that really needs to be discussed. and this would be a good place to to discuss it. joseph shapiro is lieutenant colonel in the us air force. he's got a ph.d. in philosophy from the university of oxford. his areas of expertise are everything from war theory military ethics especially the ethics of remote and autonomous weapons. he's a senior pilot with more than 1400 pilot and instructor pilot hours and many flown in of major u.s. combat humanitarian operations. he currently serves on the air force staff, so staffs, artificial intelligence, cross functional team. but, you know, the more we see u.s. military involved in other parts of the world, the more we see the use of drones and other remote weapons. and so now a good time to discuss whether that is moral or. so please join me in welcoming joseph chapter. thank you, tony, for the kind introduction. thank you for being here. this is really a privilege. i would be lying if i told you that i expected someday to write a book and to be able to talk to folks like you about it. i never thought that was going to be the case. this is really exciting. and to do so at this historic place is something special for me. also i would be remiss if i didn't mention that president carter wrote a new york times op ed in 2012, in which made it very clear that he had qualms about the quote unquote, drone program. and so i'm excited to bring some of those questions up and maybe hopefully to address some of the concerns that he expressed. so i think i'll start by talking about a period of during which i was writing this book. i think it was about 18. i walked into the family room where my kids were watching tv. they were watching paw patrol. i don't know if you're familiar whenever there a problem around adventure bay these pups save the day. and i saw that one of the human characters in the show was flying a remotely piloted aircraft using a camera onboard the aircraft to try find a lost hiker in the mountains. i could swear i heard this child in the show say the word drone. and i said to my kids, did they just say drone on a patrol? and my seven year old said to me somewhat condescendingly, yeah, dad, do you know what a drone even is? so let's start there. do we even know what a drone is? i think i do. i think in a position to talk about drones, i know what they. but it's harder than it sounds. and one of the reasons that it's harder that it's than it sounds is because there are so many misperceptions around these airplanes. and so before we even can have a conversation about whether remote warfare is moral. we have to have a conversation about what we mean, some of these terms. what kind of warfare we referring to. so i'll give you just one example. i have nothing against the international committee of the red cross. they do excellent work. this is just literally the first one that came up when i googled. but this is an article from the icrc on autonomous weapons systems. and presumably it's going to tell us about the profound implications for the future of warfare. but the art department decided to give us a picture of an empty nine reaper, an empty nine reaper is not an autonomous weapon system. there's nothing autonomous about it. there's a human crew there, qualified. they're trained. they're certified. they're qualified to aircrew under the air force instructions that govern air crew qualifications. and there are some automatic of this airplane it can fly to point it can hold an altitude. it even hold a specific bank angle, if you like. but that's no more autonomy than we have any modern airplane, including the airplane i flew went on to get here this morning. and so we kind of a problem because our our minds, we have these heuristics built because we see this image of the mq predator or its successor, the nine reaper, over and over and over again, associated with things like autonomy. i'm going to get to that a little bit more in a moment. but what i want to emphasize here is that the weapon systems that i have in mind, the predator and reaper, they're not autonomous and they're not by artificial intelligence. so what are the. well, the question remains difficult to answer. again, in 2018, i had a friend who assumed command of the newest united states air force empty nine reaper squadron. so i flew across ocean. i was living in the uk at the time. i flew across the ocean to be a part of that ceremony and the local headlines ran words like this drone squadron activated. and as you can see here, this is an actual picture of the aircrew. they went from being a detachment to being a full fledged squadron. so they peeled off the patch, signifying the detachment put on the new patch, signifying the squadron. it was a great day and i was really glad to a part of it. two days later, you might not remember this date, but i certainly do. on december 21st, 2018, i back across the ocean. and as we approached gatwick airport in london, the pilot came over the mike and said on, fortunately, we're not going to be able to land at gatwick to drone activity on the airfield. he said, i've been flying for 18 years and i have never seen anything like this. so we thought we might be able to divert to heathrow. that would have been nice. that was actually closer to my house. but heathrow was full of all the airplanes that have already diverted to gatwick. so i got a free trip to manchester and a four hour train ride back home. but the next day these are the kinds of that i saw. gatwick drones, ground flights. so this word drone, we're asking it to do a lot of work. it everything from fully autonomous killer robots that don't exist. it covers the mq one predator and empty nine reaper that have been a mainstay of us air force operations for the last 15 or 20 years. and then it covers 300 quadcopters that you can buy on amazon or anywhere quadcopters are sold. and the reason that matters to me is because unlike these air crew members who are trained and certified and have to meet longstanding standards for for air force, the person who bought that quadcopter ruined my day by having me have to divert, but also costing hundreds of millions pounds in the in the airline industry that. person had no certification they didn't need any special training. and as i said, it only cost them a few hundred bucks. so there's a huge difference to me between the kind of people that are involved in us air force operations and piloted aircraft and then the broad swath of people who might be behind one of these less expensive pieces, equipment. and so as we try to hone in on what it is, we're actually talking here, i want to away from autonomy, but i also want to recognize why we tend to think that these things are more autonomous than they are. so i don't think it's the right view, but it's an understandable view and part of the reason for that is because you look the shape of this airplane. this is the mta nine reaper on the left. nine was initially operational, capable in 27. so that was just six years after the predator was first armed with the hellfire missile, that first shot was on the opening day of the us war in afghanistan. so 2000, when we get the predator, 27, we get the reaper. and this is the reaper. and i want to point specifically at that nose in the front on any other airplane, what would you expect to see at that bulbous nose in the front? we would see canopy glass or windscreen, almost every airplane, almost every picture of every airplane that you have ever seen. if you look at that spot on the airplane, you're going to see canopy glass or windscreen and i think we've trained ourselves over and over and over and over. we've seen hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of different pictures, airplanes in the course of our lives and at the front, the airplane, canopy, glass or windscreen. and what that represents to us, i was just at the airport this morning. when you look through the canopy, what do you see? you see the pilot the person who you know is responsible for that airplane and everything on board. and on this airplane, we don't have canopy glass and we don't have a windscreen. and i can't look through that glass and see the eyes. the person who's responsible for that airplane, i might trick myself into thinking, well, maybe there is no one responsible, but i'm here to assert to you that there is someone responsible. it's a qualified aircrew member that's been certified to be responsible, that airplane and everything on it. just humor me. there's two thought experiments that i'd like you to consider. the first, i don't know if you'll be familiar with this. as you might imagine by now, i watch lot of cartoons. the the disney pixar movie planes. every one of those planes has eyes. where are those eyes on those cartoon? they're always on the canopy glass, the windscreen. right. so even the animators at pixar know that as the ancient proverb says, in the case of airplanes, the are the windows to the soul, the eyes glass is literally the window through which i see human person, the soul that's responsible for that airplane. second thought experiment. just imagine we are now in the age of autonomous vehicles. there are not that many out there on the roads. they're not in every city, but that they're in your city and you're standing at the crosswalk first. imagine just a regular automobile, good old fashioned car. it's got the windscreen. you look the glass, you see the person on the other side. when i'm at the crosswalk. and i'm trying to determine if that car going to stop for me. what do i do? i look through the windscreen and i make eye contact with the driver to see if they can see me. right. and we share a little bit of a moment if we don't make eye contact. i'm waiting till they come a complete stop before i cross right. and in fact, we can be thrown off on that. as i mentioned, i lived in the uk as much as it was difficult to learn to drive on the left hand side of the road. it was even more difficult to learn to look at the right, the correct side of the car because the car approaches the crosswalk. i'm constantly at my right side of the vehicle, which of course is the passenger seat. and it's pretty unnerving to see an empty passenger seat or even worse, to see a person's dog. but now imagine now that there's an autonomous vehicle, right? the autonomous has no need of canopy glass or windscreen. right. it senses the world around it by use of cameras and light and radar and some other things. and it positions itself in the world through those means. it doesn't need the glass. so imagine that an autonomous vehicle has, a completely opaque windscreen, imagine that. it's this composite grey that we see on the reaper. and now imagine in the crosswalk when that vehicle approaches, the crosswalk, are you going to step out in front of the vehicle? maybe there's a person inside, maybe not. is that a technical system or is that a techno, social? is it just a piece of machinery? is there a human operator behind it? i think without realizing it? these are all the questions come up when people who haven't seen the of a predator or reaper cockpit see this image. so this is a lot of table setting. there's a lot of work to do to get to the ethical. but i think this is where we need to start these airplanes are not autonomous. they're flown by a certified and qualified air force aircrew aircrew. okay. so if if we can if we can dispatch with the idea that these systems might autonomous, then we can start to ask real substance, tough questions about how does this new technology or in my view, this techno social system. it's a system that consists both of a piece of technology and human. cruise how does fit in with the long history of warfare? there are lots of ways we can ask this question. we could talk about moral justification for killing in war. we could talk about moral psychology and how that applies to war. here, i'm only going to focus on the warrior ethos, the warrior ethos in the western tradition. to us from homer, that's a statue of there on the left from the library of congress. and homer gives us two warrior achilles and hector. and of although we have these two warriors, it's achilles, that emerges in the tradition as the archetype of warrior, one wonders if that's because achilles one but we wonder whether achilles is the kind of person that we should want to emulate. is achilles the kind of person does he have, the kind of ethos that i would want? young lieutenants in the united states air force to emulate, for example, i think probably not. as you might remember, the iliad opens with achilles wrath or achilles rage, depending on the translation and his rage, his wrath, his personal sleights of honor drive the plot in several instances. reason he's enraged at the beginning of the book is because his honor has been slighted. he expected a war prize and at the last minute was taken away. his honor was hurt. that's the thing that drives him to violence that that's the thing that motivates him. and i don't know that achilles is the kind of person that we would want to emulate as a as a kind of warrior ethos. we could look at hector on the other side. hector is much more human than achilles is a scholar, is more intelligent than i have pointed out. we get glimpses of hector with his family in a way we never get glimpses of achilles with family. we get glimpses of hector with his family. in one classic scene, he's still wearing his his uniform. he's wearing his armor, including his helmet, and he leans over the crib to see his baby. and the baby starts crying because the baby's scared of the armor. right. and hector thinks, how silly of me. and takes his helmet off. right. it's a very humanizing moment where we get to experience hector in the fullness of his personhood. that never happens with achilles. achilles is a warrior, and he's only a warrior. and i spend so much time on this only say that again and again and again. the scholarship on the warrior ethos traces the warrior ethos back to achilles. and i want to challenge that a little bit for a couple of reasons. first, because when we think about the warrior, we tend to focus on the fact that both achilles and hector were to risk their lives. they were willing to pay a great sacrifice toward whatever their ends might have been. i would argue that they both have very different ends in mind and. so this warrior ethos grows up to this idea that. what it means to be a warrior is the willingness to risk one's life. the willingness to face risk in the face of an adversary, maybe even the actual imposition risk in front of the adversary. and so we think about in our modern time is the archetypal warrior. well, it's the person who's willing to to go out there and face the enemy gunfire at normandy or, you know, it's the person who's willing to raise the flag at jima, people who are willing to face great risk to themselves in battle. i think that's fair. i think that's right. think if we look at the history of warfare, we do see that. warriors are associated with this willingness, face risk, but i think there's something else operating there. first of all, we should distinguish between actually facing risk and the willingness to face risk. and i think this really matters. speaking of normandy, a few years ago, my wife and i were able to tour the beaches at normandy and the american there. and we had walked through the 9000 headstones at normandy to, commemorate the us forces who were killed, not just in that battle. but throughout the war. and as we as we got back to the tour bus to go back to our next stop, i was in line with an older gentleman who had a world two veteran cap on and there were just not that many world war two veterans around anymore. and so i made a point to strike up a conversation and i had a fascinating conversation with a man named bill. and bill told me that on d-day his job as a 17 year old was to work the night shift at a baltimore newspaper and function of the night shift was to sit there, wait until the teletype machines, the stories that are on the wire. and his job was to determine whether the story sufficient enough to wake up the editors. and so he learned about in that room on the teletype machines. and surely that was newsworthy. he woke up the editors. and so he told me, thinks he's probably one of the first people in the united states to learn about the invasion because he had that job on that day. and by the end of the he had gotten his mother's signature on his paperwork so he could enlist in the navy as a 17 year old. training takes a long time by time, he was trained up to go to the european theater, that war was over. we had achieved in europe. and so the redesign needed his ship for the pacific theater and the war ended soon thereafter. but he jokes with me that he got to the pacific just in time to earn his world war two veteran cap right now, this man, bill, didn't face combat risk. he was never actually at he never engaged the enemy, but he definitely displayed a willingness to face combat risk. right? he definitely through the steps that one must take in order to become eligible for combat risk. and i think that willingness really matters. and of the reasons that i think that is because of all of the rpa, the remotely piloted aircraft crews that i've talked to, i have never met a single person who has said, you know, i volunteered to join the military. we're an all volunteer force. so everyone who joined the military volunteered. i volunteered to join the military. i raised my right hand. i swore an oath to support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies, foreign and domestic but then i volunteered to go to the predator or the reaper, because i really didn't want to face any combat risk. that seems unlikely to me. i have friends who volunteered to go to the predator reaper because were airsick or because they were tired of travel schedule and some other airframes or they wanted to produce more operational effects. they felt like they were stuck, not close enough to operation, but i've never met anyone. that said, i'm unwilling to face combat risk. therefore send me to the predator or reaper. so when we trace this line through the history of warfare, one of the things we should recognize is this distinction between actually facing and willingness to face risk. and i want to put the emphasis on the latter rather than on the former. but there's a second thing that we can we can mention here, and that is that all of the honor and glory that achilles is concerned with, it just might not sufficient to define what it is to be warrior. and i think as we read the memoirs of of wars over time several wars, i focused on the last 100 years but i'm sure there are others we constantly we consistently this this remark that even though there are glorious things in they they are far to too minuscule to justify the of war. i've given you just a few quotes here but oliver wendell was served in world war correct and served in the civil war and he was on several occasions and actually the first time he was shot, he was in field hospital and he was convinced that he was going to die. and he wrote a letter to his mother, in fact, saying that he had resigned himself to death. of course, he and he went on to become the us supreme court justice. later in life he was giving a speech at harvard. it's one of the most famous speeches that he's given and. he says war when you're at it is horrible. and dull. it's only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. so he's willing to admit that there's something divine war, but only in retrospect, only when can review the lessons learned, not the in the midst of the blood and fighting. ulysses grant certainly was a veteran of the civil war, but long before that he was a lieutenant in the mexican-american war, and he wrote his wife, julia. wherever there are battles, great, many must suffer. and for the sake of the little glory, i do not care to see it. so he's recognizing that there is some glory to be had, but it isn't worth fighting. and finally an unnamed french soldier in world war one writes, there will never be enough glory to cover all the blood and all mud. the french soldier right before that line, he calls the people, the generals and the policymakers who got the european powers into world war one. he calls them criminals. he talks about this this crime of war they've committed. and then he recognizes that there might be glory, but not enough to cover all the blood and all the mud. so achilles, motivated by honor and glory. i don't think that's enough. i don't think that gets us all the way there to what it means to be a warrior. certainly there's something about risk, something about the willingness to face risk. but i don't think that gets us all the way there either. i think the third thing, the thing that we're missing is that there also has to be a willingness to take human life on the other side of that. and that goes under. under. remarked. under-researched. people don't talk about that as much. and i. one reason for that is that in the long history warfare, these two things almost always go together. willingness to face risk and willingness to take life. and in the predator and reaper world, we're asking people to separate those two ideas. we have predator and reaper crew members at this point, just reaper crew members of the united states air force who are willing to face risk because they they took the oath. they raised right hand. they're not actually going to face risk. but we are going to ask them to take human life. and i think that's a crucial element to understanding the warrior ethos in the way that we should. so if there's one holdout, if we can all agree that war is too muddy, too bloody to be justified, glory and honor, there must be something else that justifies war as a just war theorist. i have strong views about. i'll sidestep them here. let's just imagine that there are just causes to go to war. and it has nothing to do with. honor and glory. even so, there holdouts who think there is at least one place that's still glorious in war. and those are the pilots, right? because flight has always been glorious. flight has always been this dream that we meant to achieve. we achieved it at kitty hawk in 1903, and then it became a fixture of warfare, starting in world war one. when i was an officer trainee at boston university. several years ago, i not only had to be familiar with john gillespie, mcgee's poem high flight, but my peers and i had to memorize it. he that i've slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter. silver wings. sun word. i have climbed and done 100 things you have not dreamed of. and so maybe flying airplanes and war is still glorious. that still has the honor that achilles was after. that's still still divine in oliver wendell holmes. his terms. but i hasten to add that john gillespie mcgee wasn't writing about wartime. he was tragically killed in a training accident before he ever got to war. he was writing about pilot training. he was writing about flying in a peaceful sky. and that. i agree is romantic. that is glorious. there is a dream. in flying in a peaceful sky long. after john gillespie mcgee died, i flew the six texan two and the ti 38 sea talon in pilot training, and i lived gillespie's poetic dream. i did the things that he described in the poem and it was every bit the dream that he suggested. but i there's a there's a threshold that we have to cross as aircrew members when start talking about combat operations. and that's the time to put away the the poetry of the means and adopt the prose of combat ends. and so my view here is that there might it might be the case that when we put these cockpits on the ground, when we have air crew members, fly these airplanes from the ground rather than from the air, we are we are robbing them of some of that dream. but it's in the service of our our military service to the political community. and that's just a necessary condition success. we have to do what we have to in order to in order to achieve our ends and to say, no, no, we need to hold on to that dream. we shouldn't have remote because we should let these pilots fly in their airplanes. that would be just like achilles saying that and honor are justifications for war. and so i just don't see it. i just don't see the argument working out. so i agree, gillespie on his dream, but i think there's something different about war. okay so if these weapon systems are not autonomous and and if we're convinced that glory and honor are not justifications for war, then we can finally start to hone in on the humanity behind these systems. they're not autonomous. they're not flown by computers. they're flown by people. so what is the human element that's at work in these weapon systems? there are several stories i could tell you, but i'll just mention a few. we could about moral psychology. we could talk about virtue. we could talk about moral justification. and in some of these stories, they're all interrelated. in researching for the book, i was allowed to go sit with crew members as they flew combat missions in the cockpit or sometimes called the ground station. and so i didn't know what was going to happen on those missions. i didn't know if they were going be exciting or boring to me to be frank about it. but it was a privilege to be able to watch the crews do their work and so i was on headset listening to the crew and to everyone they were talking to on the radio. and in this one instance, the pilot was talking the jtc. that's a joint terminal attack. it's usually an air force airman, although not. and they obtained this joint qualification to be able to say cleared hot on the radio so this is the air power advocate that's embedded with the ground force that can translate ground speak army and marine corps speak into air force speak to translate the ground force commander's intent to the aircrew and the pilots. now talking to the to the jetpack and the pilot has found some disturbed earth in a field and she's not sure exactly it is and she describes it to the jetpack and the jetpack is convinced that it's in order to keep in mind the jetpack and his have been being fired at by mortars several days. so he is he is up to find mortar tubes and destroy them. and so this pilot and the sensor operator discussed the issue, discuss what they thought was under their crosshairs and said no, it just doesn't look like a mortar to the much more likely scenario is that it's a shovel because this is a field and it's disturbed earth. so it looks like someone was doing some shoveling. they finished the task and they put down the shovel. and so the jetpack wanted this pilot drop a bomb on the mortar team. and the pilot said, no, and we can do that under us military doctrine, because under us military, the pilot follows an power chain of command up to the combined forces air commander and the land force follows a chain of command up through the land forces component. and so when the when the army or the marine corps joint correction, ground force commander asks us for a weapon as the united states air force for a weapon, it's not a direct order. they're not in a position to provide with direct orders. so it's really more like both people need to consent. the pilot has to to release the weapon and the ground force commander to ask for the weapon. in this case, the pilot was uncomfortable it and said, no, thank you. now, i would argue that that is human judgment operating in the cockpit, that would not have happened if this was an autonomous computer driven system. the data could have just said, go and the system would have gone. but because we, a human in the seat, the human can execute human judgment. i that's important. even though that story that i just described is never going to make the news. you'll never read it in the newspaper. you'll never see a headline. and there are a thousand such stories like that where air crew members are using their human judgment. and you might disagree in in this case, you might side with the data and you might with the pilot. but the point is that there is a human judgment at work and these decisions. and i think crucial and fits in with the long history of of air power, the video that you're seeing on the left here. this is predator video from the of 2002 on a hill called tucker, ga. afghanistan in 2001. as i mentioned, the us invaded afghanistan on october sixth, a pilot named scott swanson, the first hellfire missile off of a predator. that was on the opening night of the campaign. but it wasn't close air support. he wasn't supporting troops in contact. he was trying to destroy a high value target. actually, he was to destroy a vehicle in the convoy that belonged to a high value target in the hopes that that would draw the high value target out. five months later, there's a predator providing overwatch for on this mountain, on this tucker gar hilltop, and this predator, unlike the previous, is not armed. the hellfire is new to the predator. they had to expedite the testing process to get the hellfire on the predator. so not the tail numbers have a hellfire missile. so this is stuck just watching. it can't do anything. it doesn't have a missile. well, the this was a special force ingress. it was a seal. and they're their their air power advocate was, an air force airman named john chapman. they took heavy. the enemy was far more dug in than they had expected. it did not go well. chapman was injured and he fell, lost consciousness, and his teammates assumed that he was dead. they quickly exfil they quickly exfiltrated the mountain top. and because they thought chapman was dead, they the risk of going to get his body was too high. so they left him and then he woke up and then he fought on by himself. another hour. and at the time he was awarded the air force cross is one of the highest ranking medals. one can be awarded posthumously. he was killed after that that our, in fact, according to some accounts, was killed because he had he had taken several bunkers from the enemy. he had driven the enemy out of several bunkers. he took up one of those bunkers as a fighting position. and he have been able to stay there and fight on longer. but according to some accounts, when the army sent a quick reaction force to support this effort, he came out of the bunker to, draw enemy fire so that they wouldn't be able to shoot down the with the army folks that were inbound. so he was awarded the air force cross several years ago, then secretary of the air force deborah lee james read an article, airman magazine, that said that an air force airman had not been awarded the congressional of honor since vietnam. and so she that page out of the magazine and handed it to an aide and said, go look into this. how come an air force airman hasn't been awarded the medal of honor since the vietnam? and so they looked over several sets of records to try to find medals that might be able to be to be promoted to the of honor. and chapman's was one. so he he has now been awarded the congressional medal of honor, one of the most important pieces of evidence. that decision was this video from predator at the time. that's why it's been declassified and why you can find it on the internet. but imagine imagine that the pilot of this airplane who if i have the historical pieces right, is also scott swanson, the pilot who fired that first missile. right on the opening day of the war. he's got an armed predator and he fired a missile. now he's watching a fellow airman fight for his life and there's nothing he can do about it. try to imagine that feeling. the next airplane. once he got out, he ran out of gas and to go back to the base, he was replaced by a different pilot and that pilot was flying an armed predator. so when that army quick reaction, quick reaction force got to the hill. another jay tech, gabe brown was able to call in the first ever close air support strike from a hellfire missile and they were able to defend the friendly forces in that strike. here's why i tell you the story. when we think about the ethics of remote, we're often we're often to terms with the headlines, with the strikes that have gone badly and will be the first to admit that several strikes have gone badly. and i'm not saying that those strikes were morally justified. that's not the argument. the argument is for every one of those strikes that you might see in the news, there are countless times that the predator or reaper crew did, the right thing produced the mission objectives, what they were asked to produce and did so with extremely low civilian harm. and imagine if scott swanson had a missile on his airplane that day, right? the story would have been very different. and john chapman might have made it home. right. so when we think about the ethics of warfare, we can't just think about the strikes that have gone badly. we have to think about all the things that would have been different had we not had these airplanes. there are. people i have met them who believe the world would be a better place had it never for remotely piloted aircraft. a big question. i don't know the answer to that question, but i know if we're going to take that question seriously, then we have to think not only about the strikes have gone bad, but also all the work that the crews have done to produce justified military aims with very low civilian harm. so what comes next? i think i've made the case the human crew is central to, these airplanes and i can imagine i've heard people say to me when i say these airplanes are not autonomous and, they're not driven by artificial intelligence. sometimes i get the response. yeah, not yet. but soon they could be. that's true. soon they could be. and in that that composite bulbous, maybe instead of a satellite dish antenna, maybe we have some supercomputer brains. someday but what i wouldn't want to do is that when that day comes, when artificial or autonomy is sophisticated, that it can autonomously control a reaper. or wouldn't it also be able to autonomously control other stuff too? i have there a picture artist's conception of what a loyal wingman might look like in the us air force's approach to loyal wingman. that would be a traditional f 35 fighter pilot controlling, a swarm of, say, four, ten or 12 autonomous, loyal wingman. if the age of artificial intelligence is upon us, if we're going to have autonomous weapons systems, sure, it could look like reaper, but it could also look like the loyal wingman. but for that matter, it could also look like a traditionally piloted f 35. we can have an artificial intelligence system and put it on that airplane to support the pilot and the pilots. so what i don't want to do is imagine this throughline that goes from predator to reaper to the age of artificial intelligence. i don't think that's what it's going to look like. i think we need to learn the lessons we can learn from remote warfare, from predator and reaper. and then i think we need to have a separate discussion about autonomy in artificial intelligence. i don't think they're as closely related as some people do. so everything i've said up to this point seems a little bit retrospective. and that's true. it is retrospective. i am looking backwards at two decades of remote warfare, but i don't want to leave you with the impression there's nothing here for us, for the future and the reason that i say that is because the emphasis, the ethics discussion on which i've very little i meant is on the distance, right? the reason that we can separate in the warrior ethos, reason we can separate the willingness to face risk and the willingness to take life is because of the distances involved. the reason have to ask questions about whether these crews their job. seriously, i didn't say much on that but that's one of the arguments that have a playstation mentality or the reason people have that concern because of the distance we've had, we've learned a lot about the psychology of remote warfare. i haven't said on that either, but i could add to is grounded in the distance. the initial assumption that these crews would be would be psychologically unaffected by their work was grounded in fact that they're at such great distances. how could they be so emotionally invested? and so all of these questions about distance, those aren't questions that go away at the end of the predator and reaper era. those are questions that are going to come. and i think they're going to come up more frequently. let me just give you a few examples. if what we're worried about in the ethics of remote warfare is the 7000 miles, which is the distance from nevada to afghanistan if that's the kind of distance that we're worried about, then think about something like cyber warfare operations or a cyber warfare operator might operate from the united states and produce effects in cyberspace that have physical effects on the other side of the. or think about hypersonic flying at five times the speed of sound continents and over oceans that, too, is going to involve thousands of miles worth of distance. or imagine, as i said, artificial and autonomy. we know we might imagine that if 35 pilot with a human pilot board staying outside of the enemy's threat ring and sending some of those wingmen forward to a place that's more dangerous even that pilot will be at a greater distance than will the autonomous level wingman. so these questions about remoteness don't go away. i think they they actually get more important. and so my hope is that will be able to look at the lessons learned from from 20 years of remote warfare, ask hard questions about what elements of this really are ethically significant, and then try to apply some of those lessons to the next 20 years. thank you all for here tonight. and do we have any questions to to mention about being 7000 miles away from afghans does that mean that there's one drone operation? so great? the question was, is there just one operations center these these airplanes? because i had mentioned the state of nevada. so i have mentioned at the top, but just in case there's any doubt the views expressed are my own and don't necessarily represent the department of defense, though i am an active duty air force officer, so there are lots open source information about various places that the air force, these airplanes out of. i'm not in a position here to list them all. there are several. yes, sir. you talked and about distance being issue, but it involves more than just the predators. what about the person? no relationship. between the and the potential victim, because it's thing if you are flying a fighter jet that sends a missile some distance or punching a button sends a missile, but it's another. you've been watching the family that you're going to perhaps attack. that's right. so the question was about the distance relationships and how that applies to the aircrew that might be on one side of the world and the person under the crosshairs on the other side of the world. and that's one of the things that we had to learn the hard way. a community that people do get invested in the work and that can at a at an emotional psychological. so not only is it case that they're witnessing what's happening on the screen. so it's it's not like you know the the remote warfare of the 1990s if you will was cruise missiles. but when the surface warfare officer launches a cruise missile from a ship, they're not actually seeing the impact. they're not seeing the missile explode. and so on the one hand, it's true that we're these crews are watching the video. right. so that's one way that it's a little more intimate. but we have that in traditional fighter planes. also, the tv screen will be smaller and the image might be a little grainier. but we share that in common with the traditional fighter and bomber crews. what really it different is the loiter time. so fact that these air crew can stay on station for eight, ten, 12, 21 hours really provide a lot of insight sometimes about how just how human the person under the crosshairs is. so different people react differently to that. but we certainly have learned that some members have had a hard time with some of those issues. i didn't get into it much here tonight, but but the the remotely piloted aircraft community, if will, is several different commands. but that community recognized. probably almost 15 years ago that this was to be a psychological, emotional challenge. and so at creech air base, for instance, they established a human performance team and at various times they've had slightly different professional cadre of professionals. but at the time i visited and interviewed folks, it was a physiologist, a psychologist, a chaplain. and so the idea is that with their powers combined, they should be able to provide support to the in the kind of emotional spiritual, psychological space. and even when they first established that team, they decided it really wasn't effective because those members didn't have the same classification readings, the crews. and so the crews didn't feel comfortable telling them what had happened on the mission because they didn't know if they were allowed to because of the classification constraints. so now that human performance team is read into all the same classifications as the crews, so they can just walk in the work centers, they can walk up and meet people and build that way. and the the stories that i got from them, from the members of human performance team when i interview them, is that it's really come a long way that they really have deep going to get support from the human performance team. so we've come a long way, but we had to learn the hard way. you you also mentioned that there can be differences of opinions, a request to going ahead with a strike that happen often. i don't have any data to to but it's it's certainly unheard of. one story that i think captures this the best is a friend of mine named, dan, had been following a high value target for several weeks and. so he's only an eight hour shift. there's a 24 hour cycle. so there are other crew, other crews that are supporting that same target. but every day he comes in and for roughly 8 hours, he follows his high value target. and every day this high value target leaves his house, puts a kid on the back of the motorbike. there's a football, you know, soccer pitch the home. and so there's a bunch of kids playing soccer. and so he goes and gets one of those kids, puts him on the back of the motorbike and goes a mile to the north to the homemade factory, because that's what he's responsible for in the terrorist organization. and so it became pretty clear that he's using those children as a human shield to to do the drive to the north. and so, my friend dan is watching this play out. and then one day after three weeks of this, he shows up and starts to get the intelligence briefing and says the ground force commander to take the shot today. and so starts asking questions of the relevant echelons today. why does it have to be today? why not yesterday? why not tomorrow? and he never a satisfactory answer to that question. and he knew that if he's asked, take the shot and if there's a kid on the back of the motorbike, he's morally responsible for that. so he decided that he wasn't willing to take that shot. and by the way, they did the ground force team did consult with with legal. so it wasn't a question of whether it was illegal. the determination was made that that the proportionality calculus would have been satisfied. so although it would have been tragic, it would have been a justifiable civilian casualty because the military value of the target was so significant. i'm to discuss that, if you like. but the point that it wouldn't have been a war crime, it wouldn't have been illegal. it's just that dan didn't feel comfortable with it. so the point of this whole story is that dan has the authority to say to the ground force commander, i'm not doing it. doesn't feel. but then because these cockpits are on the ground, the squadron commander walked into dan's cockpit and said, dan, are going to be all that. you're going to be able to take the shot today. and what strikes me about the story is that the squadron commander could have said, dan, take the shot. well, now we in uniform code of military justice, territory because now that is his commander in his chain of command him a lawful order. but the commander do that because when we put these cockpits, the ground, we built in some flexibility and the commander recognized that. so he said, dan, you going to be able to take the shot? and dan, if they could give you a reason why it has to be today, i could do it. but in the absence that reason, it feels arbitrary and i'm not comfortable with it. and so the commander said, all right, i don't have anybody else to fly the line today. so stick with it, i understand you're not going to take the shot tomorrow. i'm going to get somebody else on this line. and so that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target come out of the house and the next day, squadron commander found another pilot who was fully briefed it wasn't a secret. he knew. he knew what he was getting himself into. and he said he was willing to do that. and that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target did come out, did get on the motorbike, but didn't put a kid on the back of the bike. and so the timing, the complacency worked out to where that pilot was able to take a clean shot against the high value target. but i tell that story here because emphasizes the fact that that air chain of command, that's that's that's not in negotiation. those are orders when it comes to the air power supporting land component, that becomes more of a peer to peer relationship. this kind of warfare sounds more personal. i think that's right. one of the things that i think it took a long time to recognize is that if you look at the the development of technical i'm sorry for those that couldn't hear the question was this feels more personal. this kind of war feels more personal. so if you look at the technological developments in the 1990s, especially in the united states air force the the tasks were to try to find and destroy and that was true in the first gulf war and it was true in in kosovo. and it was true throughout the 1990s. in fact, the air and stated mission was to do time targeting and single digit minutes. so find a target and put a bomber within minutes or less. but all of the target sets were machines. now certainly if you blow up, you know, let's say an iraqi tank in 1991, certainly you're going kill the people inside. that's that's going to happen. but that was never the intent. we weren't we weren't trying to kill those people. we were trying to destroy the tank. and what happened september 11th is that we transition to a force that was in the business of targeting people. and and i think it took us a long i think we reeled from that transition for a long time. and so now we were i would like to think we're we're coming out of the post-9-11 wars, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency. there are lots of people in the dod who are talking about future conflicts. and it almost feels like a reversion to that 99 just discussion about how do i destroy the adversaries machine? and so i don't know if we ever if we ever got to a point where, we really understood all the nuances of that shift. but but we did learn to do it effectively. and as i said, to deal with some of the psychological, emotional implications of that. and do you see things like drones becoming more prevalent as a weapon warfare? so the question is whether i see these airplanes becoming more prevalent in warfare, it's really hard to and people in the united states force have very different opinions on that. it's i think this is just my opinion. it's a question of what one chooses to emphasize. so if you look, the recent national defense strategy, that emphasis is on you know great power competition, near-peer threats the pacing threat is china that's what that document says. and so when people think about that kind of conflict, we're very much in the we're looking forward not back, it's going to be a contested environment, meaning, you know, unlike iraq and afghanistan, they'll have the ability to shoot down our airplanes. and so we might need airplanes are more sophisticated than the predator and reaper there's another line of argument that says even if we need to think about those things terrorism isn't going away, that that operational concern ended. so we still need airplanes like this. so what i think we'll see is increasing automation, not all in one go. we're not going to get to loyal wingman and i had up there overnight but i think you'll start to see processes on board airplanes become more and more automated to the degree that maybe potentially eventually we're able to take a person out of it then and then it's a drone, but it's different from what i've been talking about here because now it's it's an autonomous airplane opposed to a remotely piloted one. for me, i have one last question. what is your answer? the title of your book? yeah, it's i was hoping you wouldn't. the question is, what is the answer to the. i think that these are weapons. and so i think that whether the use of a weapon is justified or not depends on what you do with it. and so i think it is incumbent upon us as as the united states of america to impose on ourselves on how we decide to use force. and as a just war theorist, i think that last resort is a crucial of what they call you, said bell in the of the decision to go to war and. one of the main one of the main arguments, the most significant arguments against remote warfare is that it creates a moral hazard? it provides an incentive for decision makers to resort, to force. it's cheap and easy, and i don't even mean monetarily cheap, although these are cheaper than, you know, f-16s and f-35s, but it's politically inexpensive because the chances of having casualties on our side are much lower. and so we create a political incentive to resort to force, even when maybe we shouldn't resort to force. and i think the solution to that isn't getting rid of these weapons systems. i think it's imposing self-discipline on our on our foreign policy. but that's just my opinion. yes, sir. so from kind of a historical perspective, you know, sixties cold minutemen, sailors, crews, bunker in american sailor, we get it. you know, in order they got 90 seconds, they go through the procedure, they push the button, obviously more distant than the experience of. the drones now. but at the other end i've seen some stuff related to like boston dynamics with their robots being basically warriors again, to the question do you see a limit of where you know a robot. one guy controlling 20 of them running through forest or back at a desk. i mean, yeah, it is you know, it's escalation. yeah, that's a great question. so the gist of the question was remote warfare has been around for a long time going back to the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the post-nuclear era. and so that seems like it's been around a time. but then we have these contemporary developments like the the boston dynamics robot dog and, you know, robot, other robots and everything and so we're putting ourselves on a trend line that we're going to have a single operator for several, maybe several dozen of these systems. and so that was the gist of the question. so i am concerned. so one of the reasons that i take view that i do is because the humans are so involved, intimately involved in all the decisions that go into the use of force. these weapon systems. and as we start to kind of aggregate those systems where, you know, maybe you'll have for eight or ten or 12 systems under one human control, there's no way that that human is going to be as intimately invested in each of those scenarios or each of those operations. and so i do have a concern about that, actually. i worked with i worked with some researchers on a project, and we were looking at how humans react to the kinds of moral dilemmas that can come up in remote warfare. and we just had an offline discussion. i was surprised to find that there proposed solution just as an idea. what if we intentionally pixelate the image before the strike right so we now have high definition cameras which is far better than what you saw in that video. but what if the time of the strike we pixelate the image so that the human operators aren't face to face with the human toll that causing? and my view on that, i don't think that's the right move. don't think that's the right direction. right. i think we should should do whatever we need to do to build emotional resiliency in the crews so that can deal with that that trauma, that stress. but i don't want to move to place where we're where we're constantly abstracting from. the human cost war, because the more we consider war to be costless, right, the more the more fail to appreciate the costs of war. the more eager we'll be to start wars. and i want to put us in that position. and there are questions questions. but joe, thank you very much is you have given us, i think, a lot to think about and. think about it in terms of of context going back in history and we appreciate you being join me in thanking joe chhabra. thank you very much. thank you all very much. and if you'll join pulitzer prize-winning historical novelist geraldine brooks. the last time we saw each other wa
i'm tony clark from the carter presidential library. and we're glad you're here for all of our programs, you know? several years ago i was watching a helen mirren movie eye in the sky, and it's about decision making process for a drone strike. and so when i saw joe book is remote warfare moral, it just seemed like the kind of topic that really needs to be discussed. and this would be a good place to to discuss it. joseph shapiro is lieutenant colonel in the us air force. he's got a ph.d. in philosophy from the university of oxford. his areas of expertise are everything from war theory military ethics especially the ethics of remote and autonomous weapons. he's a senior pilot with more than 1400 pilot and instructor pilot hours and many flown in of major u.s. combat humanitarian operations. he currently serves on the air force staff, so staffs, artificial intelligence, cross functional team. but, you know, the more we see u.s. military involved in other parts of the world, the more we see the use of drones and other remote weapons. and so now a good time to discuss whether that is moral or. so please join me in welcoming joseph chapter. thank you, tony, for the kind introduction. thank you for being here. this is really a privilege. i would be lying if i told you that i expected someday to write a book and to be able to talk to folks like you about it. i never thought that was going to be the case. this is really exciting. and to do so at this historic place is something special for me. also i would be remiss if i didn't mention that president carter wrote a new york times op ed in 2012, in which made it very clear that he had qualms about the quote unquote, drone program. and so i'm excited to bring some of those questions up and maybe hopefully to address some of the concerns that he expressed. so i think i'll start by talking about a period of during which i was writing this book. i think it was about 18. i walked into the family room where my kids were watching tv. they were watching paw patrol. i don't know if you're familiar whenever there a problem around adventure bay these pups save the day. and i saw that one of the human characters in the show was flying a remotely piloted aircraft using a camera onboard the aircraft to try find a lost hiker in the mountains. i could swear i heard this child in the show say the word drone. and i said to my kids, did they just say drone on a patrol? and my seven year old said to me somewhat condescendingly, yeah, dad, do you know what a drone even is? so let's start there. do we even know what a drone is? i think i do. i think in a position to talk about drones, i know what they. but it's harder than it sounds. and one of the reasons that it's harder that it's than it sounds is because there are so many misperceptions around these airplanes. and so before we even can have a conversation about whether remote warfare is moral. we have to have a conversation about what we mean, some of these terms. what kind of warfare we referring to. so i'll give you just one example. i have nothing against the international committee of the red cross. they do excellent work. this is just literally the first one that came up when i googled. but this is an article from the icrc on autonomous weapons systems. and presumably it's going to tell us about the profound implications for the future of warfare. but the art department decided to give us a picture of an empty nine reaper, an empty nine reaper is not an autonomous weapon system. there's nothing autonomous about it. there's a human crew there, qualified. they're trained. they're certified. they're qualified to aircrew under the air force instructions that govern air crew qualifications. and there are some automatic of this airplane it can fly to point it can hold an altitude. it even hold a specific bank angle, if you like. but that's no more autonomy than we have any modern airplane, including the airplane i flew went on to get here this morning. and so we kind of a problem because our our minds, we have these heuristics built because we see this image of the mq predator or its successor, the nine reaper, over and over and over again, associated with things like autonomy. i'm going to get to that a little bit more in a moment. but what i want to emphasize here is that the weapon systems that i have in mind, the predator and reaper, they're not autonomous and they're not by artificial intelligence. so what are the. well, the question remains difficult to answer. again, in 2018, i had a friend who assumed command of the newest united states air force empty nine reaper squadron. so i flew across ocean. i was living in the uk at the time. i flew across the ocean to be a part of that ceremony and the local headlines ran words like this drone squadron activated. and as you can see here, this is an actual picture of the aircrew. they went from being a detachment to being a full fledged squadron. so they peeled off the patch, signifying the detachment put on the new patch, signifying the squadron. it was a great day and i was really glad to a part of it. two days later, you might not remember this date, but i certainly do. on december 21st, 2018, i back across the ocean. and as we approached gatwick airport in london, the pilot came over the mike and said on, fortunately, we're not going to be able to land at gatwick to drone activity on the airfield. he said, i've been flying for 18 years and i have never seen anything like this. so we thought we might be able to divert to heathrow. that would have been nice. that was actually closer to my house. but heathrow was full of all the airplanes that have already diverted to gatwick. so i got a free trip to manchester and a four hour train ride back home. but the next day these are the kinds of that i saw. gatwick drones, ground flights. so this word drone, we're asking it to do a lot of work. it everything from fully autonomous killer robots that don't exist. it covers the mq one predator and empty nine reaper that have been a mainstay of us air force operations for the last 15 or 20 years. and then it covers 300 quadcopters that you can buy on amazon or anywhere quadcopters are sold. and the reason that matters to me is because unlike these air crew members who are trained and certified and have to meet longstanding standards for for air force, the person who bought that quadcopter ruined my day by having me have to divert, but also costing hundreds of millions pounds in the in the airline industry that. person had no certification they didn't need any special training. and as i said, it only cost them a few hundred bucks. so there's a huge difference to me between the kind of people that are involved in us air force operations and piloted aircraft and then the broad swath of people who might be behind one of these less expensive pieces, equipment. and so as we try to hone in on what it is, we're actually talking here, i want to away from autonomy, but i also want to recognize why we tend to think that these things are more autonomous than they are. so i don't think it's the right view, but it's an understandable view and part of the reason for that is because you look the shape of this airplane. this is the mta nine reaper on the left. nine was initially operational, capable in 27. so that was just six years after the predator was first armed with the hellfire missile, that first shot was on the opening day of the us war in afghanistan. so 2000, when we get the predator, 27, we get the reaper. and this is the reaper. and i want to point specifically at that nose in the front on any other airplane, what would you expect to see at that bulbous nose in the front? we would see canopy glass or windscreen, almost every airplane, almost every picture of every airplane that you have ever seen. if you look at that spot on the airplane, you're going to see canopy glass or windscreen and i think we've trained ourselves over and over and over and over. we've seen hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of different pictures, airplanes in the course of our lives and at the front, the airplane, canopy, glass or windscreen. and what that represents to us, i was just at the airport this morning. when you look through the canopy, what do you see? you see the pilot the person who you know is responsible for that airplane and everything on board. and on this airplane, we don't have canopy glass and we don't have a windscreen. and i can't look through that glass and see the eyes. the person who's responsible for that airplane, i might trick myself into thinking, well, maybe there is no one responsible, but i'm here to assert to you that there is someone responsible. it's a qualified aircrew member that's been certified to be responsible, that airplane and everything on it. just humor me. there's two thought experiments that i'd like you to consider. the first, i don't know if you'll be familiar with this. as you might imagine by now, i watch lot of cartoons. the the disney pixar movie planes. every one of those planes has eyes. where are those eyes on those cartoon? they're always on the canopy glass, the windscreen. right. so even the animators at pixar know that as the ancient proverb says, in the case of airplanes, the are the windows to the soul, the eyes glass is literally the window through which i see human person, the soul that's responsible for that airplane. second thought experiment. just imagine we are now in the age of autonomous vehicles. there are not that many out there on the roads. they're not in every city, but that they're in your city and you're standing at the crosswalk first. imagine just a regular automobile, good old fashioned car. it's got the windscreen. you look the glass, you see the person on the other side. when i'm at the crosswalk. and i'm trying to determine if that car going to stop for me. what do i do? i look through the windscreen and i make eye contact with the driver to see if they can see me. right. and we share a little bit of a moment if we don't make eye contact. i'm waiting till they come a complete stop before i cross right. and in fact, we can be thrown off on that. as i mentioned, i lived in the uk as much as it was difficult to learn to drive on the left hand side of the road. it was even more difficult to learn to look at the right, the correct side of the car because the car approaches the crosswalk. i'm constantly at my right side of the vehicle, which of course is the passenger seat. and it's pretty unnerving to see an empty passenger seat or even worse, to see a person's dog. but now imagine now that there's an autonomous vehicle, right? the autonomous has no need of canopy glass or windscreen. right. it senses the world around it by use of cameras and light and radar and some other things. and it positions itself in the world through those means. it doesn't need the glass. so imagine that an autonomous vehicle has, a completely opaque windscreen, imagine that. it's this composite grey that we see on the reaper. and now imagine in the crosswalk when that vehicle approaches, the crosswalk, are you going to step out in front of the vehicle? maybe there's a person inside, maybe not. is that a technical system or is that a techno, social? is it just a piece of machinery? is there a human operator behind it? i think without realizing it? these are all the questions come up when people who haven't seen the of a predator or reaper cockpit see this image. so this is a lot of table setting. there's a lot of work to do to get to the ethical. but i think this is where we need to start these airplanes are not autonomous. they're flown by a certified and qualified air force aircrew aircrew. okay. so if if we can if we can dispatch with the idea that these systems might autonomous, then we can start to ask real substance, tough questions about how does this new technology or in my view, this techno social system. it's a system that consists both of a piece of technology and human. cruise how does fit in with the long history of warfare? there are lots of ways we can ask this question. we could talk about moral justification for killing in war. we could talk about moral psychology and how that applies to war. here, i'm only going to focus on the warrior ethos, the warrior ethos in the western tradition. to us from homer, that's a statue of there on the left from the library of congress. and homer gives us two warrior achilles and hector. and of although we have these two warriors, it's achilles, that emerges in the tradition as the archetype of warrior, one wonders if that's because achilles one but we wonder whether achilles is the kind of person that we should want to emulate. is achilles the kind of person does he have, the kind of ethos that i would want? young lieutenants in the united states air force to emulate, for example, i think probably not. as you might