was he guilty of treason? >> i would say he was. was he given a trial to prove that fact? no, he was not. the executive branch made the decision they would execute him at the first opportunity regardless of his citizen status. it would be harder to get him on a cell phone than to put him on the kill list than the wiretap. >> with him being put on the list did not. moving further. the 5th amendment tells us you cannot be held for capitol crime without an indictment of a grand jury. the 6th amendment says that trial needs to be speedy and public. you are allowed to confront the witnesses against you and you have the right to assistance to council. none of the case is true. >> at wartime, there is a gray area. killing him probably save american lives. but, there is a kicker to the story. >> that's his teenage son, abdul ramen. he's living in his father and he hears a rumor of where his father might be. being a teenager, he's 16-year-old and he's impulsive. he decides he's going to run away from home and hop on a bus and goes to he is town where he heard his father is living and he's going to find his dad. what he does not know is that his father had been killed two weeks before. and, he was not even the town the kid thought his father would be in. he heads off. his grandparents wake up and left them a note that says i am gone off to find my father. i am sorry but i have to do this. they call ahead to the town that the kid is headed to where hay had some relatives. >> he's going to go look for his father and can you pick him up at the bus station and hold onto him for a few days and i got to get off from work and etcetera and etc. >> he spends a few days and wandering around town. the last day before he was supposed to board a bus and go back home and sitting wiat a coffee shop when a hell fire missile strike and it kills them all. the family is not able to distinguish the remains and they wound up having to build all seven of them. the families protested. why did you kill our grandsons. the federal response was, this man was a 21-year-old al-qaida operative who was actively planning operations against the united states to which the family says no, he was not. he was a teenager, 16-year-old, born in denver. he was not an al-qaida operative. look at his facebook profile. he's showing pictures of all his life, he's not radicalized. you killed him because of who his father was. the government came back and said well, actually, we didn't kill him. we killed the guy next to him and he just happens to sit next to the wrong person. we actually camed aimed at the making person. the cia had that bomb maker under surveillance at the same time and he was in egypt. he was not in yemen. the government had not commented since on this particular case. i don't think they will. there is not anything good you can say about this particular incident. it is indicative of a lot of our decision making in the 21st century. robotics make us feel that we can wage war of pi am -- militay robotics are making us more likely to go to war. they don't mean that we can fight war. the reason why is the enemy does not sit there and take the punishment reign down from robots. they cannot shoot down those robots and even if they could, it would not be satisfies. th they look for other targets. rather the organizations that were targeting with these devices tend to end whether it is personnels or tourists that happen to be at the wrong place and at the wrong time. >> they strike back and leading car bombs in crowded area. they don't just absorb the punishment and they won't follow the rules. my argument is not we should give up military robotics. we do need to think about where it is we are trying to go. and what it is we are trying to produce. last we choose are the worse possible scenario. thank you for your kind attention. i appreciate the afternoon. [ applause ] i believe if you would like to ask questions, there are microphones on the side so they can record you and remember exactly who you are forever. >> how much has the robotics cyber war responsible for the destruction of isis? al-qaida, both of those terrorist groups certainly retreated a great deal? it is a great call. al-qaida has more franchise now than it did in 2001. that maybe because its sanctuaries have been destroyed. it is difficult for al-qaeda to -- both of those organizations also received the allegiance of a lot of terrifying groups. most people don't realize that. the deadliest organization of the last ten years is boko haram. al shabaab, one of the deadliest organizatio organizations sworn its allegiance to al-qaida and now is being suede towards the islamic state. >> this is their opportunity to engage in operation that is are not. >> a lot of what we are doing now is man aircraft strikes. we are launching so many of them and they can carry ammunitions. i would argue that while geographically, the islamic state are pushed back and in terms of casualty, they are still dangerous. i am not sure if this is really eroding our power at all. >> do you think the russians were in violation of the rules o f laws and ukraine with the troops they sent in basically unrussian uniforms. >> yes, the so-called russian volunteers o patriotic russians. and there is something that the russians haves done recently so take for example of the case of georgia in 2008. the russians said there is an ethnic majority of russians and we have a responsibility to protect them from the evil over lord. in the ukraine it was the same argument. these people are russians and they speak russian and the ukraine government is mistreating them. according to the un charter, they don't have a right to invade. they do have a veto which means that the un wanted to try to pass some kind of resolution to send down or send forces. the russian can veto it. they're not required to explain their veto and there is metroplno mechanism. does that mean the international community will do anything about it? >> i seriously doubt it. trying to intervene that close to russia and far from our supply bases while we are engaged in so many conflicts is a different proposition and without america's leadership, the rest of the world is not going to do it. when artificial intelligence, what do you think is a contingency plan to have the kill button to terminate them. >> when our enemies used their robots against us, what do we do? >> no. >> oh, it is fair, hide in your basement or surrender. >> in theory, you can program robots to have a kill switch to shut down and in theory you can use something like an electronic host to fry their electronics but you can shield against those things, too. if you design killing robots for a lack of a better term and you make them powerful enough to engage in war, shoutting them down can be a bloody proposition. the last thing i want to see is a fight between humans and robots. >> i think that's a really bad idea. here is a tidbit for you. united states army is capped at 480,000 human troops. there is no limit to how many robots they can have. you can build a million or two million of those track robots and send it to conflicts. a lot of americans are saying oh, well as long as no american troops die. the allure of oh, wow, i can fight a war and not lose any of my own citizens could prove almost irresistible. >> a lot of robots i know come from the film "eye in the sky." how much of that isra realistic and how many of the political aspect of the ability -- because there is civilians that you did not want to kill. how much of that isra realistic. >> it is been a long time where i come to passage with it. you can program an entire area that's off limits. we have done it plenty of time before. we do that right now. we have areas that are considered for lack of a better term, kill boxes and areas that's off limits now or whether it is humans or robotic. hollywood does not care to be accurate when they are depicting robots. the reality is far less exciting in some ways and far more terrifying than others. i would not rely on hollywood too much to get the story exactly right. these are the same people that still have you watch a crime show and oh, keep the villains on the line so we can trace them. a telephone trace takes less than a second that's why 9/11 knows where you are when you call them. if the hollywood device works very well so it becomes a hollywood's trove. oh, it won't be bad, the new "star wars" movie with the little round robot where everybody loves him. >> american troops did that with a robot that looked like it was built out of erector set. it weighs about eight pounds and this big. they sent it forward, well, in any of these guys coming out of the shadow, we'll detonate this roli rolling land mind. i would not rely on hollywood to give you the best idea of what's going on out there. >> we have heard stories, i guess of operators who are in the military or under military control and have uniforms o on -- we heard about civilians and cia who pushed the kill button on those, too. >> so we have what's called title 10 which is the u.s. code that governs all military operations and all things military. i am a title 10 employee and i work for the united states air force. title 50 governs the intelligence force. back in the 1970s, president gerald ford issued what's referred to the intelligence ban. members of intelligence are not allowed to kill people. why? well, very publicly we have been caught doing it a few times. we also try to several times to kill castro. in one particular case, we laced his scuba suit with a bunch of lsd. >> so the point is no mor more -- every president rhenew that had until the 1990s when president created an exception for individuals who are leaders in foreign terrorist organizations as it is designated by the state department. the ban means you cannot kill forward but it is okay for intelligence officers to target al-qaeda or other groups that we have said you're terrorists and we don't like you and we'll put you on the list and give you a fair warning. when it comes to multi pilot aircra aircraft, the vast majority of aircraft particularly outside of afghanistan and iraq have not been carried out by uniform or u.s. personnel. some have been carried out by cia and a lot have been carried out by contractors working for the cia. what it does is effectively create a cut out and divorces you further and further away from the rules and it makes it easier. the intelligence thinks they're a lot better and hiding at what they are doing and who's responsible for the decision to kill or strike or etcetera and it is harder and harder of who's responsib responsible. if it is intensity the law, it is a gray area. you mercenaries which have fallen out of favor of national law or you can consider them as agents of united states of government in which case they are protected. i cannot give you a good answer because i don't think there is a good answer. >> if there is, it is someone smarter than me. >> my understanding of robots now, of the budget and million of dollars and of the fact that there are -- you don't seem to think that it is going to stop them being dominant. i would like to know why. >> first of all, the united states have always been willing to spend money more than blood. that's our thing. even in world war ii, one of the germans would say is you cannot fight against the americans because they fight out as much as 10 times artilleries as they need. this is just an extension of that. so, you are right, a predator costs a lot of money. although most of the cost of the predator is a sensor ball and not the airframe itself. it is all the stuff that you strap onto it. it turns out an american infantry person