remember, the iliad opens with achilles wrath or achilles rage, depending on the translation and his rage, his wrath, his personal sleights of honor drive the plot in several instances. reason he's enraged at the beginning of the book is because his honor has been slighted. he expected a war prize and at the last minute was taken away. his honor was hurt. that's the thing that drives him to violence that that's the thing that motivates him. and i don't know that achilles is the kind of person that we would want to emulate as a as a kind of warrior ethos. we could look at hector on the other side. hector is much more human than achilles is a scholar, is more intelligent than i have pointed out. we get glimpses of hector with his family in a way we never get glimpses of achilles with family. we get glimpses of hector with his family. in one classic scene, he's still wearing his his uniform. he's wearing his armor, including his helmet, and he leans over the crib to see his baby. and the baby starts crying because the baby's scared of the armor. right. and hector thinks, how silly of me. and takes his helmet off. right. it's a very humanizing moment where we get to experience hector in the fullness of his personhood. that never happens with achilles. achilles is a warrior, and he's only a warrior. and i spend so much time on this only say that again and again and again. the scholarship on the warrior ethos traces the warrior ethos back to achilles. and i want to challenge that a little bit for a couple of reasons. first, because when we think about the warrior, we tend to focus on the fact that both achilles and hector were to risk their lives. they were willing to pay a great sacrifice toward whatever their ends might have been. i would argue that they both have very different ends in mind and. so this warrior ethos grows up to this idea that. what it means to be a warrior is the willingness to risk one's life. the willingness to face risk in the face of an adversary, maybe even the actual imposition risk in front of the adversary. and so we think about in our modern time is the archetypal warrior. well, it's the person who's willing to to go out there and face the enemy gunfire at normandy or, you know, it's the person who's willing to raise the flag at jima, people who are willing to face great risk to themselves in battle. i think that's fair. i think that's right. think if we look at the history of warfare, we do see that. warriors are associated with this willingness, face risk, but i think there's something else operating there. first of all, we should distinguish between actually facing risk and the willingness to face risk. and i think this really matters. speaking of normandy, a few years ago, my wife and i were able to tour the beaches at normandy and the american there. and we had walked through the 9000 headstones at normandy to, commemorate the us forces who were killed, not just in that battle. but throughout the war. and as we as we got back to the tour bus to go back to our next stop, i was in line with an older gentleman who had a world two veteran cap on and there were just not that many world war two veterans around anymore. and so i made a point to strike up a conversation and i had a fascinating conversation with a man named bill. and bill told me that on d-day his job as a 17 year old was to work the night shift at a baltimore newspaper and function of the night shift was to sit there, wait until the teletype machines, the stories that are on the wire. and his job was to determine whether the story sufficient enough to wake up the editors. and so he learned about in that room on the teletype machines. and surely that was newsworthy. he woke up the editors. and so he told me, thinks he's probably one of the first people in the united states to learn about the invasion because he had that job on that day. and by the end of the he had gotten his mother's signature on his paperwork so he could enlist in the navy as a 17 year old. training takes a long time by time, he was trained up to go to the european theater, that war was over. we had achieved in europe. and so the redesign needed his ship for the pacific theater and the war ended soon thereafter. but he jokes with me that he got to the pacific just in time to earn his world war two veteran cap right now, this man, bill, didn't face combat risk. he was never actually at he never engaged the enemy, but he definitely displayed a willingness to face combat risk. right? he definitely through the steps that one must take in order to become eligible for combat risk. and i think that willingness really matters. and of the reasons that i think that is because of all of the rpa, the remotely piloted aircraft crews that i've talked to, i have never met a single person who has said, you know, i volunteered to join the military. we're an all volunteer force. so everyone who joined the military volunteered. i volunteered to join the military. i raised my right hand. i swore an oath to support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies, foreign and domestic but then i volunteered to go to the predator or the reaper, because i really didn't want to face any combat risk. that seems unlikely to me. i have friends who volunteered to go to the predator reaper because were airsick or because they were tired of travel schedule and some other airframes or they wanted to produce more operational effects. they felt like they were stuck, not close enough to operation, but i've never met anyone. that said, i'm unwilling to face combat risk. therefore send me to the predator or reaper. so when we trace this line through the history of warfare, one of the things we should recognize is this distinction between actually facing and willingness to face risk. and i want to put the emphasis on the latter rather than on the former. but there's a second thing that we can we can mention here, and that is that all of the honor and glory that achilles is concerned with, it just might not sufficient to define what it is to be warrior. and i think as we read the memoirs of of wars over time several wars, i focused on the last 100 years but i'm sure there are others we constantly we consistently this this remark that even though there are glorious things in they they are far to too minuscule to justify the of war. i've given you just a few quotes here but oliver wendell was served in world war correct and served in the civil war and he was on several occasions and actually the first time he was shot, he was in field hospital and he was convinced that he was going to die. and he wrote a letter to his mother, in fact, saying that he had resigned himself to death. of course, he and he went on to become the us supreme court justice. later in life he was giving a speech at harvard. it's one of the most famous speeches that he's given and. he says war when you're at it is horrible. and dull. it's only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. so he's willing to admit that there's something divine war, but only in retrospect, only when can review the lessons learned, not the in the midst of the blood and fighting. ulysses grant certainly was a veteran of the civil war, but long before that he was a lieutenant in the mexican-american war, and he wrote his wife, julia. wherever there are battles, great, many must suffer. and for the sake of the little glory, i do not care to see it. so he's recognizing that there is some glory to be had, but it isn't worth fighting. and finally an unnamed french soldier in world war one writes, there will never be enough glory to cover all the blood and all mud. the french soldier right before that line, he calls the people, the generals and the policymakers who got the european powers into world war one. he calls them criminals. he talks about this this crime of war they've committed. and then he recognizes that there might be glory, but not enough to cover all the blood and all the mud. so achilles, motivated by honor and glory. i don't think that's enough. i don't think that gets us all the way there to what it means to be a warrior. certainly there's something about risk, something about the willingness to face risk. but i don't think that gets us all the way there either. i think the third thing, the thing that we're missing is that there also has to be a willingness to take human life on the other side of that. and that goes under. under. remarked. under-researched. people don't talk about that as much. and i. one reason for that is that in the long history warfare, these two things almost always go together. willingness to face risk and willingness to take life. and in the predator and reaper world, we're asking people to separate those two ideas. we have predator and reaper crew members at this point, just reaper crew members of the united states air force who are willing to face risk because they they took the oath. they raised right hand. they're not actually going to face risk. but we are going to ask them to take human life. and i think that's a crucial element to understanding the warrior ethos in the way that we should. so if there's one holdout, if we can all agree that war is too muddy, too bloody to be justified, glory and honor, there must be something else that justifies war as a just war theorist. i have strong views about. i'll sidestep them here. let's just imagine that there are just causes to go to war. and it has nothing to do with. honor and glory. even so, there holdouts who think there is at least one place that's still glorious in war. and those are the pilots, right? because flight has always been glorious. flight has always been this dream that we meant to achieve. we achieved it at kitty hawk in 1903, and then it became a fixture of warfare, starting in world war one. when i was an officer trainee at boston university. several years ago, i not only had to be familiar with john gillespie, mcgee's poem high flight, but my peers and i had to memorize it. he that i've slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter. silver wings. sun word. i have climbed and done 100 things you have not dreamed of. and so maybe flying airplanes and war is still glorious. that still has the honor that achilles was after. that's still still divine in oliver wendell holmes. his terms. but i hasten to add that john gillespie mcgee wasn't writing about wartime. he was tragically killed in a training accident before he ever got to war. he was writing about pilot training. he was writing about flying in a peaceful sky. and that. i agree is romantic. that is glorious. there is a dream. in flying in a peaceful sky long. after john gillespie mcgee died, i flew the six texan two and the ti 38 sea talon in pilot training, and i lived gillespie's poetic dream. i did the things that he described in the poem and it was every bit the dream that he suggested. but i there's a there's a threshold that we have to cross as aircrew members when start talking about combat operations. and that's the time to put away the the poetry of the means and adopt the prose of combat ends. and so my view here is that there might it might be the case that when we put these cockpits on the ground, when we have air crew members, fly these airplanes from the ground rather than from the air, we are we are robbing them of some of that dream. but it's in the service of our our military service to the political community. and that's just a necessary condition success. we have to do what we have to in order to in order to achieve our ends and to say, no, no, we need to hold on to that dream. we shouldn't have remote because we should let these pilots fly in their airplanes. that would be just like achilles saying that and honor are justifications for war. and so i just don't see it. i just don't see the argument working out. so i agree, gillespie on his dream, but i think there's something different about war. okay so if these weapon systems are not autonomous and and if we're convinced that glory and honor are not justifications for war, then we can finally start to hone in on the humanity behind these systems. they're not autonomous. they're not flown by computers. they're flown by people. so what is the human element that's at work in these weapon systems? there are several stories i could tell you, but i'll just mention a few. we could about moral psychology. we could talk about virtue. we could talk about moral justification. and in some of these stories, they're all interrelated. in researching for the book, i was allowed to go sit with crew members as they flew combat missions in the cockpit or sometimes called the ground station. and so i didn't know what was going to happen on those missions. i didn't know if they were going be exciting or boring to me to be frank about it. but it was a privilege to be able to watch the crews do their work and so i was on headset listening to the crew and to everyone they were talking to on the radio. and in this one instance, the pilot was talking the jtc. that's a joint terminal attack. it's usually an air force airman, although not. and they obtained this joint qualification to be able to say cleared hot on the radio so this is the air power advocate that's embedded with the ground force that can translate ground speak army and marine corps speak into air force speak to translate the ground force commander's intent to the aircrew and the pilots. now talking to the to the jetpack and the pilot has found some disturbed earth in a field and she's not sure exactly it is and she describes it to the jetpack and the jetpack is convinced that it's in order to keep in mind the jetpack and his have been being fired at by mortars several days. so he is he is up to find mortar tubes and destroy them. and so this pilot and the sensor operator discussed the issue, discuss what they thought was under their crosshairs and said no, it just doesn't look like a mortar to the much more likely scenario is that it's a shovel because this is a field and it's disturbed earth. so it looks like someone was doing some shoveling. they finished the task and they put down the shovel. and so the jetpack wanted this pilot drop a bomb on the mortar team. and the pilot said, no, and we can do that under us military doctrine, because under us military, the pilot follows an power chain of command up to the combined forces air commander and the land force follows a chain of command up through the land forces component. and so when the when the army or the marine corps joint correction, ground force commander asks us for a weapon as the united states air force for a weapon, it's not a direct order. they're not in a position to provide with direct orders. so it's really more like both people need to consent. the pilot has to to release the weapon and the ground force commander to ask for the weapon. in this case, the pilot was uncomfortable it and said, no, thank you. now, i would argue that that is human judgment operating in the cockpit, that would not have happened if this was an autonomous computer driven system. the data could have just said, go and the system would have gone. but because we, a human in the seat, the human can execute human judgment. i that's important. even though that story that i just described is never going to make the news. you'll never read it in the newspaper. you'll never see a headline. and there are a thousand such stories like that where air crew members are using their human judgment. and you might disagree in in this case, you might side with the data and you might with the pilot. but the point is that there is a human judgment at work and these decisions. and i think crucial and fits in with the long history of of air power, the video that you're seeing on the left here. this is predator video from the of 2002 on a hill called tucker, ga. afghanistan in 2001. as i mentioned, the us invaded afghanistan on october sixth, a pilot named scott swanson, the first hellfire missile off of a predator. that was on the opening night of the campaign. but it wasn't close air support. he wasn't supporting troops in contact. he was trying to destroy a high value target. actually, he was to destroy a vehicle in the convoy that belonged to a high value target in the hopes that that would draw the high value target out. five months later, there's a predator providing overwatch for on this mountain, on this tucker gar hilltop, and this predator, unlike the previous, is not armed. the hellfire is new to the predator. they had to expedite the testing process to get the hellfire on the predator. so not the tail numbers have a hellfire missile. so this is stuck just watching. it can't do anything. it doesn't have a missile. well, the this was a special force ingress. it was a seal. and they're their their air power advocate was, an air force airman named john chapman. they took heavy. the enemy was far more dug in than they had expected. it did not go well. chapman was injured and he fell, lost consciousness, and his teammates assumed that he was dead. they quickly exfil they quickly exfiltrated the mountain top. and because they thought chapman was dead, they the risk of going to get his body was too high. so they left him and then he woke up and then he fought on by himself. another hour. and at the time he was awarded the air force cross is one of the highest ranking medals. one can be awarded posthumously. he was killed after that that our, in fact, according to some accounts, was killed because he had he had taken several bunkers from the enemy. he had driven the enemy out of several bunkers. he took up one of those bunkers as a fighting position. and he have been able to stay there and fight on longer. but according to some accounts, when the army sent a quick reaction force to support this effort, he came out of the bunker to, draw enemy fire so that they wouldn't be able to shoot down the with the army folks that were inbound. so he was awarded the air force cross several years ago, then secretary of the air force deborah lee james read an article, airman magazine, that said that an air force airman had not been awarded the congressional of honor since vietnam. and so she that page out of the magazine and handed it to an aide and said, go look into this. how come an air force airman hasn't been awarded the medal of honor since the vietnam? and so they looked over several sets of records to try to find medals that might be able to be to be promoted to the of honor. and chapman's was one. so he he has now been awarded the congressional medal of honor, one of the most important pieces of evidence. that decision was this video from predator at the time. that's why it's been declassified and why you can find it on the internet. but imagine imagine that the pilot of this airplane who if i have the historical pieces right, is also scott swanson, the pilot who fired that first missile. right on the opening day of the war. he's got an armed predator and he fired a missile. now he's watching a fellow airman fight for his life and there's nothing he can do about it. try to imagine that feeling. the next airplane. once he got out, he ran out of gas and to go back to the base, he was replaced by a different pilot and that pilot was flying an armed predator. so when that army quick reaction, quick reaction force got to the hill. another jay tech, gabe brown was able to call in the first ever close air support strike from a hellfire missile and they were able to defend the friendly forces in that strike. here's why i tell you the story. when we think about the ethics of remote, we're often we're often to terms with the headlines, with the strikes that have gone badly and will be the first to admit that several strikes have gone badly. and i'm not saying that those strikes were morally justified. that's not the argument. the argument is for every one of those strikes that you might see in the news, there are countless times that the predator or reaper crew did, the right thing produced the mission objectives, what they were asked to produce and did so with extremely low civilian harm. and imagine if scott swanson had a missile on his airplane that day, right? the story would have been very different. and john chapman might have made it home. right. so when we think about the ethics of warfare, we can't just think about the strikes that have gone badly. we have to think about all the things that would have been different had we not had these airplanes. there are. people i have met them who believe the world would be a better place had it never for remotely piloted aircraft. a big question. i don't know the answer to that question, but i know if we're going to take that question seriously, then we have to think not only about the strikes have gone bad, but also all the work that the crews have done to produce justified military aims with very low civilian harm. so what comes next? i think i've made the case the human crew is central to, these airplanes and i can imagine i've heard people say to me when i say these airplanes are not autonomous and, they're not driven by artificial intelligence. sometimes i get the response. yeah, not yet. but soon they could be. that's true. soon they could be. and in that that composite bulbous, maybe instead of a satellite dish antenna, maybe we have some supercomputer brains. someday but what i wouldn't want to do is that when that day comes, when artificial or autonomy is sophisticated, that it can autonomously control a reaper. or wouldn't it also be able to autonomously control other stuff too? i have there a picture artist's conception of what a loyal wingman might look like in the us air force's approach to loyal wingman. that would be a traditional f 35 fighter pilot controlling, a swarm of, say, four, ten or 12 autonomous, loyal wingman. if the age of artificial intelligence is upon us, if we're going to have autonomous weapons systems, sure, it could look like reaper, but it could also look like the loyal wingman. but for that matter, it could also look like a traditionally piloted f 35. we can have an artificial intelligence system and put it on that airplane to support the pilot and the pilots. so what i don't want to do is imagine this throughline that goes from predator to reaper to the age of artificial intelligence. i don't think that's what it's going to look like. i think we need to learn the lessons we can learn from remote warfare, from predator and reaper. and then i think we need to have a separate discussion about autonomy in artificial intelligence. i don't think they're as closely related as some people do. so everything i've said up to this point seems a little bit retrospective. and that's true. it is retrospective. i am looking backwards at two decades of remote warfare, but i don't want to leave you with the impression there's nothing here for us, for the future and the reason that i say that is because the emphasis, the ethics discussion on which i've very little i meant is on the distance, right? the reason that we can separate in the warrior ethos, reason we can separate the willingness to face risk and the willingness to take life is because of the distances involved. the reason have to ask questions about whether these crews their job. seriously, i didn't say much on that but that's one of the arguments that have a playstation mentality or the reason people have that concern because of the distance we've had, we've learned a lot about the psychology of remote warfare. i haven't said on that either, but i could add to is grounded in the distance. the initial assumption that these crews would be would be psychologically unaffected by their work was grounded in fact that they're at such great distances. how could they be so emotionally invested? and so all of these questions about distance, those aren't questions that go away at the end of the predator and reaper era. those are questions that are going to come. and i think they're going to come up more frequently. let me just give you a few examples. if what we're worried about in the ethics of remote warfare is the 7000 miles, which is the distance from nevada to afghanistan if that's the kind of distance that we're worried about, then think about something like cyber warfare operations or a cyber warfare operator might operate from the united states and produce effects in cyberspace that have physical effects on the other side of the. or think about hypersonic flying at five times the speed of sound continents and over oceans that, too, is going to involve thousands of miles worth of distance. or imagine, as i said, artificial and autonomy. we know we might imagine that if 35 pilot with a human pilot board staying outside of the enemy's threat ring and sending some of those wingmen forward to a place that's more dangerous even that pilot will be at a greater distance than will the autonomous level wingman. so these questions about remoteness don't go away. i think they they actually get more important. and so my hope is that will be able to look at the lessons learned from from 20 years of remote warfare, ask hard questions about what elements of this really are ethically significant, and then try to apply some of those lessons to the next 20 years. thank you all for here tonight. and do we have any questions to to mention about being 7000 miles away from afghans does that mean that there's one drone operation? so great? the question was, is there just one operations center these these airplanes? because i had mentioned the state of nevada. so i have mentioned at the top, but just in case there's any doubt the views expressed are my own and don't necessarily represent the department of defense, though i am an active duty air force officer, so there are lots open source information about various places that the air force, these airplanes out of. i'm not in a position here to list them all. there are several. yes, sir. you talked and about distance being issue, but it involves more than just the predators. what about the person? no relationship. between the and the potential victim, because it's thing if you are flying a fighter jet that sends a missile some distance or punching a button sends a missile, but it's another. you've been watching the family that you're going to perhaps attack. that's right. so the question was about the distance relationships and how that applies to the aircrew that might be on one side of the world and the person under the crosshairs on the other side of the world. and that's one of the things that we had to learn the hard way. a community that people do get invested in the work and that can at a at an emotional psychological. so not only is it case that they're witnessing what's happening on the screen. so it's it's not like you know the the remote warfare of the 1990s if you will was cruise missiles. but when the surface warfare officer launches a cruise missile from a ship, they're not actually seeing the impact. they're not seeing the missile explode. and so on the one hand, it's true that we're these crews are watching the video. right. so that's one way that it's a little more intimate. but we have that in traditional fighter planes. also, the tv screen will be smaller and the image might be a little grainier. but we share that in common with the traditional fighter and bomber crews. what really it different is the loiter time. so fact that these air crew can stay on station for eight, ten, 12, 21 hours really provide a lot of insight sometimes about how just how human the person under the crosshairs is. so different people react differently to that. but we certainly have learned that some members have had a hard time with some of those issues. i didn't get into it much here tonight, but but the the remotely piloted aircraft community, if will, is several different commands. but that community recognized. probably almost 15 years ago that this was to be a psychological, emotional challenge. and so at creech air base, for instance, they established a human performance team and at various times they've had slightly different professional cadre of professionals. but at the time i visited and interviewed folks, it was a physiologist, a psychologist, a chaplain. and so the idea is that with their powers combined, they should be able to provide support to the in the kind of emotional spiritual, psychological space. and even when they first established that team, they decided it really wasn't effective because those members didn't have the same classification readings, the crews. and so the crews didn't feel comfortable telling them what had happened on the mission because they didn't know if they were allowed to because of the classification constraints. so now that human performance team is read into all the same classifications as the crews, so they can just walk in the work centers, they can walk up and meet people and build that way. and the the stories that i got from them, from the members of human performance team when i interview them, is that it's really come a long way that they really have deep going to get support from the human performance team. so we've come a long way, but we had to learn the hard way. you you also mentioned that there can be differences of opinions, a request to going ahead with a strike that happen often. i don't have any data to to but it's it's certainly unheard of. one story that i think captures this the best is a friend of mine named, dan, had been following a high value target for several weeks and. so he's only an eight hour shift. there's a 24 hour cycle. so there are other crew, other crews that are supporting that same target. but every day he comes in and for roughly 8 hours, he follows his high value target. and every day this high value target leaves his house, puts a kid on the back of the motorbike. there's a football, you know, soccer pitch the home. and so there's a bunch of kids playing soccer. and so he goes and gets one of those kids, puts him on the back of the motorbike and goes a mile to the north to the homemade factory, because that's what he's responsible for in the terrorist organization. and so it became pretty clear that he's using those children as a human shield to to do the drive to the north. and so, my friend dan is watching this play out. and then one day after three weeks of this, he shows up and starts to get the intelligence briefing and says the ground force commander to take the shot today. and so starts asking questions of the relevant echelons today. why does it have to be today? why not yesterday? why not tomorrow? and he never a satisfactory answer to that question. and he knew that if he's asked, take the shot and if there's a kid on the back of the motorbike, he's morally responsible for that. so he decided that he wasn't willing to take that shot. and by the way, they did the ground force team did consult with with legal. so it wasn't a question of whether it was illegal. the determination was made that that the proportionality calculus would have been satisfied. so although it would have been tragic, it would have been a justifiable civilian casualty because the military value of the target was so significant. i'm to discuss that, if you like. but the point that it wouldn't have been a war crime, it wouldn't have been illegal. it's just that dan didn't feel comfortable with it. so the point of this whole story is that dan has the authority to say to the ground force commander, i'm not doing it. doesn't feel. but then because these cockpits are on the ground, the squadron commander walked into dan's cockpit and said, dan, are going to be all that. you're going to be able to take the shot today. and what strikes me about the story is that the squadron commander could have said, dan, take the shot. well, now we in uniform code of military justice, territory because now that is his commander in his chain of command him a lawful order. but the commander do that because when we put these cockpits, the ground, we built in some flexibility and the commander recognized that. so he said, dan, you going to be able to take the shot? and dan, if they could give you a reason why it has to be today, i could do it. but in the absence that reason, it feels arbitrary and i'm not comfortable with it. and so the commander said, all right, i don't have anybody else to fly the line today. so stick with it, i understand you're not going to take the shot tomorrow. i'm going to get somebody else on this line. and so that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target come out of the house and the next day, squadron commander found another pilot who was fully briefed it wasn't a secret. he knew. he knew what he was getting himself into. and he said he was willing to do that. and that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target did come out, did get on the motorbike, but didn't put a kid on the back of the bike. and so the timing, the complacency worked out to where that pilot was able to take a clean shot against the high value target. but i tell that story here because emphasizes the fact that that air chain of command, that's that's that's not in negotiation. those are orders when it comes to the air power supporting land component, that becomes more of a peer to peer relationship. this kind of warfare sounds more personal. i think that's right. one of the things that i think it took a long time to recognize is that if you look at the the development of technical i'm sorry for those that couldn't hear the question was this feels more personal. this kind of war feels more personal. so if you look at the technological developments in the 1990s, especially in the united states air force the the tasks were to try to find and destroy and that was true in the first gulf war and it was true in in kosovo. and it was true throughout the 1990s. in fact, the air and stated mission was to do time targeting and single digit minutes. so find a target and put a bomber within minutes or less. but all of the target sets were machines. now certainly if you blow up, you know, let's say an iraqi tank in 1991, certainly you're going kill the people inside. that's that's going to happen. but that was never the intent. we weren't we weren't trying to kill those people. we were trying to destroy the tank. and what happened september 11th is that we transition to a force that was in the business of targeting people. and and i think it took us a long i think we reeled from that transition for a long time. and so now we were i would like to think we're we're coming out of the post-9-11 wars, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency. there are lots of people in the dod who are talking about future conflicts. and it almost feels like a reversion to that 99 just discussion about how do i destroy the adversaries machine? and so i don't know if we ever if we ever got to a point where, we really understood all the nuances of that shift. but but we did learn to do it effectively. and as i said, to deal with some of the psychological, emotional implications of that. and do you see things like drones becoming more prevalent as a weapon warfare? so the question is whether i see these airplanes becoming more prevalent in warfare, it's really hard to and people in the united states force have very different opinions on that. it's i think this is just my opinion. it's a question of what one chooses to emphasize. so if you look, the recent national defense strategy, that emphasis is on you know great power competition, near-peer threats the pacing threat is china that's what that document says. and so when people think about that kind of conflict, we're very much in the we're looking forward not back, it's going to be a contested environment, meaning, you know, unlike iraq and afghanistan, they'll have the ability to shoot down our airplanes. and so we might need airplanes are more sophisticated than the predator and reaper there's another line of argument that says even if we need to think about those things terrorism isn't going away, that that operational concern ended. so we still need airplanes like this. so what i think we'll see is increasing automation, not all in one go. we're not going to get to loyal wingman and i had up there overnight but i think you'll start to see processes on board airplanes become more and more automated to the degree that maybe potentially eventually we're able to take a person out of it then and then it's a drone, but it's different from what i've been talking about here because now it's it's an autonomous airplane opposed to a remotely piloted one. for me, i have one last question. what is your answer? the title of your book? yeah, it's i was hoping you wouldn't. the question is, what is the answer to the. i think that these are weapons. and so i think that whether the use of a weapon is justified or not depends on what you do with it. and so i think it is incumbent upon us as as the united states of america to impose on ourselves on how we decide to use force. and as a just war theorist, i think that last resort is a crucial of what they call you, said bell in the of the decision to go to war and. one of the main one of the main arguments, the most significant arguments against remote warfare is that it creates a moral hazard? it provides an incentive for decision makers to resort, to force. it's cheap and easy, and i don't even mean monetarily cheap, although these are cheaper than, you know, f-16s and f-35s, but it's politically inexpensive because the chances of having casualties on our side are much lower. and so we create a political incentive to resort to force, even when maybe we shouldn't resort to force. and i think the solution to that isn't getting rid of these weapons systems. i think it's imposing self-discipline on our on our foreign policy. but that's just my opinion. yes, sir. so from kind of a historical perspective, you know, sixties cold minutemen, sailors, crews, bunker in american sailor, we get it. you know, in order they got 90 seconds, they go through the procedure, they push the button, obviously more distant than the experience of. the drones now. but at the other end i've seen some stuff related to like boston dynamics with their robots being basically warriors again, to the question do you see a limit of where you know a robot. one guy controlling 20 of them running through forest or back at a desk. i mean, yeah, it is you know, it's escalation. yeah, that's a great question. so the gist of the question was remote warfare has been around for a long time going back to the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the post-nuclear era. and so that seems like it's been around a time. but then we have these contemporary developments like the the boston dynamics robot dog and, you know, robot, other robots and everything and so we're putting ourselves on a trend line that we're going to have a single operator for several, maybe several dozen of these systems. and so that was the gist of the question. so i am concerned. so one of the reasons that i take view that i do is because the humans are so involved, intimately involved in all the decisions that go into the use of force. these weapon systems. and as we start to kind of aggregate those systems where, you know, maybe you'll have for eight or ten or 12 systems under one human control, there's no way that that human is going to be as intimately invested in each of those scenarios or each of those operations. and so i do have a concern about that, actually. i worked with i worked with some researchers on a project, and we were looking at how humans react to the kinds of moral dilemmas that can come up in remote warfare. and we just had an offline discussion. i was surprised to find that there proposed solution just as an idea. what if we intentionally pixelate the image before the strike right so we now have high definition cameras which is far better than what you saw in that video. but what if the time of the strike we pixelate the image so that the human operators aren't face to face with the human toll that causing? and my view on that, i don't think that's the right move. don't think that's the right direction. right. i think we should should do whatever we need to do to build emotional resiliency in the crews so that can deal with that that trauma, that stress. but i don't want to move to place where we're where we're constantly abstracting from. the human cost war, because the more we consider war to be costless, right, the more the more fail to appreciate the costs of war. the more eager we'll be to start wars. and i want to put us in that position. and there are questions questions. but joe, thank you very much is you have given us, i think, a lot to think about and. think about it in terms of of context going back in history and we appreciate you being join me in thanking joe chhabra. thank you very much. thank you all very much. and if you'll join so today we're gonna be talking about the question of what it was like to be arrested. the subject is the arrest in the united states 1880s to 2001. now, the reason i chose that, periodization, is that we've been in class talking about the 19th century up through. the 1880s with our tj stiles book and with our timothy guilfoyle book
university of oxford. his areas of expertise are everything from war theory military ethics especially the ethics of remote and autonomous weapons. he's a senior pilot with more than 1400 pilot and instructor pilot hours and many flown in of major u.s. combat humanitarian operations. he currently serves on the air force staff, so staffs, artificial intelligence, cross functional team. but, you know, the more we see u.s. military involved in other parts of the world, the more we see the use of drones and other remote weapons. and so now a good time to discuss whether that is moral or. so please join me in welcoming joseph chapter. thank you, tony, for the kind introduction. thank you for being here. this is really a privilege. i would be lying if i told you that i expected someday to write a book and to be able to talk to folks like you about it. i never thought that was going to be the case. this is really exciting. and to do so at this historic place is something special for me. also i would be remiss if i didn't mention that president carter wrote a new york times op ed in 2012, in which made it very clear that he had qualms about the quote unquote, drone program. and so i'm excited to bring some of those questions up and maybe hopefully to address some of the concerns that he expressed. so i think i'll start by talking about a period of during which i was writing this book. i think it was about 18. i walked into the family room where my kids were watching tv. they were watching paw patrol. i don't know if you're familiar whenever there a problem around adventure bay these pups save the day. and i saw that one of the human characters in the show was flying a remotely piloted aircraft using a camera onboard the aircraft to try find a lost hiker in the mountains. i could swear i heard this child in the show say the word drone. and i said to my kids, did they just say drone on a patrol? and my seven year old said to me somewhat condescendingly, yeah, dad, do you know what a drone even is? so let's start there. do we even know what a drone is? i think i do. i think in a position to talk about drones, i know what they. but it's harder than it sounds. and one of the reasons that it's harder that it's than it sounds is because there are so many misperceptions around these airplanes. and so before we even can have a conversation about whether remote warfare is moral. we have to have a conversation about what we mean, some of these terms. what kind of warfare we referring to. so i'll give you just one example. i have nothing against the international committee of the red cross. they do excellent work. this is just literally the first one that came up when i googled. but this is an article from the icrc on autonomous weapons systems. and presumably it's going to tell us about the profound implications for the future of warfare. but the art department decided to give us a picture of an empty nine reaper, an empty nine reaper is not an autonomous weapon system. there's nothing autonomous about it. there's a human crew there, qualified. they're trained. they're certified. they're qualified to aircrew under the air force instructions that govern air crew qualifications. and there are some automatic of this airplane it can fly to point it can hold an altitude. it even hold a specific bank angle, if you like. but that's no more autonomy than we have any modern airplane, including the airplane i flew went on to get here this morning. and so we kind of a problem because our our minds, we have these heuristics built because we see this image of the mq predator or its successor, the nine reaper, over and over and over again, associated with things like autonomy. i'm going to get to that a little bit more in a moment. but what i want to emphasize here is that the weapon systems that i have in mind, the predator and reaper, they're not autonomous and they're not by artificial intelligence. so what are the. well, the question remains difficult to answer. again, in 2018, i had a friend who assumed command of the newest united states air force empty nine reaper squadron. so i flew across ocean. i was living in the uk at the time. i flew across the ocean to be a part of that ceremony and the local headlines ran words like this drone squadron activated. and as you can see here, this is an actual picture of the aircrew. they went from being a detachment to being a full fledged squadron. so they peeled off the patch, signifying the detachment put on the new patch, signifying the squadron. it was a great day and i was really glad to a part of it. two days later, you might not remember this date, but i certainly do. on december 21st, 2018, i back across the ocean. and as we approached gatwick airport in london, the pilot came over the mike and said on, fortunately, we're not going to be able to land at gatwick to drone activity on the airfield. he said, i've been flying for 18 years and i have never seen anything like this. so we thought we might be able to divert to heathrow. that would have been nice. that was actually closer to my house. but heathrow was full of all the airplanes that have already diverted to gatwick. so i got a free trip to manchester and a four hour train ride back home. but the next day these are the kinds of that i saw. gatwick drones, ground flights. so this word drone, we're asking it to do a lot of work. it everything from fully autonomous killer robots that don't exist. it covers the mq one predator and empty nine reaper that have been a mainstay of us air force operations for the last 15 or 20 years. and then it covers 300 quadcopters that you can buy on amazon or anywhere quadcopters are sold. and the reason that matters to me is because unlike these air crew members who are trained and certified and have to meet longstanding standards for for air force, the person who bought that quadcopter ruined my day by having me have to divert, but also costing hundreds of millions pounds in the in the airline industry that. person had no certification they didn't need any special training. and as i said, it only cost them a few hundred bucks. so there's a huge difference to me between the kind of people that are involved in us air force operations and piloted aircraft and then the broad swath of people who might be behind one of these less expensive pieces, equipment. and so as we try to hone in on what it is, we're actually talking here, i want to away from autonomy, but i also want to recognize why we tend to think that these things are more autonomous than they are. so i don't think it's the right view, but it's an understandable view and part of the reason for that is because you look the shape of this airplane. this is the mta nine reaper on the left. nine was initially operational, capable in 27. so that was just six years after the predator was first armed with the hellfire missile, that first shot was on the opening day of the us war in afghanistan. so 2000, when we get the predator, 27, we get the reaper. and this is the reaper. and i want to point specifically at that nose in the front on any other airplane, what would you expect to see at that bulbous nose in the front? we would see canopy glass or windscreen, almost every airplane, almost every picture of every airplane that you have ever seen. if you look at that spot on the airplane, you're going to see canopy glass or windscreen and i think we've trained ourselves over and over and over and over. we've seen hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of different pictures, airplanes in the course of our lives and at the front, the airplane, canopy, glass or windscreen. and what that represents to us, i was just at the airport this morning. when you look through the canopy, what do you see? you see the pilot the person who you know is responsible for that airplane and everything on board. and on this airplane, we don't have canopy glass and we don't have a windscreen. and i can't look through that glass and see the eyes. the person who's responsible for that airplane, i might trick myself into thinking, well, maybe there is no one responsible, but i'm here to assert to you that there is someone responsible. it's a qualified aircrew member that's been certified to be responsible, that airplane and everything on it. just humor me. there's two thought experiments that i'd like you to consider. the first, i don't know if you'll be familiar with this. as you might imagine by now, i watch lot of cartoons. the the disney pixar movie planes. every one of those planes has eyes. where are those eyes on those cartoon? they're always on the canopy glass, the windscreen. right. so even the animators at pixar know that as the ancient proverb says, in the case of airplanes, the are the windows to the soul, the eyes glass is literally the window through which i see human person, the soul that's responsible for that airplane. second thought experiment. just imagine we are now in the age of autonomous vehicles. there are not that many out there on the roads. they're not in every city, but that they're in your city and you're standing at the crosswalk first. imagine just a regular automobile, good old fashioned car. it's got the windscreen. you look the glass, you see the person on the other side. when i'm at the crosswalk. and i'm trying to determine if that car going to stop for me. what do i do? i look through the windscreen and i make eye contact with the driver to see if they can see me. right. and we share a little bit of a moment if we don't make eye contact. i'm waiting till they come a complete stop before i cross right. and in fact, we can be thrown off on that. as i mentioned, i lived in the uk as much as it was difficult to learn to drive on the left hand side of the road. it was even more difficult to learn to look at the right, the correct side of the car because the car approaches the crosswalk. i'm constantly at my right side of the vehicle, which of course is the passenger seat. and it's pretty unnerving to see an empty passenger seat or even worse, to see a person's dog. but now imagine now that there's an autonomous vehicle, right? the autonomous has no need of canopy glass or windscreen. right. it senses the world around it by use of cameras and light and radar and some other things. and it positions itself in the world through those means. it doesn't need the glass. so imagine that an autonomous vehicle has, a completely opaque windscreen, imagine that. it's this composite grey that we see on the reaper. and now imagine in the crosswalk when that vehicle approaches, the crosswalk, are you going to step out in front of the vehicle? maybe there's a person inside, maybe not. is that a technical system or is that a techno, social? is it just a piece of machinery? is there a human operator behind it? i think without realizing it? these are all the questions come up when people who haven't seen the of a predator or reaper cockpit see this image. so this is a lot of table setting. there's a lot of work to do to get to the ethical. but i think this is where we need to start these airplanes are not autonomous. they're flown by a certified and qualified air force aircrew aircrew. okay. so if if we can if we can dispatch with the idea that these systems might autonomous, then we can start to ask real substance, tough questions about how does this new technology or in my view, this techno social system. it's a system that consists both of a piece of technology and human. cruise how does fit in with the long history of warfare? there are lots of ways we can ask this question. we could talk about moral justification for killing in war. we could talk about moral psychology and how that applies to war. here, i'm only going to focus on the warrior ethos, the warrior ethos in the western tradition. to us from homer, that's a statue of there on the left from the library of congress. and homer gives us two warrior achilles and hector. and of although we have these two warriors, it's achilles, that emerges in the tradition as the archetype of warrior, one wonders if that's because achilles one but we wonder whether achilles is the kind of person that we should want to emulate. is achilles the kind of person does he have, the kind of ethos that i would want? young lieutenants in the united states air force to emulate, for example, i think probably not. as you might remember, the iliad opens with achilles wrath or achilles rage, depending on the translation and his rage, his wrath, his personal sleights of honor drive the plot in several instances. reason he's enraged at the beginning of the book is because his honor has been slighted. he expected a war prize and at the last minute was taken away. his honor was hurt. that's the thing that drives him to violence that that's the thing that motivates him. and i don't know that achilles is the kind of person that we would want to emulate as a as a kind of warrior ethos. we could look at hector on the other side. hector is much more human than achilles is a scholar, is more intelligent than i have pointed out. we get glimpses of hector with his family in a way we never get glimpses of achilles with family. we get glimpses of hector with his family. in one classic scene, he's still wearing his his uniform. he's wearing his armor, including his helmet, and he leans over the crib to see his baby. and the baby starts crying because the baby's scared of the armor. right. and hector thinks, how silly of me. and takes his helmet off. right. it's a very humanizing moment where we get to experience hector in the fullness of his personhood. that never happens with achilles. achilles is a warrior, and he's only a warrior. and i spend so much time on this only say that again and again and again. the scholarship on the warrior ethos traces the warrior ethos back to achilles. and i want to challenge that a little bit for a couple of reasons. first, because when we think about the warrior, we tend to focus on the fact that both achilles and hector were to risk their lives. they were willing to pay a great sacrifice toward whatever their ends might have been. i would argue that they both have very different ends in mind and. so this warrior ethos grows up to this idea that. what it means to be a warrior is the willingness to risk one's life. the willingness to face risk in the face of an adversary, maybe even the actual imposition risk in front of the adversary. and so we think about in our modern time is the archetypal warrior. well, it's the person who's willing to to go out there and face the enemy gunfire at normandy or, you know, it's the person who's willing to raise the flag at jima, people who are willing to face great risk to themselves in battle. i think that's fair. i think that's right. think if we look at the history of warfare, we do see that. warriors are associated with this willingness, face risk, but i think there's something else operating there. first of all, we should distinguish between actually facing risk and the willingness to face risk. and i think this really matters. speaking of normandy, a few years ago, my wife and i were able to tour the beaches at normandy and the american there. and we had walked through the 9000 headstones at normandy to, commemorate the us forces who were killed, not just in that battle. but throughout the war. and as we as we got back to the tour bus to go back to our next stop, i was in line with an older gentleman who had a world two veteran cap on and there were just not that many world war two veterans around anymore. and so i made a point to strike up a conversation and i had a fascinating conversation with a man named bill. and bill told me that on d-day his job as a 17 year old was to work the night shift at a baltimore newspaper and function of the night shift was to sit there, wait until the teletype machines, the stories that are on the wire. and his job was to determine whether the story sufficient enough to wake up the editors. and so he learned about in that room on the teletype machines. and surely that was newsworthy. he woke up the editors. and so he told me, thinks he's probably one of the first people in the united states to learn about the invasion because he had that job on that day. and by the end of the he had gotten his mother's signature on his paperwork so he could enlist in the navy as a 17 year old. training takes a long time by time, he was trained up to go to the european theater, that war was over. we had achieved in europe. and so the redesign needed his ship for the pacific theater and the war ended soon thereafter. but he jokes with me that he got to the pacific just in time to earn his world war two veteran cap right now, this man, bill, didn't face combat risk. he was never actually at he never engaged the enemy, but he definitely displayed a willingness to face combat risk. right? he definitely through the steps that one must take in order to become eligible for combat risk. and i think that willingness really matters. and of the reasons that i think that is because of all of the rpa, the remotely piloted aircraft crews that i've talked to, i have never met a single person who has said, you know, i volunteered to join the military. we're an all volunteer force. so everyone who joined the military volunteered. i volunteered to join the military. i raised my right hand. i swore an oath to support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies, foreign and domestic but then i volunteered to go to the predator or the reaper, because i really didn't want to face any combat risk. that seems unlikely to me. i have friends who volunteered to go to the predator reaper because were airsick or because they were tired of travel schedule and some other airframes or they wanted to produce more operational effects. they felt like they were stuck, not close enough to operation, but i've never met anyone. that said, i'm unwilling to face combat risk. therefore send me to the predator or reaper. so when we trace this line through the history of warfare, one of the things we should recognize is this distinction between actually facing and willingness to face risk. and i want to put the emphasis on the latter rather than on the former. but there's a second thing that we can we can mention here, and that is that all of the honor and glory that achilles is concerned with, it just might not sufficient to define what it is to be warrior. and i think as we read the memoirs of of wars over time several wars, i focused on the last 100 years but i'm sure there are others we constantly we consistently this this remark that even though there are glorious things in they they are far to too minuscule to justify the of war. i've given you just a few quotes here but oliver wendell was served in world war correct and served in the civil war and he was on several occasions and actually the first time he was shot, he was in field hospital and he was convinced that he was going to die. and he wrote a letter to his mother, in fact, saying that he had resigned himself to death. of course, he and he went on to become the us supreme court justice. later in life he was giving a speech at harvard. it's one of the most famous speeches that he's given and. he says war when you're at it is horrible. and dull. it's only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. so he's willing to admit that there's something divine war, but only in retrospect, only when can review the lessons learned, not the in the midst of the blood and fighting. ulysses grant certainly was a veteran of the civil war, but long before that he was a lieutenant in the mexican-american war, and he wrote his wife, julia. wherever there are battles, great, many must suffer. and for the sake of the little glory, i do not care to see it. so he's recognizing that there is some glory to be had, but it isn't worth fighting. and finally an unnamed french soldier in world war one writes, there will never be enough glory to cover all the blood and all mud. the french soldier right before that line, he calls the people, the generals and the policymakers who got the european powers into world war one. he calls them criminals. he talks about this this crime of war they've committed. and then he recognizes that there might be glory, but not enough to cover all the blood and all the mud. so achilles, motivated by honor and glory. i don't think that's enough. i don't think that gets us all the way there to what it means to be a warrior. certainly there's something about risk, something about the willingness to face risk. but i don't think that gets us all the way there either. i think the third thing, the thing that we're missing is that there also has to be a willingness to take human life on the other side of that. and that goes under. under. remarked. under-researched. people don't talk about that as much. and i. one reason for that is that in the long history warfare, these two things almost always go together. willingness to face risk and willingness to take life. and in the predator and reaper world, we're asking people to separate those two ideas. we have predator and reaper crew members at this point, just reaper crew members of the united states air force who are willing to face risk because they they took the oath. they raised right hand. they're not actually going to face risk. but we are going to ask them to take human life. and i think that's a crucial element to understanding the warrior ethos in the way that we should. so if there's one holdout, if we can all agree that war is too muddy, too bloody to be justified, glory and honor, there must be something else that justifies war as a just war theorist. i have strong views about. i'll sidestep them here. let's just imagine that there are just causes to go to war. and it has nothing to do with. honor and glory. even so, there holdouts who think there is at least one place that's still glorious in war. and those are the pilots, right? because flight has always been glorious. flight has always been this dream that we meant to achieve. we achieved it at kitty hawk in 1903, and then it became a fixture of warfare, starting in world war one. when i was an officer trainee at boston university. several years ago, i not only had to be familiar with john gillespie, mcgee's poem high flight, but my peers and i had to memorize it. he that i've slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter. silver wings. sun word. i have climbed and done 100 things you have not dreamed of. and so maybe flying airplanes and war is still glorious. that still has the honor that achilles was after. that's still still divine in oliver wendell holmes. his terms. but i hasten to add that john gillespie mcgee wasn't writing about wartime. he was tragically killed in a training accident before he ever got to war. he was writing about pilot training. he was writing about flying in a peaceful sky. and that. i agree is romantic. that is glorious. there is a dream. in flying in a peaceful sky long. after john gillespie mcgee died, i flew the six texan two and the ti 38 sea talon in pilot training, and i lived gillespie's poetic dream. i did the things that he described in the poem and it was every bit the dream that he suggested. but i there's a there's a threshold that we have to cross as aircrew members when start talking about combat operations. and that's the time to put away the the poetry of the means and adopt the prose of combat ends. and so my view here is that there might it might be the case that when we put these cockpits on the ground, when we have air crew members, fly these airplanes from the ground rather than from the air, we are we are robbing them of some of that dream. but it's in the service of our our military service to the political community. and that's just a necessary condition success. we have to do what we have to in order to in order to achieve our ends and to say, no, no, we need to hold on to that dream. we shouldn't have remote because we should let these pilots fly in their airplanes. that would be just like achilles saying that and honor are justifications for war. and so i just don't see it. i just don't see the argument working out. so i agree, gillespie on his dream, but i think there's something different about war. okay so if these weapon systems are not autonomous and and if we're convinced that glory and honor are not justifications for war, then we can finally start to hone in on the humanity behind these systems. they're not autonomous. they're not flown by computers. they're flown by people. so what is the human element that's at work in these weapon systems? there are several stories i could tell you, but i'll just mention a few. we could about moral psychology. we could talk about virtue. we could talk about moral justification. and in some of these stories, they're all interrelated. in researching for the book, i was allowed to go sit with crew members as they flew combat missions in the cockpit or sometimes called the ground station. and so i didn't know what was going to happen on those missions. i didn't know if they were going be exciting or boring to me to be frank about it. but it was a privilege to be able to watch the crews do their work and so i was on headset listening to the crew and to everyone they were talking to on the radio. and in this one instance, the pilot was talking the jtc. that's a joint terminal attack. it's usually an air force airman, although not. and they obtained this joint qualification to be able to say cleared hot on the radio so this is the air power advocate that's embedded with the ground force that can translate ground speak army and marine corps speak into air force speak to translate the ground force commander's intent to the aircrew and the pilots. now talking to the to the jetpack and the pilot has found some disturbed earth in a field and she's not sure exactly it is and she describes it to the jetpack and the jetpack is convinced that it's in order to keep in mind the jetpack and his have been being fired at by mortars several days. so he is he is up to find mortar tubes and destroy them. and so this pilot and the sensor operator discussed the issue, discuss what they thought was under their crosshairs and said no, it just doesn't look like a mortar to the much more likely scenario is that it's a shovel because this is a field and it's disturbed earth. so it looks like someone was doing some shoveling. they finished the task and they put down the shovel. and so the jetpack wanted this pilot drop a bomb on the mortar team. and the pilot said, no, and we can do that under us military doctrine, because under us military, the pilot follows an power chain of command up to the combined forces air commander and the land force follows a chain of command up through the land forces component. and so when the when the army or the marine corps joint correction, ground force commander asks us for a weapon as the united states air force for a weapon, it's not a direct order. they're not in a position to provide with direct orders. so it's really more like both people need to consent. the pilot has to to release the weapon and the ground force commander to ask for the weapon. in this case, the pilot was uncomfortable it and said, no, thank you. now, i would argue that that is human judgment operating in the cockpit, that would not have happened if this was an autonomous computer driven system. the data could have just said, go and the system would have gone. but because we, a human in the seat, the human can execute human judgment. i that's important. even though that story that i just described is never going to make the news. you'll never read it in the newspaper. you'll never see a headline. and there are a thousand such stories like that where air crew members are using their human judgment. and you might disagree in in this case, you might side with the data and you might with the pilot. but the point is that there is a human judgment at work and these decisions. and i think crucial and fits in with the long history of of air power, the video that you're seeing on the left here. this is predator video from the of 2002 on a hill called tucker, ga. afghanistan in 2001. as i mentioned, the us invaded afghanistan on october sixth, a pilot named scott swanson, the first hellfire missile off of a predator. that was on the opening night of the campaign. but it wasn't close air support. he wasn't supporting troops in contact. he was trying to destroy a high value target. actually, he was to destroy a vehicle in the convoy that belonged to a high value target in the hopes that that would draw the high value target out. five months later, there's a predator providing overwatch for on this mountain, on this tucker gar hilltop, and this predator, unlike the previous, is not armed. the hellfire is new to the predator. they had to expedite the testing process to get the hellfire on the predator. so not the tail numbers have a hellfire missile. so this is stuck just watching. it can't do anything. it doesn't have a missile. well, the this was a special force ingress. it was a seal. and they're their their air power advocate was, an air force airman named john chapman. they took heavy. the enemy was far more dug in than they had expected. it did not go well. chapman was injured and he fell, lost consciousness, and his teammates assumed that he was dead. they quickly exfil they quickly exfiltrated the mountain top. and because they thought chapman was dead, they the risk of going to get his body was too high. so they left him and then he woke up and then he fought on by himself. another hour. and at the time he was awarded the air force cross is one of the highest ranking medals. one can be awarded posthumously. he was killed after that that our, in fact, according to some accounts, was killed because he had he had taken several bunkers from the enemy. he had driven the enemy out of several bunkers. he took up one of those bunkers as a fighting position. and he have been able to stay there and fight on longer. but according to some accounts, when the army sent a quick reaction force to support this effort, he came out of the bunker to, draw enemy fire so that they wouldn't be able to shoot down the with the army folks that were inbound. so he was awarded the air force cross several years ago, then secretary of the air force deborah lee james read an article, airman magazine, that said that an air force airman had not been awarded the congressional of honor since vietnam. and so she that page out of the magazine and handed it to an aide and said, go look into this. how come an air force airman hasn't been awarded the medal of honor since the vietnam? and so they looked over several sets of records to try to find medals that might be able to be to be promoted to the of honor. and chapman's was one. so he he has now been awarded the congressional medal of honor, one of the most important pieces of evidence. that decision was this video from predator at the time. that's why it's been declassified and why you can find it on the internet. but imagine imagine that the pilot of this airplane who if i have the historical pieces right, is also scott swanson, the pilot who fired that first missile. right on the opening day of the war. he's got an armed predator and he fired a missile. now he's watching a fellow airman fight for his life and there's nothing he can do about it. try to imagine that feeling. the next airplane. once he got out, he ran out of gas and to go back to the base, he was replaced by a different pilot and that pilot was flying an armed predator. so when that army quick reaction, quick reaction force got to the hill. another jay tech, gabe brown was able to call in the first ever close air support strike from a hellfire missile and they were able to defend the friendly forces in that strike. here's why i tell you the story. when we think about the ethics of remote, we're often we're often to terms with the headlines, with the strikes that have gone badly and will be the first to admit that several strikes have gone badly. and i'm not saying that those strikes were morally justified. that's not the argument. the argument is for every one of those strikes that you might see in the news, there are countless times that the predator or reaper crew did, the right thing produced the mission objectives, what they were asked to produce and did so with extremely low civilian harm. and imagine if scott swanson had a missile on his airplane that day, right? the story would have been very different. and john chapman might have made it home. right. so when we think about the ethics of warfare, we can't just think about the strikes that have gone badly. we have to think about all the things that would have been different had we not had these airplanes. there are. people i have met them who believe the world would be a better place had it never for remotely piloted aircraft. a big question. i don't know the answer to that question, but i know if we're going to take that question seriously, then we have to think not only about the strikes have gone bad, but also all the work that the crews have done to produce justified military aims with very low civilian harm. so what comes next? i think i've made the case the human crew is central to, these airplanes and i can imagine i've heard people say to me when i say these airplanes are not autonomous and, they're not driven by artificial intelligence. sometimes i get the response. yeah, not yet. but soon they could be. that's true. soon they could be. and in that that composite bulbous, maybe instead of a satellite dish antenna, maybe we have some supercomputer brains. someday but what i wouldn't want to do is that when that day comes, when artificial or autonomy is sophisticated, that it can autonomously control a reaper. or wouldn't it also be able to autonomously control other stuff too? i have there a picture artist's conception of what a loyal wingman might look like in the us air force's approach to loyal wingman. that would be a traditional f 35 fighter pilot controlling, a swarm of, say, four, ten or 12 autonomous, loyal wingman. if the age of artificial intelligence is upon us, if we're going to have autonomous weapons systems, sure, it could look like reaper, but it could also look like the loyal wingman. but for that matter, it could also look like a traditionally piloted f 35. we can have an artificial intelligence system and put it on that airplane to support the pilot and the pilots. so what i don't want to do is imagine this throughline that goes from predator to reaper to the age of artificial intelligence. i don't think that's what it's going to look like. i think we need to learn the lessons we can learn from remote warfare, from predator and reaper. and then i think we need to have a separate discussion about autonomy in artificial intelligence. i don't think they're as closely related as some people do. so everything i've said up to this point seems a little bit retrospective. and that's true. it is retrospective. i am looking backwards at two decades of remote warfare, but i don't want to leave you with the impression there's nothing here for us, for the future and the reason that i say that is because the emphasis, the ethics discussion on which i've very little i meant is on the distance, right? the reason that we can separate in the warrior ethos, reason we can separate the willingness to face risk and the willingness to take life is because of the distances involved. the reason have to ask questions about whether these crews their job. seriously, i didn't say much on that but that's one of the arguments that have a playstation mentality or the reason people have that concern because of the distance we've had, we've learned a lot about the psychology of remote warfare. i haven't said on that either, but i could add to is grounded in the distance. the initial assumption that these crews would be would be psychologically unaffected by their work was grounded in fact that they're at such great distances. how could they be so emotionally invested? and so all of these questions about distance, those aren't questions that go away at the end of the predator and reaper era. those are questions that are going to come. and i think they're going to come up more frequently. let me just give you a few examples. if what we're worried about in the ethics of remote warfare is the 7000 miles, which is the distance from nevada to afghanistan if that's the kind of distance that we're worried about, then think about something like cyber warfare operations or a cyber warfare operator might operate from the united states and produce effects in cyberspace that have physical effects on the other side of the. or think about hypersonic flying at five times the speed of sound continents and over oceans that, too, is going to involve thousands of miles worth of distance. or imagine, as i said, artificial and autonomy. we know we might imagine that if 35 pilot with a human pilot board staying outside of the enemy's threat ring and sending some of those wingmen forward to a place that's more dangerous even that pilot will be at a greater distance than will the autonomous level wingman. so these questions about remoteness don't go away. i think they they actually get more important. and so my hope is that will be able to look at the lessons learned from from 20 years of remote warfare, ask hard questions about what elements of this really are ethically significant, and then try to apply some of those lessons to the next 20 years. thank you all for here tonight. and do we have any questions to to mention about being 7000 miles away from afghans does that mean that there's one drone operation? so great? the question was, is there just one operations center these these airplanes? because i had mentioned the state of nevada. so i have mentioned at the top, but just in case there's any doubt the views expressed are my own and don't necessarily represent the department of defense, though i am an active duty air force officer, so there are lots open source information about various places that the air force, these airplanes out of. i'm not in a position here to list them all. there are several. yes, sir. you talked and about distance being issue, but it involves more than just the predators. what about the person? no relationship. between the and the potential victim, because it's thing if you are flying a fighter jet that sends a missile some distance or punching a button sends a missile, but it's another. you've been watching the family that you're going to perhaps attack. that's right. so the question was about the distance relationships and how that applies to the aircrew that might be on one side of the world and the person under the crosshairs on the other side of the world. and that's one of the things that we had to learn the hard way. a community that people do get invested in the work and that can at a at an emotional psychological. so not only is it case that they're witnessing what's happening on the screen. so it's it's not like you know the the remote warfare of the 1990s if you will was cruise missiles. but when the surface warfare officer launches a cruise missile from a ship, they're not actually seeing the impact. they're not seeing the missile explode. and so on the one hand, it's true that we're these crews are watching the video. right. so that's one way that it's a little more intimate. but we have that in traditional fighter planes. also, the tv screen will be smaller and the image might be a little grainier. but we share that in common with the traditional fighter and bomber crews. what really it different is the loiter time. so fact that these air crew can stay on station for eight, ten, 12, 21 hours really provide a lot of insight sometimes about how just how human the person under the crosshairs is. so different people react differently to that. but we certainly have learned that some members have had a hard time with some of those issues. i didn't get into it much here tonight, but but the the remotely piloted aircraft community, if will, is several different commands. but that community recognized. probably almost 15 years ago that this was to be a psychological, emotional challenge. and so at creech air base, for instance, they established a human performance team and at various times they've had slightly different professional cadre of professionals. but at the time i visited and interviewed folks, it was a physiologist, a psychologist, a chaplain. and so the idea is that with their powers combined, they should be able to provide support to the in the kind of emotional spiritual, psychological space. and even when they first established that team, they decided it really wasn't effective because those members didn't have the same classification readings, the crews. and so the crews didn't feel comfortable telling them what had happened on the mission because they didn't know if they were allowed to because of the classification constraints. so now that human performance team is read into all the same classifications as the crews, so they can just walk in the work centers, they can walk up and meet people and build that way. and the the stories that i got from them, from the members of human performance team when i interview them, is that it's really come a long way that they really have deep going to get support from the human performance team. so we've come a long way, but we had to learn the hard way. you you also mentioned that there can be differences of opinions, a request to going ahead with a strike that happen often. i don't have any data to to but it's it's certainly unheard of. one story that i think captures this the best is a friend of mine named, dan, had been following a high value target for several weeks and. so he's only an eight hour shift. there's a 24 hour cycle. so there are other crew, other crews that are supporting that same target. but every day he comes in and for roughly 8 hours, he follows his high value target. and every day this high value target leaves his house, puts a kid on the back of the motorbike. there's a football, you know, soccer pitch the home. and so there's a bunch of kids playing soccer. and so he goes and gets one of those kids, puts him on the back of the motorbike and goes a mile to the north to the homemade factory, because that's what he's responsible for in the terrorist organization. and so it became pretty clear that he's using those children as a human shield to to do the drive to the north. and so, my friend dan is watching this play out. and then one day after three weeks of this, he shows up and starts to get the intelligence briefing and says the ground force commander to take the shot today. and so starts asking questions of the relevant echelons today. why does it have to be today? why not yesterday? why not tomorrow? and he never a satisfactory answer to that question. and he knew that if he's asked, take the shot and if there's a kid on the back of the motorbike, he's morally responsible for that. so he decided that he wasn't willing to take that shot. and by the way, they did the ground force team did consult with with legal. so it wasn't a question of whether it was illegal. the determination was made that that the proportionality calculus would have been satisfied. so although it would have been tragic, it would have been a justifiable civilian casualty because the military value of the target was so significant. i'm to discuss that, if you like. but the point that it wouldn't have been a war crime, it wouldn't have been illegal. it's just that dan didn't feel comfortable with it. so the point of this whole story is that dan has the authority to say to the ground force commander, i'm not doing it. doesn't feel. but then because these cockpits are on the ground, the squadron commander walked into dan's cockpit and said, dan, are going to be all that. you're going to be able to take the shot today. and what strikes me about the story is that the squadron commander could have said, dan, take the shot. well, now we in uniform code of military justice, territory because now that is his commander in his chain of command him a lawful order. but the commander do that because when we put these cockpits, the ground, we built in some flexibility and the commander recognized that. so he said, dan, you going to be able to take the shot? and dan, if they could give you a reason why it has to be today, i could do it. but in the absence that reason, it feels arbitrary and i'm not comfortable with it. and so the commander said, all right, i don't have anybody else to fly the line today. so stick with it, i understand you're not going to take the shot tomorrow. i'm going to get somebody else on this line. and so that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target come out of the house and the next day, squadron commander found another pilot who was fully briefed it wasn't a secret. he knew. he knew what he was getting himself into. and he said he was willing to do that. and that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target did come out, did get on the motorbike, but didn't put a kid on the back of the bike. and so the timing, the complacency worked out to where that pilot was able to take a clean shot against the high value target. but i tell that story here because emphasizes the fact that that air chain of command, that's that's that's not in negotiation. those are orders when it comes to the air power supporting land component, that becomes more of a peer to peer relationship. this kind of warfare sounds more personal. i think that's right. one of the things that i think it took a long time to recognize is that if you look at the the development of technical i'm sorry for those that couldn't hear the question was this feels more personal. this kind of war feels more personal. so if you look at the technological developments in the 1990s, especially in the united states air force the the tasks were to try to find and destroy and that was true in the first gulf war and it was true in in kosovo. and it was true throughout the 1990s. in fact, the air and stated mission was to do time targeting and single digit minutes. so find a target and put a bomber within minutes or less. but all of the target sets were machines. now certainly if you blow up, you know, let's say an iraqi tank in 1991, certainly you're going kill the people inside. that's that's going to happen. but that was never the intent. we weren't we weren't trying to kill those people. we were trying to destroy the tank. and what happened september 11th is that we transition to a force that was in the business of targeting people. and and i think it took us a long i think we reeled from that transition for a long time. and so now we were i would like to think we're we're coming out of the post-9-11 wars, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency. there are lots of people in the dod who are talking about future conflicts. and it almost feels like a reversion to that 99 just discussion about how do i destroy the adversaries machine? and so i don't know if we ever if we ever got to a point where, we really understood all the nuances of that shift. but but we did learn to do it effectively. and as i said, to deal with some of the psychological, emotional implications of that. and do you see things like drones becoming more prevalent as a weapon warfare? so the question is whether i see these airplanes becoming more prevalent in warfare, it's really hard to and people in the united states force have very different opinions on that. it's i think this is just my opinion. it's a question of what one chooses to emphasize. so if you look, the recent national defense strategy, that emphasis is on you know great power competition, near-peer threats the pacing threat is china that's what that document says. and so when people think about that kind of conflict, we're very much in the we're looking forward not back, it's going to be a contested environment, meaning, you know, unlike iraq and afghanistan, they'll have the ability to shoot down our airplanes. and so we might need airplanes are more sophisticated than the predator and reaper there's another line of argument that says even if we need to think about those things terrorism isn't going away, that that operational concern ended. so we still need airplanes like this. so what i think we'll see is increasing automation, not all in one go. we're not going to get to loyal wingman and i had up there overnight but i think you'll start to see processes on board airplanes become more and more automated to the degree that maybe potentially eventually we're able to take a person out of it then and then it's a drone, but it's different from what i've been talking about here because now it's it's an autonomous airplane opposed to a remotely piloted one. for me, i have one last question. what is your answer? the title of your book? yeah, it's i was hoping you wouldn't. the question is, what is the answer to the. i think that these are weapons. and so i think that whether the use of a weapon is justified or not depends on what you do with it. and so i think it is incumbent upon us as as the united states of america to impose on ourselves on how we decide to use force. and as a just war theorist, i think that last resort is a crucial of what they call you, said bell in the of the decision to go to war and. one of the main one of the main arguments, the most significant arguments against remote warfare is that it creates a moral hazard? it provides an incentive for decision makers to resort, to force. it's cheap and easy, and i don't even mean monetarily cheap, although these are cheaper than, you know, f-16s and f-35s, but it's politically inexpensive because the chances of having casualties on our side are much lower. and so we create a political incentive to resort to force, even when maybe we shouldn't resort to force. and i think the solution to that isn't getting rid of these weapons systems. i think it's imposing self-discipline on our on our foreign policy. but that's just my opinion. yes, sir. so from kind of a historical perspective, you know, sixties cold minutemen, sailors, crews, bunker in american sailor, we get it. you know, in order they got 90 seconds, they go through the procedure, they push the button, obviously more distant than the experience of. the drones now. but at the other end i've seen some stuff related to like boston dynamics with their robots being basically warriors again, to the question do you see a limit of where you know a robot. one guy controlling 20 of them running through forest or back at a desk. i mean, yeah, it is you know, it's escalation. yeah, that's a great question. so the gist of the question was remote warfare has been around for a long time going back to the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the post-nuclear era. and so that seems like it's been around a time. but then we have these contemporary developments like the the boston dynamics robot dog and, you know, robot, other robots and everything and so we're putting ourselves on a trend line that we're going to have a single operator for several, maybe several dozen of these systems. and so that was the gist of the question. so i am concerned. so one of the reasons that i take view that i do is because the humans are so involved, intimately involved in all the decisions that go into the use of force. these weapon systems. and as we start to kind of aggregate those systems where, you know, maybe you'll have for eight or ten or 12 systems under one human control, there's no way that that human is going to be as intimately invested in each of those scenarios or each of those operations. and so i do have a concern about that, actually. i worked with i worked with some researchers on a project, and we were looking at how humans react to the kinds of moral dilemmas that can come up in remote warfare. and we just had an offline discussion. i was surprised to find that there proposed solution just as an idea. what if we intentionally pixelate the image before the strike right so we now have high definition cameras which is far better than what you saw in that video. but what if the time of the strike we pixelate the image so that the human operators aren't face to face with the human toll that causing? and my view on that, i don't think that's the right move. don't think that's the right direction. right. i think we should should do whatever we need to do to build emotional resiliency in the crews so that can deal with that that trauma, that stress. but i don't want to move to place where we're where we're constantly abstracting from. the human cost war, because the more we consider war to be costless, right, the more the more fail to appreciate the costs of war. the more eager we'll be to start wars. and i want to put us in that position. and there are questions questions. but joe, thank you very much is you have given us, i think, a lot to think about and. think about it in terms of of context going back in history and we appreciate you being join me in thanking joe chhabra. thank you very much. thank you all very much. and if you'll joinand welcome ts here to hear our talk by paul miller on his new book the religion of american greatness. i am mark tooley, president of the institute on, religion and democracy and of providence journal of christiana and american foreign policy. we welcome all who are here, all who are this event live on, facebook and twitter and i, audie youtube all who will be watching this on c-span book tv. we're very grateful for the presence of their crew here this ev
i'm tony clark from the carter presidential library. and we're glad you're here for all of our programs, you know? several years ago i was watching a helen mirren movie eye in the sky, and it's about decision making process for a drone strike. and so when i saw joe book is remote warfare moral, it just seemed like the kind of topic that really needs to be discussed. and this would be a good place to to discuss it. joseph shapiro is lieutenant colonel in the us air force. he's got a ph.d. in philosophy from the university of oxford. his areas of expertise are everything from war theory military ethics especially the ethics of remote and autonomous weapons. he's a senior pilot with more than 1400 pilot and instructor pilot hours and many flown in of major u.s. combat humanitarian operations. he currently serves on the air force staff, so staffs, artificial intelligence, cross functional team. but, you know, the more we see u.s. military involved in other parts of the world, the more we see the use of drones and other remote weapons. and so now a good time to discuss whether that is moral or. so please join me in welcoming joseph chapter. thank you, tony, for the kind introduction. thank you for being here. this is really a privilege. i would be lying if i told you that i expected someday to write a book and to be able to talk to folks like you about it. i never thought that was going to be the case. this is really exciting. and to do so at this historic place is something special for me. also i would be remiss if i didn't mention that president carter wrote a new york times op ed in 2012, in which made it very clear that he had qualms about the quote unquote, drone program. and so i'm excited to bring some of those questions up and maybe hopefully to address some of the concerns that he expressed. so i think i'll start by talking about a period of during which i was writing this book. i think it was about 18. i walked into the family room where my kids were watching tv. they were watching paw patrol. i don't know if you're familiar whenever there a problem around adventure bay these pups save the day. and i saw that one of the human characters in the show was flying a remotely piloted aircraft using a camera onboard the aircraft to try find a lost hiker in the mountains. i could swear i heard this child in the show say the word drone. and i said to my kids, did they just say drone on a patrol? and my seven year old said to me somewhat condescendingly, yeah, dad, do you know what a drone even is? so let's start there. do we even know what a drone is? i think i do. i think in a position to talk about drones, i know what they. but it's harder than it sounds. and one of the reasons that it's harder that it's than it sounds is because there are so many misperceptions around these airplanes. and so before we even can have a conversation about whether remote warfare is moral. we have to have a conversation about what we mean, some of these terms. what kind of warfare we referring to. so i'll give you just one example. i have nothing against the international committee of the red cross. they do excellent work. this is just literally the first one that came up when i googled. but this is an article from the icrc on autonomous weapons systems. and presumably it's going to tell us about the profound implications for the future of warfare. but the art department decided to give us a picture of an empty nine reaper, an empty nine reaper is not an autonomous weapon system. there's nothing autonomous about it. there's a human crew there, qualified. they're trained. they're certified. they're qualified to aircrew under the air force instructions that govern air crew qualifications. and there are some automatic of this airplane it can fly to point it can hold an altitude. it even hold a specific bank angle, if you like. but that's no more autonomy than we have any modern airplane, including the airplane i flew went on to get here this morning. and so we kind of a problem because our our minds, we have these heuristics built because we see this image of the mq predator or its successor, the nine reaper, over and over and over again, associated with things like autonomy. i'm going to get to that a little bit more in a moment. but what i want to emphasize here is that the weapon systems that i have in mind, the predator and reaper, they're not autonomous and they're not by artificial intelligence. so what are the. well, the question remains difficult to answer. again, in 2018, i had a friend who assumed command of the newest united states air force empty nine reaper squadron. so i flew across ocean. i was living in the uk at the time. i flew across the ocean to be a part of that ceremony and the local headlines ran words like this drone squadron activated. and as you can see here, this is an actual picture of the aircrew. they went from being a detachment to being a full fledged squadron. so they peeled off the patch, signifying the detachment put on the new patch, signifying the squadron. it was a great day and i was really glad to a part of it. two days later, you might not remember this date, but i certainly do. on december 21st, 2018, i back across the ocean. and as we approached gatwick airport in london, the pilot came over the mike and said on, fortunately, we're not going to be able to land at gatwick to drone activity on the airfield. he said, i've been flying for 18 years and i have never seen anything like this. so we thought we might be able to divert to heathrow. that would have been nice. that was actually closer to my house. but heathrow was full of all the airplanes that have already diverted to gatwick. so i got a free trip to manchester and a four hour train ride back home. but the next day these are the kinds of that i saw. gatwick drones, ground flights. so this word drone, we're asking it to do a lot of work. it everything from fully autonomous killer robots that don't exist. it covers the mq one predator and empty nine reaper that have been a mainstay of us air force operations for the last 15 or 20 years. and then it covers 300 quadcopters that you can buy on amazon or anywhere quadcopters are sold. and the reason that matters to me is because unlike these air crew members who are trained and certified and have to meet longstanding standards for for air force, the person who bought that quadcopter ruined my day by having me have to divert, but also costing hundreds of millions pounds in the in the airline industry that. person had no certification they didn't need any special training. and as i said, it only cost them a few hundred bucks. so there's a huge difference to me between the kind of people that are involved in us air force operations and piloted aircraft and then the broad swath of people who might be behind one of these less expensive pieces, equipment. and so as we try to hone in on what it is, we're actually talking here, i want to away from autonomy, but i also want to recognize why we tend to think that these things are more autonomous than they are. so i don't think it's the right view, but it's an understandable view and part of the reason for that is because you look the shape of this airplane. this is the mta nine reaper on the left. nine was initially operational, capable in 27. so that was just six years after the predator was first armed with the hellfire missile, that first shot was on the opening day of the us war in afghanistan. so 2000, when we get the predator, 27, we get the reaper. and this is the reaper. and i want to point specifically at that nose in the front on any other airplane, what would you expect to see at that bulbous nose in the front? we would see canopy glass or windscreen, almost every airplane, almost every picture of every airplane that you have ever seen. if you look at that spot on the airplane, you're going to see canopy glass or windscreen and i think we've trained ourselves over and over and over and over. we've seen hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of different pictures, airplanes in the course of our lives and at the front, the airplane, canopy, glass or windscreen. and what that represents to us, i was just at the airport this morning. when you look through the canopy, what do you see? you see the pilot the person who you know is responsible for that airplane and everything on board. and on this airplane, we don't have canopy glass and we don't have a windscreen. and i can't look through that glass and see the eyes. the person who's responsible for that airplane, i might trick myself into thinking, well, maybe there is no one responsible, but i'm here to assert to you that there is someone responsible. it's a qualified aircrew member that's been certified to be responsible, that airplane and everything on it. just humor me. there's two thought experiments that i'd like you to consider. the first, i don't know if you'll be familiar with this. as you might imagine by now, i watch lot of cartoons. the the disney pixar movie planes. every one of those planes has eyes. where are those eyes on those cartoon? they're always on the canopy glass, the windscreen. right. so even the animators at pixar know that as the ancient proverb says, in the case of airplanes, the are the windows to the soul, the eyes glass is literally the window through which i see human person, the soul that's responsible for that airplane. second thought experiment. just imagine we are now in the age of autonomous vehicles. there are not that many out there on the roads. they're not in every city, but that they're in your city and you're standing at the crosswalk first. imagine just a regular automobile, good old fashioned car. it's got the windscreen. you look the glass, you see the person on the other side. when i'm at the crosswalk. and i'm trying to determine if that car going to stop for me. what do i do? i look through the windscreen and i make eye contact with the driver to see if they can see me. right. and we share a little bit of a moment if we don't make eye contact. i'm waiting till they come a complete stop before i cross right. and in fact, we can be thrown off on that. as i mentioned, i lived in the uk as much as it was difficult to learn to drive on the left hand side of the road. it was even more difficult to learn to look at the right, the correct side of the car because the car approaches the crosswalk. i'm constantly at my right side of the vehicle, which of course is the passenger seat. and it's pretty unnerving to see an empty passenger seat or even worse, to see a person's dog. but now imagine now that there's an autonomous vehicle, right? the autonomous has no need of canopy glass or windscreen. right. it senses the world around it by use of cameras and light and radar and some other things. and it positions itself in the world through those means. it doesn't need the glass. so imagine that an autonomous vehicle has, a completely opaque windscreen, imagine that. it's this composite grey that we see on the reaper. and now imagine in the crosswalk when that vehicle approaches, the crosswalk, are you going to step out in front of the vehicle? maybe there's a person inside, maybe not. is that a technical system or is that a techno, social? is it just a piece of machinery? is there a human operator behind it? i think without realizing it? these are all the questions come up when people who haven't seen the of a predator or reaper cockpit see this image. so this is a lot of table setting. there's a lot of work to do to get to the ethical. but i think this is where we need to start these airplanes are not autonomous. they're flown by a certified and qualified air force aircrew aircrew. okay. so if if we can if we can dispatch with the idea that these systems might autonomous, then we can start to ask real substance, tough questions about how does this new technology or in my view, this techno social system. it's a system that consists both of a piece of technology and human. cruise how does fit in with the long history of warfare? there are lots of ways we can ask this question. we could talk about moral justification for killing in war. we could talk about moral psychology and how that applies to war. here, i'm only going to focus on the warrior ethos, the warrior ethos in the western tradition. to us from homer, that's a statue of there on the left from the library of congress. and homer gives us two warrior achilles and hector. and of although we have these two warriors, it's achilles, that emerges in the tradition as the archetype of warrior, one wonders if that's because achilles one but we wonder whether achilles is the kind of person that we should want to emulate. is achilles the kind of person does he have, the kind of ethos that i would want? young lieutenants in the united states air force to emulate, for example, i think probably not. as you might remember, the iliad opens with achilles wrath or achilles rage, depending on the translation and his rage, his wrath, his personal sleights of honor drive the plot in several instances. reason he's enraged at the beginning of the book is because his honor has been slighted. he expected a war prize and at the last minute was taken away. his honor was hurt. that's the thing that drives him to violence that that's the thing that motivates him. and i don't know that achilles is the kind of person that we would want to emulate as a as a kind of warrior ethos. we could look at hector on the other side. hector is much more human than achilles is a scholar, is more intelligent than i have pointed out. we get glimpses of hector with his family in a way we never get glimpses of achilles with family. we get glimpses of hector with his family. in one classic scene, he's still wearing his his uniform. he's wearing his armor, including his helmet, and he leans over the crib to see his baby. and the baby starts crying because the baby's scared of the armor. right. and hector thinks, how silly of me. and takes his helmet off. right. it's a very humanizing moment where we get to experience hector in the fullness of his personhood. that never happens with achilles. achilles is a warrior, and he's only a warrior. and i spend so much time on this only say that again and again and again. the scholarship on the warrior ethos traces the warrior ethos back to achilles. and i want to challenge that a little bit for a couple of reasons. first, because when we think about the warrior, we tend to focus on the fact that both achilles and hector were to risk their lives. they were willing to pay a great sacrifice toward whatever their ends might have been. i would argue that they both have very different ends in mind and. so this warrior ethos grows up to this idea that. what it means to be a warrior is the willingness to risk one's life. the willingness to face risk in the face of an adversary, maybe even the actual imposition risk in front of the adversary. and so we think about in our modern time is the archetypal warrior. well, it's the person who's willing to to go out there and face the enemy gunfire at normandy or, you know, it's the person who's willing to raise the flag at jima, people who are willing to face great risk to themselves in battle. i think that's fair. i think that's right. think if we look at the history of warfare, we do see that. warriors are associated with this willingness, face risk, but i think there's something else operating there. first of all, we should distinguish between actually facing risk and the willingness to face risk. and i think this really matters. speaking of normandy, a few years ago, my wife and i were able to tour the beaches at normandy and the american there. and we had walked through the 9000 headstones at normandy to, commemorate the us forces who were killed, not just in that battle. but throughout the war. and as we as we got back to the tour bus to go back to our next stop, i was in line with an older gentleman who had a world two veteran cap on and there were just not that many world war two veterans around anymore. and so i made a point to strike up a conversation and i had a fascinating conversation with a man named bill. and bill told me that on d-day his job as a 17 year old was to work the night shift at a baltimore newspaper and function of the night shift was to sit there, wait until the teletype machines, the stories that are on the wire. and his job was to determine whether the story sufficient enough to wake up the editors. and so he learned about in that room on the teletype machines. and surely that was newsworthy. he woke up the editors. and so he told me, thinks he's probably one of the first people in the united states to learn about the invasion because he had that job on that day. and by the end of the he had gotten his mother's signature on his paperwork so he could enlist in the navy as a 17 year old. training takes a long time by time, he was trained up to go to the european theater, that war was over. we had achieved in europe. and so the redesign needed his ship for the pacific theater and the war ended soon thereafter. but he jokes with me that he got to the pacific just in time to earn his world war two veteran cap right now, this man, bill, didn't face combat risk. he was never actually at he never engaged the enemy, but he definitely displayed a willingness to face combat risk. right? he definitely through the steps that one must take in order to become eligible for combat risk. and i think that willingness really matters. and of the reasons that i think that is because of all of the rpa, the remotely piloted aircraft crews that i've talked to, i have never met a single person who has said, you know, i volunteered to join the military. we're an all volunteer force. so everyone who joined the military volunteered. i volunteered to join the military. i raised my right hand. i swore an oath to support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies, foreign and domestic but then i volunteered to go to the predator or the reaper, because i really didn't want to face any combat risk. that seems unlikely to me. i have friends who volunteered to go to the predator reaper because were airsick or because they were tired of travel schedule and some other airframes or they wanted to produce more operational effects. they felt like they were stuck, not close enough to operation, but i've never met anyone. that said, i'm unwilling to face combat risk. therefore send me to the predator or reaper. so when we trace this line through the history of warfare, one of the things we should recognize is this distinction between actually facing and willingness to face risk. and i want to put the emphasis on the latter rather than on the former. but there's a second thing that we can we can mention here, and that is that all of the honor and glory that achilles is concerned with, it just might not sufficient to define what it is to be warrior. and i think as we read the memoirs of of wars over time several wars, i focused on the last 100 years but i'm sure there are others we constantly we consistently this this remark that even though there are glorious things in they they are far to too minuscule to justify the of war. i've given you just a few quotes here but oliver wendell was served in world war correct and served in the civil war and he was on several occasions and actually the first time he was shot, he was in field hospital and he was convinced that he was going to die. and he wrote a letter to his mother, in fact, saying that he had resigned himself to death. of course, he and he went on to become the us supreme court justice. later in life he was giving a speech at harvard. it's one of the most famous speeches that he's given and. he says war when you're at it is horrible. and dull. it's only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. so he's willing to admit that there's something divine war, but only in retrospect, only when can review the lessons learned, not the in the midst of the blood and fighting. ulysses grant certainly was a veteran of the civil war, but long before that he was a lieutenant in the mexican-american war, and he wrote his wife, julia. wherever there are battles, great, many must suffer. and for the sake of the little glory, i do not care to see it. so he's recognizing that there is some glory to be had, but it isn't worth fighting. and finally an unnamed french soldier in world war one writes, there will never be enough glory to cover all the blood and all mud. the french soldier right before that line, he calls the people, the generals and the policymakers who got the european powers into world war one. he calls them criminals. he talks about this this crime of war they've committed. and then he recognizes that there might be glory, but not enough to cover all the blood and all the mud. so achilles, motivated by honor and glory. i don't think that's enough. i don't think that gets us all the way there to what it means to be a warrior. certainly there's something about risk, something about the willingness to face risk. but i don't think that gets us all the way there either. i think the third thing, the thing that we're missing is that there also has to be a willingness to take human life on the other side of that. and that goes under. under. remarked. under-researched. people don't talk about that as much. and i. one reason for that is that in the long history warfare, these two things almost always go together. willingness to face risk and willingness to take life. and in the predator and reaper world, we're asking people to separate those two ideas. we have predator and reaper crew members at this point, just reaper crew members of the united states air force who are willing to face risk because they they took the oath. they raised right hand. they're not actually going to face risk. but we are going to ask them to take human life. and i think that's a crucial element to understanding the warrior ethos in the way that we should. so if there's one holdout, if we can all agree that war is too muddy, too bloody to be justified, glory and honor, there must be something else that justifies war as a just war theorist. i have strong views about. i'll sidestep them here. let's just imagine that there are just causes to go to war. and it has nothing to do with. honor and glory. even so, there holdouts who think there is at least one place that's still glorious in war. and those are the pilots, right? because flight has always been glorious. flight has always been this dream that we meant to achieve. we achieved it at kitty hawk in 1903, and then it became a fixture of warfare, starting in world war one. when i was an officer trainee at boston university. several years ago, i not only had to be familiar with john gillespie, mcgee's poem high flight, but my peers and i had to memorize it. he that i've slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter. silver wings. sun word. i have climbed and done 100 things you have not dreamed of. and so maybe flying airplanes and war is still glorious. that still has the honor that achilles was after. that's still still divine in oliver wendell holmes. his terms. but i hasten to add that john gillespie mcgee wasn't writing about wartime. he was tragically killed in a training accident before he ever got to war. he was writing about pilot training. he was writing about flying in a peaceful sky. and that. i agree is romantic. that is glorious. there is a dream. in flying in a peaceful sky long. after john gillespie mcgee died, i flew the six texan two and the ti 38 sea talon in pilot training, and i lived gillespie's poetic dream. i did the things that he described in the poem and it was every bit the dream that he suggested. but i there's a there's a threshold that we have to cross as aircrew members when start talking about combat operations. and that's the time to put away the the poetry of the means and adopt the prose of combat ends. and so my view here is that there might it might be the case that when we put these cockpits on the ground, when we have air crew members, fly these airplanes from the ground rather than from the air, we are we are robbing them of some of that dream. but it's in the service of our our military service to the political community. and that's just a necessary condition success. we have to do what we have to in order to in order to achieve our ends and to say, no, no, we need to hold on to that dream. we shouldn't have remote because we should let these pilots fly in their airplanes. that would be just like achilles saying that and honor are justifications for war. and so i just don't see it. i just don't see the argument working out. so i agree, gillespie on his dream, but i think there's something different about war. okay so if these weapon systems are not autonomous and and if we're convinced that glory and honor are not justifications for war, then we can finally start to hone in on the humanity behind these systems. they're not autonomous. they're not flown by computers. they're flown by people. so what is the human element that's at work in these weapon systems? there are several stories i could tell you, but i'll just mention a few. we could about moral psychology. we could talk about virtue. we could talk about moral justification. and in some of these stories, they're all interrelated. in researching for the book, i was allowed to go sit with crew members as they flew combat missions in the cockpit or sometimes called the ground station. and so i didn't know what was going to happen on those missions. i didn't know if they were going be exciting or boring to me to be frank about it. but it was a privilege to be able to watch the crews do their work and so i was on headset listening to the crew and to everyone they were talking to on the radio. and in this one instance, the pilot was talking the jtc. that's a joint terminal attack. it's usually an air force airman, although not. and they obtained this joint qualification to be able to say cleared hot on the radio so this is the air power advocate that's embedded with the ground force that can translate ground speak army and marine corps speak into air force speak to translate the ground force commander's intent to the aircrew and the pilots. now talking to the to the jetpack and the pilot has found some disturbed earth in a field and she's not sure exactly it is and she describes it to the jetpack and the jetpack is convinced that it's in order to keep in mind the jetpack and his have been being fired at by mortars several days. so he is he is up to find mortar tubes and destroy them. and so this pilot and the sensor operator discussed the issue, discuss what they thought was under their crosshairs and said no, it just doesn't look like a mortar to the much more likely scenario is that it's a shovel because this is a field and it's disturbed earth. so it looks like someone was doing some shoveling. they finished the task and they put down the shovel. and so the jetpack wanted this pilot drop a bomb on the mortar team. and the pilot said, no, and we can do that under us military doctrine, because under us military, the pilot follows an power chain of command up to the combined forces air commander and the land force follows a chain of command up through the land forces component. and so when the when the army or the marine corps joint correction, ground force commander asks us for a weapon as the united states air force for a weapon, it's not a direct order. they're not in a position to provide with direct orders. so it's really more like both people need to consent. the pilot has to to release the weapon and the ground force commander to ask for the weapon. in this case, the pilot was uncomfortable it and said, no, thank you. now, i would argue that that is human judgment operating in the cockpit, that would not have happened if this was an autonomous computer driven system. the data could have just said, go and the system would have gone. but because we, a human in the seat, the human can execute human judgment. i that's important. even though that story that i just described is never going to make the news. you'll never read it in the newspaper. you'll never see a headline. and there are a thousand such stories like that where air crew members are using their human judgment. and you might disagree in in this case, you might side with the data and you might with the pilot. but the point is that there is a human judgment at work and these decisions. and i think crucial and fits in with the long history of of air power, the video that you're seeing on the left here. this is predator video from the of 2002 on a hill called tucker, ga. afghanistan in 2001. as i mentioned, the us invaded afghanistan on october sixth, a pilot named scott swanson, the first hellfire missile off of a predator. that was on the opening night of the campaign. but it wasn't close air support. he wasn't supporting troops in contact. he was trying to destroy a high value target. actually, he was to destroy a vehicle in the convoy that belonged to a high value target in the hopes that that would draw the high value target out. five months later, there's a predator providing overwatch for on this mountain, on this tucker gar hilltop, and this predator, unlike the previous, is not armed. the hellfire is new to the predator. they had to expedite the testing process to get the hellfire on the predator. so not the tail numbers have a hellfire missile. so this is stuck just watching. it can't do anything. it doesn't have a missile. well, the this was a special force ingress. it was a seal. and they're their their air power advocate was, an air force airman named john chapman. they took heavy. the enemy was far more dug in than they had expected. it did not go well. chapman was injured and he fell, lost consciousness, and his teammates assumed that he was dead. they quickly exfil they quickly exfiltrated the mountain top. and because they thought chapman was dead, they the risk of going to get his body was too high. so they left him and then he woke up and then he fought on by himself. another hour. and at the time he was awarded the air force cross is one of the highest ranking medals. one can be awarded posthumously. he was killed after that that our, in fact, according to some accounts, was killed because he had he had taken several bunkers from the enemy. he had driven the enemy out of several bunkers. he took up one of those bunkers as a fighting position. and he have been able to stay there and fight on longer. but according to some accounts, when the army sent a quick reaction force to support this effort, he came out of the bunker to, draw enemy fire so that they wouldn't be able to shoot down the with the army folks that were inbound. so he was awarded the air force cross several years ago, then secretary of the air force deborah lee james read an article, airman magazine, that said that an air force airman had not been awarded the congressional of honor since vietnam. and so she that page out of the magazine and handed it to an aide and said, go look into this. how come an air force airman hasn't been awarded the medal of honor since the vietnam? and so they looked over several sets of records to try to find medals that might be able to be to be promoted to the of honor. and chapman's was one. so he he has now been awarded the congressional medal of honor, one of the most important pieces of evidence. that decision was this video from predator at the time. that's why it's been declassified and why you can find it on the internet. but imagine imagine that the pilot of this airplane who if i have the historical pieces right, is also scott swanson, the pilot who fired that first missile. right on the opening day of the war. he's got an armed predator and he fired a missile. now he's watching a fellow airman fight for his life and there's nothing he can do about it. try to imagine that feeling. the next airplane. once he got out, he ran out of gas and to go back to the base, he was replaced by a different pilot and that pilot was flying an armed predator. so when that army quick reaction, quick reaction force got to the hill. another jay tech, gabe brown was able to call in the first ever close air support strike from a hellfire missile and they were able to defend the friendly forces in that strike. here's why i tell you the story. when we think about the ethics of remote, we're often we're often to terms with the headlines, with the strikes that have gone badly and will be the first to admit that several strikes have gone badly. and i'm not saying that those strikes were morally justified. that's not the argument. the argument is for every one of those strikes that you might see in the news, there are countless times that the predator or reaper crew did, the right thing produced the mission objectives, what they were asked to produce and did so with extremely low civilian harm. and imagine if scott swanson had a missile on his airplane that day, right? the story would have been very different. and john chapman might have made it home. right. so when we think about the ethics of warfare, we can't just think about the strikes that have gone badly. we have to think about all the things that would have been different had we not had these airplanes. there are. people i have met them who believe the world would be a better place had it never for remotely piloted aircraft. a big question. i don't know the answer to that question, but i know if we're going to take that question seriously, then we have to think not only about the strikes have gone bad, but also all the work that the crews have done to produce justified military aims with very low civilian harm. so what comes next? i think i've made the case the human crew is central to, these airplanes and i can imagine i've heard people say to me when i say these airplanes are not autonomous and, they're not driven by artificial intelligence. sometimes i get the response. yeah, not yet. but soon they could be. that's true. soon they could be. and in that that composite bulbous, maybe instead of a satellite dish antenna, maybe we have some supercomputer brains. someday but what i wouldn't want to do is that when that day comes, when artificial or autonomy is sophisticated, that it can autonomously control a reaper. or wouldn't it also be able to autonomously control other stuff too? i have there a picture artist's conception of what a loyal wingman might look like in the us air force's approach to loyal wingman. that would be a traditional f 35 fighter pilot controlling, a swarm of, say, four, ten or 12 autonomous, loyal wingman. if the age of artificial intelligence is upon us, if we're going to have autonomous weapons systems, sure, it could look like reaper, but it could also look like the loyal wingman. but for that matter, it could also look like a traditionally piloted f 35. we can have an artificial intelligence system and put it on that airplane to support the pilot and the pilots. so what i don't want to do is imagine this throughline that goes from predator to reaper to the age of artificial intelligence. i don't think that's what it's going to look like. i think we need to learn the lessons we can learn from remote warfare, from predator and reaper. and then i think we need to have a separate discussion about autonomy in artificial intelligence. i don't think they're as closely related as some people do. so everything i've said up to this point seems a little bit retrospective. and that's true. it is retrospective. i am looking backwards at two decades of remote warfare, but i don't want to leave you with the impression there's nothing here for us, for the future and the reason that i say that is because the emphasis, the ethics discussion on which i've very little i meant is on the distance, right? the reason that we can separate in the warrior ethos, reason we can separate the willingness to face risk and the willingness to take life is because of the distances involved. the reason have to ask questions about whether these crews their job. seriously, i didn't say much on that but that's one of the arguments that have a playstation mentality or the reason people have that concern because of the distance we've had, we've learned a lot about the psychology of remote warfare. i haven't said on that either, but i could add to is grounded in the distance. the initial assumption that these crews would be would be psychologically unaffected by their work was grounded in fact that they're at such great distances. how could they be so emotionally invested? and so all of these questions about distance, those aren't questions that go away at the end of the predator and reaper era. those are questions that are going to come. and i think they're going to come up more frequently. let me just give you a few examples. if what we're worried about in the ethics of remote warfare is the 7000 miles, which is the distance from nevada to afghanistan if that's the kind of distance that we're worried about, then think about something like cyber warfare operations or a cyber warfare operator might operate from the united states and produce effects in cyberspace that have physical effects on the other side of the. or think about hypersonic flying at five times the speed of sound continents and over oceans that, too, is going to involve thousands of miles worth of distance. or imagine, as i said, artificial and autonomy. we know we might imagine that if 35 pilot with a human pilot board staying outside of the enemy's threat ring and sending some of those wingmen forward to a place that's more dangerous even that pilot will be at a greater distance than will the autonomous level wingman. so these questions about remoteness don't go away. i think they they actually get more important. and so my hope is that