is also incredibly expensive. not only you have to pay them a salary every year but you spend them a quarter of a million dollars just training them to do their basic job. should they become any kind of casualty, you may spend millions of dollars on their veterans benefits in terms of a cost benefits analysis, the nice thing about the machines are, you can mass produce them and stock file. you can have them sit around. you have to create this force in being. there is also the attractiveness. if you are a civilian decision maker and you say, i want you to go to x. there is a possibility that humans are going to say no. i am not going to do that. they just do what they are told. that can make them attractive if you want to be a controlling leader. right now as you know thanks to the constitution, the military is subordinant. civilians want to tell them how to do things. but, there have not been any instances in american history where the military flat out refuse to do what was asked of them in terms of military mission. there is been plenty of times of non military mission that is not our thing and we cannot do that. >> robot don't talk fast. while there might not be an initial investment, that investment -- that costs almost nothing to operate. you have to replace the mission and give them a battery charge once in a while and that is pretty much it. these things are becoming more and more attractive. if you go to north korean and south korean, for example, south korean starts to build century robots. one of the traattractive side o this is it can see in the uv spectrum and so on and so forth, this is something that makes me feel good. our century robot don't have to use necessarily for force. you are willing to risk for robots so you can arm a robot with taser or tear gas and it may expect you to save lives on both sides. in terms of why i see this is happening, i don't think costs is what stops us. we are $23 trillion in debt. we seem to be comfortable racking it up. we just passed our billion dollars budget. we are talking a few billion dollars that's being spent in robots right now. they are wining up becoming the more cost and effective option. >> what in your view constitute an act of war in cyber base and where would the issue of sovereignty come in? >> that's a good question. i am going to stall. >>. [ laughs ] and stall some more. time's up, have a great night. generally, the threshold for an act of war is in the recipients' eyes. canadian hunters wandering across and they're shooting a deer and they shot my cousin instead. that's just an accident. unless the u.s. government may p i can a fight with canada, in that case, we'll make a big deal. what secretary defense robert gates said, the u.s. reserves the right to retaliate of any kind of cyber attack. >> we are feeffectively if you e doing anything in cyber that we can plausibly call it an act of warthen we'll call it an act of war. >> an act of war needs to be done with that purpose. it cannot be an accidental, gosh, is was trying to engage i is espinouge and some people died. it turns out, it is not to me. depending on who we thought launch that attack, we may very well classify it an act of war so we have the opportunity for retaliation. the cyber domain, one of the hardest things to do is attribution. how did you figure out who did this to you. >> if i pull out a good afternoon and shoot, the rest of you will know that i did it. if i launch some kind of attack and shuts down his system, for all you know is that i am sending a text to my wife. in the cyber room, this act of war, it is hard to decipher. >> in 2007 when the russians unleashed their cyber millitia, they shut down their entire system. >> every transaction that's done electronically and the russians shut down their entire internet for the whole country for three weeks. over a really tiny ballpolitica issue. >> the y wanted to move away frm the city center into a garden and the russians got angry. was that an act of war for them to shut down the histonian economy and shut down the ba banking history. you can call that an act of war. it is incredibly damaging. if you are astonia, do you really want to pick a fight through your russian neighbors? what are you going to do in response? a cyber retaliation would work. they knew the attack is coming. what do they do? >> they apologize and put the statue back. was it an act of war? yeah, probably. >> nato said oh, well we don't want to get involved in this. we are not going to fight over a 9-foot run statue, you got to be kid meg. >> i am not sure of a well define threshold. >> the casualty was always there. they would have put it in the sea and changing the out come of the war. why didn't we work on something also during the second world war. why didn't we work on that ? we worked on the atomic bomb. we pick and choose which technology we want to pursue. one of the technology that we were pursuing were the b-29 that was going to deliver it. a lot of our top scientists and engineers going in the proximity cue. phenomena effective air defense system but absolutely terrified us that the enemy might get a hold of it. we got a hold of some of their bomb and we started to reverse and engineered them. part of the problem were these things were jet engines. the germans were so far ahead of us in terms of jet technology. even if you try to reverse it, the enemies had a significant head start and they have done all the experience on how you control the engines and how do you produce it effectively. and as you might know the end of the war, we capture as many german scientists and engineers as we could. >> so alabama, for example, we build a program centers around ge german rocket scientists. rather than surrendering the soviets coming in. we worked on it but we were far enough behind that we did not prioritize