will be able to look at the lessons learned from from 20 years of remote warfare, ask hard questions about what elements of this really are ethically significant, and then try to apply some of those lessons to the next 20 years. thank you all for here tonight. and do we have any questions to to mention about being 7000 miles away from afghans does that mean that there's one drone operation? so great? the question was, is there just one operations center these these airplanes? because i had mentioned the state of nevada. so i have mentioned at the top, but just in case there's any doubt the views expressed are my own and don't necessarily represent the department of defense, though i am an active duty air force officer, so there are lots open source information about various places that the air force, these airplanes out of. i'm not in a position here to list them all. there are several. yes, sir. you talked and about distance being issue, but it involves more than just the predators. what about the person? no relationship. between the and the potential victim, because it's thing if you are flying a fighter jet that sends a missile some distance or punching a button sends a missile, but it's another. you've been watching the family that you're going to perhaps attack. that's right. so the question was about the distance relationships and how that applies to the aircrew that might be on one side of the world and the person under the crosshairs on the other side of the world. and that's one of the things that we had to learn the hard way. a community that people do get invested in the work and that can at a at an emotional psychological. so not only is it case that they're witnessing what's happening on the screen. so it's it's not like you know the the remote warfare of the 1990s if you will was cruise missiles. but when the surface warfare officer launches a cruise missile from a ship, they're not actually seeing the impact. they're not seeing the missile explode. and so on the one hand, it's true that we're these crews are watching the video. right. so that's one way that it's a little more intimate. but we have that in traditional fighter planes. also, the tv screen will be smaller and the image might be a little grainier. but we share that in common with the traditional fighter and bomber crews. what really it different is the loiter time. so fact that these air crew can stay on station for eight, ten, 12, 21 hours really provide a lot of insight sometimes about how just how human the person under the crosshairs is. so different people react differently to that. but we certainly have learned that some members have had a hard time with some of those issues. i didn't get into it much here tonight, but but the the remotely piloted aircraft community, if will, is several different commands. but that community recognized. probably almost 15 years ago that this was to be a psychological, emotional challenge. and so at creech air base, for instance, they established a human performance team and at various times they've had slightly different professional cadre of professionals. but at the time i visited and interviewed folks, it was a physiologist, a psychologist, a chaplain. and so the idea is that with their powers combined, they should be able to provide support to the in the kind of emotional spiritual, psychological space. and even when they first established that team, they decided it really wasn't effective because those members didn't have the same classification readings, the crews. and so the crews didn't feel comfortable telling them what had happened on the mission because they didn't know if they were allowed to because of the classification constraints. so now that human performance team is read into all the same classifications as the crews, so they can just walk in the work centers, they can walk up and meet people and build that way. and the the stories that i got from them, from the members of human performance team when i interview them, is that it's really come a long way that they really have deep going to get support from the human performance team. so we've come a long way, but we had to learn the hard way. you you also mentioned that there can be differences of opinions, a request to going ahead with a strike that happen often. i don't have any data to to but it's it's certainly unheard of. one story that i think captures this the best is a friend of mine named, dan, had been following a high value target for several weeks and. so he's only an eight hour shift. there's a 24 hour cycle. so there are other crew, other crews that are supporting that same target. but every day he comes in and for roughly 8 hours, he follows his high value target. and every day this high value target leaves his house, puts a kid on the back of the motorbike. there's a football, you know, soccer pitch the home. and so there's a bunch of kids playing soccer. and so he goes and gets one of those kids, puts him on the back of the motorbike and goes a mile to the north to the homemade factory, because that's what he's responsible for in the terrorist organization. and so it became pretty clear that he's using those children as a human shield to to do the drive to the north. and so, my friend dan is watching this play out. and then one day after three weeks of this, he shows up and starts to get the intelligence briefing and says the ground force commander to take the shot today. and so starts asking questions of the relevant echelons today. why does it have to be today? why not yesterday? why not tomorrow? and he never a satisfactory answer to that question. and he knew that if he's asked, take the shot and if there's a kid on the back of the motorbike, he's morally responsible for that. so he decided that he wasn't willing to take that shot. and by the way, they did the ground force team did consult with with legal. so it wasn't a question of whether it was illegal. the determination was made that that the proportionality calculus would have been satisfied. so although it would have been tragic, it would have been a justifiable civilian casualty because the military value of the target was so significant. i'm to discuss that, if you like. but the point that it wouldn't have been a war crime, it wouldn't have been illegal. it's just that dan didn't feel comfortable with it. so the point of this whole story is that dan has the authority to say to the ground force commander, i'm not doing it. doesn't feel. but then because these cockpits are on the ground, the squadron commander walked into dan's cockpit and said, dan, are going to be all that. you're going to be able to take the shot today. and what strikes me about the story is that the squadron commander could have said, dan, take the shot. well, now we in uniform code of military justice, territory because now that is his commander in his chain of command him a lawful order. but the commander do that because when we put these cockpits, the ground, we built in some flexibility and the commander recognized that. so he said, dan, you going to be able to take the shot? and dan, if they could give you a reason why it has to be today, i could do it. but in the absence that reason, it feels arbitrary and i'm not comfortable with it. and so the commander said, all right, i don't have anybody else to fly the line today. so stick with it, i understand you're not going to take the shot tomorrow. i'm going to get somebody else on this line. and so that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target come out of the house and the next day, squadron commander found another pilot who was fully briefed it wasn't a secret. he knew. he knew what he was getting himself into. and he said he was willing to do that. and that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target did come out, did get on the motorbike, but didn't put a kid on the back of the bike. and so the timing, the complacency worked out to where that pilot was able to take a clean shot against the high value target. but i tell that story here because emphasizes the fact that that air chain of command, that's that's that's not in negotiation. those are orders when it comes to the air power supporting land component, that becomes more of a peer to peer relationship. this kind of warfare sounds more personal. i think that's right. one of the things that i think it took a long time to recognize is that if you look at the the development of technical i'm sorry for those that couldn't hear the question was this feels more personal. this kind of war feels more personal. so if you look at the technological developments in the 1990s, especially in the united states air force the the tasks were to try to find and destroy and that was true in the first gulf war and it was true in in kosovo. and it was true throughout the 1990s. in fact, the air and stated mission was to do time targeting and single digit minutes. so find a target and put a bomber within minutes or less. but all of the target sets were machines. now certainly if you blow up, you know, let's say an iraqi tank in 1991, certainly you're going kill the people inside. that's that's going to happen. but that was never the intent. we weren't we weren't trying to kill those people. we were trying to destroy the tank. and what happened september 11th is that we transition to a force that was in the business of targeting people. and and i think it took us a long i think we reeled from that transition for a long time. and so now we were i would like to think we're we're coming out of the post-9-11 wars, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency. there are lots of people in the dod who are talking about future conflicts. and it almost feels like a reversion to that 99 just discussion about how do i destroy the adversaries machine? and so i don't know if we ever if we ever got to a point where, we really understood all the nuances of that shift. but but we did learn to do it effectively. and as i said, to deal with some of the psychological, emotional implications of that. and do you see things like drones becoming more prevalent as a weapon warfare? so the question is whether i see these airplanes becoming more prevalent in warfare, it's really hard to and people in the united states force have very different opinions on that. it's i think this is just my opinion. it's a question of what one chooses to emphasize. so if you look, the recent national defense strategy, that emphasis is on you know great power competition, near-peer threats the pacing threat is china that's what that document says. and so when people think about that kind of conflict, we're very much in the we're looking forward not back, it's going to be a contested environment, meaning, you know, unlike iraq and afghanistan, they'll have the ability to shoot down our airplanes. and so we might need airplanes are more sophisticated than the predator and reaper there's another line of argument that says even if we need to think about those things terrorism isn't going away, that that operational concern ended. so we still need airplanes like this. so what i think we'll see is increasing automation, not all in one go. we're not going to get to loyal wingman and i had up there overnight but i think you'll start to see processes on board airplanes become more and more automated to the degree that maybe potentially eventually we're able to take a person out of it then and then it's a drone, but it's different from what i've been talking about here because now it's it's an autonomous airplane opposed to a remotely piloted one. for me, i have one last question. what is your answer? the title of your book? yeah, it's i was hoping you wouldn't. the question is, what is the answer to the. i think that these are weapons. and so i think that whether the use of a weapon is justified or not depends on what you do with it. and so i think it is incumbent upon us as as the united states of america to impose on ourselves on how we decide to use force. and as a just war theorist, i think that last resort is a crucial of what they call you, said bell in the of the decision to go to war and. one of the main one of the main arguments, the most significant arguments against remote warfare is that it creates a moral hazard? it provides an incentive for decision makers to resort, to force. it's cheap and easy, and i don't even mean monetarily cheap, although these are cheaper than, you know, f-16s and f-35s, but it's politically inexpensive because the chances of having casualties on our side are much lower. and so we create a political incentive to resort to force, even when maybe we shouldn't resort to force. and i think the solution to that isn't getting rid of these weapons systems. i think it's imposing self-discipline on our on our foreign policy. but that's just my opinion. yes, sir. so from kind of a historical perspective, you know, sixties cold minutemen, sailors, crews, bunker in american sailor, we get it. you know, in order they got 90 seconds, they go through the procedure, they push the button, obviously more distant than the experience of. the drones now. but at the other end i've seen some stuff related to like boston dynamics with their robots being basically warriors again, to the question do you see a limit of where you know a robot. one guy controlling 20 of them running through forest or back at a desk. i mean, yeah, it is you know, it's escalation. yeah, that's a great question. so the gist of the question was remote warfare has been around for a long time going back to the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the post-nuclear era. and so that seems like it's been around a time. but then we have these contemporary developments like the the boston dynamics robot dog and, you know, robot, other robots and everything and so we're putting ourselves on a trend line that we're going to have a single operator for several, maybe several dozen of these systems. and so that was the gist of the question. so i am concerned. so one of the reasons that i take view that i do is because the humans are so involved, intimately involved in all the decisions that go into the use of force. these weapon systems. and as we start to kind of aggregate those systems where, you know, maybe you'll have for eight or ten or 12 systems under one human control, there's no way that that human is going to be as intimately invested in each of those scenarios or each of those operations. and so i do have a concern about that, actually. i worked with i worked with some researchers on a project, and we were looking at how humans react to the kinds of moral dilemmas that can come up in remote warfare. and we just had an offline discussion. i was surprised to find that there proposed solution just as an idea. what if we intentionally pixelate the image before the strike right so we now have high definition cameras which is far better than what you saw in that video. but what if the time of the strike we pixelate the image so that the human operators aren't face to face with the human toll that causing? and my view on that, i don't think that's the right move. don't think that's the right direction. right. i think we should should do whatever we need to do to build emotional resiliency in the crews so that can deal with that that trauma, that stress. but i don't want to move to place where we're where we're constantly abstracting from. the human cost war, because the more we consider war to be costless, right, the more the more fail to appreciate the costs of war. the more eager we'll be to start wars. and i want to put us in that position. and there are questions questions. but joe, thank you very much is you have given us, i think, a lot to think about and. think about it in terms of of context going back in history and we appreciate you being join me in thanking joe chhabra. thank you very much. thank you all very much. and if you'll join >> longtime historian, activist, professor and author roxanne dunbar ortiz joins booktv to talk about native american culture, women's liberation movement, the founding of the united states and more. here's a portion of the discussion. >> this term, a nation of immigrants, is actually very recent. i was surprised, actually, to find that it dates to 1958, and it was implemented by john f. kennedy when he was senator. and it seemed to me that his -- was many planning to run for president -- that heed had -- he had the, a difficult path because he was a child of immigrants, irish and catholic. and every president up until that time, his presidency, had been either anglo or scots irish and protestant. so i think he, what he emphasizes in the book that he published called "a nation of immigrant with -- immigrants," he emphasizes all the great quality withs about the irish in particular, and it's mainly about that. but the terminology -- i don't remember it, frankly, when i was in graduate school in history in the 1960, i don't remember the term having caught on yet. i think it was with multiculturalism more in the 1970s, '80s, and then by the 1990s it's in all of the textbooks in public schools, and it's simply an accepted term. so i see it as a post-world war ii, cold war competition with the soviet union to create a positive image, what people around the world were seeing on television were black people being bloodied and beaten in the south, the desegregation movements. and so this was, this competition was not only in weapons and economics, but also cultural. and the soviet union was making -- and cuba -- more definitely publicizing these negative if qualities. so i think the nation of immigrants was -- and also the immigration law that john f. kennedy did initiate. he wasn't able to -- he wasn't alive when it was finally passed in 1965, but it did open up immigration for the first time to non-european immigration. and so there was, you know, this little pinch. i say it's the new nationalism, but, of course, we also have a fast developing white nationalism that opposes that and still does not want immigrants, people of color, pretty much want a white republic. so it's not uncontest thed. >> host: so when we go back in history if we went back to the 1700s or so, were there open borders at that time into the united states? >> guest: well, there were no immigration laws, but there was a great deal of suspicion of some immigrants. not anglo ones or scots or germans. but the, alexander hamilton was absolutely paranoid about french immigration. that was during the french revolution. and that these revolutionaries would infiltrate the united states and create ideas. so the alien and sedition act's during that time, which hamilton was a major author of, was a preventative. so there was great suspicion of anyone who was not english speaking or german and -- or scandinavian soon after. but in the very beginning, it was pretty limited. >> "in depth" is live at noon if eastern the first sunday of every month featuring your calls and questions for best selling authors. you can watch previous episodes including our interview with roxanne dunbar-ortiz live, just click on the "in depth" tap near the top of the page of c-span.org. in the runup to the 2022 midterm elections, many politicians, journalists and public figures are out with new books about their lives, their work and the state of america. here's a look at some of those books. in "america: a redemption story," republican senator tim scott of south carolina tells the story of americans that he's met that have overcome hardship and shaped the nation. in the midst of american inequality, former texas republican senator bill graham suggests the problem of economic inequality is overstated and that the policy issue is biased by poor government data. peter baker and student glaser look -- susan glaser look back at president trump's time in the white house in their new book titled, the divider. paul manafort who was later pardoned by then-president trump argues in his book, "political prisoner," that the charges against him were politically motivated. and trump's son-in-law jared kushner released a memoir in "breaking history." and coming out soon, it's so help me god, former vice president mike pence's autobiography in which he examines his faith and journey to the vice president presidency. -- vice presidency. former first lady michelle obama follows up her memoir. cori bush's upcoming memoir looks at her journey if from registered nurse to represent thive in congress. and former trump administration u.n. ambassador nikki haley takes a look at the lessons that can be learned from women leaders in, "if you want something done." those are just some of the political books that are being published this fall. you can look forward to booktv covering all of these books in the near future on c-span2 and booktv.org. the late historian, david mccullough, was a frequent guest on c-span with more than 70 appearances. he was also a frequent speaker at the national book festival. here's a look at some of those appearances. [applause] >> mr. mccullough is here for his sixth national book festival appearance, and we hope you will continue to make this a habit. >> ladies and gentlemen, david mccullough came into my office two days after the first national book festival to say how important it was to continue to do this kind of event nationally, and he offered to help in any way he could. >> and it was here in this library, the great library of congress, while i was employed in a government job as a young man that i first discovered the pull of history and first discovered my vocation, found out what i wanted to do. so i can never, ever express sufficiently my brat the tuesday to the library of -- my gratitude to the library of congress or to the library system overall. when you think of what we have in this country in our public library system, there's nothing like it in the world. when you walk through the doors of a public library anywhere in the country, little town, big city, doesn't matter. when you walk through those doors, you're walking through the portals of freedom. pleasure curiosity, curiosity is one of the essential elements of being a human being. curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages -- [laughter] and it's accelerative, like gravity. the more we know, the more we want to know. and i have thought particularly those teachers who encourage their students to ask questions -- not just to know the answers, but to ask questions -- because it's by asking questions that you find things out. if i tell you that the king died and then the queen die died, that's a sequence of event9. -- events. i'm moved by the story. and if i'm really moved by the story and excited about pursuing that subject, that story for three, four, five or more years, then i can't pull back. something clicks, and i just feel i gotta do it, this is one i have to do. that question of what subject hasn't been done, it has all to do, do i really want to do it, am i burning to do it, is this the book i have to write right now. and i know it when it happens. and so far it's the happened many times. this was a young man's revolution, a young man's cause. and washington, being a member of congress, was known by the others in congress, and they picked him because of his character. they knew the man, and is they knew they could trust him. and when the war was over and washington did return the command to the congress, he did something that had never been done before. when george iii was told that the washington might do this, george iii said if he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world. and he stood back from power as he had promised to do in the beginning. but the real story, it seems to me, is with those men in rags who marched with him. when his army finally got to the delaware river and crossed the delaware river at night trying to put the river between them and the oncoming british army, they were men who were utterly exhausted. most of them were sick. they were all hungry. they were cold. they had no winter clothing, they were in raggings. many of them had their feet wrapped in rags, and the stories of men leaving bloody footprints in the snow from their bare feet are not mythical. that's what it was. we must never forget them. we must never not recognize how much we owe to them. and among the things that we must do is know about them, learn about them, tell our children about them, encourage our children and our grandchildren to read about them and to know what they went through. these were not characters in a costume pageant. they were human beings as real and as alive as we are. and and all that they did for our country is also, of course, part of what is stirring much of the world. august 22nd, a sunday, after having attendedded church all day -- which was to be a lifelong habit for john adams -- he went out under the stars so inspired by the sermon, he said. and also in a state of euphoria. and it would also seem by a feeling of relief at his decision not to become a minister was at last resolved. and he wrote of the glorious shows of nature overhead and the intense sensation of pleasure they evoked. beholding the night sky, the amazing concave of heaven sprinkled and glittering with stars. he was thrown, he wrote, into a kind of transport and knew that such wonders were the gifts of god. expressions of god's love. but that the greatest gift of all, he was certain, was the gift of an inquiring mind. he has given us reason to find out the truth and the real design and true end of our existence. it will be hard, he wrote -- meaning, the studies that were still ahead of him -- but the point is now determined. i shall have the liberty to think for myself. i think the first page of a book is crucial, critical. i think that how a bookends is critical -- book ends is critical. one of my favorite endings in one of my books is when the wright brothers put on their first exhibit of what they could do at home out at the cow pasture where they had been experimenting all those years. and orville wanted to take his father up, and his father was in hissing -- 80s. up they went, bishop wright, wonderful man. and all the time they were up there, bishop wright kept saying, higher, orville. higher. that's the spirit. >> that's the spirit. >> also the quote that i began that book book with, wilbur said no bird ever soared in a calm. you've got to have adversity, you've got to have the wind against you in order to lift off. and that's so true, so very true. if everything were easy and we did nothing but sit around, we would not only not accomplish much of anything, i don't think we'd be very happy. and there's always somebody, there's always people who need help, always advances that are exciting. what's happening in medicine right now under our very noses, it's going to be written about for years and years as maybe the most important events of our time. it's exciting, and it's all human ingenuity, human perseverance. and admirable use of the mind in working together. all of it. >> what would you say is the legacy you are most proud of having achieved? >> he tried to do the his best -- to do his best. >> and you've been watching booktv, every sunday on c-span2 watch nonfiction if authors discuss their books. television for serious readers. and watch them all online anytime at booktv.org. you could also find us on twitter, facebook and youtube @booktv. .. this is just under 21 half hours.
that really needs to be discussed. and this would be a good place to to discuss it. joseph shapiro is lieutenant colonel in the us air force. he's got a ph.d. in philosophy from the university of oxford. his areas of expertise are everything from war theory military ethics especially the ethics of remote and autonomous weapons. he's a senior pilot with more than 1400 pilot and instructor pilot hours and many flown in of major u.s. combat humanitarian operations. he currently serves on the air force staff, so staffs, artificial intelligence, cross functional team. but, you know, the more we see u.s. military involved in other parts of the world, the more we see the use of drones and other remote weapons. and so now a good time to discuss whether that is moral or. so please join me in welcoming joseph chapter. thank you, tony, for the kind introduction. thank you for being here. this is really a privilege. i would be lying if i told you that i expected someday to write a book and to be able to talk to folks like you about it. i never thought that was going to be the case. this is really exciting. and to do so at this historic place is something special for me. also i would be remiss if i didn't mention that president carter wrote a new york times op ed in 2012, in which made it very clear that he had qualms about the quote unquote, drone program. and so i'm excited to bring some of those questions up and maybe hopefully to address some of the concerns that he expressed. so i think i'll start by talking about a period of during which i was writing this book. i think it was about 18. i walked into the family room where my kids were watching tv. they were watching paw patrol. i don't know if you're familiar whenever there a problem around adventure bay these pups save the day. and i saw that one of the human characters in the show was flying a remotely piloted aircraft using a camera onboard the aircraft to try find a lost hiker in the mountains. i could swear i heard this child in the show say the word drone. and i said to my kids, did they just say drone on a patrol? and my seven year old said to me somewhat condescendingly, yeah, dad, do you know what a drone even is? so let's start there. do we even know what a drone is? i think i do. i think in a position to talk about drones, i know what they. but it's harder than it sounds. and one of the reasons that it's harder that it's than it sounds is because there are so many misperceptions around these airplanes. and so before we even can have a conversation about whether remote warfare is moral. we have to have a conversation about what we mean, some of these terms. what kind of warfare we referring to. so i'll give you just one example. i have nothing against the international committee of the red cross. they do excellent work. this is just literally the first one that came up when i googled. but this is an article from the icrc on autonomous weapons systems. and presumably it's going to tell us about the profound implications for the future of warfare. but the art department decided to give us a picture of an empty nine reaper, an empty nine reaper is not an autonomous weapon system. there's nothing autonomous about it. there's a human crew there, qualified. they're trained. they're certified. they're qualified to aircrew under the air force instructions that govern air crew qualifications. and there are some automatic of this airplane it can fly to point it can hold an altitude. it even hold a specific bank angle, if you like. but that's no more autonomy than we have any modern airplane, including the airplane i flew went on to get here this morning. and so we kind of a problem because our our minds, we have these heuristics built because we see this image of the mq predator or its successor, the nine reaper, over and over and over again, associated with things like autonomy. i'm going to get to that a little bit more in a moment. but what i want to emphasize here is that the weapon systems that i have in mind, the predator and reaper, they're not autonomous and they're not by artificial intelligence. so what are the. well, the question remains difficult to answer. again, in 2018, i had a friend who assumed command of the newest united states air force empty nine reaper squadron. so i flew across ocean. i was living in the uk at the time. i flew across the ocean to be a part of that ceremony and the local headlines ran words like this drone squadron activated. and as you can see here, this is an actual picture of the aircrew. they went from being a detachment to being a full fledged squadron. so they peeled off the patch, signifying the detachment put on the new patch, signifying the squadron. it was a great day and i was really glad to a part of it. two days later, you might not remember this date, but i certainly do. on december 21st, 2018, i back across the ocean. and as we approached gatwick airport in london, the pilot came over the mike and said on, fortunately, we're not going to be able to land at gatwick to drone activity on the airfield. he said, i've been flying for 18 years and i have never seen anything like this. so we thought we might be able to divert to heathrow. that would have been nice. that was actually closer to my house. but heathrow was full of all the airplanes that have already diverted to gatwick. so i got a free trip to manchester and a four hour train ride back home. but the next day these are the kinds of that i saw. gatwick drones, ground flights. so this word drone, we're asking it to do a lot of work. it everything from fully autonomous killer robots that don't exist. it covers the mq one predator and empty nine reaper that have been a mainstay of us air force operations for the last 15 or 20 years. and then it covers 300 quadcopters that you can buy on amazon or anywhere quadcopters are sold. and the reason that matters to me is because unlike these air crew members who are trained and certified and have to meet longstanding standards for for air force, the person who bought that quadcopter ruined my day by having me have to divert, but also costing hundreds of millions pounds in the in the airline industry that. person had no certification they didn't need any special training. and as i said, it only cost them a few hundred bucks. so there's a huge difference to me between the kind of people that are involved in us air force operations and piloted aircraft and then the broad swath of people who might be behind one of these less expensive pieces, equipment. and so as we try to hone in on what it is, we're actually talking here, i want to away from autonomy, but i also want to recognize why we tend to think that these things are more autonomous than they are. so i don't think it's the right view, but it's an understandable view and part of the reason for that is because you look the shape of this airplane. this is the mta nine reaper on the left. nine was initially operational, capable in 27. so that was just six years after the predator was first armed with the hellfire missile, that first shot was on the opening day of the us war in afghanistan. so 2000, when we get the predator, 27, we get the reaper. and this is the reaper. and i want to point specifically at that nose in the front on any other airplane, what would you expect to see at that bulbous nose in the front? we would see canopy glass or windscreen, almost every airplane, almost every picture of every airplane that you have ever seen. if you look at that spot on the airplane, you're going to see canopy glass or windscreen and i think we've trained ourselves over and over and over and over. we've seen hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of different pictures, airplanes in the course of our lives and at the front, the airplane, canopy, glass or windscreen. and what that represents to us, i was just at the airport this morning. when you look through the canopy, what do you see? you see the pilot the person who you know is responsible for that airplane and everything on board. and on this airplane, we don't have canopy glass and we don't have a windscreen. and i can't look through that glass and see the eyes. the person who's responsible for that airplane, i might trick myself into thinking, well, maybe there is no one responsible, but i'm here to assert to you that there is someone responsible. it's a qualified aircrew member that's been certified to be responsible, that airplane and everything on it. just humor me. there's two thought experiments that i'd like you to consider. the first, i don't know if you'll be familiar with this. as you might imagine by now, i watch lot of cartoons. the the disney pixar movie planes. every one of those planes has eyes. where are those eyes on those cartoon? they're always on the canopy glass, the windscreen. right. so even the animators at pixar know that as the ancient proverb says, in the case of airplanes, the are the windows to the soul, the eyes glass is literally the window through which i see human person, the soul that's responsible for that airplane. second thought experiment. just imagine we are now in the age of autonomous vehicles. there are not that many out there on the roads. they're not in every city, but that they're in your city and you're standing at the crosswalk first. imagine just a regular automobile, good old fashioned car. it's got the windscreen. you look the glass, you see the person on the other side. when i'm at the crosswalk. and i'm trying to determine if that car going to stop for me. what do i do? i look through the windscreen and i make eye contact with the driver to see if they can see me. right. and we share a little bit of a moment if we don't make eye contact. i'm waiting till they come a complete stop before i cross right. and in fact, we can be thrown off on that. as i mentioned, i lived in the uk as much as it was difficult to learn to drive on the left hand side of the road. it was even more difficult to learn to look at the right, the correct side of the car because the car approaches the crosswalk. i'm constantly at my right side of the vehicle, which of course is the passenger seat. and it's pretty unnerving to see an empty passenger seat or even worse, to see a person's dog. but now imagine now that there's an autonomous vehicle, right? the autonomous has no need of canopy glass or windscreen. right. it senses the world around it by use of cameras and light and radar and some other things. and it positions itself in the world through those means. it doesn't need the glass. so imagine that an autonomous vehicle has, a completely opaque windscreen, imagine that. it's this composite grey that we see on the reaper. and now imagine in the crosswalk when that vehicle approaches, the crosswalk, are you going to step out in front of the vehicle? maybe there's a person inside, maybe not. is that a technical system or is that a techno, social? is it just a piece of machinery? is there a human operator behind it? i think without realizing it? these are all the questions come up when people who haven't seen the of a predator or reaper cockpit see this image. so this is a lot of table setting. there's a lot of work to do to get to the ethical. but i think this is where we need to start these airplanes are not autonomous. they're flown by a certified and qualified air force aircrew aircrew. okay. so if if we can if we can dispatch with the idea that these systems might autonomous, then we can start to ask real substance, tough questions about how does this new technology or in my view, this techno social system. it's a system that consists both of a piece of technology and human. cruise how does fit in with the long history of warfare? there are lots of ways we can ask this question. we could talk about moral justification for killing in war. we could talk about moral psychology and how that applies to war. here, i'm only going to focus on the warrior ethos, the warrior ethos in the western tradition. to us from homer, that's a statue of there on the left from the library of congress. and homer gives us two warrior achilles and hector. and of although we have these two warriors, it's achilles, that emerges in the tradition as the archetype of warrior, one wonders if that's because achilles one but we wonder whether achilles is the kind of person that we should want to emulate. is achilles the kind of person does he have, the kind of ethos that i would want? young lieutenants in the united states air force to emulate, for example, i think probably not. as you might remember, the iliad opens with achilles wrath or achilles rage, depending on the translation and his rage, his wrath, his personal sleights of honor drive the plot in several instances. reason he's enraged at the beginning of the book is because his honor has been slighted. he expected a war prize and at the last minute was taken away. his honor was hurt. that's the thing that drives him to violence that that's the thing that motivates him. and i don't know that achilles is the kind of person that we would want to emulate as a as a kind of warrior ethos. we could look at hector on the other side. hector is much more human than achilles is a scholar, is more intelligent than i have pointed out. we get glimpses of hector with his family in a way we never get glimpses of achilles with family. we get glimpses of hector with his family. in one classic scene, he's still wearing his his uniform. he's wearing his armor, including his helmet, and he leans over the crib to see his baby. and the baby starts crying because the baby's scared of the armor. right. and hector thinks, how silly of me. and takes his helmet off. right. it's a very humanizing moment where we get to experience hector in the fullness of his personhood. that never happens with achilles. achilles is a warrior, and he's only a warrior. and i spend so much time on this only say that again and again and again. the scholarship on the warrior ethos traces the warrior ethos back to achilles. and i want to challenge that a little bit for a couple of reasons. first, because when we think about the warrior, we tend to focus on the fact that both achilles and hector were to risk their lives. they were willing to pay a great sacrifice toward whatever their ends might have been. i would argue that they both have very different ends in mind and. so this warrior ethos grows up to this idea that. what it means to be a warrior is the willingness to risk one's life. the willingness to face risk in the face of an adversary, maybe even the actual imposition risk in front of the adversary. and so we think about in our modern time is the archetypal warrior. well, it's the person who's willing to to go out there and face the enemy gunfire at normandy or, you know, it's the person who's willing to raise the flag at jima, people who are willing to face great risk to themselves in battle. i think that's fair. i think that's right. think if we look at the history of warfare, we do see that. warriors are associated with this willingness, face risk, but i think there's something else operating there. first of all, we should distinguish between actually facing risk and the willingness to face risk. and i think this really matters. speaking of normandy, a few years ago, my wife and i were able to tour the beaches at normandy and the american there. and we had walked through the 9000 headstones at normandy to, commemorate the us forces who were killed, not just in that battle. but throughout the war. and as we as we got back to the tour bus to go back to our next stop, i was in line with an older gentleman who had a world two veteran cap on and there were just not that many world war two veterans around anymore. and so i made a point to strike up a conversation and i had a fascinating conversation with a man named bill. and bill told me that on d-day his job as a 17 year old was to work the night shift at a baltimore newspaper and function of the night shift was to sit there, wait until the teletype machines, the stories that are on the wire. and his job was to determine whether the story sufficient enough to wake up the editors. and so he learned about in that room on the teletype machines. and surely that was newsworthy. he woke up the editors. and so he told me, thinks he's probably one of the first people in the united states to learn about the invasion because he had that job on that day. and by the end of the he had gotten his mother's signature on his paperwork so he could enlist in the navy as a 17 year old. training takes a long time by time, he was trained up to go to the european theater, that war was over. we had achieved in europe. and so the redesign needed his ship for the pacific theater and the war ended soon thereafter. but he jokes with me that he got to the pacific just in time to earn his world war two veteran cap right now, this man, bill, didn't face combat risk. he was never actually at he never engaged the enemy, but he definitely displayed a willingness to face combat risk. right? he definitely through the steps that one must take in order to become eligible for combat risk. and i think that willingness really matters. and of the reasons that i think that is because of all of the rpa, the remotely piloted aircraft crews that i've talked to, i have never met a single person who has said, you know, i volunteered to join the military. we're an all volunteer force. so everyone who joined the military volunteered. i volunteered to join the military. i raised my right hand. i swore an oath to support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies, foreign and domestic but then i volunteered to go to the predator or the reaper, because i really didn't want to face any combat risk. that seems unlikely to me. i have friends who volunteered to go to the predator reaper because were airsick or because they were tired of travel schedule and some other airframes or they wanted to produce more operational effects. they felt like they were stuck, not close enough to operation, but i've never met anyone. that said, i'm unwilling to face combat risk. therefore send me to the predator or reaper. so when we trace this line through the history of warfare, one of the things we should recognize is this distinction between actually facing and willingness to face risk. and i want to put the emphasis on the latter rather than on the former. but there's a second thing that we can we can mention here, and that is that all of the honor and glory that achilles is concerned with, it just might not sufficient to define what it is to be warrior. and i think as we read the memoirs of of wars over time several wars, i focused on the last 100 years but i'm sure there are others we constantly we consistently this this remark that even though there are glorious things in they they are far to too minuscule to justify the of war. i've given you just a few quotes here but oliver wendell was served in world war correct and served in the civil war and he was on several occasions and actually the first time he was shot, he was in field hospital and he was convinced that he was going to die. and he wrote a letter to his mother, in fact, saying that he had resigned himself to death. of course, he and he went on to become the us supreme court justice. later in life he was giving a speech at harvard. it's one of the most famous speeches that he's given and. he says war when you're at it is horrible. and dull. it's only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. so he's willing to admit that there's something divine war, but only in retrospect, only when can review the lessons learned, not the in the midst of the blood and fighting. ulysses grant certainly was a veteran of the civil war, but long before that he was a lieutenant in the mexican-american war, and he wrote his wife, julia. wherever there are battles, great, many must suffer. and for the sake of the little glory, i do not care to see it. so he's recognizing that there is some glory to be had, but it isn't worth fighting. and finally an unnamed french soldier in world war one writes, there will never be enough glory to cover all the blood and all mud. the french soldier right before that line, he calls the people, the generals and the policymakers who got the european powers into world war one. he calls them criminals. he talks about this this crime of war they've committed. and then he recognizes that there might be glory, but not enough to cover all the blood and all the mud. so achilles, motivated by honor and glory. i don't think that's enough. i don't think that gets us all the way there to what it means to be a warrior. certainly there's something about risk, something about the willingness to face risk. but i don't think that gets us all the way there either. i think the third thing, the thing that we're missing is that there also has to be a willingness to take human life on the other side of that. and that goes under. under. remarked. under-researched. people don't talk about that as much. and i. one reason for that is that in the long history warfare, these two things almost always go together. willingness to face risk and willingness to take life. and in the predator and reaper world, we're asking people to separate those two ideas. we have predator and reaper crew members at this point, just reaper crew members of the united states air force who are willing to face risk because they they took the oath. they raised right hand. they're not actually going to face risk. but we are going to ask them to take human life. and i think that's a crucial element to understanding the warrior ethos in the way that we should. so if there's one holdout, if we can all agree that war is too muddy, too bloody to be justified, glory and honor, there must be something else that justifies war as a just war theorist. i have strong views about. i'll sidestep them here. let's just imagine that there are just causes to go to war. and it has nothing to do with. honor and glory. even so, there holdouts who think there is at least one place that's still glorious in war. and those are the pilots, right? because flight has always been glorious. flight has always been this dream that we meant to achieve. we achieved it at kitty hawk in 1903, and then it became a fixture of warfare, starting in world war one. when i was an officer trainee at boston university. several years ago, i not only had to be familiar with john gillespie, mcgee's poem high flight, but my peers and i had to memorize it. he that i've slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter. silver wings. sun word. i have climbed and done 100 things you have not dreamed of. and so maybe flying airplanes and war is still glorious. that still has the honor that achilles was after. that's still still divine in oliver wendell holmes. his terms. but i hasten to add that john gillespie mcgee wasn't writing about wartime. he was tragically killed in a training accident before he ever got to war. he was writing about pilot training. he was writing about flying in a peaceful sky. and that. i agree is romantic. that is glorious. there is a dream. in flying in a peaceful sky long. after john gillespie mcgee died, i flew the six texan two and the ti 38 sea talon in pilot training, and i lived gillespie's poetic dream. i did the things that he described in the poem and it was every bit the dream that he suggested. but i there's a there's a threshold that we have to cross as aircrew members when start talking about combat operations. and that's the time to put away the the poetry of the means and adopt the prose of combat ends. and so my view here is that there might it might be the case that when we put these cockpits on the ground, when we have air crew members, fly these airplanes from the ground rather than from the air, we are we are robbing them of some of that dream. but it's in the service of our our military service to the political community. and that's just a necessary condition success. we have to do what we have to in order to in order to achieve our ends and to say, no, no, we need to hold on to that dream. we shouldn't have remote because we should let these pilots fly in their airplanes. that would be just like achilles saying that and honor are justifications for war. and so i just don't see it. i just don't see the argument working out. so i agree, gillespie on his dream, but i think there's something different about war. okay so if these weapon systems are not autonomous and and if we're convinced that glory and honor are not justifications for war, then we can finally start to hone in on the humanity behind these systems. they're not autonomous. they're not flown by computers. they're flown by people. so what is the human element that's at work in these weapon systems? there are several stories i could tell you, but i'll just mention a few. we could about moral psychology. we could talk about virtue. we could talk about moral justification. and in some of these stories, they're all interrelated. in researching for the book, i was allowed to go sit with crew members as they flew combat missions in the cockpit or sometimes called the ground station. and so i didn't know what was going to happen on those missions. i didn't know if they were going be exciting or boring to me to be frank about it. but it was a privilege to be able to watch the crews do their work and so i was on headset listening to the crew and to everyone they were talking to on the radio. and in this one instance, the pilot was talking the jtc. that's a joint terminal attack. it's usually an air force airman, although not. and they obtained this joint qualification to be able to say cleared hot on the radio so this is the air power advocate that's embedded with the ground force that can translate ground speak army and marine corps speak into air force speak to translate the ground force commander's intent to the aircrew and the pilots. now talking to the to the jetpack and the pilot has found some disturbed earth in a field and she's not sure exactly it is and she describes it to the jetpack and the jetpack is convinced that it's in order to keep in mind the jetpack and his have been being fired at by mortars several days. so he is he is up to find mortar tubes and destroy them. and so this pilot and the sensor operator discussed the issue, discuss what they thought was under their crosshairs and said no, it just doesn't look like a mortar to the much more likely scenario is that it's a shovel because this is a field and it's disturbed earth. so it looks like someone was doing some shoveling. they finished the task and they put down the shovel. and so the jetpack wanted this pilot drop a bomb on the mortar team. and the pilot said, no, and we can do that under us military doctrine, because under us military, the pilot follows an power chain of command up to the combined forces air commander and the land force follows a chain of command up through the land forces component. and so when the when the army or the marine corps joint correction, ground force commander asks us for a weapon as the united states air force for a weapon, it's not a direct order. they're not in a position to provide with direct orders. so it's really more like both people need to consent. the pilot has to to release the weapon and the ground force commander to ask for the weapon. in this case, the pilot was uncomfortable it and said, no, thank you. now, i would argue that that is human judgment operating in the cockpit, that would not have happened if this was an autonomous computer driven system. the data could have just said, go and the system would have gone. but because we, a human in the seat, the human can execute human judgment. i that's important. even though that story that i just described is never going to make the news. you'll never read it in the newspaper. you'll never see a headline. and there are a thousand such stories like that where air crew members are using their human judgment. and you might disagree in in this case, you might side with the data and you might with the pilot. but the point is that there is a human judgment at work and these decisions. and i think crucial and fits in with the long history of of air power, the video that you're seeing on the left here. this is predator video from the of 2002 on a hill called tucker, ga. afghanistan in 2001. as i mentioned, the us invaded afghanistan on october sixth, a pilot named scott swanson, the first hellfire missile off of a predator. that was on the opening night of the campaign. but it wasn't close air support. he wasn't supporting troops in contact. he was trying to destroy a high value target. actually, he was to destroy a vehicle in the convoy that belonged to a high value target in the hopes that that would draw the high value target out. five months later, there's a predator providing overwatch for on this mountain, on this tucker gar hilltop, and this predator, unlike the previous, is not armed. the hellfire is new to the predator. they had to expedite the testing process to get the hellfire on the predator. so not the tail numbers have a hellfire missile. so this is stuck just watching. it can't do anything. it doesn't have a missile. well, the this was a special force ingress. it was a seal. and they're their their air power advocate was, an air force airman named john chapman. they took heavy. the enemy was far more dug in than they had expected. it did not go well. chapman was injured and he fell, lost consciousness, and his teammates assumed that he was dead. they quickly exfil they quickly exfiltrated the mountain top. and because they thought chapman was dead, they the risk of going to get his body was too high. so they left him and then he woke up and then he fought on by himself. another hour. and at the time he was awarded the air force cross is one of the highest ranking medals. one can be awarded posthumously. he was killed after that that our, in fact, according to some accounts, was killed because he had he had taken several bunkers from the enemy. he had driven the enemy out of several bunkers. he took up one of those bunkers as a fighting position. and he have been able to stay there and fight on longer. but according to some accounts, when the army sent a quick reaction force to support this effort, he came out of the bunker to, draw enemy fire so that they wouldn't be able to shoot down the with the army folks that were inbound. so he was awarded the air force cross several years ago, then secretary of the air force deborah lee james read an article, airman magazine, that said that an air force airman had not been awarded the congressional of honor since vietnam. and so she that page out of the magazine and handed it to an aide and said, go look into this. how come an air force airman hasn't been awarded the medal of honor since the vietnam? and so they looked over several sets of records to try to find medals that might be able to be to be promoted to the of honor. and chapman's was one. so he he has now been awarded the congressional medal of honor, one of the most important pieces of evidence. that decision was this video from predator at the time. that's why it's been declassified and why you can find it on the internet. but imagine imagine that the pilot of this airplane who if i have the historical pieces right, is also scott swanson, the pilot who fired that first missile. right on the opening day of the war. he's got an armed predator and he fired a missile. now he's watching a fellow airman fight for his life and there's nothing he can do about it. try to imagine that feeling. the next airplane. once he got out, he ran out of gas and to go back to the base, he was replaced by a different pilot and that pilot was flying an armed predator. so when that army quick reaction, quick reaction force got to the hill. another jay tech, gabe brown was able to call in the first ever close air support strike from a hellfire missile and they were able to defend the friendly forces in that strike. here's why i tell you the story. when we think about the ethics of remote, we're often we're often to terms with the headlines, with the strikes that have gone badly and will be the first to admit that several strikes have gone badly. and i'm not saying that those strikes were morally justified. that's not the argument. the argument is for every one of those strikes that you might see in the news, there are countless times that the predator or reaper crew did, the right thing produced the mission objectives, what they were asked to produce and did so with extremely low civilian harm. and imagine if scott swanson had a missile on his airplane that day, right? the story would have been very different. and john chapman might have made it home. right. so when we think about the ethics of warfare, we can't just think about the strikes that have gone badly. we have to think about all the things that would have been different had we not had these airplanes. there are. people i have met them who believe the world would be a better place had it never for remotely piloted aircraft. a big question. i don't know the answer to that question, but i know if we're going to take that question seriously, then we have to think not only about the strikes have gone bad, but also all the work that the crews have done to produce justified military aims with very low civilian harm. so what comes next? i think i've made the case the human crew is central to, these airplanes and i can imagine i've heard people say to me when i say these airplanes are not autonomous and, they're not driven by artificial intelligence. sometimes i get the response. yeah, not yet. but soon they could be. that's true. soon they could be. and in that that composite bulbous, maybe instead of a satellite dish antenna, maybe we have some supercomputer brains. someday but what i wouldn't want to do is that when that day comes, when artificial or autonomy is sophisticated, that it can autonomously control a reaper. or wouldn't it also be able to autonomously control other stuff too? i have there a picture artist's conception of what a loyal wingman might look like in the us air force's approach to loyal wingman. that would be a traditional f 35 fighter pilot controlling, a swarm of, say, four, ten or 12 autonomous, loyal wingman. if the age of artificial intelligence is upon us, if we're going to have autonomous weapons systems, sure, it could look like reaper, but it could also look like the loyal wingman. but for that matter, it could also look like a traditionally piloted f 35. we can have an artificial intelligence system and put it on that airplane to support the pilot and the pilots. so what i don't want to do is imagine this throughline that goes from predator to reaper to the age of artificial intelligence. i don't think that's what it's going to look like. i think we need to learn the lessons we can learn from remote warfare, from predator and reaper. and then i think we need to have a separate discussion about autonomy in artificial intelligence. i don't think they're as closely related as some people do. so everything i've said up to this point seems a little bit retrospective. and that's true. it is retrospective. i am looking backwards at two decades of remote warfare, but i don't want to leave you with the impression there's nothing here for us, for the future and the reason that i say that is because the emphasis, the ethics discussion on which i've very little i meant is on the distance, right? the reason that we can separate in the warrior ethos, reason we can separate the willingness to face risk and the willingness to take life is because of the distances involved. the reason have to ask questions about whether these crews their job. seriously, i didn't say much on that but that's one of the arguments that have a playstation mentality or the reason people have that concern because of the distance we've had, we've learned a lot about the psychology of remote warfare. i haven't said on that either, but i could add to is grounded in the distance. the initial assumption that these crews would be would be psychologically unaffected by their work was grounded in fact that they're at such great distances. how could they be so emotionally invested? and so all of these questions about distance, those aren't questions that go away at the end of the predator and reaper era. those are questions that are going to come. and i think they're going to come up more frequently. let me just give you a few examples. if what we're worried about in the ethics of remote warfare is the 7000 miles, which is the distance from nevada to afghanistan if that's the kind of distance that we're worried about, then think about something like cyber warfare operations or a cyber warfare operator might operate from the united states and produce effects in cyberspace that have physical effects on the other side of the. or think about hypersonic flying at five times the speed of sound continents and over oceans that, too, is going to involve thousands of miles worth of distance. or imagine, as i said, artificial and autonomy. we know we might imagine that if 35 pilot with a human pilot board staying outside of the enemy's threat ring and sending some of those wingmen forward to a place that's more dangerous even that pilot will be at a greater distance than will the autonomous level wingman. so these questions about remoteness don't go away. i think they they actually get more important. and so my hope is that will be able to look at the lessons learned from from 20 years of remote warfare, ask hard questions about what elements of this really are ethically significant, and then try to apply some of those lessons to the next 20 years. thank you all for here tonight. and do we have any questions to to mention about being 7000 miles away from afghans does that mean that there's one drone operation? so great? the question was, is there just one operations center these these airplanes? because i had mentioned the state of nevada. so i have mentioned at the top, but just in case there's any doubt the views expressed are my own and don't necessarily represent the department of defense, though i am an active duty air force officer, so there are lots open source information about various places that the air force, these airplanes out of. i'm not in a position here to list them all. there are several. yes, sir. you talked and about distance being issue, but it involves more than just the predators. what about the person? no relationship. between the and the potential victim, because it's thing if you are flying a fighter jet that sends a missile some distance or punching a button sends a missile, but it's another. you've been watching the family that you're going to perhaps attack. that's right. so the question was about the distance relationships and how that applies to the aircrew that might be on one side of the world and the person under the crosshairs on the other side of the world. and that's one of the things that we had to learn the hard way. a community that people do get invested in the work and that can at a at an emotional psychological. so not only is it case that they're witnessing what's happening on the screen. so it's it's not like you know the the remote warfare of the 1990s if you will was cruise missiles. but when the surface warfare officer launches a cruise missile from a ship, they're not actually seeing the impact. they're not seeing the missile explode. and so on the one hand, it's true that we're these crews are watching the video. right. so that's one way that it's a little more intimate. but we have that in traditional fighter planes. also, the tv screen will be smaller and the image might be a little grainier. but we share that in common with the traditional fighter and bomber crews. what really it different is the loiter time. so fact that these air crew can stay on station for eight, ten, 12, 21 hours really provide a lot of insight sometimes about how just how human the person under the crosshairs is. so different people react differently to that. but we certainly have learned that some members have had a hard time with some of those issues. i didn't get into it much here tonight, but but the the remotely piloted aircraft community, if will, is several different commands. but that community recognized. probably almost 15 years ago that this was to be a psychological, emotional challenge. and so at creech air base, for instance, they established a human performance team and at various times they've had slightly different professional cadre of professionals. but at the time i visited and interviewed folks, it was a physiologist, a psychologist, a chaplain. and so the idea is that with their powers combined, they should be able to provide support to the in the kind of emotional spiritual, psychological space. and even when they first established that team, they decided it really wasn't effective because those members didn't have the same classification readings, the crews. and so the crews didn't feel comfortable telling them what had happened on the mission because they didn't know if they were allowed to because of the classification constraints. so now that human performance team is read into all the same classifications as the crews, so they can just walk in the work centers, they can walk up and meet people and build that way. and the the stories that i got from them, from the members of human performance team when i interview them, is that it's really come a long way that they really have deep going to get support from the human performance team. so we've come a long way, but we had to learn the hard way. you you also mentioned that there can be differences of opinions, a request to going ahead with a strike that happen often. i don't have any data to to but it's it's certainly unheard of. one story that i think captures this the best is a friend of mine named, dan, had been following a high value target for several weeks and. so he's only an eight hour shift. there's a 24 hour cycle. so there are other crew, other crews that are supporting that same target. but every day he comes in and for roughly 8 hours, he follows his high value target. and every day this high value target leaves his house, puts a kid on the back of the motorbike. there's a football, you know, soccer pitch the home. and so there's a bunch of kids playing soccer. and so he goes and gets one of those kids, puts him on the back of the motorbike and goes a mile to the north to the homemade factory, because that's what he's responsible for in the terrorist organization. and so it became pretty clear that he's using those children as a human shield to to do the drive to the north. and so, my friend dan is watching this play out. and then one day after three weeks of this, he shows up and starts to get the intelligence briefing and says the ground force commander to take the shot today. and so starts asking questions of the relevant echelons today. why does it have to be today? why not yesterday? why not tomorrow? and he never a satisfactory answer to that question. and he knew that if he's asked, take the shot and if there's a kid on the back of the motorbike, he's morally responsible for that. so he decided that he wasn't willing to take that shot. and by the way, they did the ground force team did consult with with legal. so it wasn't a question of whether it was illegal. the determination was made that that the proportionality calculus would have been satisfied. so although it would have been tragic, it would have been a justifiable civilian casualty because the military value of the target was so significant. i'm to discuss that, if you like. but the point that it wouldn't have been a war crime, it wouldn't have been illegal. it's just that dan didn't feel comfortable with it. so the point of this whole story is that dan has the authority to say to the ground force commander, i'm not doing it. doesn't feel. but then because these cockpits are on the ground, the squadron commander walked into dan's cockpit and said, dan, are going to be all that. you're going to be able to take the shot today. and what strikes me about the story is that the squadron commander could have said, dan, take the shot. well, now we in uniform code of military justice, territory because now that is his commander in his chain of command him a lawful order. but the commander do that because when we put these cockpits, the ground, we built in some flexibility and the commander recognized that. so he said, dan, you going to be able to take the shot? and dan, if they could give you a reason why it has to be today, i could do it. but in the absence that reason, it feels arbitrary and i'm not comfortable with it. and so the commander said, all right, i don't have anybody else to fly the line today. so stick with it, i understand you're not going to take the shot tomorrow. i'm going to get somebody else on this line. and so that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target come out of the house and the next day, squadron commander found another pilot who was fully briefed it wasn't a secret. he knew. he knew what he was getting himself into. and he said he was willing to do that. and that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target did come out, did get on the motorbike, but didn't put a kid on the back of the bike. and so the timing, the complacency worked out to where that pilot was able to take a clean shot against the high value target. but i tell that story here because emphasizes the fact that that air chain of command, that's that's that's not in negotiation. those are orders when it comes to the air power supporting land component, that becomes more of a peer to peer relationship. this kind of warfare sounds more personal. i think that's right. one of the things that i think it took a long time to recognize is that if you look at the the development of technical i'm sorry for those that couldn't hear the question was this feels more personal. this kind of war feels more personal. so if you look at the technological developments in the 1990s, especially in the united states air force the the tasks were to try to find and destroy and that was true in the first gulf war and it was true in in kosovo. and it was true throughout the 1990s. in fact, the air and stated mission was to do time targeting and single digit minutes. so find a target and put a bomber within minutes or less. but all of the target sets were machines. now certainly if you blow up, you know, let's say an iraqi tank in 1991, certainly you're going kill the people inside. that's that's going to happen. but that was never the intent. we weren't we weren't trying to kill those people. we were trying to destroy the tank. and what happened september 11th is that we transition to a force that was in the business of targeting people. and and i think it took us a long i think we reeled from that transition for a long time. and so now we were i would like to think we're we're coming out of the post-9-11 wars, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency. there are lots of people in the dod who are talking about future conflicts. and it almost feels like a reversion to that 99 just discussion about how do i destroy the adversaries machine? and so i don't know if we ever if we ever got to a point where, we really understood all the nuances of that shift. but but we did learn to do it effectively. and as i said, to deal with some of the psychological, emotional implications of that. and do you see things like drones becoming more prevalent as a weapon warfare? so the question is whether i see these airplanes becoming more prevalent in warfare, it's really hard to and people in the united states force have very different opinions on that. it's i think this is just my opinion. it's a question of what one chooses to emphasize. so if you look, the recent national defense strategy, that emphasis is on you know great power competition, near-peer threats the pacing threat is china that's what that document says. and so when people think about that kind of conflict, we're very much in the we're looking forward not back, it's going to be a contested environment, meaning, you know, unlike iraq and afghanistan, they'll have the ability to shoot down our airplanes. and so we might need airplanes are more sophisticated than the predator and reaper there's another line of argument that says even if we need to think about those things terrorism isn't going away, that that operational concern ended. so we still need airplanes like this. so what i think we'll see is increasing automation, not all in one go. we're not going to get to loyal wingman and i had up there overnight but i think you'll start to see processes on board airplanes become more and more automated to the degree that maybe potentially eventually we're able to take a person out of it then and then it's a drone, but it's different from what i've been talking about here because now it's it's an autonomous airplane opposed to a remotely piloted one. for me, i have one last question. what is your answer? the title of your book? yeah, it's i was hoping you wouldn't. the question is, what is the answer to the. i think that these are weapons. and so i think that whether the use of a weapon is justified or not depends on what you do with it. and so i think it is incumbent upon us as as the united states of america to impose on ourselves on how we decide to use force. and as a just war theorist, i think that last resort is a crucial of what they call you, said bell in the of the decision to go to war and. one of the main one of the main arguments, the most significant arguments against remote warfare is that it creates a moral hazard? it provides an incentive for decision makers to resort, to force. it's cheap and easy, and i don't even mean monetarily cheap, although these are cheaper than, you know, f-16s and f-35s, but it's politically inexpensive because the chances of having casualties on our side are much lower. and so we create a political incentive to resort to force, even when maybe we shouldn't resort to force. and i think the solution to that isn't getting rid of these weapons systems. i think it's imposing self-discipline on our on our foreign policy. but that's just my opinion. yes, sir. so from kind of a historical perspective, you know, sixties cold minutemen, sailors, crews, bunker in american sailor, we get it. you know, in order they got 90 seconds, they go through the procedure, they push the button, obviously more distant than the experience of. the drones now. but at the other end i've seen some stuff related to like boston dynamics with their robots being basically warriors again, to the question do you see a limit of where you know a robot. one guy controlling 20 of them running through forest or back at a desk. i mean, yeah, it is you know, it's escalation. yeah, that's a great question. so the gist of the question was remote warfare has been around for a long time going back to the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the post-nuclear era. and so that seems like it's been around a time. but then we have these contemporary developments like the the boston dynamics robot dog and, you know, robot, other robots and everything and so we're putting ourselves on a trend line that we're going to have a single operator for several, maybe several dozen of these systems. and so that was the gist of the question. so i am concerned. so one of the reasons that i take view that i do is because the humans are so involved, intimately involved in all the decisions that go into the use of force. these weapon systems. and as we start to kind of aggregate those systems where, you know, maybe you'll have for eight or ten or 12 systems under one human control, there's no way that that human is going to be as intimately invested in each of those scenarios or each of those operations. and so i do have a concern about that, actually. i worked with i worked with some researchers on a project, and we were looking at how humans react to the kinds of moral dilemmas that can come up in remote warfare. and we just had an offline discussion. i was surprised to find that there proposed solution just as an idea. what if we intentionally pixelate the image before the strike right so we now have high definition cameras which is far better than what you saw in that video. but what if the time of the strike we pixelate the image so that the human operators aren't face to face with the human toll that causing? and my view on that, i don't think that's the right move. don't think that's the right direction. right. i think we should should do whatever we need to do to build emotional resiliency in the crews so that can deal with that that trauma, that stress. but i don't want to move to place where we're where we're constantly abstracting from. the human cost war, because the more we consider war to be costless, right, the more the more fail to appreciate the costs of war. the more eager we'll be to start wars. and i want to put us in that position. and there are questions questions. but joe, thank you very much is you have given us, i think, a lot to think about and. think about it in terms of of context going back in history and we appreciate you being join me in thanking joe chhabra. thank you very much. thank you all very much. and if you'll joinand welcome ts here to hear our talk by paul miller on his new book the religion of american greatness. i am mark tooley, president of the institute on, religion and democracy and of providence journal of christiana and american foreign policy. we welcome all who are here, all who are this event live
i'm tony clark from the carter presidential library. and we're glad you're here for all of our programs, you know? several years ago i was watching a helen mirren movie eye in the sky, and it's about decision making process for a drone strike. and so when i saw joe book is remote warfare moral, it just seemed like the kind of topic that really needs to be discussed. and this would be a good place to to discuss it. joseph shapiro is lieutenant colonel in the us air force. he's got a ph.d. in philosophy from the university of oxford. his areas of expertise are everything from war theory military ethics especially the ethics of remote and autonomous weapons. he's a senior pilot with more than 1400 pilot and instructor pilot hours and many flown in of major u.s. combat humanitarian operations. he currently serves on the air force staff, so staffs, artificial intelligence, cross functional team. but, you know, the more we see u.s. military involved in other parts of the world, the more we see the use of drones and other remote weapons. and so now a good time to discuss whether that is moral or. so please join me in welcoming joseph chapter. thank you, tony, for the kind introduction. thank you for being here. this is really a privilege. i would be lying if i told you that i expected someday to write a book and to be able to talk to folks like you about it. i never thought that was going to be the case. this is really exciting. and to do so at this historic place is something special for me. also i would be remiss if i didn't mention that president carter wrote a new york times op ed in 2012, in which made it very clear that he had qualms about the quote unquote, drone program. and so i'm excited to bring some of those questions up and maybe hopefully to address some of the concerns that he expressed. so i think i'll start by talking about a period of during which i was writing this book. i think it was about 18. i walked into the family room where my kids were watching tv. they were watching paw patrol. i don't know if you're familiar whenever there a problem around adventure bay these pups save the day. and i saw that one of the human characters in the show was flying a remotely piloted aircraft using a camera onboard the aircraft to try find a lost hiker in the mountains. i could swear i heard this child in the show say the word drone. and i said to my kids, did they just say drone on a patrol? and my seven year old said to me somewhat condescendingly, yeah, dad, do you know what a drone even is? so let's start there. do we even know what a drone is? i think i do. i think in a position to talk about drones, i know what they. but it's harder than it sounds. and one of the reasons that it's harder that it's than it sounds is because there are so many misperceptions around these airplanes. and so before we even can have a conversation about whether remote warfare is moral. we have to have a conversation about what we mean, some of these terms. what kind of warfare we referring to. so i'll give you just one example. i have nothing against the international committee of the red cross. they do excellent work. this is just literally the first one that came up when i googled. but this is an article from the icrc on autonomous weapons systems. and presumably it's going to tell us about the profound implications for the future of warfare. but the art department decided to give us a picture of an empty nine reaper, an empty nine reaper is not an autonomous weapon system. there's nothing autonomous about it. there's a human crew there, qualified. they're trained. they're certified. they're qualified to aircrew under the air force instructions that govern air crew qualifications. and there are some automatic of this airplane it can fly to point it can hold an altitude. it even hold a specific bank angle, if you like. but that's no more autonomy than we have any modern airplane, including the airplane i flew went on to get here this morning. and so we kind of a problem because our our minds, we have these heuristics built because we see this image of the mq predator or its successor, the nine reaper, over and over and over again, associated with things like autonomy. i'm going to get to that a little bit more in a moment. but what i want to emphasize here is that the weapon systems that i have in mind, the predator and reaper, they're not autonomous and they're not by artificial intelligence. so what are the. well, the question remains difficult to answer. again, in 2018, i had a friend who assumed command of the newest united states air force empty nine reaper squadron. so i flew across ocean. i was living in the uk at the time. i flew across the ocean to be a part of that ceremony and the local headlines ran words like this drone squadron activated. and as you can see here, this is an actual picture of the aircrew. they went from being a detachment to being a full fledged squadron. so they peeled off the patch, signifying the detachment put on the new patch, signifying the squadron. it was a great day and i was really glad to a part of it. two days later, you might not remember this date, but i certainly do. on december 21st, 2018, i back across the ocean. and as we approached gatwick airport in london, the pilot came over the mike and said on, fortunately, we're not going to be able to land at gatwick to drone activity on the airfield. he said, i've been flying for 18 years and i have never seen anything like this. so we thought we might be able to divert to heathrow. that would have been nice. that was actually closer to my house. but heathrow was full of all the airplanes that have already diverted to gatwick. so i got a free trip to manchester and a four hour train ride back home. but the next day these are the kinds of that i saw. gatwick drones, ground flights. so this word drone, we're asking it to do a lot of work. it everything from fully autonomous killer robots that don't exist. it covers the mq one predator and empty nine reaper that have been a mainstay of us air force operations for the last 15 or 20 years. and then it covers 300 quadcopters that you can buy on amazon or anywhere quadcopters are sold. and the reason that matters to me is because unlike these air crew members who are trained and certified and have to meet longstanding standards for for air force, the person who bought that quadcopter ruined my day by having me have to divert, but also costing hundreds of millions pounds in the in the airline industry that. person had no certification they didn't need any special training. and as i said, it only cost them a few hundred bucks. so there's a huge difference to me between the kind of people that are involved in us air force operations and piloted aircraft and then the broad swath of people who might be behind one of these less expensive pieces, equipment. and so as we try to hone in on what it is, we're actually talking here, i want to away from autonomy, but i also want to recognize why we tend to think that these things are more autonomous than they are. so i don't think it's the right view, but it's an understandable view and part of the reason for that is because you look the shape of this airplane. this is the mta nine reaper on the left. nine was initially operational, capable in 27. so that was just six years after the predator was first armed with the hellfire missile, that first shot was on the opening day of the us war in afghanistan. so 2000, when we get the predator, 27, we get the reaper. and this is the reaper. and i want to point specifically at that nose in the front on any other airplane, what would you expect to see at that bulbous nose in the front? we would see canopy glass or windscreen, almost every airplane, almost every picture of every airplane that you have ever seen. if you look at that spot on the airplane, you're going to see canopy glass or windscreen and i think we've trained ourselves over and over and over and over. we've seen hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of different pictures, airplanes in the course of our lives and at the front, the airplane, canopy, glass or windscreen. and what that represents to us, i was just at the airport this morning. when you look through the canopy, what do you see? you see the pilot the person who you know is responsible for that airplane and everything on board. and on this airplane, we don't have canopy glass and we don't have a windscreen. and i can't look through that glass and see the eyes. the person who's responsible for that airplane, i might trick myself into thinking, well, maybe there is no one responsible, but i'm here to assert to you that there is someone responsible. it's a qualified aircrew member that's been certified to be responsible, that airplane and everything on it. just humor me. there's two thought experiments that i'd like you to consider. the first, i don't know if you'll be familiar with this. as you might imagine by now, i watch lot of cartoons. the the disney pixar movie planes. every one of those planes has eyes. where are those eyes on those cartoon? they're always on the canopy glass, the windscreen. right. so even the animators at pixar know that as the ancient proverb says, in the case of airplanes, the are the windows to the soul, the eyes glass is literally the window through which i see human person, the soul that's responsible for that airplane. second thought experiment. just imagine we are now in the age of autonomous vehicles. there are not that many out there on the roads. they're not in every city, but that they're in your city and you're standing at the crosswalk first. imagine just a regular automobile, good old fashioned car. it's got the windscreen. you look the glass, you see the person on the other side. when i'm at the crosswalk. and i'm trying to determine if that car going to stop for me. what do i do? i look through the windscreen and i make eye contact with the driver to see if they can see me. right. and we share a little bit of a moment if we don't make eye contact. i'm waiting till they come a complete stop before i cross right. and in fact, we can be thrown off on that. as i mentioned, i lived in the uk as much as it was difficult to learn to drive on the left hand side of the road. it was even more difficult to learn to look at the right, the correct side of the car because the car approaches the crosswalk. i'm constantly at my right side of the vehicle, which of course is the passenger seat. and it's pretty unnerving to see an empty passenger seat or even worse, to see a person's dog. but now imagine now that there's an autonomous vehicle, right? the autonomous has no need of canopy glass or windscreen. right. it senses the world around it by use of cameras and light and radar and some other things. and it positions itself in the world through those means. it doesn't need the glass. so imagine that an autonomous vehicle has, a completely opaque windscreen, imagine that. it's this composite grey that we see on the reaper. and now imagine in the crosswalk when that vehicle approaches, the crosswalk, are you going to step out in front of the vehicle? maybe there's a person inside, maybe not. is that a technical system or is that a techno, social? is it just a piece of machinery? is there a human operator behind it? i think without realizing it? these are all the questions come up when people who haven't seen the of a predator or reaper cockpit see this image. so this is a lot of table setting. there's a lot of work to do to get to the ethical. but i think this is where we need to start these airplanes are not autonomous. they're flown by a certified and qualified air force aircrew aircrew. okay. so if if we can if we can dispatch with the idea that these systems might autonomous, then we can start to ask real substance, tough questions about how does this new technology or in my view, this techno social system. it's a system that consists both of a piece of technology and human. cruise how does fit in with the long history of warfare? there are lots of ways we can ask this question. we could talk about moral justification for killing in war. we could talk about moral psychology and how that applies to war. here, i'm only going to focus on the warrior ethos, the warrior ethos in the western tradition. to us from homer, that's a statue of there on the left from the library of congress. and homer gives us two warrior achilles and hector. and of although we have these two warriors, it's achilles, that emerges in the tradition as the archetype of warrior, one wonders if that's because achilles one but we wonder whether achilles is the kind of person that we should want to emulate. is achilles the kind of person does he have, the kind of ethos that i would want? young lieutenants in the united states air force to emulate, for example, i think probably not. as you might remember, the iliad opens with achilles wrath or achilles rage, depending on the translation and his rage, his wrath, his personal sleights of honor drive the plot in several instances. reason he's enraged at the beginning of the book is because his honor has been slighted. he expected a war prize and at the last minute was taken away. his honor was hurt. that's the thing that drives him to violence that that's the thing that motivates him. and i don't know that achilles is the kind of person that we would want to emulate as a as a kind of warrior ethos. we could look at hector on the other side. hector is much more human than achilles is a scholar, is more intelligent than i have pointed out. we get glimpses of hector with his family in a way we never get glimpses of achilles with family. we get glimpses of hector with his family. in one classic scene, he's still wearing his his uniform. he's wearing his armor, including his helmet, and he leans over the crib to see his baby. and the baby starts crying because the baby's scared of the armor. right. and hector thinks, how silly of me. and takes his helmet off. right. it's a very humanizing moment where we get to experience hector in the fullness of his personhood. that never happens with achilles. achilles is a warrior, and he's only a warrior. and i spend so much time on this only say that again and again and again. the scholarship on the warrior ethos traces the warrior ethos back to achilles. and i want to challenge that a little bit for a couple of reasons. first, because when we think about the warrior, we tend to focus on the fact that both achilles and hector were to risk their lives. they were willing to pay a great sacrifice toward whatever their ends might have been. i would argue that they both have very different ends in mind and. so this warrior ethos grows up to this idea that. what it means to be a warrior is the willingness to risk one's life. the willingness to face risk in the face of an adversary, maybe even the actual imposition risk in front of the adversary. and so we think about in our modern time is the archetypal warrior. well, it's the person who's willing to to go out there and face the enemy gunfire at normandy or, you know, it's the person who's willing to raise the flag at jima, people who are willing to face great risk to themselves in battle. i think that's fair. i think that's right. think if we look at the history of warfare, we do see that. warriors are associated with this willingness, face risk, but i think there's something else operating there. first of all, we should distinguish between actually facing risk and the willingness to face risk. and i think this really matters. speaking of normandy, a few years ago, my wife and i were able to tour the beaches at normandy and the american there. and we had walked through the 9000 headstones at normandy to, commemorate the us forces who were killed, not just in that battle. but throughout the war. and as we as we got back to the tour bus to go back to our next stop, i was in line with an older gentleman who had a world two veteran cap on and there were just not that many world war two veterans around anymore. and so i made a point to strike up a conversation and i had a fascinating conversation with a man named bill. and bill told me that on d-day his job as a 17 year old was to work the night shift at a baltimore newspaper and function of the night shift was to sit there, wait until the teletype machines, the stories that are on the wire. and his job was to determine whether the story sufficient enough to wake up the editors. and so he learned about in that room on the teletype machines. and surely that was newsworthy. he woke up the editors. and so he told me, thinks he's probably one of the first people in the united states to learn about the invasion because he had that job on that day. and by the end of the he had gotten his mother's signature on his paperwork so he could enlist in the navy as a 17 year old. training takes a long time by time, he was trained up to go to the european theater, that war was over. we had achieved in europe. and so the redesign needed his ship for the pacific theater and the war ended soon thereafter. but he jokes with me that he got to the pacific just in time to earn his world war two veteran cap right now, this man, bill, didn't face combat risk. he was never actually at he never engaged the enemy, but he definitely displayed a willingness to face combat risk. right? he definitely through the steps that one must take in order to become eligible for combat risk. and i think that willingness really matters. and of the reasons that i think that is because of all of the rpa, the remotely piloted aircraft crews that i've talked to, i have never met a single person who has said, you know, i volunteered to join the military. we're an all volunteer force. so everyone who joined the military volunteered. i volunteered to join the military. i raised my right hand. i swore an oath to support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies, foreign and domestic but then i volunteered to go to the predator or the reaper, because i really didn't want to face any combat risk. that seems unlikely to me. i have friends who volunteered to go to the predator reaper because were airsick or because they were tired of travel schedule and some other airframes or they wanted to produce more operational effects. they felt like they were stuck, not close enough to operation, but i've never met anyone. that said, i'm unwilling to face combat risk. therefore send me to the predator or reaper. so when we trace this line through the history of warfare, one of the things we should recognize is this distinction between actually facing and willingness to face risk. and i want to put the emphasis on the latter rather than on the former. but there's a second thing that we can we can mention here, and that is that all of the honor and glory that achilles is concerned with, it just might not sufficient to define what it is to be warrior. and i think as we read the memoirs of of wars over time several wars, i focused on the last 100 years but i'm sure there are others we constantly we consistently this this remark that even though there are glorious things in they they are far to too minuscule to justify the of war. i've given you just a few quotes here but oliver wendell was served in world war correct and served in the civil war and he was on several occasions and actually the first time he was shot, he was in field hospital and he was convinced that he was going to die. and he wrote a letter to his mother, in fact, saying that he had resigned himself to death. of course, he and he went on to become the us supreme court justice. later in life he was giving a speech at harvard. it's one of the most famous speeches that he's given and. he says war when you're at it is horrible. and dull. it's only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. so he's willing to admit that there's something divine war, but only in retrospect, only when can review the lessons learned, not the in the midst of the blood and fighting. ulysses grant certainly was a veteran of the civil war, but long before that he was a lieutenant in the mexican-american war, and he wrote his wife, julia. wherever there are battles, great, many must suffer. and for the sake of the little glory, i do not care to see it. so he's recognizing that there is some glory to be had, but it isn't worth fighting. and finally an unnamed french soldier in world war one writes, there will never be enough glory to cover all the blood and all mud. the french soldier right before that line, he calls the people, the generals and the policymakers who got the european powers into world war one. he calls them criminals. he talks about this this crime of war they've committed. and then he recognizes that there might be glory, but not enough to cover all the blood and all the mud. so achilles, motivated by honor and glory. i don't think that's enough. i don't think that gets us all the way there to what it means to be a warrior. certainly there's something about risk, something about the willingness to face risk. but i don't think that gets us all the way there either. i think the third thing, the thing that we're missing is that there also has to be a willingness to take human life on the other side of that. and that goes under. under. remarked. under-researched. people don't talk about that as much. and i. one reason for that is that in the long history warfare, these two things almost always go together. willingness to face risk and willingness to take life. and in the predator and reaper world, we're asking people to separate those two ideas. we have predator and reaper crew members at this point, just reaper crew members of the united states air force who are willing to face risk because they they took the oath. they raised right hand. they're not actually going to face risk. but we are going to ask them to take human life. and i think that's a crucial element to understanding the warrior ethos in the way that we should. so if there's one holdout, if we can all agree that war is too muddy, too bloody to be justified, glory and honor, there must be something else that justifies war as a just war theorist. i have strong views about. i'll sidestep them here. let's just imagine that there are just causes to go to war. and it has nothing to do with. honor and glory. even so, there holdouts who think there is at least one place that's still glorious in war. and those are the pilots, right? because flight has always been glorious. flight has always been this dream that we meant to achieve. we achieved it at kitty hawk in 1903, and then it became a fixture of warfare, starting in world war one. when i was an officer trainee at boston university. several years ago, i not only had to be familiar with john gillespie, mcgee's poem high flight, but my peers and i had to memorize it. he that i've slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter. silver wings. sun word. i have climbed and done 100 things you have not dreamed of. and so maybe flying airplanes and war is still glorious. that still has the honor that achilles was after. that's still still divine in oliver wendell holmes. his terms. but i hasten to add that john gillespie mcgee wasn't writing about wartime. he was tragically killed in a training accident before he ever got to war. he was writing about pilot training. he was writing about flying in a peaceful sky. and that. i agree is romantic. that is glorious. there is a dream. in flying in a peaceful sky long. after john gillespie mcgee died, i flew the six texan two and the ti 38 sea talon in pilot training, and i lived gillespie's poetic dream. i did the things that he described in the poem and it was every bit the dream that he suggested. but i there's a there's a threshold that we have to cross as aircrew members when start talking about combat operations. and that's the time to put away the the poetry of the means and adopt the prose of combat ends. and so my view here is that there might it might be the case that when we put these cockpits on the ground, when we have air crew members, fly these airplanes from the ground rather than from the air, we are we are robbing them of some of that dream. but it's in the service of our our military service to the political community. and that's just a necessary condition success. we have to do what we have to in order to in order to achieve our ends and to say, no, no, we need to hold on to that dream. we shouldn't have remote because we should let these pilots fly in their airplanes. that would be just like achilles saying that and honor are justifications for war. and so i just don't see it. i just don't see the argument working out. so i agree, gillespie on his dream, but i think there's something different about war. okay so if these weapon systems are not autonomous and and if we're convinced that glory and honor are not justifications for war, then we can finally start to hone in on the humanity behind these systems. they're not autonomous. they're not flown by computers. they're flown by people. so what is the human element that's at work in these weapon systems? there are several stories i could tell you, but i'll just mention a few. we could about moral psychology. we could talk about virtue. we could talk about moral justification. and in some of these stories, they're all interrelated. in researching for the book, i was allowed to go sit with crew members as they flew combat missions in the cockpit or sometimes called the ground station. and so i didn't know what was going to happen on those missions. i didn't know if they were going be exciting or boring to me to be frank about it. but it was a privilege to be able to watch the crews do their work and so i was on headset listening to the crew and to everyone they were talking to on the radio. and in this one instance, the pilot was talking the jtc. that's a joint terminal attack. it's usually an air force airman, although not. and they obtained this joint qualification to be able to say cleared hot on the radio so this is the air power advocate that's embedded with the ground force that can translate ground speak army and marine corps speak into air force speak to translate the ground force commander's intent to the aircrew and the pilots. now talking to the to the jetpack and the pilot has found some disturbed earth in a field and she's not sure exactly it is and she describes it to the jetpack and the jetpack is convinced that it's in order to keep in mind the jetpack and his have been being fired at by mortars several days. so he is he is up to find mortar tubes and destroy them. and so this pilot and the sensor operator discussed the issue, discuss what they thought was under their crosshairs and said no, it just doesn't look like a mortar to the much more likely scenario is that it's a shovel because this is a field and it's disturbed earth. so it looks like someone was doing some shoveling. they finished the task and they put down the shovel. and so the jetpack wanted this pilot drop a bomb on the mortar team. and the pilot said, no, and we can do that under us military doctrine, because under us military, the pilot follows an power chain of command up to the combined forces air commander and the land force follows a chain of command up through the land forces component. and so when the when the army or the marine corps joint correction, ground force commander asks us for a weapon as the united states air force for a weapon, it's not a direct order. they're not in a position to provide with direct orders. so it's really more like both people need to consent. the pilot has to to release the weapon and the ground force commander to ask for the weapon. in this case, the pilot was uncomfortable it and said, no, thank you. now, i would argue that that is human judgment operating in the cockpit, that would not have happened if this was an autonomous computer driven system. the data could have just said, go and the system would have gone. but because we, a human in the seat, the human can execute human judgment. i that's important. even though that story that i just described is never going to make the news. you'll never read it in the newspaper. you'll never see a headline. and there are a thousand such stories like that where air crew members are using their human judgment. and you might disagree in in this case, you might side with the data and you might with the pilot. but the point is that there is a human judgment at work and these decisions. and i think crucial and fits in with the long history of of air power, the video that you're seeing on the left here. this is predator video from the of 2002 on a hill called tucker, ga. afghanistan in 2001. as i mentioned, the us invaded afghanistan on october sixth, a pilot named scott swanson, the first hellfire missile off of a predator. that was on the opening night of the campaign. but it wasn't close air support. he wasn't supporting troops in contact. he was trying to destroy a high value target. actually, he was to destroy a vehicle in the convoy that belonged to a high value target in the hopes that that would draw the high value target out. five months later, there's a predator providing overwatch for on this mountain, on this tucker gar hilltop, and this predator, unlike the previous, is not armed. the hellfire is new to the predator. they had to expedite the testing process to get the hellfire on the predator. so not the tail numbers have a hellfire missile. so this is stuck just watching. it can't do anything. it doesn't have a missile. well, the this was a special force ingress. it was a seal. and they're their their air power advocate was, an air force airman named john chapman. they took heavy. the enemy was far more dug in than they had expected. it did not go well. chapman was injured and he fell, lost consciousness, and his teammates assumed that he was dead. they quickly exfil they quickly exfiltrated the mountain top. and because they thought chapman was dead, they the risk of going to get his body was too high. so they left him and then he woke up and then he fought on by himself. another hour. and at the time he was awarded the air force cross is one of the highest ranking medals. one can be awarded posthumously. he was killed after that that our, in fact, according to some accounts, was killed because he had he had taken several bunkers from the enemy. he had driven the enemy out of several bunkers. he took up one of those bunkers as a fighting position. and he have been able to stay there and fight on longer. but according to some accounts, when the army sent a quick reaction force to support this effort, he came out of the bunker to, draw enemy fire so that they wouldn't be able to shoot down the with the army folks that were inbound. so he was awarded the air force cross several years ago, then secretary of the air force deborah lee james read an article, airman magazine, that said that an air force airman had not been awarded the congressional of honor since vietnam. and so she that page out of the magazine and handed it to an aide and said, go look into this. how come an air force airman hasn't been awarded the medal of honor since the vietnam? and so they looked over several sets of records to try to find medals that might be able to be to be promoted to the of honor. and chapman's was one. so he he has now been awarded the congressional medal of honor, one of the most important pieces of evidence. that decision was this video from predator at the time. that's why it's been declassified and why you can find it on the internet. but imagine imagine that the pilot of this airplane who if i have the historical pieces right, is also scott swanson, the pilot who fired that first missile. right on the opening day of the war. he's got an armed predator and he fired a missile. now he's watching a fellow airman fight for his life and there's nothing he can do about it. try to imagine that feeling. the next airplane. once he got out, he ran out of gas and to go back to the base, he was replaced by a different pilot and that pilot was flying an armed predator. so when that army quick reaction, quick reaction force got to the hill. another jay tech, gabe brown was able to call in the first ever close air support strike from a hellfire missile and they were able to defend the friendly forces in that strike. here's why i tell you the story. when we think about the ethics of remote, we're often we're often to terms with the headlines, with the strikes that have gone badly and will be the first to admit that several strikes have gone badly. and i'm not saying that those strikes were morally justified. that's not the argument. the argument is for every one of those strikes that you might see in the news, there are countless times that the predator or reaper crew did, the right thing produced the mission objectives, what they were asked to produce and did so with extremely low civilian harm. and imagine if scott swanson had a missile on his airplane that day, right? the story would have been very different. and john chapman might have made it home. right. so when we think about the ethics of warfare, we can't just think about the strikes that have gone badly. we have to think about all the things that would have been different had we not had these airplanes. there are. people i have met them who believe the world would be a better place had it never for remotely piloted aircraft. a big question. i don't know the answer to that question, but i know if we're going to take that question seriously, then we have to think not only about the strikes have gone bad, but also all the work that the crews have done to produce justified military aims with very low civilian harm. so what comes next? i think i've made the case the human crew is central to, these airplanes and i can imagine i've heard people say to me when i say these airplanes are not autonomous and, they're not driven by artificial intelligence. sometimes i get the response. yeah, not yet. but soon they could be. that's true. soon they could be. and in that that composite bulbous, maybe instead of a satellite dish antenna, maybe we have some supercomputer brains. someday but what i wouldn't want to do is that when that day comes, when artificial or autonomy is sophisticated, that it can autonomously control a reaper. or wouldn't it also be able to autonomously control other stuff too? i have there a picture artist's conception of what a loyal wingman might look like in the us air force's approach to loyal wingman. that would be a traditional f 35 fighter pilot controlling, a swarm of, say, four, ten or 12 autonomous, loyal wingman. if the age of artificial intelligence is upon us, if we're going to have autonomous weapons systems, sure, it could look like reaper, but it could also look like the loyal wingman. but for that matter, it could also look like a traditionally piloted f 35. we can have an artificial intelligence system and put it on that airplane to support the pilot and the pilots. so what i don't want to do is imagine this throughline that goes from predator to reaper to the age of artificial intelligence. i don't think that's what it's going to look like. i think we need to learn the lessons we can learn from remote warfare, from predator and reaper. and then i think we need to have a separate discussion about autonomy in artificial intelligence. i don't think they're as closely related as some people do. so everything i've said up to this point seems a little bit retrospective. and that's true. it is retrospective. i am looking backwards at two decades of remote warfare, but i don't want to leave you with the impression there's nothing here for us, for the future and the reason that i say that is because the emphasis, the ethics discussion on which i've very little i meant is on the distance, right? the reason that we can separate in the warrior ethos, reason we can separate the willingness to face risk and the willingness to take life is because of the distances involved. the reason have to ask questions about whether these crews their job. seriously, i didn't say much on that but that's one of the arguments that have a playstation mentality or the reason people have that concern because of the distance we've had, we've learned a lot about the psychology of remote warfare. i haven't said on that either, but i could add to is grounded in the distance. the initial assumption that these crews would be would be psychologically unaffected by their work was grounded in fact that they're at such great distances. how could they be so emotionally invested? and so all of these questions about distance, those aren't questions that go away at the end of the predator and reaper era. those are questions that are going to come. and i think they're going to come up more frequently. let me just give you a few examples. if what we're worried about in the ethics of remote warfare is the 7000 miles, which is the distance from nevada to afghanistan if that's the kind of distance that we're worried about, then think about something like cyber warfare operations or a cyber warfare operator might operate from the united states and produce effects in cyberspace that have physical effects on the other side of the. or think about hypersonic flying at five times the speed of sound continents and over oceans that, too, is going to involve thousands of miles worth of distance. or imagine, as i said, artificial and autonomy. we know we might imagine that if 35 pilot with a human pilot board staying outside of the enemy's threat ring and sending some of those wingmen forward to a place that's more dangerous even that pilot will be at a greater distance than will the autonomous level wingman. so these questions about remoteness don't go away. i think they they actually get more important. and so my hope is that will be able to look at the lessons learned from from 20 years of remote warfare, ask hard questions about what elements of this really are ethically significant, and then try to apply some of those lessons to the next 20 years. thank you all for here tonight. and do we have any questions to to mention about being 7000 miles away from afghans does that mean that there's one drone operation? so great? the question was, is there just one operations center these these airplanes? because i had mentioned the state of nevada. so i have mentioned at the top, but just in case there's any doubt the views expressed are my own and don't necessarily represent the department of defense, though i am an active duty air force officer, so there are lots open source information about various places that the air force, these airplanes out of. i'm not in a position here to list them all. there are several. yes, sir. you talked and about distance being issue, but it involves more than just the predators. what about the person? no relationship. between the and the potential victim, because it's thing if you are flying a fighter jet that sends a missile some distance or punching a button sends a missile, but it's another. you've been watching the family that you're going to perhaps attack. that's right. so the question was about the distance relationships and how that applies to the aircrew that might be on one side of the world and the person under the crosshairs on the other side of the world. and that's one of the things that we had to learn the hard way. a community that people do get invested in the work and that can at a at an emotional psychological. so not only is it case that they're witnessing what's happening on the screen. so it's it's not like you know the the remote warfare of the 1990s if you will was cruise missiles. but when the surface warfare officer launches a cruise missile from a ship, they're not actually seeing the impact. they're not seeing the missile explode. and so on the one hand, it's true that we're these crews are watching the video. right. so that's one way that it's a little more intimate. but we have that in traditional fighter planes. also, the tv screen will be smaller and the image might be a little grainier. but we share that in common with the traditional fighter and bomber crews. what really it different is the loiter time. so fact that these air crew can stay on station for eight, ten, 12, 21 hours really provide a lot of insight sometimes about how just how human the person under the crosshairs is. so different people react differently to that. but we certainly have learned that some members have had a hard time with some of those issues. i didn't get into it much here tonight, but but the the remotely piloted aircraft community, if will, is several different commands. but that community recognized. probably almost 15 years ago that this was to be a psychological, emotional challenge. and so at creech air base, for instance, they established a human performance team and at various times they've had slightly different professional cadre of professionals. but at the time i visited and interviewed folks, it was a physiologist, a psychologist, a chaplain. and so the idea is that with their powers combined, they should be able to provide support to the in the kind of emotional spiritual, psychological space. and even when they first established that team, they decided it really wasn't effective because those members didn't have the same classification readings, the crews. and so the crews didn't feel comfortable telling them what had happened on the mission because they didn't know if they were allowed to because of the classification constraints. so now that human performance team is read into all the same classifications as the crews, so they can just walk in the work centers, they can walk up and meet people and build that way. and the the stories that i got from them, from the members of human performance team when i interview them, is that it's really come a long way that they really have deep going to get support from the human performance team. so we've come a long way, but we had to learn the hard way. you you also mentioned that there can be differences of opinions, a request to going ahead with a strike that happen often. i don't have any data to to but it's it's certainly unheard of. one story that i think captures this the best is a friend of mine named, dan, had been following a high value target for several weeks and. so he's only an eight hour shift. there's a 24 hour cycle. so there are other crew, other crews that are supporting that same target. but every day he comes in and for roughly 8 hours, he follows his high value target. and every day this high value target leaves his house, puts a kid on the back of the motorbike. there's a football, you know, soccer pitch the home. and so there's a bunch of kids playing soccer. and so he goes and gets one of those kids, puts him on the back of the motorbike and goes a mile to the north to the homemade factory, because that's what he's responsible for in the terrorist organization. and so it became pretty clear that he's using those children as a human shield to to do the drive to the north. and so, my friend dan is watching this play out. and then one day after three weeks of this, he shows up and starts to get the intelligence briefing and says the ground force commander to take the shot today. and so starts asking questions of the relevant echelons today. why does it have to be today? why not yesterday? why not tomorrow? and he never a satisfactory answer to that question. and he knew that if he's asked, take the shot and if there's a kid on the back of the motorbike, he's morally responsible for that. so he decided that he wasn't willing to take that shot. and by the way, they did the ground force team did consult with with legal. so it wasn't a question of whether it was illegal. the determination was made that that the proportionality calculus would have been satisfied. so although it would have been tragic, it would have been a justifiable civilian casualty because the military value of the target was so significant. i'm to discuss that, if you like. but the point that it wouldn't have been a war crime, it wouldn't have been illegal. it's just that dan didn't feel comfortable with it. so the point of this whole story is that dan has the authority to say to the ground force commander, i'm not doing it. doesn't feel. but then because these cockpits are on the ground, the squadron commander walked into dan's cockpit and said, dan, are going to be all that. you're going to be able to take the shot today. and what strikes me about the story is that the squadron commander could have said, dan, take the shot. well, now we in uniform code of military justice, territory because now that is his commander in his chain of command him a lawful order. but the commander do that because when we put these cockpits, the ground, we built in some flexibility and the commander recognized that. so he said, dan, you going to be able to take the shot? and dan, if they could give you a reason why it has to be today, i could do it. but in the absence that reason, it feels arbitrary and i'm not comfortable with it. and so the commander said, all right, i don't have anybody else to fly the line today. so stick with it, i understand you're not going to take the shot tomorrow. i'm going to get somebody else on this line. and so that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target come out of the house and the next day, squadron commander found another pilot who was fully briefed it wasn't a secret. he knew. he knew what he was getting himself into. and he said he was willing to do that. and that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target did come out, did get on the motorbike, but didn't put a kid on the back of the bike. and so the timing, the complacency worked out to where that pilot was able to take a clean shot against the high value target. but i tell that story here because emphasizes the fact that that air chain of command, that's that's that's not in negotiation. those are orders when it comes to the air power supporting land component, that becomes more of a peer to peer relationship. this kind of warfare sounds more personal. i think that's right. one of the things that i think it took a long time to recognize is that if you look at the the development of technical i'm sorry for those that couldn't hear the question was this feels more personal. this kind of war feels more personal. so if you look at the technological developments in the 1990s, especially in the united states air force the the tasks were to try to find and destroy and that was true in the first gulf war and it was true in in kosovo. and it was true throughout the 1990s. in fact, the air and stated mission was to do time targeting and single digit minutes. so find a target and put a bomber within minutes or less. but all of the target sets were machines. now certainly if you blow up, you know, let's say an iraqi tank in 1991, certainly you're going kill the people inside. that's that's going to happen. but that was never the intent. we weren't we weren't trying to kill those people. we were trying to destroy the tank. and what happened september 11th is that we transition to a force that was in the business of targeting people. and and i think it took us a long i think we reeled from that transition for a long time. and so now we were i would like to think we're we're coming out of the post-9-11 wars, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency. there are lots of people in the dod who are talking about future conflicts. and it almost feels like a reversion to that 99 just discussion about how do i destroy the adversaries machine? and so i don't know if we ever if we ever got to a point where, we really understood all the nuances of that shift. but but we did learn to do it effectively. and as i said, to deal with some of the psychological, emotional implications of that. and do you see things like drones becoming more prevalent as a weapon warfare? so the question is whether i see these airplanes becoming more prevalent in warfare, it's really hard to and people in the united states force have very different opinions on that. it's i think this is just my opinion. it's a question of what one chooses to emphasize. so if you look, the recent national defense strategy, that emphasis is on you know great power competition, near-peer threats the pacing threat is china that's what that document says. and so when people think about that kind of conflict, we're very much in the we're looking forward not back, it's going to be a contested environment, meaning, you know, unlike iraq and afghanistan, they'll have the ability to shoot down our airplanes. and so we might need airplanes are more sophisticated than the predator and reaper there's another line of argument that says even if we need to think about those things terrorism isn't going away, that that operational concern ended. so we still need airplanes like this. so what i think we'll see is increasing automation, not all in one go. we're not going to get to loyal wingman and i had up there overnight but i think you'll start to see processes on board airplanes become more and more automated to the degree that maybe potentially eventually we're able to take a person out of it then and then it's a drone, but it's different from what i've been talking about here because now it's it's an autonomous airplane opposed to a remotely piloted one. for me, i have one last question. what is your answer? the title of your book? yeah, it's i was hoping you wouldn't. the question is, what is the answer to the. i think that these are weapons. and so i think that whether the use of a weapon is justified or not depends on what you do with it. and so i think it is incumbent upon us as as the united states of america to impose on ourselves on how we decide to use force. and as a just war theorist, i think that last resort is a crucial of what they call you, said bell in the of the decision to go to war and. one of the main one of the main arguments, the most significant arguments against remote warfare is that it creates a moral hazard? it provides an incentive for decision makers to resort, to force. it's cheap and easy, and i don't even mean monetarily cheap, although these are cheaper than, you know, f-16s and f-35s, but it's politically inexpensive because the chances of having casualties on our side are much lower. and so we create a political incentive to resort to force, even when maybe we shouldn't resort to force. and i think the solution to that isn't getting rid of these weapons systems. i think it's imposing self-discipline on our on our foreign policy. but that's just my opinion. yes, sir. so from kind of a historical perspective, you know, sixties cold minutemen, sailors, crews, bunker in american sailor, we get it. you know, in order they got 90 seconds, they go through the procedure, they push the button, obviously more distant than the experience of. the drones now. but at the other end i've seen some stuff related to like boston dynamics with their robots being basically warriors again, to the question do you see a limit of where you know a robot. one guy controlling 20 of them running through forest or back at a desk. i mean, yeah, it is you know, it's escalation. yeah, that's a great question. so the gist of the question was remote warfare has been around for a long time going back to the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the post-nuclear era. and so that seems like it's been around a time. but then we have these contemporary developments like the the boston dynamics robot dog and, you know, robot, other robots and everything and so we're putting ourselves on a trend line that we're going to have a single operator for several, maybe several dozen of these systems. and so that was the gist of the question. so i am concerned. so one of the reasons that i take view that i do is because the humans are so involved, intimately involved in all the decisions that go into the use of force. these weapon systems. and as we start to kind of aggregate those systems where, you know, maybe you'll have for eight or ten or 12 systems under one human control, there's no way that that human is going to be as intimately invested in each of those scenarios or each of those operations. and so i do have a concern about that, actually. i worked with i worked with some researchers on a project, and we were looking at how humans react to the kinds of moral dilemmas that can come up in remote warfare. and we just had an offline discussion. i was surprised to find that there proposed solution just as an idea. what if we intentionally pixelate the image before the strike right so we now have high definition cameras which is far better than what you saw in that video. but what if the time of the strike we pixelate the image so that the human operators aren't face to face with the human toll that causing? and my view on that, i don't think that's the right move. don't think that's the right direction. right. i think we should should do whatever we need to do to build emotional resiliency in the crews so that can deal with that that trauma, that stress. but i don't want to move to place where we're where we're constantly abstracting from. the human cost war, because the more we consider war to be costless, right, the more the more fail to appreciate the costs of war. the more eager we'll be to start wars. and i want to put us in that position. and there are questions questions. but joe, thank you very much is you have given us, i think, a lot to think about and. think about it in terms of of context going back in history and we appreciate you being join me in thanking joe chhabra. thank you very much. thank you all very much. and if you'll join >> good evening, everyone, and welcome to warwick's. on behalf of four weeks, i want to thank you for your support. last year, what >> celebrated 135 years is the oldest continuously family owned bookstore in the u.s.. thank you very much. hopefully next year we will have our 126th year. what weeks -- warwick's is pleased