eit. sometimes that meant we have to put up the enemy how they're going to advantage over us. that's the danger that when you face a technologically advance moment. >> thank you. >> you mentioned earlier of the magnetic polls and individual robots, i would love for you to comment about how harden we are of any micro level in terms of drones and things like that and which of course is wonderful and protects us against isis and people like that try to do something electronically. on a macro and strategic level, how are increasing dependant on computer driven is more robust electronic than russia and china. >> hardening is possible. we don't typically do it especially we are facing an enemy and does not have the capacity to do anything about it. islamic state does not have any air defenses or cyber capability. >> when it comes to a predator, the life expectancy -- shooting one down would not be difficult. it cruises about 100 miles per hour. its radar section is obvious. we are not trying to hide it. right now we use it to the enemy and we cannot do anything about it. hardening electro magnetic radiation is really a space program. >> space is a harsh environment and satellite in particular have had to be harden to against things. and so we had to learn how to protect these components long-term. we know how to do it more or less. it is expensive and it weighs down whatever you are trying to h harden. if you want to have a time of 24 hours as a predator, you cannot harden with electronics right now. when you remotely control of something. there is a case a few years ago of -- it landed on iranian highway. hey, we took over your aircraft. these great hackers. no, they did not. they broadcast the gps signal at a stronger wattage. they overwhelmed its gps receiver and con fivinced it wa some where than it was. you are right over the air fill that you are supposed to land. that's not taking over but that's not a clever way to bring it down. >> and the iranian is incapable of reversing engineering of things. should the iranian choose to sell components of it. you run the risk of somebody else controlling it. after all, the machine controls itself than it is not as susceptible to external control. and that means your own external control as well. setting off an emp without a detonation is not that easy right now. there is experiments show that it can be done. it is one of those cases where hollywood makes it seem like it is so simple. . it is definitely not like that. jamming is a bigger problem for us right now than some kind of a polls to knock out the system. >> the final question, make it a really good one. >> well, robotic weapon systems have had domestic popular support because we the good guys are using on the bad guys. it is not going to be pretty for us when the table are turned. do you know any diplomatic initiatives or thoughts about making them ban like chemicals, nuclear and bio logic. >> those are both cases where you say, well, there are horrible they thinks in the world that you should not use more. these are really, really bad >> now, there are regimes, for example, the syrian regimes accused of chemical weapons that uses gas. the nuclear weapons situation in theory there is a nuclear non proliferation in place, no other nation are going to start and developing nuclear weapon program. >> we see it is not true. there are non signal toir to it. there is a social movement to ban autonomous weapons. there is not been a significant push in the international legal arena yet. there are a lot of individual scholars and theorists saying, you know, we can save a lot of trouble to ban these things before you use them. that does not seem to be the way humans work. the ban came about after world war one when we saw how horrible chemical weapons were and how unu undevisive. they're not going to win a war unless you are faced opponents where you would not beat without them. they're going to make it more worse. lets say hypothetically, we get in a war that they also use robots. our robots destroyed theirs, does that mean their country is going to surrender? >> human history says no, they keep on fighting and particularly if we are talking about a war conquest rather than a limited fight. in that particular case, now your robot are going to have to deploy against human troops. they're going to be effective at killing them. humans will fight a lot longer than hindsight would indicate with a practical idea and particularly in wars of national survivor. what i see and i am a pessimist, you build enough of these machines that you will feel to use them. you will whine using these things and you will create one of the first human atrocity in this world without changing it. >> so that's a happy note. [ applause ] >> on behalf of the new york society and our foreign policy institute. i want to thank paul springer for sharing with us remarks that offers clarity and approaching a technical issue that we face today as a country and the world. i thank all of you for joining us. there are a lot of things going on here at this society. come back often. thank you very much. [ applause ] great. wednesday night on american history tv on cspan 3, the presidency and political career ronald reagan. first, we'll talk to nancy reagan from the white house. and james kemmer son. and finally a west point history professor on the influence. and reagan's cold war policies. the democratic national convention is live from philadelphia this week. watch every minute on cspan, listen live on the free cspan radio app. it is easy to download from the apple store or google play. watch live or on demand or any time on cspan.org on your desktop or phones or tablets. follow us at cspan @twitter or like us on facebook. it is all this week on cspan, on our app and on cspan.org. >> next, we visit the society of cincinnati wre