but, you know, the more we see u.s. military involved in other parts of the world, the more we see the use of drones and other remote weapons. and so now a good time to discuss whether that is moral or. so please join me in welcoming joseph chapter. thank you, tony, for the kind introduction. thank you for being here. this is really a privilege. i would be lying if i told you that i expected someday to write a book and to be able to talk to folks like you about it. i never thought that was going to be the case. this is really exciting. and to do so at this historic place is something special for me. also i would be remiss if i didn't mention that president carter wrote a new york times op ed in 2012, in which made it very clear that he had qualms about the quote unquote, drone program. and so i'm excited to bring some of those questions up and maybe hopefully to address some of the concerns that he expressed. so i think i'll start by talking about a period of during which i was writing this book. i think it was about 18. i walked into the family room where my kids were watching tv. they were watching paw patrol. i don't know if you're familiar whenever there a problem around adventure bay these pups save the day. and i saw that one of the human characters in the show was flying a remotely piloted aircraft using a camera onboard the aircraft to try find a lost hiker in the mountains. i could swear i heard this child in the show say the word drone. and i said to my kids, did they just say drone on a patrol? and my seven year old said to me somewhat condescendingly, yeah, dad, do you know what a drone even is? so let's start there. do we even know what a drone is? i think i do. i think in a position to talk about drones, i know what they. but it's harder than it sounds. and one of the reasons that it's harder that it's than it sounds is because there are so many misperceptions around these airplanes. and so before we even can have a conversation about whether remote warfare is moral. we have to have a conversation about what we mean, some of these terms. what kind of warfare we referring to. so i'll give you just one example. i have nothing against the international committee of the red cross. they do excellent work. this is just literally the first one that came up when i googled. but this is an article from the icrc on autonomous weapons systems. and presumably it's going to tell us about the profound implications for the future of warfare. but the art department decided to give us a picture of an empty nine reaper, an empty nine reaper is not an autonomous weapon system. there's nothing autonomous about it. there's a human crew there, qualified. they're trained. they're certified. they're qualified to aircrew under the air force instructions that govern air crew qualifications. and there are some automatic of this airplane it can fly to point it can hold an altitude. it even hold a specific bank angle, if you like. but that's no more autonomy than we have any modern airplane, including the airplane i flew went on to get here this morning. and so we kind of a problem because our our minds, we have these heuristics built because we see this image of the mq predator or its successor, the nine reaper, over and over and over again, associated with things like autonomy. i'm going to get to that a little bit more in a moment. but what i want to emphasize here is that the weapon systems that i have in mind, the predator and reaper, they're not autonomous and they're not by artificial intelligence. so what are the. well, the question remains difficult to answer. again, in 2018, i had a friend who assumed command of the newest united states air force empty nine reaper squadron. so i flew across ocean. i was living in the uk at the time. i flew across the ocean to be a part of that ceremony and the local headlines ran words like this drone squadron activated. and as you can see here, this is an actual picture of the aircrew. they went from being a detachment to being a full fledged squadron. so they peeled off the patch, signifying the detachment put on the new patch, signifying the squadron. it was a great day and i was really glad to a part of it. two days later, you might not remember this date, but i certainly do. on december 21st, 2018, i back across the ocean. and as we approached gatwick airport in london, the pilot came over the mike and said on, fortunately, we're not going to be able to land at gatwick to drone activity on the airfield. he said, i've been flying for 18 years and i have never seen anything like this. so we thought we might be able to divert to heathrow. that would have been nice. that was actually closer to my house. but heathrow was full of all the airplanes that have already diverted to gatwick. so i got a free trip to manchester and a four hour train ride back home. but the next day these are the kinds of that i saw. gatwick drones, ground flights. so this word drone, we're asking it to do a lot of work. it everything from fully autonomous killer robots that don't exist. it covers the mq one predator and empty nine reaper that have been a mainstay of us air force operations for the last 15 or 20 years. and then it covers 300 quadcopters that you can buy on amazon or anywhere quadcopters are sold. and the reason that matters to me is because unlike these air crew members who are trained and certified and have to meet longstanding standards for for air force, the person who bought that quadcopter ruined my day by having me have to divert, but also costing hundreds of millions pounds in the in the airline industry that. person had no certification they didn't need any special training. and as i said, it only cost them a few hundred bucks. so there's a huge difference to me between the kind of people that are involved in us air force operations and piloted aircraft and then the broad swath of people who might be behind one of these less expensive pieces, equipment. and so as we try to hone in on what it is, we're actually talking here, i want to away from autonomy, but i also want to recognize why we tend to think that these things are more autonomous than they are. so i don't think it's the right view, but it's an understandable view and part of the reason for that is because you look the shape of this airplane. this is the mta nine reaper on the left. nine was initially operational, capable in 27. so that was just six years after the predator was first armed with the hellfire missile, that first shot was on the opening day of the us war in afghanistan. so 2000, when we get the predator, 27, we get the reaper. and this is the reaper. and i want to point specifically at that nose in the front on any other airplane, what would you expect to see at that bulbous nose in the front? we would see canopy glass or windscreen, almost every airplane, almost every picture of every airplane that you have ever seen. if you look at that spot on the airplane, you're going to see canopy glass or windscreen and i think we've trained ourselves over and over and over and over. we've seen hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of different pictures, airplanes in the course of our lives and at the front, the airplane, canopy, glass or windscreen. and what that represents to us, i was just at the airport this morning. when you look through the canopy, what do you see? you see the pilot the person who you know is responsible for that airplane and everything on board. and on this airplane, we don't have canopy glass and we don't have a windscreen. and i can't look through that glass and see the eyes. the person who's responsible for that airplane, i might trick myself into thinking, well, maybe there is no one responsible, but i'm here to assert to you that there is someone responsible. it's a qualified aircrew member that's been certified to be responsible, that airplane and everything on it. just humor me. there's two thought experiments that i'd like you to consider. the first, i don't know if you'll be familiar with this. as you might imagine by now, i watch lot of cartoons. the the disney pixar movie planes. every one of those planes has eyes. where are those eyes on those cartoon? they're always on the canopy glass, the windscreen. right. so even the animators at pixar know that as the ancient proverb says, in the case of airplanes, the are the windows to the soul, the eyes glass is literally the window through which i see human person, the soul that's responsible for that airplane. second thought experiment. just imagine we are now in the age of autonomous vehicles. there are not that many out there on the roads. they're not in every city, but that they're in your city and you're standing at the crosswalk first. imagine just a regular automobile, good old fashioned car. it's got the windscreen. you look the glass, you see the person on the other side. when i'm at the crosswalk. and i'm trying to determine if that car going to stop for me. what do i do? i look through the windscreen and i make eye contact with the driver to see if they can see me. right. and we share a little bit of a moment if we don't make eye contact. i'm waiting till they come a complete stop before i cross right. and in fact, we can be thrown off on that. as i mentioned, i lived in the uk as much as it was difficult to learn to drive on the left hand side of the road. it was even more difficult to learn to look at the right, the correct side of the car because the car approaches the crosswalk. i'm constantly at my right side of the vehicle, which of course is the passenger seat. and it's pretty unnerving to see an empty passenger seat or even worse, to see a person's dog. but now imagine now that there's an autonomous vehicle, right? the autonomous has no need of canopy glass or windscreen. right. it senses the world around it by use of cameras and light and radar and some other things. and it positions itself in the world through those means. it doesn't need the glass. so imagine that an autonomous vehicle has, a completely opaque windscreen, imagine that. it's this composite grey that we see on the reaper. and now imagine in the crosswalk when that vehicle approaches, the crosswalk, are you going to step out in front of the vehicle? maybe there's a person inside, maybe not. is that a technical system or is that a techno, social? is it just a piece of machinery? is there a human operator behind it? i think without realizing it? these are all the questions come up when people who haven't seen the of a predator or reaper cockpit see this image. so this is a lot of table setting. there's a lot of work to do to get to the ethical. but i think this is where we need to start these airplanes are not autonomous. they're flown by a certified and qualified air force aircrew aircrew. okay. so if if we can if we can dispatch with the idea that these systems might autonomous, then we can start to ask real substance, tough questions about how does this new technology or in my view, this techno social system. it's a system that consists both of a piece of technology and human. cruise how does fit in with the long history of warfare? there are lots of ways we can ask this question. we could talk about moral justification for killing in war. we could talk about moral psychology and how that applies to war. here, i'm only going to focus on the warrior ethos, the warrior ethos in the western tradition. to us from homer, that's a statue of there on the left from the library of congress. and homer gives us two warrior achilles and hector. and of although we have these two warriors, it's achilles, that emerges in the tradition as the archetype of warrior, one wonders if that's because achilles one but we wonder whether achilles is the kind of person that we should want to emulate. is achilles the kind of person does he have, the kind of ethos that i would want? young lieutenants in the united states air force to emulate, for example, i think probably not. as you might remember, the iliad opens with achilles wrath or achilles rage, depending on the translation and his rage, his wrath, his personal sleights of honor drive the plot in several instances. reason he's enraged at the beginning of the book is because his honor has been slighted. he expected a war prize and at the last minute was taken away. his honor was hurt. that's the thing that drives him to violence that that's the thing that motivates him. and i don't know that achilles is the kind of person that we would want to emulate as a as a kind of warrior ethos. we could look at hector on the other side. hector is much more human than achilles is a scholar, is more intelligent than i have pointed out. we get glimpses of hector with his family in a way we never get glimpses of achilles with family. we get glimpses of hector with his family. in one classic scene, he's still wearing his his uniform. he's wearing his armor, including his helmet, and he leans over the crib to see his baby. and the baby starts crying because the baby's scared of the armor. right. and hector thinks, how silly of me. and takes his helmet off. right. it's a very humanizing moment where we get to experience hector in the fullness of his personhood. that never happens with achilles. achilles is a warrior, and he's only a warrior. and i spend so much time on this only say that again and again and again. the scholarship on the warrior ethos traces the warrior ethos back to achilles. and i want to challenge that a little bit for a couple of reasons. first, because when we think about the warrior, we tend to focus on the fact that both achilles and hector were to risk their lives. they were willing to pay a great sacrifice toward whatever their ends might have been. i would argue that they both have very different ends in mind and. so this warrior ethos grows up to this idea that. what it means to be a warrior is the willingness to risk one's life. the willingness to face risk in the face of an adversary, maybe even the actual imposition risk in front of the adversary. and so we think about in our modern time is the archetypal warrior. well, it's the person who's willing to to go out there and face the enemy gunfire at normandy or, you know, it's the person who's willing to raise the flag at jima, people who are willing to face great risk to themselves in battle. i think that's fair. i think that's right. think if we look at the history of warfare, we do see that. warriors are associated with this willingness, face risk, but i think there's something else operating there. first of all, we should distinguish between actually facing risk and the willingness to face risk. and i think this really matters. speaking of normandy, a few years ago, my wife and i were able to tour the beaches at normandy and the american there. and we had walked through the 9000 headstones at normandy to, commemorate the us forces who were killed, not just in that battle. but throughout the war. and as we as we got back to the tour bus to go back to our next stop, i was in line with an older gentleman who had a world two veteran cap on and there were just not that many world war two veterans around anymore. and so i made a point to strike up a conversation and i had a fascinating conversation with a man named bill. and bill told me that on d-day his job as a 17 year old was to work the night shift at a baltimore newspaper and function of the night shift was to sit there, wait until the teletype machines, the stories that are on the wire. and his job was to determine whether the story sufficient enough to wake up the editors. and so he learned about in that room on the teletype machines. and surely that was newsworthy. he woke up the editors. and so he told me, thinks he's probably one of the first people in the united states to learn about the invasion because he had that job on that day. and by the end of the he had gotten his mother's signature on his paperwork so he could enlist in the navy as a 17 year old. training takes a long time by time, he was trained up to go to the european theater, that war was over. we had achieved in europe. and so the redesign needed his ship for the pacific theater and the war ended soon thereafter. but he jokes with me that he got to the pacific just in time to earn his world war two veteran cap right now, this man, bill, didn't face combat risk. he was never actually at he never engaged the enemy, but he definitely displayed a willingness to face combat risk. right? he definitely through the steps that one must take in order to become eligible for combat risk. and i think that willingness really matters. and of the reasons that i think that is because of all of the rpa, the remotely piloted aircraft crews that i've talked to, i have never met a single person who has said, you know, i volunteered to join the military. we're an all volunteer force. so everyone who joined the military volunteered. i volunteered to join the military. i raised my right hand. i swore an oath to support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies, foreign and domestic but then i volunteered to go to the predator or the reaper, because i really didn't want to face any combat risk. that seems unlikely to me. i have friends who volunteered to go to the predator reaper because were airsick or because they were tired of travel schedule and some other airframes or they wanted to produce more operational effects. they felt like they were stuck, not close enough to operation, but i've never met anyone. that said, i'm unwilling to face combat risk. therefore send me to the predator or reaper. so when we trace this line through the history of warfare, one of the things we should recognize is this distinction between actually facing and willingness to face risk. and i want to put the emphasis on the latter rather than on the former. but there's a second thing that we can we can mention here, and that is that all of the honor and glory that achilles is concerned with, it just might not sufficient to define what it is to be warrior. and i think as we read the memoirs of of wars over time several wars, i focused on the last 100 years but i'm sure there are others we constantly we consistently this this remark that even though there are glorious things in they they are far to too minuscule to justify the of war. i've given you just a few quotes here but oliver wendell was served in world war correct and served in the civil war and he was on several occasions and actually the first time he was shot, he was in field hospital and he was convinced that he was going to die. and he wrote a letter to his mother, in fact, saying that he had resigned himself to death. of course, he and he went on to become the us supreme court justice. later in life he was giving a speech at harvard. it's one of the most famous speeches that he's given and. he says war when you're at it is horrible. and dull. it's only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. so he's willing to admit that there's something divine war, but only in retrospect, only when can review the lessons learned, not the in the midst of the blood and fighting. ulysses grant certainly was a veteran of the civil war, but long before that he was a lieutenant in the mexican-american war, and he wrote his wife, julia. wherever there are battles, great, many must suffer. and for the sake of the little glory, i do not care to see it. so he's recognizing that there is some glory to be had, but it isn't worth fighting. and finally an unnamed french soldier in world war one writes, there will never be enough glory to cover all the blood and all mud. the french soldier right before that line, he calls the people, the generals and the policymakers who got the european powers into world war one. he calls them criminals. he talks about this this crime of war they've committed. and then he recognizes that there might be glory, but not enough to cover all the blood and all the mud. so achilles, motivated by honor and glory. i don't think that's enough. i don't think that gets us all the way there to what it means to be a warrior. certainly there's something about risk, something about the willingness to face risk. but i don't think that gets us all the way there either. i think the third thing, the thing that we're missing is that there also has to be a willingness to take human life on the other side of that. and that goes under. under. remarked. under-researched. people don't talk about that as much. and i. one reason for that is that in the long history warfare, these two things almost always go together. willingness to face risk and willingness to take life. and in the predator and reaper world, we're asking people to separate those two ideas. we have predator and reaper crew members at this point, just reaper crew members of the united states air force who are willing to face risk because they they took the oath. they raised right hand. they're not actually going to face risk. but we are going to ask them to take human life. and i think that's a crucial element to understanding the warrior ethos in the way that we should. so if there's one holdout, if we can all agree that war is too muddy, too bloody to be justified, glory and honor, there must be something else that justifies war as a just war theorist. i have strong views about. i'll sidestep them here. let's just imagine that there are just causes to go to war. and it has nothing to do with. honor and glory. even so, there holdouts who think there is at least one place that's still glorious in war. and those are the pilots, right? because flight has always been glorious. flight has always been this dream that we meant to achieve. we achieved it at kitty hawk in 1903, and then it became a fixture of warfare, starting in world war one. when i was an officer trainee at boston university. several years ago, i not only had to be familiar with john gillespie, mcgee's poem high flight, but my peers and i had to memorize it. he that i've slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter. silver wings. sun word. i have climbed and done 100 things you have not dreamed of. and so maybe flying airplanes and war is still glorious. that still has the honor that achilles was after. that's still still divine in oliver wendell holmes. his terms. but i hasten to add that john gillespie mcgee wasn't writing about wartime. he was tragically killed in a training accident before he ever got to war. he was writing about pilot training. he was writing about flying in a peaceful sky. and that. i agree is romantic. that is glorious. there is a dream. in flying in a peaceful sky long. after john gillespie mcgee died, i flew the six texan two and the ti 38 sea talon in pilot training, and i lived gillespie's poetic dream. i did the things that he described in the poem and it was every bit the dream that he suggested. but i there's a there's a threshold that we have to cross as aircrew members when start talking about combat operations. and that's the time to put away the the poetry of the means and adopt the prose of combat ends. and so my view here is that there might it might be the case that when we put these cockpits on the ground, when we have air crew members, fly these airplanes from the ground rather than from the air, we are we are robbing them of some of that dream. but it's in the service of our our military service to the political community. and that's just a necessary condition success. we have to do what we have to in order to in order to achieve our ends and to say, no, no, we need to hold on to that dream. we shouldn't have remote because we should let these pilots fly in their airplanes. that would be just like achilles saying that and honor are justifications for war. and so i just don't see it. i just don't see the argument working out. so i agree, gillespie on his dream, but i think there's something different about war. okay so if these weapon systems are not autonomous and and if we're convinced that glory and honor are not justifications for war, then we can finally start to hone in on the humanity behind these systems. they're not autonomous. they're not flown by computers. they're flown by people. so what is the human element that's at work in these weapon systems? there are several stories i could tell you, but i'll just mention a few. we could about moral psychology. we could talk about virtue. we could talk about moral justification. and in some of these stories, they're all interrelated. in researching for the book, i was allowed to go sit with crew members as they flew combat missions in the cockpit or sometimes called the ground station. and so i didn't know what was going to happen on those missions. i didn't know if they were going be exciting or boring to me to be frank about it. but it was a privilege to be able to watch the crews do their work and so i was on headset listening to the crew and to everyone they were talking to on the radio. and in this one instance, the pilot was talking the jtc. that's a joint terminal attack. it's usually an air force airman, although not. and they obtained this joint qualification to be able to say cleared hot on the radio so this is the air power advocate that's embedded with the ground force that can translate ground speak army and marine corps speak into air force speak to translate the ground force commander's intent to the aircrew and the pilots. now talking to the to the jetpack and the pilot has found some disturbed earth in a field and she's not sure exactly it is and she describes it to the jetpack and the jetpack is convinced that it's in order to keep in mind the jetpack and his have been being fired at by mortars several days. so he is he is up to find mortar tubes and destroy them. and so this pilot and the sensor operator discussed the issue, discuss what they thought was under their crosshairs and said no, it just doesn't look like a mortar to the much more likely scenario is that it's a shovel because this is a field and it's disturbed earth. so it looks like someone was doing some shoveling. they finished the task and they put down the shovel. and so the jetpack wanted this pilot drop a bomb on the mortar team. and the pilot said, no, and we can do that under us military doctrine, because under us military, the pilot follows an power chain of command up to the combined forces air commander and the land force follows a chain of command up through the land forces component. and so when the when the army or the marine corps joint correction, ground force commander asks us for a weapon as the united states air force for a weapon, it's not a direct order. they're not in a position to provide with direct orders. so it's really more like both people need to consent. the pilot has to to release the weapon and the ground force commander to ask for the weapon. in this case, the pilot was uncomfortable it and said, no, thank you. now, i would argue that that is human judgment operating in the cockpit, that would not have happened if this was an autonomous computer driven system. the data could have just said, go and the system would have gone. but because we, a human in the seat, the human can execute human judgment. i that's important. even though that story that i just described is never going to make the news. you'll never read it in the newspaper. you'll never see a headline. and there are a thousand such stories like that where air crew members are using their human judgment. and you might disagree in in this case, you might side with the data and you might with the pilot. but the point is that there is a human judgment at work and these decisions. and i think crucial and fits in with the long history of of air power, the video that you're seeing on the left here. this is predator video from the of 2002 on a hill called tucker, ga. afghanistan in 2001. as i mentioned, the us invaded afghanistan on october sixth, a pilot named scott swanson, the first hellfire missile off of a predator. that was on the opening night of the campaign. but it wasn't close air support. he wasn't supporting troops in contact. he was trying to destroy a high value target. actually, he was to destroy a vehicle in the convoy that belonged to a high value target in the hopes that that would draw the high value target out. five months later, there's a predator providing overwatch for on this mountain, on this tucker gar hilltop, and this predator, unlike the previous, is not armed. the hellfire is new to the predator. they had to expedite the testing process to get the hellfire on the predator. so not the tail numbers have a hellfire missile. so this is stuck just watching. it can't do anything. it doesn't have a missile. well, the this was a special force ingress. it was a seal. and they're their their air power advocate was, an air force airman named john chapman. they took heavy. the enemy was far more dug in than they had expected. it did not go well. chapman was injured and he fell, lost consciousness, and his teammates assumed that he was dead. they quickly exfil they quickly exfiltrated the mountain top. and because they thought chapman was dead, they the risk of going to get his body was too high. so they left him and then he woke up and then he fought on by himself. another hour. and at the time he was awarded the air force cross is one of the highest ranking medals. one can be awarded posthumously. he was killed after that that our, in fact, according to some accounts, was killed because he had he had taken several bunkers from the enemy. he had driven the enemy out of several bunkers. he took up one of those bunkers as a fighting position. and he have been able to stay there and fight on longer. but according to some accounts, when the army sent a quick reaction force to support this effort, he came out of the bunker to, draw enemy fire so that they wouldn't be able to shoot down the with the army folks that were inbound. so he was awarded the air force cross several years ago, then secretary of the air force deborah lee james read an article, airman magazine, that said that an air force airman had not been awarded the congressional of honor since vietnam. and so she that page out of the magazine and handed it to an aide and said, go look into this. how come an air force airman hasn't been awarded the medal of honor since the vietnam? and so they looked over several sets of records to try to find medals that might be able to be to be promoted to the of honor. and chapman's was one. so he he has now been awarded the congressional medal of honor, one of the most important pieces of evidence. that decision was this video from predator at the time. that's why it's been declassified and why you can find it on the internet. but imagine imagine that the pilot of this airplane who if i have the historical pieces right, is also scott swanson, the pilot who fired that first missile. right on the opening day of the war. he's got an armed predator and he fired a missile. now he's watching a fellow airman fight for his life and there's nothing he can do about it. try to imagine that feeling. the next airplane. once he got out, he ran out of gas and to go back to the base, he was replaced by a different pilot and that pilot was flying an armed predator. so when that army quick reaction, quick reaction force got to the hill. another jay tech, gabe brown was able to call in the first ever close air support strike from a hellfire missile and they were able to defend the friendly forces in that strike. here's why i tell you the story. when we think about the ethics of remote, we're often we're often to terms with the headlines, with the strikes that have gone badly and will be the first to admit that several strikes have gone badly. and i'm not saying that those strikes were morally justified. that's not the argument. the argument is for every one of those strikes that you might see in the news, there are countless times that the predator or reaper crew did, the right thing produced the mission objectives, what they were asked to produce and did so with extremely low civilian harm. and imagine if scott swanson had a missile on his airplane that day, right? the story would have been very different. and john chapman might have made it home. right. so when we think about the ethics of warfare, we can't just think about the strikes that have gone badly. we have to think about all the things that would have been different had we not had these airplanes. there are. people i have met them who believe the world would be a better place had it never for remotely piloted aircraft. a big question. i don't know the answer to that question, but i know if we're going to take that question seriously, then we have to think not only about the strikes have gone bad, but also all the work that the crews have done to produce justified military aims with very low civilian harm. so what comes next? i think i've made the case the human crew is central to, these airplanes and i can imagine i've heard people say to me when i say these airplanes are not autonomous and, they're not driven by artificial intelligence. sometimes i get the response. yeah, not yet. but soon they could be. that's true. soon they could be. and in that that composite bulbous, maybe instead of a satellite dish antenna, maybe we have some supercomputer brains. someday but what i wouldn't want to do is that when that day comes, when artificial or autonomy is sophisticated, that it can autonomously control a reaper. or wouldn't it also be able to autonomously control other stuff too? i have there a picture artist's conception of what a loyal wingman might look like in the us air force's approach to loyal wingman. that would be a traditional f 35 fighter pilot controlling, a swarm of, say, four, ten or 12 autonomous, loyal wingman. if the age of artificial intelligence is upon us, if we're going to have autonomous weapons systems, sure, it could look like reaper, but it could also look like the loyal wingman. but for that matter, it could also look like a traditionally piloted f 35. we can have an artificial intelligence system and put it on that airplane to support the pilot and the pilots. so what i don't want to do is imagine this throughline that goes from predator to reaper to the age of artificial intelligence. i don't think that's what it's going to look like. i think we need to learn the lessons we can learn from remote warfare, from predator and reaper. and then i think we need to have a separate discussion about autonomy in artificial intelligence. i don't think they're as closely related as some people do. so everything i've said up to this point seems a little bit retrospective. and that's true. it is retrospective. i am looking backwards at two decades of remote warfare, but i don't want to leave you with the impression there's nothing here for us, for the future and the reason that i say that is because the emphasis, the ethics discussion on which i've very little i meant is on the distance, right? the reason that we can separate in the warrior ethos, reason we can separate the willingness to face risk and the willingness to take life is because of the distances involved. the reason have to ask questions about whether these crews their job. seriously, i didn't say much on that but that's one of the arguments that have a playstation mentality or the reason people have that concern because of the distance we've had, we've learned a lot about the psychology of remote warfare. i haven't said on that either, but i could add to is grounded in the distance. the initial assumption that these crews would be would be psychologically unaffected by their work was grounded in fact that they're at such great distances. how could they be so emotionally invested? and so all of these questions about distance, those aren't questions that go away at the end of the predator and reaper era. those are questions that are going to come. and i think they're going to come up more frequently. let me just give you a few examples. if what we're worried about in the ethics of remote warfare is the 7000 miles, which is the distance from nevada to afghanistan if that's the kind of distance that we're worried about, then think about something like cyber warfare operations or a cyber warfare operator might operate from the united states and produce effects in cyberspace that have physical effects on the other side of the. or think about hypersonic flying at five times the speed of sound continents and over oceans that, too, is going to involve thousands of miles worth of distance. or imagine, as i said, artificial and autonomy. we know we might imagine that if 35 pilot with a human pilot board staying outside of the enemy's threat ring and sending some of those wingmen forward to a place that's more dangerous even that pilot will be at a greater distance than will the autonomous level wingman. so these questions about remoteness don't go away. i think they they actually get more important. and so my hope is that will be able to look at the lessons learned from from 20 years of remote warfare, ask hard questions about what elements of this really are ethically significant, and then try to apply some of those lessons to the next 20 years. thank you all for here tonight. and do we have any questions to to mention about being 7000 miles away from afghans does that mean that there's one drone operation? so great? the question was, is there just one operations center these these airplanes? because i had mentioned the state of nevada. so i have mentioned at the top, but just in case there's any doubt the views expressed are my own and don't necessarily represent the department of defense, though i am an active duty air force officer, so there are lots open source information about various places that the air force, these airplanes out of. i'm not in a position here to list them all. there are several. yes, sir. you talked and about distance being issue, but it involves more than just the predators. what about the person? no relationship. between the and the potential victim, because it's thing if you are flying a fighter jet that sends a missile some distance or punching a button sends a missile, but it's another. you've been watching the family that you're going to perhaps attack. that's right. so the question was about the distance relationships and how that applies to the aircrew that might be on one side of the world and the person under the crosshairs on the other side of the world. and that's one of the things that we had to learn the hard way. a community that people do get invested in the work and that can at a at an emotional psychological. so not only is it case that they're witnessing what's happening on the screen. so it's it's not like you know the the remote warfare of the 1990s if you will was cruise missiles. but when the surface warfare officer launches a cruise missile from a ship, they're not actually seeing the impact. they're not seeing the missile explode. and so on the one hand, it's true that we're these crews are watching the video. right. so that's one way that it's a little more intimate. but we have that in traditional fighter planes. also, the tv screen will be smaller and the image might be a little grainier. but we share that in common with the traditional fighter and bomber crews. what really it different is the loiter time. so fact that these air crew can stay on station for eight, ten, 12, 21 hours really provide a lot of insight sometimes about how just how human the person under the crosshairs is. so different people react differently to that. but we certainly have learned that some members have had a hard time with some of those issues. i didn't get into it much here tonight, but but the the remotely piloted aircraft community, if will, is several different commands. but that community recognized. probably almost 15 years ago that this was to be a psychological, emotional challenge. and so at creech air base, for instance, they established a human performance team and at various times they've had slightly different professional cadre of professionals. but at the time i visited and interviewed folks, it was a physiologist, a psychologist, a chaplain. and so the idea is that with their powers combined, they should be able to provide support to the in the kind of emotional spiritual, psychological space. and even when they first established that team, they decided it really wasn't effective because those members didn't have the same classification readings, the crews. and so the crews didn't feel comfortable telling them what had happened on the mission because they didn't know if they were allowed to because of the classification constraints. so now that human performance team is read into all the same classifications as the crews, so they can just walk in the work centers, they can walk up and meet people and build that way. and the the stories that i got from them, from the members of human performance team when i interview them, is that it's really come a long way that they really have deep going to get support from the human performance team. so we've come a long way, but we had to learn the hard way. you you also mentioned that there can be differences of opinions, a request to going ahead with a strike that happen often. i don't have any data to to but it's it's certainly unheard of. one story that i think captures this the best is a friend of mine named, dan, had been following a high value target for several weeks and. so he's only an eight hour shift. there's a 24 hour cycle. so there are other crew, other crews that are supporting that same target. but every day he comes in and for roughly 8 hours, he follows his high value target. and every day this high value target leaves his house, puts a kid on the back of the motorbike. there's a football, you know, soccer pitch the home. and so there's a bunch of kids playing soccer. and so he goes and gets one of those kids, puts him on the back of the motorbike and goes a mile to the north to the homemade factory, because that's what he's responsible for in the terrorist organization. and so it became pretty clear that he's using those children as a human shield to to do the drive to the north. and so, my friend dan is watching this play out. and then one day after three weeks of this, he shows up and starts to get the intelligence briefing and says the ground force commander to take the shot today. and so starts asking questions of the relevant echelons today. why does it have to be today? why not yesterday? why not tomorrow? and he never a satisfactory answer to that question. and he knew that if he's asked, take the shot and if there's a kid on the back of the motorbike, he's morally responsible for that. so he decided that he wasn't willing to take that shot. and by the way, they did the ground force team did consult with with legal. so it wasn't a question of whether it was illegal. the determination was made that that the proportionality calculus would have been satisfied. so although it would have been tragic, it would have been a justifiable civilian casualty because the military value of the target was so significant. i'm to discuss that, if you like. but the point that it wouldn't have been a war crime, it wouldn't have been illegal. it's just that dan didn't feel comfortable with it. so the point of this whole story is that dan has the authority to say to the ground force commander, i'm not doing it. doesn't feel. but then because these cockpits are on the ground, the squadron commander walked into dan's cockpit and said, dan, are going to be all that. you're going to be able to take the shot today. and what strikes me about the story is that the squadron commander could have said, dan, take the shot. well, now we in uniform code of military justice, territory because now that is his commander in his chain of command him a lawful order. but the commander do that because when we put these cockpits, the ground, we built in some flexibility and the commander recognized that. so he said, dan, you going to be able to take the shot? and dan, if they could give you a reason why it has to be today, i could do it. but in the absence that reason, it feels arbitrary and i'm not comfortable with it. and so the commander said, all right, i don't have anybody else to fly the line today. so stick with it, i understand you're not going to take the shot tomorrow. i'm going to get somebody else on this line. and so that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target come out of the house and the next day, squadron commander found another pilot who was fully briefed it wasn't a secret. he knew. he knew what he was getting himself into. and he said he was willing to do that. and that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target did come out, did get on the motorbike, but didn't put a kid on the back of the bike. and so the timing, the complacency worked out to where that pilot was able to take a clean shot against the high value target. but i tell that story here because emphasizes the fact that that air chain of command, that's that's that's not in negotiation. those are orders when it comes to the air power supporting land component, that becomes more of a peer to peer relationship. this kind of warfare sounds more personal. i think that's right. one of the things that i think it took a long time to recognize is that if you look at the the development of technical i'm sorry for those that couldn't hear the question was this feels more personal. this kind of war feels more personal. so if you look at the technological developments in the 1990s, especially in the united states air force the the tasks were to try to find and destroy and that was true in the first gulf war and it was true in in kosovo. and it was true throughout the 1990s. in fact, the air and stated mission was to do time targeting and single digit minutes. so find a target and put a bomber within minutes or less. but all of the target sets were machines. now certainly if you blow up, you know, let's say an iraqi tank in 1991, certainly you're going kill the people inside. that's that's going to happen. but that was never the intent. we weren't we weren't trying to kill those people. we were trying to destroy the tank. and what happened september 11th is that we transition to a force that was in the business of targeting people. and and i think it took us a long i think we reeled from that transition for a long time. and so now we were i would like to think we're we're coming out of the post-9-11 wars, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency. there are lots of people in the dod who are talking about future conflicts. and it almost feels like a reversion to that 99 just discussion about how do i destroy the adversaries machine? and so i don't know if we ever if we ever got to a point where, we really understood all the nuances of that shift. but but we did learn to do it effectively. and as i said, to deal with some of the psychological, emotional implications of that. and do you see things like drones becoming more prevalent as a weapon warfare? so the question is whether i see these airplanes becoming more prevalent in warfare, it's really hard to and people in the united states force have very different opinions on that. it's i think this is just my opinion. it's a question of what one chooses to emphasize. so if you look, the recent national defense strategy, that emphasis is on you know great power competition, near-peer threats the pacing threat is china that's what that document says. and so when people think about that kind of conflict, we're very much in the we're looking forward not back, it's going to be a contested environment, meaning, you know, unlike iraq and afghanistan, they'll have the ability to shoot down our airplanes. and so we might need airplanes are more sophisticated than the predator and reaper there's another line of argument that says even if we need to think about those things terrorism isn't going away, that that operational concern ended. so we still need airplanes like this. so what i think we'll see is increasing automation, not all in one go. we're not going to get to loyal wingman and i had up there overnight but i think you'll start to see processes on board airplanes become more and more automated to the degree that maybe potentially eventually we're able to take a person out of it then and then it's a drone, but it's different from what i've been talking about here because now it's it's an autonomous airplane opposed to a remotely piloted one. for me, i have one last question. what is your answer? the title of your book? yeah, it's i was hoping you wouldn't. the question is, what is the answer to the. i think that these are weapons. and so i think that whether the use of a weapon is justified or not depends on what you do with it. and so i think it is incumbent upon us as as the united states of america to impose on ourselves on how we decide to use force. and as a just war theorist, i think that last resort is a crucial of what they call you, said bell in the of the decision to go to war and. one of the main one of the main arguments, the most significant arguments against remote warfare is that it creates a moral hazard? it provides an incentive for decision makers to resort, to force. it's cheap and easy, and i don't even mean monetarily cheap, although these are cheaper than, you know, f-16s and f-35s, but it's politically inexpensive because the chances of having casualties on our side are much lower. and so we create a political incentive to resort to force, even when maybe we shouldn't resort to force. and i think the solution to that isn't getting rid of these weapons systems. i think it's imposing self-discipline on our on our foreign policy. but that's just my opinion. yes, sir. so from kind of a historical perspective, you know, sixties cold minutemen, sailors, crews, bunker in american sailor, we get it. you know, in order they got 90 seconds, they go through the procedure, they push the button, obviously more distant than the experience of. the drones now. but at the other end i've seen some stuff related to like boston dynamics with their robots being basically warriors again, to the question do you see a limit of where you know a robot. one guy controlling 20 of them running through forest or back at a desk. i mean, yeah, it is you know, it's escalation. yeah, that's a great question. so the gist of the question was remote warfare has been around for a long time going back to the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the post-nuclear era. and so that seems like it's been around a time. but then we have these contemporary developments like the the boston dynamics robot dog and, you know, robot, other robots and everything and so we're putting ourselves on a trend line that we're going to have a single operator for several, maybe several dozen of these systems. and so that was the gist of the question. so i am concerned. so one of the reasons that i take view that i do is because the humans are so involved, intimately involved in all the decisions that go into the use of force. these weapon systems. and as we start to kind of aggregate those systems where, you know, maybe you'll have for eight or ten or 12 systems under one human control, there's no way that that human is going to be as intimately invested in each of those scenarios or each of those operations. and so i do have a concern about that, actually. i worked with i worked with some researchers on a project, and we were looking at how humans react to the kinds of moral dilemmas that can come up in remote warfare. and we just had an offline discussion. i was surprised to find that there proposed solution just as an idea. what if we intentionally pixelate the image before the strike right so we now have high definition cameras which is far better than what you saw in that video. but what if the time of the strike we pixelate the image so that the human operators aren't face to face with the human toll that causing? and my view on that, i don't think that's the right move. don't think that's the right direction. right. i think we should should do whatever we need to do to build emotional resiliency in the crews so that can deal with that that trauma, that stress. but i don't want to move to place where we're where we're constantly abstracting from. the human cost war, because the more we consider war to be costless, right, the more the more fail to appreciate the costs of war. the more eager we'll be to start wars. and i want to put us in that position. and there are questions questions. but joe, thank you very much is you have given us, i think, a lot to think about and. think about it in terms of of context going back in history and we appreciate you being join me in thanking joe chhabra. thank you very much. thank you all very much. and if you'll join >> good evening, everyone, and welcome to warwick's. on behalf of four weeks, i want to thank you for your support. last year, what >> celebrated 135 years is the oldest continuously family owned bookstore in the u.s.. thank you very much. hopefully next year we will have our 126th year. what weeks -- warwick's is pleased to introduce andrew saul who will discuss his
war. >> booktv in prime time continues this week. tonight after "the communicators," we'll bring you authors from book fairs and festivals. at 8:30 p.m. eastern, we begin with oscar goodman at freedom fest. he talks about "being oscar: from mob lawyer to mayor of las vegas." after that, we'll go to this year's printer's row literary festival to hear about "the cooked seed." then on to bookexpo be america in new york city city with erica jong who talks about "fear of flying." and we finish with author and radio talk show host larry elder at the los angeles times festival of books as he discusses his memoir about his troubled relationship with his father in "dear father, dear son." booktv in prime time all this week on c-span2. >> c-span, created by america's cable companies in 1979, brought to you as a public service by your television provider. >> host: well, with the announcement this week that "the washington post" has been sold to jeff bethos, we thought we'd take this opportunity to look at changes in the newspaper industry and the potential future of the news industry in general. we have two guests joining us this week. first, we want to introduce you to alan mutter. he is in san francisco, and he is a newspaper consultant, he's a lecturer as well at the university of california berkeley on media economics, and he has served as a newspaper editor, a cable tv executive and a tech ceo. today he consults with both traditional and media -- traditional and digital companies. also joining us from from our new york studio is edmund lee who is the media reporter for bloomberg news. and, mr. lee, if we could start with you, how big a deal is this sale? >> guest: well, it's a big deal in secular terms at least, in terms of numbers, in terms of finances, $250 million isn't -- it's a lot of money, but compared to a lot of media deals, it's pretty small. it's more the fact it's "the washington post," a storied brand, a storied newspaper that once helped topple a sitting u.s. president, and jeff bethos who's a well known internet billionaire, despite the fact he tends to be press shy, ironically enough. so that's the sides of this deal, it's the secular interest that the big names behind it. >> host: is there interest in this deal, mr. lee, outside of washington and outside of media circles? >> guest: you know what? i think the fact that there are probably almost everyone in this country has come across amazon, either bought something or at least is aware of it will at least, you know, get main street's attention. but, yes, the focus is the power centers. media, washington, d.c., of course, and silicon valley. so these are pretty important areas to get people's attention. in that way, it'll sort of amplify down across the country and into main street. also what it means for newspapers in general, old media with, new media linking up here, and i think that a's what -- that's what's drawing the speculation as to what will happen to the post and newspapers in general, and it seems like he clearly has something in mind. we still don't know what it is though. >> host: alan mutter, same question. how big a deal is this deal? >> guest: well, it's certainly a big deal in the journalism community. people are going to wonder about how this new owner will guide the journalistic side of the enterprise. but also inside the to media business this is a huge story, because the first time that a true digital native has stepped into one of the legacy media businesses, a newspaper or broadcasting company, and if he acts in any way like he did in disrupting the book publishing business, the book selling business, the delivery of streaming media and certainly e-commerce, then mr. besos probably will disrupt and reenvision what it is to be the hoop in the 21st century and how that business remains a business. >> host: what kind of disruptions could you foresee? >> guest: well, as i said, he's very much one of the authors, if you will, of the modern digital world, and he understands the technology, and he understands enormously the modern consumer both of books and things as mundane as diapers or pens. so i think he will bring together those two threads, his understanding of the consumer and his understanding of digital information delivery and lidgeal commerce. -- digital commerce. he'll bring those things together and say, okay, here's a major national/international brand. could we make the audience bigger? could we do more things with the content? are there more ways to extract money from this large audience in and, of course, can we make the audience bigger and make even more money? >> host: and a question for both of you, we'll start with you, mr. mutter, how do you personalize the newspaper business like you do amazonsome. >> guest: well, a broadcast on radio or tv or a printed publication like a newspaper or magazine is a one size fits all product. it may have lots of different points of entry, it may have different programs to watch from hour to hour on tv, given articles you can read in the newspaper, but basically everybody has that same experience. digital information delivery means that products can be personalized enormously based on expressed preferences by individuals as well as by inferring their interests, their needs, their wants from such data as what they're reading, where they are if they're using a mobile device with gps, what they are shopping for, what they've bought. so amazon, of course, has made a great capital of personalizing book offerings. so if you click on a book about mitt romney, you're going to start getting other interesting books about mitt romney and books that other people who bought the book mitt romney bought, they'll say maybe you're one of those guys. as publishers and advertisers track people's movements on the web and on their mobile phones and their laptops, they begin to develop a profile about that individual so they can send ever more personalized, more tailored content to that individual whether it's news and information or commercial information also known as advertising. >> host: edmund lee, personalization. >> guest: personalization, absolutely, that's a big part of the amazon selling strategy. but taking a step farther back, i think the key to understand here is that jeff besos is -- amazon is fundamentally a commerce company despite the fact that he's invested a lot in media, and, you know, if you think about the kind and what he did to the book business, he's more about trying to make sure as many people are on his site or on his devices buying thing, and he'll sell things. he sells kindles at a loss, he's even sort of brokered relationship with book publishers. so despite the fact he might end up paying the publishers more for each book, he'll sell it to the consumer at a loss just so he can get people to his site. that's important to understand in terms of what he might do with the washington post. newspapers have become more transactional mean the way that the new york times has recently and "the washington post" this year, you know, engaging in paywalls, basically getting the reader to pay for the content as opposed to having advertisers subsidize his. so the fact that newspapers are already headed in more of a commerce mode in terms of how it'll grow or survive as a business, and jeff besos has engaged in that at amazon, that's one of the few sort of obvious links in terms of why that might appeal to him, where he might have thought that fit into his business acumen and probably what more to come. another aspect to that, that alan talked about earlier as well, you know, is if you take a look at kindles, there there are probably a few million circulating, interestingly enough, amazon won't disclose exactly how many they sold, but estimates are from 2-4 million. that's already, you know, four times the circulation of "the washington post." you can imagine that, you know, supposing that there's an arm's length deal that you could see washington post circulation bump up just by appearing on kindles everywhere. but also taking advantage of sort of the emergence of e-singles or short books, so to speak, where you have sort of longer form journalism or articles that get told like a dollar per or $2 per, and "the washington post" has a really talented staff, a lot of them who could easily pump out these e-books that you could buy on kindles or amazon or any other reading device for that matter. so there are some clear, immediate overlaps that besos could start to turn the post in that direction, and, you know, i think whether it's personalization or single kindles or just sort of more digital distribution for the post, those seem to be obvious areas where he might take it. >> host: edmund lee, how did the post get into the position in the last six, seven years where its circulation went from 700,000 to 470,000 on sundays, 950,000 to 680,000 and got into the position where it was money losing and available for sale? >> guest: well, two main things. the internet, clearly. but what the internet did can, it made content largely free, so people started to go online to read about news whether it's the local weather or sports or what's going on in the world. and, second, advertisers flocked to the internecessary as well because that's -- internet as well because that's where the ad dollars are going. they could buy advertising much more cheaply than they could in newsprint. newspapers lost readers which lowered circulation which lowered ad dollars on top of which advertising moving off of print. so it's not just "the washington post," it's happened across all newspapers. i think the entire sector saw a 6% drop in advertising sales over the last few years or year to year, that is, and it's been getting worse since 2007-2008 when the recession hit. so some of the blame is on the post itself in terms of how it may have managed itself, but newspapers have been falling everywhere. that hastened the need for whether it was the post or the new york times or small market newspapers to go online and to exploit those audiences in a smarter way without giving things, their content away for free and not turning them away either. it's a balancing game in terms of what they've had to do. >> guest: if i could hop in with a bit of perspective. newspaper advertising revenues which is their primary source of revenue for the business peaked at over $49 billion in 2005, and and last year they were around $22 billion. so more than half of the industry's primary revenue stream has been lost. >> guest: yeah. >> guest: and circulation is down about 40% from that 2005 to last year. and newspapers have not had a positive advertising number since the spring of 2006. and most publishers have cut back on their staffs, have reduced pages. some publishers such as those in new orleans have reduced the days of the week that they print a newspaper, and a couple of newspapers have even gone out of business. so what has been going on, there's been an enormous contraction in the industry in terms of revenues and profit and, therefore, in terms of employment. one out of three journalists have lost their jobs at american newspapers within the decade. so what happened at the post company is that the family having great pride of ownership in the paper to a large degree has resisted a lot of the cutbacks that other publishers have made. and what that meant is they could have made the post profitable in an hour, but they would have done damage to the product and to the journalism and the family legacy. so i think they decided they don't have enough money to stay the course to find a new model, and so the grahams decided that they would find a worthy successor who might have the vision and the resources, quite frankly, and the ambition to find a new way for doing what newspapers have done in the past and do it as well into the future. >> host: mr. mutter -- >> guest: graham family also -- >> host: go ahead, mr. lee. >> guest: just to tag on to alan's point, the graham family was very late in terms of adopting a paywall product which most of the major metro market and even smaller newspapers have started doing. the fact that, you know, they could have started that years ago the way the times or the financial times or "the wall street journal," for example, had done years ago. and i think maybe that certainly hastened their financial difficulties, that they were so late to doing a paywall. and, you know, politico, which is a blog in d.c., they have a paywall product as well, the high-priced, high-tiered subscription product which seems to be doing fairly well. it wasn't a as if there wasn't a market for it. i think they were trying to balance being a community newspaper as well as an inside-the-beltway read, and i think that's where they may have taken a misstep. >> guest: i would say there's a strong argument to be made against paywalls pause they harvest more money from the audience you have which is, of course, nothing wrong with that, but they also, that wall also keeps people out who might otherwise look at your product and develop an affinity for it and visit with you more often. so some publishers have adopted paywalls, but some have not, and i think for a long time the post company made a strategic decision. they weren't late. they didn't -- it's not as though they didn't know about it. but they made a strategic decision they wanted to build audience by offering their content without limitation in hopes of building the business. history shows that they haven't been wildly successful in that, but neither have most of the publishers that do charge for content. the gannette company has 1% digital-only subscription according to some numbers i ran the other day. a number equal to 1% of all the print subscribers subscribes to the digital-only product. that's not really a very big number in the scheme of things. >> host: well, gentleman -- >> guest: but if you argue "the washington post" is already a well respected, well known brand, and in terms of balancing keeping readers without turning them away, you know, a metered paywall which is something "the new york times" does where you can read ten free articles in a month seems to be a clever way of doing it. i don't think that the post suffered from lack of awareness amongst its readers, i think it just -- and they eventually did adopt a paywall. the new york times is a touchstone for this debate. they now develop more than 50% of the revenues from circulation given the fact that advertising has fallen. it's been a big part of their business now. >> guest: i certainly agree with respect to "the new york times," but it does not have a global audience, you know? that's something on the order of 29 or 30 million people who are willing to pay for streaming content, movies and so forth. "the new york times" has 700,000 people. that's -- when you consider that they have the whole globe to market to, that's wonderful, and i'm glad that they're doing it and they can support the work of "the new york times," but it's not a major revenue stream that comes close to equaling what's been lost with respect to print advertising. >> host: well, gentlemen, if we could, what about paywalls, "the wall street journal," edmund lee, you mentioned politico as well. those are two newspapers that are hiring and appear to be profitable, correct? and the orange county register is another one that's hiring and appears to be profitable as well. what's their secret to success? >> guest: well, you brought up some good examples, but they all have different reasons. i think "the wall street journal" to start with, they had a paywall from the very beginning, since the beginning of the commercial internet, i think 1996 when they went online as wsj.com, they were probably the first news outlet to say, no, you have to pay for content. and everyone said they were crazy at the time. the mantra of the internet at the time was information wants, needs to be free and, you know, here's dow jones and co. flying in the face of that. now it's the smart -- in hindsight, it was clear the smart play or at least the play that everyone else is making. so they haven't lost as much from the internet because of the fact that from the very beginning they started, they charged people. when you look at politico, it's an upstart, it's a new blog or relatively new blog, and they have a tiered model which is there is a free version which gets a lot of traffic or at least relative to its size and given its audience, but they also started what they call politico pro where there's a bit more of the information about the beltway and the lobbying and the bills that are going through, sort of a deeper dive for more cost. so, you know, by all accounts that seems to be doing well, seems to be getting traction. so there is that two-tiered element there. the other thing is another ap mall all together -- animal altogether, community newspapers. and i think their sort of mode in terms of doing a paywall is still really new, and the jury's still out in terms of whether it is a success, though they certainly are investing money for staff, and you have to applaud them for that at least. >> host: mr. mutter? >> guest: well, "the wall street journal" and the new york times, the financial times, certain other products that are what we would call b b to b products, sd to academics, business people, they've always done very well in terms of attracting advertising and subscription rate, so it's not surprising that, for example, "the wall street journal" has done very well. but, again, most community newspapers have, certainly have a passionate be following. but they may not be able to generate the numbers that "the wall street journal" or "the new york times" can do. and i should say that "the washington post" is certainly the brand and its location as the house organ of the capital of the free world. the post certainly has standing in the world to attract subscription following. so, in fact, they might do very well with a pay model online. but there may be other ways to go. and if now under mr. bezos since he's willing to waitime to make money and spend -- invest a lot in building audience, he may say the paywall isn't where i want to go right now. on the other hand, he might. i don't know, he hasn't asked me. [laughter] >> host: well, mr. mutter, if you were advising him, i want to go to the $250 million figure n. the last ten years the tribune company was sold for 13bil, plus, the huffington post just a couple years ago, $315 million, the omaha world herald sold for 200 million to warren with buffett a few years back. washington post, 250 million? >> guest: well, actually, 250 million is a pretty good price for the fact that "the washington post" is losing money. the omaha paper budget losing money, and -- wasn't losing money, and you can't even equate huffington post with a newspaper because huffington post is viewed as being a large and growing digital enterprise. it was valued at something like ten times its revenues on the very same day that the new york times company was valued at about one and a half or two times its revenues. so the price is associated -- the prices associated with newspapers nowadays are all other the map. they have to do the with the passion of somebody to want to own it, they have to do with market fundamentals, they have to do with the characteristics of the business itself. so, you know, "the boston globe" -- which is making a profit -- sold for only $70 million, and "the new york times" company has to hold on to $100 million worth of -- has to pay $100 million or more of pension obligations, so they actually lost money on that deal. and that was a paper that was bought for $1.1 billion in 1993 when we were live anything a different world. edmund lee -- >> guest: if i could jump in here. >> host: please. >> guest: if i could jump in on the $250 million figure, it's actually a princely sum. if you look at, and we were able to get some good sources to tell us about this, "the washington post" finances, yes, they've been losing money every year. but also if you look at a line item of their balance sheet which looks at earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, all it really means is it's a good line item to look at in terms of how much money the post had been making, it had been making about $14.5 million in that kind of profit line. so typically, newspapers have been selling for about three or four times those profits whereas bezos paying 250 million was 17 times those profits. so it was a much, much higher premium than major metro market newspapers have been selling for. so in a way, the graham family made out very nice and its shareholders as well. you could call that the bezos multiple, and he sort of set, i guess you could say, a new standard for what you might pay for a premium newspaper like that. >> host: so, edmund lee, do you have to be a michael bloomberg, a jeff bezos anywhere to own a paper? >> guest: you mean in terms of so much to fund a potentially money-losing enterprise? yes. >> guest: well, look at warren buffett. he's been buying community newspapers, that's the other end of the spectrum in newspapers, and now jeff bezos. you know, i don't represent bloomberg lp or mike bloomberg, there have been reports he's interested in buy a newspaper such as "the new york times." i think in general these days with newspapers they tend to attract people with deep pockets because it requires a lot of money to keep them going or keep them funding into the future. >> guest: the reality is the future bids model for a newspaper company is somewhat uncertain with, again, advertising revenues continuing to decline. for now some seven years, with profitability uncertain, with future consumer habits unknown in the world, in the digital world. we don't know what the next product will be to disrupt the way people get and give information. you know, six, seven years ago if we'd have talked about the iphone, we wouldn't have known what that was. laptops are only about three years old. so if your going to buy a newspaper, you're not buying it per se for the dollars and cents coming in, you're buying it for a sense of civic responsibility in the best case or in the worst case to help your friends and punish your enemies. so these now tend to be things that people who have made money elsewhere and who have a little money to spend on a civic mission, more and more newspapers are being bought that a way as opposed to being bought as they used to be bought by large companies and publicly-held companies like mcclatchy, gannette in the day, "the new york times" company and so forth. so there is a real change in who owns newspapers, and according to the interests of those owners, you know, some communities are worried about, for example, with the owner of the white sox buying "the boston globe," how will that change coverage of the red sox? i'm not saying it will, i'm saying that's the question. >> host: mr. mutter, why is it significant that "the new york times" publisher announced the need to say that "the new york times" is not for sale? >> guest: you know, i really have been wondering about that all night long, i barely slept after i read the announcement. i kind of take it at face value because i think there's been so much speculation based on nothing other than the sale of the post to make people wonder about whether the family could stay the course. i think, i tend to believe that "the new york times" is not for sale, because the company has worked to get rid of all the other assets. it had a bunch of small regional newspapers in florida and even one in california. it used to have, own about thatting, it's gotten rid of the boston globe. the whole company is centered on the new york times and all the things it can be such a as the international herald tribune. so i tend to believe, i tend to believe that the times is not for sale, but i think that the speculation that it could be or should be is kind of logical in light of what we've seen the last few weeks. so i guess, i guess he thought that the statement would silence the speculation, but, you know, being an old time journalist, you know, that actually could be a way to -- we could riff off that and turn it into speculation. >> host: and finally, gentlemen, for our last question does this portend anything for the future of journalism and the news industry in general? edmund lee? >> guest: well, it's hard to say. i think with newspapers in particular, journalism in general, journalism itself is changing. it's manifesting itself in very different ways whether it's a blog or through twitter for that matter, and the intersection between video and newspapers these days, so it's really hard to say where it's headed. i think we're at a stage where it's still being figured out. and, you know, with jeff bezos buying the post, that was one stark example of here's one possible future for newspapers, and i think everyone's doing their own version of it in terms of how they feel like they'll be able to grow their business for the future. i think one more note with mr. bezos in particular is he's famous for -- and this is with his amazon business -- he's famous for not caring about nearer term profits. he's willing to take a loss even or live a after of small -- off of small margins for the long term, and that's exactly what "the washington post" needs and any other major newspaper out there. so if there's a future for newspapers or for that kind of journalism, it's going to require that kind of, that kind of attitude, that kind of foresight. >> host: alan mutter. >> guest: journalism is in a state of complete disruption. historically, most of the news and information we got was provided by large for-profit corporations, say for public broadcasting and c-span. but it mostly came from large, highly-profitable companies, and they were able to support having certain numbers of journalists out on the street. as those companies have shrunk, the number of journalists have gone away. the "chicago sun-times" fired every last one of its photographers including a pulitzer prize winner because they just couldn't afford to keep them anymore. so we are now at a point where the old owners, many of the old owners are leaving and new people are coming in from warren buffett to mr. bezos to john henry to the guy who owns the orange county register. this new blood in the industry is, these are all successful business people, and they're going to go back, and they're going to revisit the business model. and the journalism that they can afford to produce or not afford to produce remains to be seen. so at the end of the day, we're going to have to start asking ourself, we used to know who owned the news. it used to be big publishing and broadcasting companies. now we don't know who's going own the news. and until we know who owns the news, we really won't know what kind of journalism we're going to get. >> host: alan mutter and edmund lee, thank you both for being on "the communicators." >> guest: sure. >> c-span, created by america's cable companies in 1979, brought to you as a public service by your television provider. >> today the national press club hosts a discussion on the role of federal public affairs offices. a panel will examine if they help or hinder government transparency. speakers from the fields of journalism, public relations and academia will participate. our live coverage begins at 6:30 p.m. eastern here on c-span2. a discussion now on how the government should balance national security concerns with the protection of civil liberties. looking at recent revelations of the national security agency's surveillance programs, the government's terror alert and the recent closure of u.s. embassies. on friday president obama announced proposals to change the oversight and transparency of the nsa. speakers included congressman peter king who chairs the homeland security subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence, former new york times reporter judith miller and fox business network host john stossel. the event was cohosted by the manhattan institute, the weekly standard and the group concerned veterans for america. >> we want to thank you all for coming. i'm not normally intimidated when i speak at these events, but now that i didn't realize gunny sergeant duff was here, now i'm very worried. [laughter] it's great to have all of you. i also want to join in thanking those of you who serve for your service and to say how pleased i am that pete king and john stossel have agreed to be here and also judy miller and gary bernstein who will be joining us for the panel. pete, when i saw -- i saw pete in afghanistan, i was visiting with a couple of people looking around for about a week in late 2011, and pete had volunteered, reuped and gone to afghanistan then to help train the ana, the afghan army, and i remember pete telling me at the time that one of the key principles certainly of our army, but certainly training foreign armies was keep it simple, stupid, you know, kiss. that's a key military principle. pete has organized this event in the opposite way. we have two speakers, comoderaters, and i think we'll make it work, and it should be an excellent event. luckily, the quality of the people overwhelms the slight complexity. so here's what we're going to do. we're going to have pete king speak for ten minutes, john stossel speak for ten minute, and then we'll have the panel, we'll ask judy and gary to kick it off for five minutes each and then have a discussion. the topic is liberty t and security. it's not intended particularly to be a debate. i think we have some diversive views, but it may turn out that we agree balancing security and liberty isn't as hard as some people say. we'll have the discussion to see what we think, and these are people who have thought very seriously about this. i'll give a very brief introduction of pete king and john stossel and then get off the stage. peter king is a veteran congressman from long island, before that was comptroller of nassau county. really i've been in washington for over a quarter century i'm embarrassed to say, and one of those people i went there for a year, you know, took leave to see what it was like, and like everyone who comes to washington, sucked in and there i still am. pete is one of the most thoughtful and, i would say, energetic and entrepreneurial members of the house. he's been a leader on a bunch of issues, domestic and foreign, in particular on the homeland security and intelligence committee, a real leader in trying to not just call attention to the threats we face, but make sure we're doing the right thing to deal with them. he's been willing to criticize administrations of both parties when he thought they weren't doing the right thing and support administrations, actually, of both parties when he thought they were doing the right thing. so i really am a big fan of pete king and very pleased that he took time out -- he came in from the island of new york, the opposite direction everyone else is going in august, for this event. john stossel is an old friend, a star, obviously, of fox, the fox business network where he has that terrific show, "stossel," it's called n case you wonder who the moderator is or the anchor. [laughter] john didn't want to call it that, you know? he thought it should just be called what's going on in the world of business, but roger race insisted -- roger ailes insisted on stossel. i think that's probably true. [laughter] john has a long and distinguished career on abc, he's broken different stories, as you know, investigating various aspects of big government and big business. east also been an eloquent, been very thoughtful, i think, on some of these liberty versus security issues. as someone who comes from the liberty side, you might say, of the conservative movement, has been concerned but thoughtfully concerned, i think, about the questions of how do we preserve national security and as well as make sure we are preserving our fundamental liberties. so let me call up peter king and then john stossel who will each speak for ten minute, and then we'll all get back up here with gary and judy and have a discussion. pete king. [applause] >> thank you, bill. thank you very much. and thank all of you for the being here today. i certainly look forward to working with the panelist, john stossel, gary, judith, and, of course, bill kristol who every week i open up the standard just to get my marching orders for the week. so thank you, bill. also old friend in the audience, herb london, who i want to acknowledge. [applause] great race for governor, i guess it was 23 years ago, and he's been a good friend of me and my family, i want to say what a pleasure it is to see herb here today, and all the veterans who have done so much for our country, thank you. the whole issue of liberty versus security, i think it has to be looked at against the backdrop of what's happened since september 11th and the current threat we see right now is a vivid reminder of how real and constant the threat is. i'm only going into the foreign aspect to put the domestic part in context. we have a president who spent the last campaign and most recently gave a speech in early may where he said al-qaeda have been decimated, implied the war had been won and we could retreat to a pre-9/11 mindset, saying there would be occasional thugs around the world who gives themselves an islamic title, but the fact is, al-qaeda had been decimated. now, it was intellectually dishonest for him to say that, wrong to say it in the context of a campaign, in the context of a major speech. but the implications of that are if you go before the american people and tell them, basically, the war is over, almost over or al-qaeda is on its last legs, then it makes it very hard to defend one or two weeks later why the nsa program has expanded so much. when you want to get allies on our side saying how essential it is we stand firm on islamic trim of after the president says the war is almost over. and being in congress, i support the nsa program, but apart from whatever isolationist streak may be in congress, whatever bring america first crowd may be in congress, i think one of the reasons we have a hard time maintaining support is because the president has undercut us. he should be the one out there on national television, he should be the one out there instead of talking about phony scandals, he should be talking about the phony speeches he's made about islamic terrorism and tell us why the nsa program is so important. [applause] and that -- so we're really up against a situation where the people who would be considered republicans, the conservatives, the right-of-center people are defending a program of a left-of-center president who refuses to defend it himself. but the country has to come first, and that's why we use that program for the basis for today's program, and it's so essential. let me just talk about privacy versus security. really unlike even, you know, the communist menace of the '40s, the '50s and the '60s, we face an enemy which is overseas and right here many our own country x it's an enemy which is willing to carry out attacks in our own country. during the cold war, the soviets were not going to do that. they knew that would mean all-out war. but it's not that easy for us just to respond. we can't blow up a country if we get attacked in times square. we have to maintain as much of a security level as we can without infringing on civil liberties. now, with the nsa, for instance, let me just put it right up front, no american is having his phone calls listened to by the nsa, no american is having his e-mails looked at by the nsa. what the nsa does is collect metadata which means phone numbers of every call that's made, the time and the date. there's no names, no one's listening to the calls, all that information is stored. and because there is this threat -- and i've seen the intelligence, i know people always get burned, i've seen the intelligence, and if you knew what i knew, i'm trying to say that, basically, everyone who has looked at this and analyzed it, this is, i think, the most precise threat we've seen since, if not since september 11th, certainly since 2006 when there was a liquid explosive plot coming out of london which would have blown up ten airliners over the atlantic ocean which would have killed thousands and thousands of americans. but this plot is very specific as to the enormity of the attack, the catastrophic be nature of the attack that they want to car aout. and there are also a series of dates in there. but as far as the credibility of the sources, the quality of the intelligence, it is there more than any i've seen in the last ten years. this is not that difficult to do. so as we're looking to see if it's in the middle east, that's why the embassies have been closed down. that, we think, could be the main focus of it. but it could also be worldwide. if they're talking about something, an attack of this magnitude, would it be more so if they simultaneously carried out attacks in western europe and the united states? so there's, it's very, very essential that we find out where this attack will be carried out. so let's assume, it's all hypothetical but not really -- [laughter] that we have phone numbers coming from the middle east. we get a phone number from the middle east. we want to find out who that phone number has contacted in the u.s., and that is when the metadata would be used by the nsa. they would take that number from overseas and drill it down into these millions and millions of phone calls and phone numbers that they have stored. and if you want to call it a lock box. we know al gore gave lock box a bad name back in the 2000 election when he was talking about social security, but these numbers are in a lock box. and they drill down on those numbers, and they will find if there's any number in the u.s. that's been contacted by that number overseas, then they can go to that number, and be they can call what's called a hop, then they go to the phone numbers that that number has been in contact with here in the u.s. to see what the background is, to see if there's any other indicia of evidence and the individuals involved. that's the only time the nsa is allowed to drill down on those numbers, when there's probable cause or actually a reasonable suspicion that it's connected to an overseas plot. that's what happened with the subway bombing of zazi in 2009. they can then see an overall question mat pick of combating terror who in this country could be involved in this current plot that we know is coming from overseas. that is the sum and substance of the nsa program, and i think it's wrong when we have people who are supposedly on the conservative side of the fence going on television saying the government is snooping, the government is spying, the government knows who i'm talking to, the government is following me everywhere i go and they somehow attribute this to the nsa. the nsa is not the irs, let's make that clear. i wouldn't more a moment give these powers ott irs. but the fact is the nsa is probably under more surveillance -- which is ironic enough for a surveillance program -- under more surveillance than any other operation in our country today. it's watched on a regular, regular basis by the fisa court. and clients would agree at the weekly standard, i don't think we need a fisa court. i think the president has the inherent power as the commander in chief to carry out these operations. that's what president bush claimed in early 2000. i think the reality is, though, we're going to have a fisa court, and we have to find ways to work with it. in any event, it's monitored on a regular, regular basis by the fisa court. for instance, if when they are tracking -- and last year there was only 300 times where they had to drill down on numbers in the metadata. if by some reason they make a mistake and put the wrong digit in, well, they have to do a full report on that, they have to purge everything they got from the 982 and file a report with the court just essex planing that one -- just explaining that one human error that was made. and my experience on the intelligence committee with the nsa was what we heard mainly over the last several years before any of this broke -- of course, with all of the allegations that have been made about security over the last 12 years, the nsa hardly ever come up. they were attacking dick cheney, attacking george bush with, attacking the fbi and others, nsa had pretty much been unscathed in all this. the only time it really came up as a matter of debate in the intelligence committee was people from the nsa coming forward and saying what a rough time they were having with the fisa court, how hard it was for them to get court orders, how hard it was to be able to follow up on the information they were getting. this is not a rubber stamp. this is constantly scrutinized. it's also scrutinized by the house and senate intelligence committees. i worry saying congress is keeping an eye on it for you isn't exactly a vote of confidence. but, seriously, people on the intelligence committee take it very seriously. i can tell you that this stuff is looked at very, very carefully. so i think we have to keep all of this in mind. i don't see any significant violation of civil liberties. i don't see any significant -- to me, if we have a balanced thought like with zazi in 2009, zazi, and this is one of those forest gump moments where you happen to be at a location. i was at mayor bloomberg's home on a sunday night in september, 2009, he was entertaining the lord mayor of london, and rupert murdoch was there, all these powerful people, even tina brown was there, show you how powerful it was. [laughter] and ray kelly. so two irish guys, we're not really going to mingle out with all the elite. so he asked me to go out into the street and talk with him. i was not aware until that moment of the zazi attack which was actually going to happen that night or the next day. it's the only time i've ever seen ray kelly show concern. we knew zazi was coming from colorado. we knew be everyone else was involved in new york in this, and this was a plot that would have killed hundreds if not thousands of people on the new york city subway system. and that plot was is solved or stopped to a significant extent by the work that the nsa did. did the nsa do it by itself? no. it works with the other part of the overall mosaic, but it was a key component of it, and if it had not been for the nsa, we would not have known everyone involved in that plot, and we could have had hundreds if not thousands of people killed in new york the next day. now, i say to grow when you balance out whatever violation of privacy, i don't see it. basically tracing an overseas number to a number here in the u.s., the same information you'd have in a phonebook almost, and the other side is saving hundreds of people being burned to death in subway tunnels, so with that, i know john stossel's going to come up here in a much more entertaining and charismatic way to give his side. we're maybe not that far apart. we may try and start a fight -- [laughter] in any event, let me just say it's important here to realize is we have a real enemy that wants to kill us. this is not the core al-qaeda of 2001 which was focused on the afghan/pakistan border. this is al-qaeda whether it's in the islamic maghreb, al-qaeda in iraq, al-qaeda in the arabian peninsula, al-qaeda which is operating in libya and syria under other names, al-nusra in syria, this is an enemy that wants to destroy us, and we have to use every weapon at our disposal. we can have changes, we can have nuances, but the underlying premise should be we are under siege, and if we let our guard down for a moment, we can be destroyed. thank you very much. [applause] >> actually, you were pretty entertaining. [laughter] that's about one of the best descriptions i've heard about what the nsa does. and i'm a libertarian. libertarians have been very skeptical. you say no one is listening. well, why would i believe you? why would i believe my government? you say there's been no significant violation of civil liberty. well, actually, i've looked for 'em for my show, and i'm in trouble with libertarians because i kind of agree with you. i can't find 'em. and libertarians talk about this terribly dangerous slippery slope, all this secrecy, the vastness of the data, but i can't get worked up. you say no one's listening to my phone calls, i already assume that media matters is listening to my phone calls. and my boss at fox can legally read my e-mails and listen to any call i make at work, and i give my information voluntarily to facebook and google. it's out there. so even if the abuse was happening, why would that be such a terrible threat when lives are at stake? so i'm being called a lino. [laughter] libertarian in name only. you are a traitor to the libertarian ideals. couldn't even finish your article on the nsa, i'm disgusted. but, i'm sorry, i'm not a good antagonist for the other speakers tonight -- this morning. [laughter] i don't even know what time of day it is. however, i am, do consider myself an expert on safety and relative risk. and here i've gotta say something is off today, and i know i'm in the minority opinion on that here. the congressman talked about the real and constant threat. i did a show years ago based on my experience as a consumer reporter called "scaring ourselves to death," and i think the homeland security state is scaring america to death. yes, there is a real and constant threat, but how big is it? the d. of homeland -- the department of homeland security proudly was invented after 9/11 to oversee 22 existing priest be agencies -- previous agencies. they more than doubled spending. are they more efficient? i doubt can it. earlier it was talked about reforming the bloated bureaucracy, i think that's like teaching a cat to bark, it can't be done. when it's this big, it will be awful. the pentagon does have a 26-page brownie recipe, as an example. [laughter] but as a consumer reporter, my specialty was relative risk. ht this home to me was on 20/20 years ago when a producer came in with a story on trial lawyers, we've got to do a story on bic lighters. they're expose -- exploding in people's pockets. and this was true. ild four people over the past four years, that many many more had been horribly burned. but i have gotten sick of taken stories from the trial lawyers. i had a list of what kills people in america and and the law, and i could point to that and say, okay, i'll do bic writers, but let's do plastic bags first or bathtubs, they kill 800 americans every four years. it's a big country. if we scare people about the abilities, they won't -- about the ant, they won't pay attention when the elephants come. he called me callous, and they did get somebody else to do that story. [laughter] when i now look at the 9/11 threat, war is the friend of the state. crisis is the friend of the state. in the economic field, we had a credit crunch. the people in power said we would have economic collapse if we don't bail out the banks, if we don't let a few men spend a trillion dollars of your money. cry us grows the state -- crisis grows the state. that's an enemy of freedom. 3 be ,000 people died on -- 3,000 people died on september 11th, more than that. it's been 12 years. let's assume it happened every ten years, 300 deaths a year, that would be horrible in america. but we live with risk. 35,000 depths on the highway, 100 depths today, odds are. be -- 3,000 americans die in house fires. a $10 smoke detector is a wonderful thing. it's a place to spend money. a thousand americans drown. the media gets it wrong. the media warns you about sharks. you ought to worry about drowning. a hundred americans are killed every year hitting deer. where does terrorism fit in to this? nothing's, almost nothing has happened in the years. it may happen a, i don't presume to know. the rest of the panel is much more informed about this than i, but over my career i've looked at scare after scare that's led to the growth of government and limits on flee.com. certainly -- freedom. certainly, massive amounts of money is sucked for the war against law chemicals, danger in the grass, was the feature on 20 clash 20. we forget these scares a week later. the terrorism scare stays with us. the cancer epidemic, food additives, pesticides. we banned ddt which has killed millions of people around the world because ddt a wonderful insecticide that stops malaria and hurts no one. it was a lie what silent spring claimed about it. now we're told plastic bot be les -- bottles are killing children, that global warming, says the left, is the the biggest threat to america, bigger than terrorism. kids are not allowed to play ahone anymore because the media hype the risk of kidnapping which almost never happens, stranger kidnappings. plane crashes. the plane crash is hyped by the media, and you'd say it has to be. if a plane hit -- if a plane doesn't crash, that's the amazing miracle that we should cover, that thousands of planes take off and land next to each other and don't crash, but when the plane crashes, we go crazy saying we're live here at the scene, we don't know anything, but we'll keep telling you we don't know live for hours. [laughter] they used to get me to do stories about the least safe airlines, and i would refuse because that's statistical murder, in my opinion. more people drive to grandma's house, and that kills people. relative risk ought to be paid attention to, and i think we have deeply lost that in the homeland security state. one good example is the tsa. now, before the tsa was created, we did have these private contractors who were paying people minimum wage letting people on the airplanes. they obeyed all the government's rules, the small knives were legal under the faa's rules, the unlocked cockpit doors, they were legal. but with after 9/11 congress said this isn't good enough, we have to have in this run by government. tom daschle said you can't professionalize if you don't federalize. that made sense to me at the time. we were scared. when you're scared, it's hard to make good judgments. so now it's 12 years later, we have the tsa. how's that working out for us? so we've all had problems with it, but you could say maybe it's a necessary thing to go through for safety. we volunteer to fly, we should expect some discomfort. it's just part of the trip. except the law did allow some cities to opt out, and san francisco did. it was the only big city to do that. so recently i sent a producer to san francisco to talk to passengers, what's it like going through this privatized airport security? and they say it was weird. the screeners, they're friendlier. and it was faster. and the tsa tests them now and then, and they try to smuggle in fake pipe bombs and so forth, and they caught 'em 75% of the cases in san francisco. in los angeles they found them in 25% of cases. so the private screeners are friendlier and faster and better at their jobs. be -- now, why is that? well, it's because it's private, it's the way it's done in israel. government support, private contractors competing. you can fire the contractor. can't fire the government. and the contractor knows if he does a good job, he may be get hired by other airports and get rich, selfishly. so he does things like give workers a day off where he has contests, who can search the luggage fastest? they play music, they give out awards. they're better. so other airports hear about this, they want to opt out. one upgy by glacier national park in montana where the tsa is in charge, and people don't want to go to glacier national park in the winter. they want to go in the summer. but government being government, tsa maintains staffing levels equally all year round. so in winter the tsa stands for its initials, thousands standing around -- [laughter] and in summer there are long waits and some people miss their planes. and the law says if you ask the department of homeland security, you can opt out. twelve other airports ask, homeland security sits on these for over a year and finally says, no. we don'tty this is advantageous to the federal government. wouldn't burger king like to say that to mcdonald's? my point is, the bureaucracy grows. you can't teach it to be efficient. the growth of the homeland security state is a great threat to our economic future and our freedom. terrorism may be a threat, but it is one of many, and we should keep it in perspective. thank you. [applause] oh, wait, i'm supposed to introduce the next speakers. such -- such a narcissist that i just -- >> [inaudible] >> okay. and then we should all, i guess, sit up here. judith miller is one of the speakers. she is a fellow here at the manhattan institute and writes about the balance between security and civil liberties. she won a pulitzer prize for her reporting at "the new york times" on terrorism. gary burnson is an air force vet, has a long cia career, led several counterterrorism deployments including our response to the east africa bombing and 9/11. and he was commander of all cia forces in eastern afghanistan. >> should we all sit down and then -- [inaudible] >> so let's -- yeah, since we haven't heard from judy and gary, let's hear from them first, and then we'll have a discussion. >> with okay. thank you very, very much for coming here morning. and i want to thank pete -- [inaudible] and bill for organizing a very timely and important conference on a crucial subject of interest to everyone in this room. and i also want to thank all of you who are serving or have served for your service. we can't do that too often even on a sunday -- a monday -- a tuesday in august. [laughter] i, too, came as pete king did from long island in this morning, so i vaguely know what day it is. [laughter] there is no spying on americans. we don't have a domestic spying program. i am quoting the president of the united states as he spoke to a usually-reliable source of information and where many americans get their news, i'm speaking of jay leno. [laughter] i didn't, i didn't actually see it because i was in bed, but with i read the transcript, and those were the two assurances he gave us about the national surveillance agency. well, i'm sorry, mr. president, and with all due respect to someone i greatly admire and do trust, pete king, i am in the skeptical camp. i remain skeptical because the president said a number of other things in this interview which i encourage you all to read. he said, first of all, that the reason we need this program as it is, in its current form, is that after the boston bombing law enforcement needed to be able to see who the two tsarnaev brothers were talking to, whether or not they had been speaking to anyone here in new york, for example. they wanted to roll up those people, get to those numbers quickly. what troubled me was the reference to after the boston bombing. my supposition is that if the tsarnaev brothers had been live anything new york, there never would have been -- living in new york, there never would have been a bombing because they would have been watched. someone who had gone to russia who had a report from the russians that he was being radicalized and, in fact, was a radical would have had more than an fbi interview or two to satisfy the curiosity of the nypd. dealing with something and rounding up other people on cell phone numbers and e-mails after an event is not good counterterrorism work. i was also skeptical because he said he was talking to congress about changes in the fisa program and in the fisa oversight system, he didn't actually say that he was willing to consider any or endorse any. and i think change -- and here again i'm going to disagree with my friend, pete king -- i think change is long overdue. there's no reason why the head of the supreme court should be appointing every justice on the fisa court, a court which has never turned down a request for information by the government. it had sent a couple back for amendment, for changes, but basically it's a rubber stamp. there's no reason why people on the intelligence committees, house and senate, can't get summaries of the cases and why we can't know more about kinds of cases that are being brought to that court. i'm skeptical because i know that with the best of intentions governments gradually accumulate power. and why i might trust pete king and even president obama to respect the balance between civil liberties and national security, i'm not sure i'm going to be able to trust the next president. that's why we have a constitution and a bill of rights. and i'm speaking to you today as someone who considers herself a kind of national security hawk. i endorse the patriot act. i thought we needed it. i think we still need to do more to protect american citizens. i don't think guantanamo should be closed, because i want to be able to take men who have just been indicted, i want to be able to take him somewhere that's not in the united states where i know he can be safeguarded for trial. the terrible thing about this indictment is that we don't have him, and now that we've indicted him, we are not likely to get him. unless he has an unfortunate traffic accident in libya, which could happen. [laughter] but these are the problems with the way in which the president has approached national security. it is, as pete king says, schizophrenic. finally, i'm skeptical because i know firsthand the enormous power of the government when it turns and focuses on an individual. and i'm not speaking of having to go to jail to protect a source, i'm speaking of the search and the subpoena and the ultimate delivery of my telephone records; home, office, cell. shortly after i got out of jail in connection with another case that the government was investigating. i know what it feels like to have everything looked at, and i don't think i posed any kind of threat to national security. so finally, i want to be assured that the reuters story that said the drug enforcement agency which had requested and had gotten access to the nsa records is not actually spying on me, i want to be sure that "the new york times" story is not correct when it said that half a dozen other agencies had requested access to the national security metadata to pursue various crimes. i want to be sure that even if the nsa is not spying on me, another branch of government may be without sufficient oversight. and that's why i think the time has come for a look congressionally and in the public at this balance between what we do to stay safe and what we're doing to protect our civil liberties. and i welcome this debate, and i'm delighted and honored to be here with such esteemed thank you. [applause] >> thanks, judy, for those very thoughtful remarks. gary? >> fifteen years ago today was the attacks in east africa where our embassies in nairobi were attacked. a lot has happened in the last 15 years. on that morning of 7, august, 1998, no one thought that bin laden was a threat. actually, the bin laden unit had been ordered to be shut down a week earlier. mr. michael scheuer had fought valiantly within the operation to keep that going. no one had seen anything, they told him he overplayed it. bombings went off. i was the chief of hezbollah operations. i traveled out to east africa and the subcontinent. we captured the individuals, and showier got new legs. and much of what he would do would help us in afghanistan in 2001 when we were in the invasion. i have fairly -- [inaudible] on the collection of metadata. i am am not a supporter of the collection of metadata in the way they are doing identity -- doing it right now. where there are opportunities for abuse and humans involved, there will be abuses. and i think if you look at the bill of rights and you look at the fourth amendment, it's very easy to think, well, they're violating the constitution. but if you look at the law which is maryland versus smith in 1979, it was a case that stated that there should be no expectation of privacy if there is a collection of the pen registry, and that is the numbers, essentially, from the phone company. so you have a constitution, and you have a law that's sort of at variance with each other right now. what i would say is that i would feel much more comfortable, and i think those who have sort of a libertarian streak would be more comfortable if we just had the phone companies hold the data for five years, the government pays to hold that data, and when we want to go into the data, you've got to have one perp in there. i don't think we should lose that data. i agree completely you've got to have that data at times. the question is how cumbersome are -- will this process be because sometimes you need to move quickly. that's correct as well. we need to have a balance here, and i think the balance is the point that i just stated. i think right now what we're looking at, united states is looking at are two things, two factors. right now you really do have the al-qaeda 2.0 coming at us. many of these organizations that are being led, these al-qaeda affiliates are led by gitmo detainees, people we had and people we released. we had two administrations, a republican and a democratic administration that were releasing these people. shame on them. shame on them for letting these people go. [applause] those are international organizations, and those are the taliban militant organizations operating along the northwest frontier province, and they're attacking our sons and daughters who are now fighting, some of us fought earlier on. so al-qaeda is a problem. this is a decade-long problem. and it's something that we've got to be prepared for, we've got to balance, of course, liberty and security. but the other piece we need to be mindful of which no one is speaking about is a resurgence of hezbollah, the shiite organization that attacked us in the 1980s and took many hostages. after 9/11 they stepped back because they saw the frosty with which the -- ferocity with which the united states went after the taliban and iraq. it took four or five years for them to get their bearings, but during that process hezbollah shifted from doing terrorist organizations to creating maybe one of the largest criminal enterprises on the planet. they are receiving between $3-$400 million a year from the iranian government, and they have increased their capacity in crime and terror. about a year and a half ago, the iranians and hezbollah made a decision together to reinitiate, and they have made a number of efforts to conduct terrorist attacks. many of them have failed because they lost capacity with a lot of the people. hezbollah's back in the game. they're larger, and though we criticized the clinton administration in the 19 t 0s for being a little bit too law enforcement-centric, we're going of to have to use the law enforcement model against hezbollah because they're a large criminal organization. just like we might not have been able to convict al capone for murder, but we were able to get him on taxes. we're going to have to take some of those guys off the table, and maybe law enforcement we'll have to use. so we're going to be something into a new phase in this struggle, and it's going to be two phases. both hezbollah and al-qaeda, the new phase, the new groups of these simultaneously. and the third part of this is we're going to be doing this in an environment where there's less resources. economic security is very, very important. if we cannot get our economy organized properly, we'll not be able to feel the forces whether they be military forces or national security forces in terms of intelligence that we need to defend the united states. we've got a lot of challenges. i think there are some compromises we can find to get ourselves through some of these issues that we're having right now, and i think that ultimately in the end, you know, we could put ourselves in a good position to defend ourselves. thank you. [applause] >> you hear me okay? the particular point that judy made and then we can all -- [inaudible] i think it's let's get off maybe the legal company which we're not going to resolve here and exactly how the fisa court might be reconstituted. i'm also struck by the point that judy made, are we depending too much on nsa-type -- assuming that that's going to solve our problems and has at the federal level at least, unlike the nypd, have we short -- what's the right way to say this? have we not done enough on some of the human intelligence both here and abroad? is the problem with nsa not that it's necessarily going to violate our civil liberties, but we're actually following things better than we can or in the balance of things as a matter of counterterrorism, not as a matter of constitutional law? what's your judgment of how we're doing in general and is the nsa part both necessary and, also, are we depending on it too much? >> yeah, i think the nsa is necessary, but it's only a part of the overall mosaic, and nothing beats having real human intelligence. the nypd was mentioned, unfortunately, that is not being done at the national level. the boston marathon bombing should not have occurred. i don't believe -- as judy said, it would not have occurred here in new york. the fbi were told by the russian government that the older brother had been radicalized. there's no reason to believe the russian government, but out certainly warrants investigation. the fbi spoke to the older brother, his mother, his father, his wife or somebody, they never spoke to anybody in the mosque. under the attorney general guidelines, the fbi is not allowed to question anyone in a mosque. now, how are you going to find out if a person has been radicalized in a mosque unless you go to the mosque? also, the fbi never told the boston police department that they had this information on the older brother. and yet the boston police had four detectives with top secret clearance on the jttf. and they were under the impression they were being told everything. they were never told at all about the older brother. now, if that had been here in new york, first of all, because of ray kelly, the fbi gives the nypd information whether it wants to or not. [laughter] i think it's 275 police officers on the jttf. not four like in boston. mike in the back, you'd have a better idea, but it's way up there in the hundreds. and the nypd does have sources. they have sources everywhere. and the boston police have a great commissioner, commissioner davis, they also have sources everywhere. if the fbi had gone to them, they would have found out the older brother was thrown out of his moss being in february of last year because he had become so radicalized. and yet the fbi didn't find that out, the boss boston police had never been given his name. you have to put political correctness aside, you have to realize that islamic terrorists are going to come from the islamic community. the whole list of ethnic groups, we can't be so politically correct as we interview the swedish grandmother before we interview the islamic grandson. the fact is we have to use common sense. the fbi is not allowed to because of the attorney general's guidelines. >> comments? what about, john made the point about tsa, maybe i'll ask you about that. how much, i mean, those of us who want to defend a strong, hawkish view on national security both at home and abroad, how much should we be for reforming some of these major institutions? like ten years later is homeland security ripe for a fresh congressional law? tsa, if it's true they have to have the same number of people in the winters or the summers or they're not privatizing when they might, how much of a problem is that? >> there's a problem. i believe we do need tsa, but i do believe that tsa especially under this administration has not been sufficiently managed, it's not been -- maybe there's always going to be waste, there's always going to be abuse when you have a federal bureaucracy. the fact is much more could be done to keep it under control, and it's not. we've had real problems at newark airport, for instance, gross negligence there. and there's overstaffing in some areas, understaffing in other areas, and tsa needs much, much tougher management, no doubt about that. and then this is the whole question we do have to have something there. but to me, this should be more of a competition between the private and the government. homeland security should not hold back when these airports want to use private security. they find excuses not to do it, and that's wrong. and the examples that john gave are on target. i can't quarrel with him at all. but again, the media reacts differently. when i was chairman of the homeland security committee, we passed legislation last year out of the house anyway which basically would make it easier for private airports to use the tsa. daily news accused me of selling out to private security companies, to bringing in the represent-a-cops. -- rent-a-continues. not that many people in government want to take that on, so they let the status quo go ahead. but john and i are basically on the same page here. >> defend the media, john? >> no. [laughter] i'm ignorant on the subject. i would just love to have the panel explain to me how does it work that we have five million americans that hold security clearance? how do we expect to keep anything secret? and secondly, where are the bodies with all these people wanting to murder us and when you can make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom, and the internet is making this easier every day, why hasn't it happened? why do more people die in bathtubs? >> on the first question, we'll go back to pete and gary on this as the intelligence -- >> one additional -- one footnote, gary, to the question which is what about snowden? someone like me who generally is inclined to defend the agency and other related parts, how could that happen, and have people been disciplined by that? one has no impression in the press that any pure rat has been called into account -- >> never should have been hired, never should have been cleared. i understand they're investigating the organization that did the clearance on him, they didn't complete the process. the problem is the intelligence community whether it's nsa, cia and other components have tried to cut costs by hiring contractors because contractors are cheaper than long-term people who have careers because they have retirements and all that goes with that. it's a question of efficiency versus security, and we have lost terribly on this because the loss of the intel that snowden has surely provided to the chinese and to the russians -- whether he wanted to or not, they would have imaged his hard drives, it's probably worse than what hanson and bradley manning did combined. the president, you know, the greatest understatement i think in the field of intelligence that this guy's some young hacker. holy cow. this was massive losses that are occurred, and they're probably going to need a 500-man task force just to review all the intel and figure out what has been lost. because what'll happen now, our opponents are going to take that stuff, categorize it by country, they'll try to figure out who the sources of those intelligence -- and understand something, there's human intelligence from the agency that gets transmitted over nsa's lines as well. they'll be able to distinguish what that is. so it's not just the internet -- i mean, the signals intelligence stuff at risk. there's a lot of human at risk here in this process. this is horrific. and it occurred because they were trying to go on the cheap, they were not acting efficient -- they weren't acting efficiently. we've got to get away from that model. we need to be more like jewelers and less like walmart when we're doing the intelligence and counterterrorism business. it's a large problem. and they need to have a down size not because of cost, but because of security. we have too many people inside the box. >> judy, you've covered this for a long time. what's your sense? is it worse than it was 10, 15 years ago? >> in terms of security? >> yeah, in terms of clearance, in terms of the kinds of things gary's talking about? >> society in a way that someone dying in bathtub does not. and it's not just a question of numbers, and i think the reason we're so much safer today, because everything that the bush administration did and the obama administration continue to do while talking about transparency and not doing it is actually degraded and just decimated -- [inaudible] that main group. that was the group that i followed and that gary followed that was really serious about getting a weapon of mass destruction. we tend to remember 9/11, we tend not to focus on the anthrax attack which was less than two ounces of anthrax in letters that shut down the capitol, changed the way we get our mail, killed five, infected 17, put 100,000 people on sip roll in this country, two ounces. well, the terrorist groups like hezbollah are very interested in weapons of mass destruction, and we forget that. we're not just talking talking e boston bombing, as terrible as that was. we're talking about groups that may be incapacitated for the moment but which will regroup if we take our eye off the ball and continue to search for the most effective way of killing the largest number of us. and that's why when pete and john talk about the threat, yes, the threat exists, and it's less now because of all of the measures we've taken and all of the money we've spent. but if we stop doing that, my problem is i think we can do it in a way that preserves civil liberties which we're now in danger of sacrificing in the name of that. we don't have to, we just have to do the other stuff that we know how to do better. >> i'd like to add one thing. the single greatest threat facing the united states is biological terrorism, worse than anything else. it's insidious, it's silent, it comes in, and it will present a whole new set of challenges for us. and so we'd be better off with much greater capability on that and take a loss of an aircraft, you know, and defund one aircraft carrier battle group to position ourselves to defend ourselves. let me tell you, i know a lot of people like to complain about the post office. don't close the post office because if we have a bio problem in the united states, we're going to deliver the medicine to all of you with the post office. you don't want to be going to gymnasiums or cafeterias to be getting this en masse. the post office in the united states may be something that saves a lot of lives in the end. you have to think about this sort of struggle in different terms. >> now i'm -- [laughter] how about ups? why do we need the post office? if we overreact -- i mean, osama bin laden was caught on tape saying he wanted to bleed america to the point of bankruptcy. and if 250,000 people take ciprol because there are tiny envelopes in washington, d.c., this is our own overreaction. it's self-destructive. >> homeland security and, again, i think the total budget's about $40 billion. if it had not been combined, maybe it would have been 32, 33 billion. so we're not talking about that large amount of money. in the overall picture, it has not been that draining. also you said where are bodies? well, if we hadn't stopped the london explosive plot, if we hadn't stopped the times square, the new york subway bombing, the -- actually, we got lucky in the michigan one, there's three or four thousand people right there, that's just three attacks i'm talking about, and there are any number of others that have been stopped. and again, i just wish the rest of the country used the nypd as the model because there's so much cooperation. if somebody does go to buy certain types of explosives, certain devices, that is told the nypd, and they can follow up on it. >> [inaudible] >> i would just say 3,000 bodies is terrible, but that's worldwide when every year 3,000 die in house fires in america. >> there was a successful dirty bomb attack, though, it could neutralize an entire city. one dirty bomb going off in times square or lower manhattan or down up to chicago or boston would cripple the economy, besides killing any number of people, and i think bring our national economy to a halt which would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. >> the other thing, one never knows what would have happened or what could have happened if we hadn't done certain things. and that argument is abused at times, but i guess i am struck by that. i do think we -- my personal view, and i'll jutte step out of -- just step out of my moderator role s that we do underestimate the degree to which we've helped others around the world not just by homeland security and internal measures, be but by a forward-leading defense policy. and what worries me is the combination of some problems here at home and the general sense abroad that we're in retreat and the cuts to the defense budget and the -- [inaudible] and the drawdown in afghanistan regard he is of conditions on the ground -- regardless of conditions on the ground. any one of these things finish. [inaudible] what should our syria policy be, the appropriate defense budget, how the nsa should be set up. but if you look at them in isolation, i think it's a little misleading. i've talked to people, i'm sure judy, an ambassador from the middle east, pretty friendly ambassador from a pretty friendly country, none is really fully friendly, but wants the u.s. to be strong and wants his own government to survive. i've known him over the years, and he's a very calm, measured and experienced guy and genuinely worried. you do not understand what it looks like over there. it looks like you guys are not serious, all you guys want to do is get out, huddle down, shelter in place, and the embassy closures can i'm not -- which i'm not challenging, the image of that is closing 32 embassies from, what, all the way from west africa to bangladesh, i think, and then extending the closure for a week? and these are well fortified -- one of the problems is they're like fortresses in all these countries, and we're closing those? we, the united states of america, can't defend them adequately? i mean, the image that is out there is bad, and it does become a self-suggest -- self-fulfilling prophesy. we're a very strong country, but i do worry we rook like a relatively weak horse going in the wrong direction, and that, for me, makes things dangerous. [applause] >> all of us have different things we'd like done, and for the most apartment under bush and cheney, everyone was operating in the same direction. under president obama it is schizophrenic, and i thought it was disgraceful when he had the investigations of the cia interrogators -- so much so, i'm not sure if this is still through, but for a number of years every interrogator had to buy personal liability insurance to protect themselves against the informations in their own government. now, with all the hypocrisy we have in the world, during these last few days we're fearing these attacks, if some operative got hold of some islamist and held his head underwater to find out where the attack was coming from, everybody would say it was great the first few days, and three years from now the guy would be indicted for violating international haw or committing war crimes. what we do overseas, we should give our people, i think, a lot more leeway than they have right now and not have to worry about eric holder looking over their shoulder. >> judy? >> just one comment and one question for pete king. as far as the president's statements to jay leno when he was asked, well, are you telling americans don't travel this summer, don't go to the middle east, he said, no, no, all i'm saying is you should get in touch with your embassy and exercise be caution. excuse me, he just closed the embassies. so, you know, once again schizophrenia writ large, and he's rarely -- the reason he goes on jay leno is that he doesn't like to take really tough questions from people who are going to follow up on him. but, pete, i want to ask you a question about the issue i raised in my opening remarks which was we've had these two reports that while the nsa is not, quote, abusing the metadata that you believe is essential and john believes is essential, what about these other requests from the dea getting access to that, what about the six other agencies that "the new york times" wrote about that said they've also gotten this access to this information? .. >> when these embassies are closed they are not completely closed. they are closed to the public. officers are inside their working. we just don't want 1000 people out in the street waiting for a visa when a car bomb pulls up. 200 people died in kenya at that bombing. they were not american. so you have a responsibility sort of with local governments. should they close all these places? holy cow, they over did this and this was for politics. this was for politics. i was shocked to see him in the yesterday they said the specific intercept, they name the specific people, i'm horrified. taste on that specific intel they will close 20 embassies? overreaction. understand when embassies are closed, american citizens can still get them. you call, they will let you in. the embassy offices are in the property. it's just close to the public. people are coming and going, believe me. they are not shuttered and they're not all at home afraid. people are still operating. >> [inaudible] >> the state department issued a travel alert, not a travel advisory. it's really unusual. really unusual for them to do actually. i do think it was a reasonable question today, shouldn't we be worrying about people traveling? they don't want to destroy tourism. what does that mean? one reason the state department doesn't issue travel alerts very often at all, very few, especially of this breath, local governments haiti. they make representations to the ambassadobastard and say you'reg our tourism in the area. if we do a travel alert europeans have to follow up. they won't come but it's not clothing for the state department to on the one in. on the one hand, they really thought this was a very serious threat of the magnitude we haven't seen maybe sense, and a decade even. on the other hand, the idea that people here have said, this administration, their message on one hand we really, really, really are worried and is a very cities threat of the present think it's appropriate to go on jay leno. percy goes to camp david when the thread is supposed happen. he plays golf. and then he goes on jay leno and sort of, go ahead and travel. either it's a very, very cities threat, or it's business as usual. we go about business as usual. >> the president went to camp david and played golf. >> right. that's it. >> but there were two threats by the state department warnings issued in 2011, the anniversary of the attack, and when we killed osama bin laden. >> right. think i read that is. doethere was a one day, september 11 specific threat which made sense, you kill bin laden, you expect something then the next few days. this is pretty unusual to a half a travel alert. >> but embassies are closed quietly and have been the last couple of days. this is just politics. to show, to convince the american public that they're on top of things. it's like a painful effect for our allies. >> we have time for a couple of questions. i think there's a mic. i'm supposed ask you to go to each of the question, is that right? if you could make your way to the mic we will take questions. >> can anyone hear me? great. i'll test it again. let me just -- i apologize. that's better, okay. there was an article in "national review" a few weeks ago by a commentator who had done an economic analysis of these issues which i thought was interesting, slightly different perspective. and his observation was that the cost of a -- about $20 million per life. if you compare the cost of our establishment, defense establishment, comes out to about 20 million per american life saved in these efforts. and that the nsa's program, by his calculation it was costing in the range of around $100 million per life saved. so his point, apart from the very important issues the panelists raised was that is important to do a cost-benefit. it's important to see what methods are most cost this -- cost effective, which i think is in part sort of the point jon and judith were making in this discussion, that causes are important. judith bennett probably said well, -- the question is what is the panels reaction to that kind of analysis what is the appropriate do the analysis? is it appropriate is that nsa is frankly too expensive in the context of other efforts that may be more effective? >> the most cost effective this human intelligence. you get a lot of bang for the buck. but you need all of this together to you need a mosaic, signals and intelligence, reporting from the state department of all these things from dod, you need altogether. but the least expensive this human. >> the other thing is you don't know how many lives are saved by the program. how many lives were saved by having more nuclear weapons we need presumably in the cold war? i mean, that's why i think some cost-benefit, if you're in government you have to budget your resources into some kind of cost-benefit analysis. the tricky thing about terrorism, generally the tricky thing about foreign policy is you don't know what dangers and pricing human catastrophes you of heard sometimes by spending a lot of money or indeed by sacrificing american lives in some of these efforts. that's where i think the pure economic analysis is tough and do them when you're doing they consume analysis where i think you can make a more stricter fda will describe a side effect but it will say this number of people. >> the epa values ally for $6.9 million they have no clue either. spin if i can add, that nsa is more than just tourism. it's a dangerous world with other major powers and countries in the world, and nsa essential to our overall defense as well. >> i like to bring this to a local level. like to bring this to a local level. judy has written a great deal about the nypd. we are facing an election in which mayoral candidates on the democratic side have all committed to stopping the stop and frisk program, and i wondered if congressman king and judith in particular could comment on what they think the impact is going to be on the safety and security of new york city. >> i think those allegatioallegatio ns by the democratic candidates for the new your times or "the associated press" were absolutelabsolutel y painful and disgraceful. the nypd program of countercharges program should be a model for entire country. it's absolute a necessary, it's needed. and if anyone would've told us septembeseptembe r 12, 2001, ma that the nypd would've stopped all these attacks over 12 years and result of that would be the next mayor wants to dispel the program or cut about i think would crazy. the program is essential, necessary. ray kelly deserves every possible recognition he can get for what he's done. [applause] >> just a brief note on ray kelly, and that is, he, if they mayoral candidates are perceived to me doesn't seem likely to be asked to stay on. but i think everyone of them ought to be asked specifically whether not they would keep ray kelly on his mayor. he should have been mayor. [laughter] police commissioner. but beyond that, you know, kelly was a candidate for several high level posts in washington. and apparently it was his stop and frisk activity and the endorsement of the program, and also his muslim surveillance, radical muslim surveillance program in new york which disqualified him, and i think that says a great deal about the administration's mindset, which is unfortunate. >> next question. >> i addressed my question to those who say that taking the storing of the telephone data records out of the nsa and allowing it to stay in the phone company, will wait leaking to the fact that we have such a the tedious society -- the tedious society that is so easy for some to going to court, get a left wing judge if you will who will give a state and an injunction and does prevent the immediate availability of that information, if you're allowed to remain in the phone company mix? >> fisa court, a special court. you're dealing with a fisa court and the judge that makes the determination -- >> you are talking while it's in the possession of the government on the nsa. what i'm talking about is you are dealing with is the suggestion that yo judy may come everything somebody else joined in, of taking it out of the nsa's possession and allowing it to remain for five years in the phone company's possession. you are taking it out of come and putting it into civil courts where the phone company is subject to an injunction. >> general alexander and the others and as a have discussed the overall issue. they have no problem with the phone company holding on to records. but again, their concern is with have absolutely immediate access that they need to the issue you raise is an added question regarding civil courts, somebody getting an injunction, restraining order or something, delaney. the one thing the nsa says they have to have instantaneous access to the records. they said they're willing to work, a way that it can be kept in the private sector would be absolute assurance do have instantaneous access. i don't know if that can be done. the nsa is not -- they just want to know if they have access. instant access. >> just to correct the record, i did not endorse that -- suppose was another panelist at the made up my mind yet about the specific recommendations. i will be interested to see what hearings produce and what various experts say about where the balance should be and what should be taped. right now i'm focusing a lot on transparency and the appointment of judges as opposed to he keeps the records and where. thank you. >> one final question. some people in new york work, don't they? maybe let people up to make one final comment. comment. >> there was a comment made over 5 million people in the united states with clearances, and why is that? first of i to clarify if they need to know basis to have access to any classified information. i felt clinton's 1986. i cannot say the last time i was like top secret document it is based upon the fact i'm working in a clear facility and i must be cleared to work there. so my question is to gary and also to judith, do you know ed snowden that he full scope polygraph done to work at nsa? the reason i'm asking, people don't understand, you have to go through a lifestyle polygraph to get in there in a counterintelligence polygraph. if he had that under surprise because it would've thought it would've detected this mouse. and also to judy, you state you felt that are too many contractors with clinton's and i want you to clarify why you trust a government employee more than a contractor. >> just, i don't know, must have had at last top secret special -- i anointed with had a lifestyle polygraph which is more sort of interested thing but i suspect he did not. and i don't have any other comments on what i said. >> snowden should never have gotten clearance in the first place in the clearance pass along as h you would from job to job. several instances they found out about them as he was leaving one job going to the next. that's an inexcusable and also -- in the way he was able to get access which should've been anticipated and were not the hopefully ill be corrected in the future. finally, just final comment to i would say as we go forward what i found, all of us agree that we have to stand together come and is so important public life today, we have politicians of both parties, somehow the in is his purpose is to spy on innocent americans and find out where the presidential candidates are going to that is wrong. let's find ways to make sure we can protect it but not thinking the nsa is more dangerous than al qaeda. >> he's very sensitive about the nsa fun at work future presidential candidates are going. >> i think the reason i just said we shouldn't be using contractors, is edward snowden. added don't think he would've gotten a government clearance. top secret clearance. my understanding is it's 1 million people who have top secret clearance. 5 million who have secret -- >> [inaudible] >> but in general, right now we were just told that i just read in the press that some people are being polygraphed at the cia once a month now, issued polygraphed over a leak investigation. seems to me it would've been a lot, our time and effort and money would've been a lot better served to have the edward snowden of the were to work for contractors, or for the nsa, given that kind of scrutiny rather than spend it on people who may be talking to the press. >> snowden did get his clinton when he was with the cia. >> and i would just expressed skepticism at your point of the contractors on the problem. a million people of access and the government employees, that means as mitt romney -- >> but half of them are not. >> but mitt romney said i'm going to shred the government. but by attrition. they are afraid of fire anybody so you would have deadwood, and many people knowing the secrets. the cia missed the collapse of the soviet union, the fal the ff the shah, arab spring, almost none of these people speak arabic. gary does not speak -- >> why do we trust -- >> he speaks farsi. [laughter] >> john will disappear shortly. [laughter] >> it's been good knowing you, john. [laughter] >> i just remain skeptical that all, i would love it to have it explained to me how this line works undoubtedly going to keep us safe. spent i do think we are happy to be cosponsors of the been. this is been a good discussion from an interesting one. it shows these are difficult questions which need to be thought through seriously with civil liberties, effectiveness, trade-offs, the contractor thing was not crazy, the notion that the private sector could do a lot of things better. but then, of course, things have gotten out of control. when the nsa has to do a lot more data than they were used to. bradley manning, that's crazy for private with the think not even as his clearance was able to get access to all that stuff. it was crazy that people could look into other things. so these are really tough choices of governance i think, and i do think we need serious people, weekly standard and congress and the media and elsewhere to really think through these questions. i'm personally thinking it's an interesting question, a thoughtful discussion. tried to think these issues through and not just settle on sound bites. and you all for coming. i think pete wants to close this off in a timely way. >> we didn't keep it simple but we did keep it on time, so if you count on 10 you get that. i want to thank bill and "the weekly standard," john, judy for making the bus ride in this morning. representative king, thank you. and gary berntsen is a great member of our organization. i think it is the right discussion and build rapid a probably. i think judy asked one of the most important and right questions in this discussion was she turned and said hey, how do we know this metadata can we've heard reports it's more accessible than people think. of the agencies are using it. the representative come and this is not to disparage, was the answer is i'm not sure what the answer is. if anyone knows, it's them. but it's because in some cases the fear amongst conservatives or liberty minded folks, sometimes whereas we should be a nation of laws, sometimes when people of the wrong access, people do things with the data that they shouldn't otherwise do. and a blanket checkup trust of what government will do is sometimes difficult to give. however, we all acknowledge and agree that we live in the world of incredible threat. if one city knows and understands it, it's new york city. and that's what makes discussions like this so important. i think what we hope to do and be able to do is to come into discussions with and understand, a fundamental understanding of that threat, but the folks that wish to do us harm. but also believe in liberty and freedom we fought for, and if you give at all what you are securing yourself you've lost the country you want to fight for. so we just appreciate this group. we appreciate "the weekly standard," and most important the manhattan institute for facilitating this. i know a lot of you are here because of that invitation. we are honored to partner with him at this event and very grateful that you took the time out of your day. thanks very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> here's what's coming up today on c-span2. up next and the chiefs of the military reserve component talk about force readiness, cybersecurity and the effects of the automatic defense cuts have had on their branches. the reserve officers association hosts that discussion. after that, the head of unicef speaks at a usaid conference. >> later to become u.s. representative bobby scott will host a town hall meeting in his congressional district in richmond, virginia, on the federal health care law. no, referred to as obamacare. he will be joined by the virginia state secretary for health and human resources to answer questions. the laws of such workers are scheduled to take effect in a few months. new insurance marketplaces are set to open on october 1 to begin enrolling individuals and policies that begin as early as january 1. you can watch this town hall live at 6:30 p.m. eastern over on c-span. >> this is a huge story because it's the first time that a true digital native have stepped into one of the legacy media businesses and newspaper are broadcasting companies and if he acts in any way like you did in disrupting the book publishing business, the book selling business, the delivery of streaming media and certainly e-commerce, then he probably will disrupt and we envision what it is to be a newspaper in the 21st century and how the business remains a business. journalism itself is change. it's manifesting itself in very different ways whether it's log on twitter for that matter. for the intersection between video and newspapers these days. so it's hard to say where it said that i think we are at a stage where still being figured out, and with him find a post i think that's one start a example of here's one possible for the newspaper. >> tonight on "the communicators" at 8 p.m. eastern on c-span2. >> all the handsome young officers that were surrounding my grandmother, who was 23 years old at the time, very beautiful. my grandfather had been trying to get you to a doctor and a god because of all the handsome young naval officer around the but when the ship-to-ship, they all rushed upstairs to do what they had to do, whatever they're going to do. and that's, she knew her father welfare. my grandfather went up the steps to the deck. don't less ms. gardner followed. her father is dead. when jafa, my grandmother fainted. right back into the arms of the president. he caught her tenderly a >> this week the encore presentation of our original series first ladies, influence an image, looking at the public and private lives of our nation's first lady's. this week, first ladies weeknights all this month at nine eastern on c-span. >> up next on the recent reserve officers association annual meeting, military chiefs discuss a number of issues facing reserve and active forces, including operational and cybersecurity training and efforts to curb military sexual assault. they also examine the recent budget cuts are impacting the armed forces. this is about 90 minutes. >> the next four hours of this program -- just kidding. [laughter] will be i think one of the most beneficial of this national security symposium, simple because it is really most relevant to the current state and future of our reserve force. we are fortunate to have with us today the commanders of each of the reserve services and the chief of the national guard bureau and representatives from the army guard and air guard. to moderate this panel we are not going to have the typical panel where everybody stands up and does five minutes about the wonderfulness of his or her service. what we're going to have is an interactive discussion on the top issues facing the reserve forces. to lead that discussion, as we e had last year, we have the perfect interlocutor, and that is major general, marine general retired arnold punaro. is been the director of reserve affairs for the marine corps, as a general officer he was a deputy commanding general of the marine corps combat development command, commanding general of the fourth marine, fighting fourth marine division,hich he was really privileged to have as assistant division commander, me. [laughter] >> no, he was a great boss. actually, i had that job twice. i screwed it up the first time. is on the adjunct faculty at the marine corps university. notably, he was the staff director of the senate armed services committee and the chief of staff or senator sam nunn. there are few people in this city of washington, d.c. who are more familiar, both having lived the reserve life in the military and on capitol hill. he's a combat veteran of vietnam, with a bronze star, combat, and purple heart. having been grievously wounded in vietnam. and after that, this is the other intersect, i was the second lieutenant davis, i was training officer of my basic school class at quantico, virginia. general punaro as i said will lead a discussion of reserve forces for roughly an hour, and then we'll open it up for about a half hour of questions from the floor. again, write your questions down and pass them up and we'll get them to the service chiefs. without further ado, general punaro. >> thanks, drew. i can say there's a block and the marine corps fitness report called supply discipline, and you went on way too long. i would have to market and in that area. but appreciate a great great introduction. secretary defends hegel has had we're at a strategic inflection point. nothing could be truer as you gather here in roa to discuss the future of our national security. and that's a great leaders here on the stage are involved in the course of august and into the middle of september, deliberations on what we call the program objective and memorandum for fy '15 in the future defense plants. all the key decisions about the size of military, the weapons, the active component, reserve component makes them these things are being decided as we speak right now. they are being decided in a world of increasing threat and decreasing resources. and this comes at a time when the coalition that supported a strong national defense certainly as far back as i know, when my years on the hill and years in industry, that coalition is severely fractured, if not hopelessly broken. and i say that, i don't share the optimism that chairman levin has about the solution because come if you look at the body politic, the deficit cut and the spending cuts have more votes than the defense. that's just a fact of life. .. >> he's the secretary that's tried to get out in front of almost any issue, whether it was for drone operations or sexual harassment, many issues he said we don't like it, we don't support the sequester, chairman levin has been against the sequester. all the titans of industry opposed to it, and it didn't move one vote. so we're stuck with it, ladies and gentlemen, and, you know, think smarter, not richer. so he basically is forcing the departments to figure out how we program our resources at a $500 billion less than we planned for a year ago, that's act a -10% cut in the defense top line. that comes on the 10% cut that has already occurred previously to the physical 12 future year plan that brought us down to the bca caps which was another $489 billion. so the department -- [inaudible] the last couple years looking at a taking dollars out of their planned spending. so in the skimmer, they've come up with some tough things like consolidating commands and taking a hard look at the costs of the all-volunteer force. and we on the reserve force's policy board have looked at that in detail, put a report led by major general jimmy stewart on the life cycle costs of military personnel, something we have to come to grips with on the domestic side as well. the sequester, as horrible as it is for national security, it doesn't do one thick to rein many -- one thing to rein in the entitlement programs both in the pentagon and the domestic. so it doesn't fix any of the nation's underlying fiscal problems. so the skimmer also came out with its big issue was looking at the size of the force, and it presented the secretary with two options. option one was maintaining a very large force structure on the active side, but one that probably was not as well equipped and well trained. some people would call that a hollow force, but maintaining capacity and not capability. option two that they presented, let's have a much smaller force active in some smaller guard and reserve, but with -- but let's make sure it's well equipped and well trained. one of them is just a total nonstarter of maintaining what i would call a hollow force, but also i was disappointed and i know others were, there's another option they ought to look add, the middle option. so when they're considering in the next six weeks to two months, you know, where to come out between these various options, i think they ought to put a middle ground option on the table which is looking at the size of the guard and reserve. if we're forced because of the budget to reduce the size of the active component -- and i want to be very up front about this -- i'm not one that has or will advocate we ought to be cutting the size of our active component. number two, even though i grew up in the reserves and spent my entire life and chaired the rfpb, i'm not advocating increasing the size of the guard and reserve at the expense of the active component. however, these budget realities are driving, are going to drive the active force to a smaller -- smaller whether we like it or not, and the building certainly is going to do that. so what we ought not to do is not take advantage of the tremendous capacity and capability that you could marry up. it's not going to be a hollow -- and in the guard and reserve, particularly as you draw down. we've got these great young, talented youngsters that'll be coming out of the guard -- coming out of the active force both at the nco level and the junior officer level, many of whom don't want to leave. we ought to basically have the option of keeping them in the guard and reserve. so i would hope that would be an option that the skimmer and the secretary and others take a look at and put back on the table. this middle ground option is not new. it's a balanced concept, it's been supported by previous analysis, independent think tanks. many of the think tanks that have been talking about this have been talking about beefing up the guard and reserve, and it's, of course, best business practical analysis. by the way, to continue an operational use of the reserves is aligned with strategic guidance. that's what the guy dance says. so my argument would be or my proposition would be we should not reduce the size of the reserve component just gauze the active -- just because the actives are having to reduce their size. so this notion suggested by some proportional cuts or fair shared, to me, it's flawed. what sense does that make? so if we continue to go down this path of the two options, everyone gets smaller together but to what strategic end? and the strategic end is where we ought to be focused. and in that way we also as we think about this at the guard and reserve, maintaining the incredible capability of ten, plus, eleven years of war, 800,000 guard and personnel have been mobilized. as chairman levin said, we need more seamless integration and take advantage of working more closely with the actives. this is not and should not be an us versus them. this should be a hand in glove situation. we're all in in the together. the guard and reserve bring tremendous capability to the active component. and we need to rook at -- look at that as this capability is not at their expense. we also need to be very careful, and i would say to any of you that have ideas of if only we had this or that additional benefit, we should not increase our costs in the guard and reserve. we are a true gift to the taxpayer, but we are less of a bargain for the taxpayer, and we need to push for an objective and discussion of these costs. i would say as we get into that, we're very fortunate to have in key positions in the pentagon right now people that i think are thoughtful and objective on this subject. the honorable jess wright, retired major general from pennsylvania. debly lee james has been nominated to be secretary of the air force. she was the assistant secretary for reserve affairs in the carter administration be, has worked with me in my business capacity, i've known him for 30 years. she's very knowledgeable, very pro-guard and reserve. rich flagman who's the active ra, patrick who you heard from yesterday, they do a tremendous job. and i've had some opportunities to talk to the senior leadership, secretary hagel, ash carter, general dempsey, the chairman, very, very supportive of the guard and reserve. let me be honest, we shouldn't discuss jess wright and any of those to be advocating for us just because they were in the guard and reserve. it ought to be on the merits. if we can get the objective facts on the table, our arguments are going to prevail because they make so much sense. a lot of times, unfortunately, the things never get up to that level. so the challenge is to not have these things arm wrestle out in the military departments, particularly if they're going the wrong way. roa can play a critical role in insuring these debates are elevated to the highest levels of the pentagon and the congress if need be. so, and y'all do a terrific job at that. but you're going to have to keep ate. so with those, let me kind of introduce our panel. as drew said, you have got all their bios, so i won't give long introductions. i'd just say we're going to go first, i'll introduce the order i was given. the chief of the national guard bureau, a member of the joint chiefs of staff, former tenty commander at north com and many other commands, general frank grass. [applause] >> thanks. >> okay. [laughter] >> i think what i understood is maybe we got a disconnect. let's see, you are the division commander, so -- >> have at it. >> i think they'd make a few comments and then we'll go to the q&a. if it isn't, we're going to do it anyway, but go ahead. [laughter] >> first, let me say thanks to everyone in this audience. whether you're currently serving, served in the past, we have the best military, the best reserve components we have ever had in our history. and, of course, took a lot of work to get there. so i want to applaud all the retirees. you have outfitted us, especially us now in the leadership positions, with just a tremendous leadership cast across the services. and as i look out and i get a chance to go out and look at the young men and women that serve in the national guard, both the army and air guard, i can't tell you and somebody says they've used this too much, i don't see that. i don't see that. these young men and women expect to deploy. they joined since 9/11. they know what they're getting into. they want predictability as much as possible. but they do want an opportunity to deploy. and so what i, what i think we have to do, and we already hit on it, we've got to figure out what is that a right mix that the nation needs for security, you know, strategic hedge against a very uncertain world, how do we maintain an all-volunteer force both, you know, active and reserve component balance and then not break faith with our people? and our people, our warriors do expect to deploy. i was, just over the weekend a number of different states that i met with -- and i'd have 20 or 30 in each group, every time i would ask how many people deployed, anywhere from a quarter to a half of the group would always have already deployed. how many want to deploy in the future? every hand goes up. every hand. and i do think, though, there's a balance here in the deployment that we have to look at. one is we do can need to continue to engage in the operational missions of our services. for me, it's with the army and air force. so we have to look like the army and the air force, and we have to have missions that get us into the fight. so we continue to grow leaders that can be ready at a moment's notice anywhere in the world. the second part of that, i think, though is we've got to get our training focused back probably where we were in the '80s and '90s doing rotations for our combat units and all the enablers that went with that. we've had a number of overseas canceled because of the budget issue. i think about the days in the '90s when many of us deployed to central america on humanitarian missions, dental, medical, veterinarian, all of those skill sets really paid us benefits in the '90s and 2000. so we have to figure out how do we get enough money to have that dynamic training that will keep people in and keep them attracted in the guard. and the last part of that is, i think, for all the reserve components, and we're really pushing this hard in the guard right now, we have the opportunity to fill vacancies whether it's a critical shortfall for three or four weeks or for two or three years. some of you remember the old keep up program, something like that where our folks who can get away from an employer, the family situation is right that they can go plug an active duty bill for a time especially in the joint world for the reserve components, getting those opportunities. i think that's really what we've got to focus on, but it starts getting the force structure right for the future. >> thanks, frank. lieutenant general rich mills just left as the commanding general of the marine corps down at quantico, he's headed to the reserve commanding general of the first marine division in combat be, of our larger organization, first marine expeditionary force, first marine general to command forces in combat, general mills. >> i'll temper my remarks and say that i come to work now with the reserve component with the greatest respect because of what i saw on the battlefield both in iraq and afghanistan. and i think that one of the challenges for us is going to be to maintain that momentum in the years ahead, that we don't, again, break that bond that's been forged and forged with blood and steel out in some very strange places. i was privileged to have reserve forces both organized units and ias under me in afghanistan, and they just did a magnificent job. so i realize the reputation, and they've done that through training, they've done that through well organization and through good support for resources. and as the marine corps begins to trim forces, and it's very natural that we should do that over the next few years, we come out of the war, our goal is to maintain the reserve forces at the level they're at, to maintain the support and, again, keep that bond between the active force and the reserve force very, very strong. we'll do that through training together, through deployment of our reserves and as individual august men meant -- august meantees. to, again, continue to shine. >> thanks, rich. vice admiral robin braun is chief of the navy reserve and commander of the reserve forces, she's also commanded at every level throughout her career. admiral braun. >> thank you so much. good morning, everyone, and thank you for your service. the navy reserve right now is forging ahead. we have taken over all of the -- or we're in the process of taking over all of the individual augmentees serving in afghanistan and forward deployed. so at this point we're at about 70% reserve component, about 30% active component and looking to take over all of those missions so that the active component can get back to sea. our reserves are serving across the board. you name it, medical, intel, logistics, seals, unmanned vehicles over in afghanistan right now. for next year we're anticipating about 3500 mobilizations. and i'm proud to say that even after 12 years of war, we still have about an 80% volunteer rate. and i think that really shows you the commitment and the dedication of the reserve force that we have right now. our challenges currently, we're in the middle of a drawdown of expeditionary forces. and so in 12 and 13 the navy made some hard decisions and decided to reduce forces in both the active and reserve component in expeditionary capabilities. that means reduction of about 6,000 navy reserves who serve in cb battalions, cargo handling and expeditionary logistics as well as maritime security, small boat teams. and so we're just beginning the drawdown of those 6,000 billets next month, and so our focus right now is finding homes for those 6,000 who will be displaced. and so we've done a study of where all those forces are and where they live throughout the united states, and we've tried to replace bill with ets so that -- billets so that they are not completely displaced. know we'll have overmanned units, but at this point we're trying to manage that through normal attrition, normal retirements and then reducing the asessions into the navy reserve. going forward we've got some new missionaries that we're very excited about, especially in cyber, in unmanned vehicle, into lcs ships and that program. we're looking to grow it to about a thousand billets. so there are new and exciting capabilities out will for the navy reserve. the challenge will be over the next couple of years with sequestration and looking at the proper active component and reserve component mix. we think that we have a great opportunity to shift some capabilities from the active component into the reserve component without taking too much risk. and so that's one of the things we're working every day in the pent gone. thank you. >> great, thanks. sitting in today for lieutenant general stan clark is brigadier general john mott who's special assistant to the director, general clark, of the air national guard. generalsome. >> thank you, sir. and being the youngest member of the panel, i'll keep my remarks appropriately short. on behalf of the director of the air national guard, i look forward to the opportunity to discuss on behalf of the 106,000 dedicated airmen out there today. thank you. >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> boy, he gets an a. make a note of man. [laughter] lieutenant -- yj, he's putting you in a tight spot here. general j.j. jackson, also commanded at every level. >> first off, thank you for your comments. thank you very much for being here. first, thanks to the roa for putting this on. there's been a lot of fiscal pressure to not have these type of conferences, and thank you very much for every member that's here supporting it, and i'd like you to thank your commanders also for letting you attend this symposium. it's of great value to our air force reserve and the total air force, so thank you very much for being here. a couple things i'd like to pile on with the chairman and a couple of the comments made. the things we are focused on now have to do with moving capacity and capability into a more efficient and effective force structure, and that will be in the air force reserve. we have an opportunity right now, and the chairman had mentioned the skimmer. i personally was disappointed that the skimmer did not have more discussion concerning the reserve component. i believe the qdr will be the place we can have that discussion. so given the support of your organization and get the support of the members that the chairman mentioned within the office of the secretary of defense be, i believe we can get those discussions raised into the qdr and actually have some proposals put forward to the secretary. part of that discussion has to do, obviously, with force structure. and so what we're attempting to do within the air force reserve right now which is about an 18-month process we've just completed is do a strategic view of our mission sets and be our missions. so what we've done is taken all of our mission sets that support the total active duty air force, and we've racked and stacked those into different priorities to find out where the mission stats are going to be of most value to the nation and to the air force reserve. the bottom line is that we're trying to find out how we can best equip and effectively produce combat power for the air force to in the year 2023. because that is what chief welsh is focused on right now, shaping the air force to do the fight. try not and get caught up in the quagmire that's fy-15 and 16 when it comes to sequestration cuts. we know we're all going to be smaller, but the air force can benefit from having capacity and capability migrated to the air force reserve, and we're looking forward to making those types of arguments. there's some great work put out in the report by the chairman and jimmy stewart, need everyone's support to make the argument at every level. >> major general marcia anderson commanded at every level from company to officer, our subcommittee on the continuum of service. >> thank you, mr. chairman. on behalf of lieutenant general sally who's not here today, i want to extend my appreciation for your attendance. i think this demonstrates your dedication not to your civilian career, but to your professional military education by your attendance here today. so, again, i'd like to thank you for your attendance. on behalf to the 205,000 members of the army reserve who together comprise the majority of the logistics enablers and engineers, medical, legal, support for the army i want to say, again, thank you for attending here -- for being here today. the army reserve wants to continue to be a part of the national defense strategy. we believe that our ability to participate in the war fight across all phases of the war fight add immeasurably to the army's capability. and like the other members of the services that are here today, we believe that having a strong reserve component is key to our national defense. so, again, i look forward to the debate and discussion here today system and to your questions later on. thank you. >> thanks. admiral steve day is acting director of reserve and military personnel policy and the coast guard, another great rfpber and someone that's been mobilized more than i know. [laughter] he's been throughout his career on active duty. >> thank you, sir. thank you, mr. chairman. a pleasure to be here, be amongst friends. i guess i just want to tie up all the comments made by my respective reserve chiefs, tie it into three words. in 1991 the coast guard reserve shield came out and circling our shield is professionalism and patriotism and preparedness. i look at all of us, us on the stage, out in a the audience, we all took an oath, and is we're expected to uphold that oath. so we need to be prepared regardless. i was in desert storm, was one of the first the land on the ground in september, and since that day guard and reserve have been called up continuously. so we need to be prepared. so i really hammer that with my fellow coast guardsmen that are reservists. be prepared. second point is professionalism. professionalism, i've experienced that through a lot of joint tours. one of my shipmates in the audience, major general rich -- [inaudible] was the colonel in charge of the joint training reserve unit at jib-com, we've maintained relationships throughout the year. rich's son is a first class petty officer on one of our expeditionary warfare units in san francisco in psu-12. i've been around a great many professionals and again, that's something on us who choose to wear the uniform. and my last point is patriotism. i'm sure you've experienced, i've experienced when i've gone through the airports people come up and shake my hand and thank you me for service. i think that's great that they're recognizing me, but i don't consider myself the patriot. i took the oath, i agreed to go in uniform. but i do want to remind all of us as guardsmen and reservists -- this is my opinion -- i believe our families are the patriots, and also i believe our employer is the patriot. i've been fortunate to deploy as much as i have because be i've had good employers that understood what the mission was and understood what the requirements were. but i didn't stay any longer than i had to because that employer needed me to get back to work. so i just raise that point. i think we're all meeting the preparedness piece. i think we're all professionals, and i just throw in the families and the o the patriot side. thank you, sir. >> great, thanks. well, let's start our round are table discussion. i'd like to put out on the table and try to deal wi these two issues either together or inner is idea am, one is the issue of the middle ground i discussed, the size of the active of component, the size of the guard and reserve component, the rimm between the two, the ac/rc mix. and at the same time, i think we should talk about the nature of the reserve and guard component in the future, the operational -- when i chaired the commission on national guard and reserve, we looked at this for two and a half years and asked the question, could we sustain and support what was then called the operational reserve? we concluded we could. there are those that are now arguing, well, maybe we ought to move it all the way back to the strategic reserve of the cold war with era. and so i think those are the two issues that we should spend a good bit of time talking among ourselves. and i want to say as we do that if we could talk about only of the myths that -- about some of the myths that have been put out there. and i'll mention just one. and, again, we want to be careful. i'm very, mean it when i say it's not an us versus them. but there are those that are saying that guard and reserve can't get there in a timely fashion. they're saying they're too hard to get to, they take too long to mobilize. and so the one anecdote -- and anecdotes should not determine outcome of arguments, objective facts should. in the immediate aftermath of bombing at the boston marathon, the first picture i saw, it was in like 15 seconds, every tv across the world showed these two individuals in army digital camouflage right there on the scene within seconds helping the wounded, severely wounded victims. and i thought to myself, you know, it must be amazing that the 82nd airborne at fort bragg has got that dr. spock where they transsported themselves to help those wounded within seconds of it happening. isn't that amazing? i said, wait a minute, that's the massachusetts national guard. ladies and gentlemen -- [applause] we saw it in thage in new york. members of the marine corps reserve, members of the national guard, they were first on the scene. so as we talk about these issues of the mix and as we talk about operational, i hope we will dispel this fact that somehow the guard and reserve is not available to base beically carry out these missions. so what i would pose to the group is, is this middle ground option that i highlighted earlier, is that something that ought to be seriously looked at? the best way to go about doing that, and then what is your thinking about are we in danger of moving too far away from the operational reserve? and if so, what do we do about that as well? so, you know, go to my right here to our most senior member and throw both of those out and get this discussion going. >> thanks, arnold. thanks more your salute to those massachusetts guardsmen. i actually had a chance to meet -- there was three of them there, two that you saw on the news. they had actually just completed with their rucksacks 26 miles, 26.2 miles. they were there volunteering, and when the bombs went off, they ran to the sounds of the guns. and i was able to pin some medals on them with governor patrick. but you meet these three young soldiers, and they would tell you they didn't do anything different than anybody else would, and i totally believe no heart what reserve component you're serving in, our folks would step up to the challenge. but i think it says something a lot, too, about where we are for the nation and really looking at two missionings and why do we need this middle ground. why do we have to have this operational force. there's a lot of threats against the homeland. we don't have geography be even if you look at, you know, the manmade threats today and terrorism. and then if you look at the increase, and you can read any scientific study you'd like, but the increase in the number of more complex catastrophes that we see coming our way and how are we going to respond to that in the homeland if we don't have trained leaders? and part of that trained leaders goes back to force structure, and we grow command and control through our hometown units, and thairs dispursed -- they're disbursed. so we can respond quickly. why were we in boss to on the? we live there. when we do go to war, everybody knows something. it brings along the populace. and i look at operational, from a reserve component, from a national guard to airman be and i look at the numbers today, we have 3835 guardsmen doing missions in the homeland both from state active duty site all the way to a title x mission. and the baseline right now is about 4,000 a day. if you take our six-year average in the homeland, it's 6,000 a day. of we have guardsmen and women responding somewhere in the home lambed. deployed today, 18,973 deployed overseas in every operation that our active air force and our active army are in. we're side by side with them. we want to maintain it. i think we have to if we're going to sustain this force. >> great. marcia, i know if jeffal hi was here -- hally was here, he'd want to jump in on that. operational may have of the army reserve? >> well, there's an extremely strong argument for the fact that we're concerned right now about whether or not we're going to assume risk by reducing the size of our armed forces. and i think the counterpoint to that argument is by increasing your capability in the reserve component, you mitigate that risk significantly. because many of the skill sets that we need, as i said, across the spectrum of the war fight are in the reserve components. and they are in ways perishable skills. i look at the air force, the fighter pilots, and in the army reserve, for example, as i mentioned earlier, our logistics, engineers, medical capabilities. those individuals not only have military skill sets, but they bring with them -- and you all know this yourself -- you bring innovation and other creativity from your civilian careers into those same jobs. and a lot of the advances we saw in terms of medicine on the battlefield came from a lot of our military and and our reserve doctors. so in order to mitigate the risk that we might face by reducing the size of the active component, we need to look at the capabilities that pre-exist in our reserve component and perhaps grow and enhance those. >> and on the operational, do you see a push away from using the army reserve? we know the army guard was off ramped for some admissions they'd been doing highly successfully for the last ten years in sigh tie and -- [inaudible] do you see a push coming in the building with either on the army side or something that's pushing the army back more to the cold war strategic side? >> there have been, in cases our units have been offramped because we have some other specialized capabilities, there's still a demand signal from some of the combatant commanders. i think that -- and i probably should thank senator levin, he's already left, but 12304 is going to enable the combatant commanders for bravo to utilize reserve components not for long duration-type activities, but for some of the short duration missions they have. and that will fit very nicely, general talley might tell you they'd need a concentrated small capability to support security cooperation or some other partner building capacity. >> great. >>. j., what's your take on these two issues? >> operational reserve, we hike to bid -- we like to bring the operational capability we bring every single day, so the pile-on comment there is we need to remain tier i ready, may be a little different between the services. we get programmed, planned and trained to that one-ready level. so that allows us to bring it every single day to the fight. currently about 5,000 air force reserve members that are direct support to combatant commanders. the second part is that surge capacity. you have to have that 2 to 1 radius, but why pay for something 24/7 when you can put it in the reserve component and have it whenever you need it. and the third one has to do with that strategic capability. whether you're talking about the inactive reserve or whether you're talking about fighting the big conflict, that is a strategic requirement. so once again we've got to plan towards that strategic requirement but have the capacity and capability every single day. when it comes to the ac/rc mix part of it, i'm pretty happy with air force general welsh because he has us mapping combatant commander requirements using all 600,000 airmen, guard and reserve active, meet that requirement at a 1 to 5 starting point and see what we can use the reserve component to do. and then we're going to program against that requirement and see what money mpa and also o&m is going to be required to do that. so we're optimistic that we're headed down a pathway we want to go down. >> great. and i should have mentioned, i think general welch and with debbie james coming in, i think you've got, as you mentioned, very open minded new leadership where we hopefully won't repeat the food fights that happened between the air guard and the air reserve and the active air force -- which the congress, and i spent 24 years in the congress, all four committees the two authorizing committees and the two subcommittees not just rejected the proposal in the budget, but soundly rejected it in a way that i had not seen before. but with general welch, he's a very, very thoughtful, objective individual. before we jump to the next area, would my of our other leaders want to jump in on any of those areas i henced? >> i would because coast guard, we're pretty unique. and the operational piece is expected by the operational force. we do not have reserve units. we did away with them in 1995. we fully integrated with our active duty force. and just as an example, both area commander, current air commanders -- admiral parker in the atlantic area and admiral due cover in pac area, are making sure that force is ready. the commandant and i have talked about this. today we have about 5,000 forces ready to go out the door for a title x or title xiv contingency. we have atsus that are approximately 1,000 of our 8,100 force. during the expeditionary warfare, they're racked and stacked and, in fact, 301s are going to be going out the door very soon to replace the unit down in the gitmo. so we'll have the gitmo mission for as long as we have prisoners down there. but the more important thing is us being prepared to ready to answer that call like in deepwater horizon of which we recalled about 2,000 reservists for that incident under title xiv. so we're very much integrated with the active duty command. they expect it. they plan for it, and we're being part of their plans all the time. >> great. a question from the audience that i think really is very, very important and phrased this way, could you have a reserve force with half of the units operational and half strategy snick and before posing it to the panel, we need to understand because there's a lot of myth about readiness, and you've unfortunately seen that the readiness of all our units have been deteriorating on the sequester. but if you look at the active duty force at any one time -- and it's different a little for each service, but for the most part a third of that force is operational probably either out in deployment, they're on the ground in afghanistan, they're in kosovo or the sinai, whenever they are they're training, so that third is absolutely 100% on freedom's edge. the second third is probably the units that are getting ready to go do something of various kinds. it may not be a deployment, but they -- in their state of readiness, it may be a tick below that of the first third, but the notion -- and then a third of the active force at any one time just got back from the deployment, for example, if you're an amphibious-ready group or a carrier battle group and you just came back from a 6-9 month deployment, no one expects that third to be, you know, ready to go do anything. so the notion that all our active duty forces are 100% ready every single day of the week, 365 days, one, we couldn't afford it and, two, it's just not the way it is. so issue on the reserve side is, you know, we don't propose to have 100% of our units, you know, operationally ready every day. but what is the percentage? and, again the hidden agenda here is when people talk about the strategic reserve, and maybe the new leaders are thinking of it differently. when i hear the words strategic reserve, i think of the marine corps reserves as i knew it in the late '70s, really '80s where we had no i equipment, no training, no the money, and that's because in the peak of the cold war a lot of reserves or but going to have longer to mobilize. it's a really serious question that's been posed. could you have a reserve force with half of the units operational and half strategic? again, frank, i'm going to turn to you first because, you know, at any one point leading up to 9/11, the guard actually had over 60,000 guard personnel on act you have duty doing -- active duty doing something somewhere. even in peacetime, all of the reserve components were on active duty a heck of a lot more than people realized, so many of them. so i throw this out for the whole group. again, this issue of how much should be operational and how much should be strategic. and when we say strategic, are we talking about a new definition of what strategic is? >> you know, look back in the '70s, '80s and even into the '90s in the national guard especially on the army side, we had enhanced separate brigades, we had division al-bahary gaze, and they were resourced at different levels. and even though we trained and resourced the enhanced brigades and our force support packages which were the short deployers and our enabler, we gave them more resources. by the time you got it down to hometown america, that was being balanced a bit. although we held those others to a higher standard. what i found, though, is the one-third that was in the bottom all the time, and usually it was our divisional unit, you created a mindset that, hey, that's all they expect of us, that's what they're resourcing, that's what we're going to stay until the war, and then we have 180 days plus to get ready to go. i think one of the best things the army ever did was adopt the rotation model. that model has done so much for every functional area within the guard. not just our combat forces, but all the enablers. everyone is in in a cycle, and i love that model. people do need a break from that high-op tempo, so my recommendation is we continue in a cycle, figure out what the right amount is for the different functions in a cycle. >> robin? >> i think there absolutely is more room for more operational forces and more strategic forces in the navy reserve. and we see that with cb who are involved in rotation, squadrons who are operational. and yet there needs to be room in the reserve for people who can only do 38 days a year, you can do your 12 months of drill weekends and then your 14 days of at and 38 days. basically, that's all they can give because of their civilian job or family situation. but yet they're trained and ready so that when we need them, they can come and serve. so i do think there's room for both, because there are so many different missions in the navy reserve. >> super. marcia, i know, as chairwoman of our subcommittee, you're actually looking at that model. but from your army reserve hat. >> just to kind of echo a little bit what general grass said in his remarks, the predictability is important, number one. but number two, i agree with admiral braun. you're going to have people who are going to have to be ready to go at a moment's notice. because as a practical matter, in the first 60 days of the war fight you're going to have people who are enablers in army reserve who are going to have to get there to prepare for the follow-on forces. so you're going to have to have some who are operational and some strategic to your point, admiral braun, you're going to have people who can commit more time x we need to give them the opportunity to do that, and we're going to be smart about how we go about that, but we need to have a mix that supports that. >> jonsome. >> i think it's a little narrow focus to ask if the reserve components are the only ones that can be half and half. i would submit that the active duty could afford with the deploy to dwell ratio so that all together they come up with a force that's ready to go at a moment's notice and all the different service core function functions that we have yet still have some recovering and recuperating, and that helps with recruiting intention throughout the entire force. >> great. rich? >> sure. i think it plays into, exactly, a total force concept the marine corps is banking on, and we're looking at the reserve as being a shock absorber in the event of a major crisis but also a regular part of our rotational forces in order to give more dwell time for our active component so they can refit as they come off of their deployments. we look at it more as an operational force that plays directly in support of a total force concept both in peacetime and wartime. i think for all of us as we look at all of our structures getting smaller, you look at the requirements the co-coms have, you've got to have a reserve that's ready and able and trained to go out the door fairly quickly. timelines will stretch out, they may be the later forces that come into a crisis, but the timelines are relatively short overall. so think you've got to maintain an operational reserve, have them ready to go. >> j.j.? >> just like i mentioned previously, there's too much baggage with those terms. we do the surge capacity because we have to help with this fight and then we have strategic depth on the end of that whether it's someone that participates 38, 40 days a year or in the big fight, we look at each one. but there's a temporal aspect to this. so whether get to the fight or whether it's training on a daily basis, there's opportunity for the total force like jon said to go ahead and have that across all three components, to look at that aspect of it. >> steve? >> sir, when i was senior reserve officer for admiral parker, i proposed the concert for the -- [inaudible] that aren't in psus. they're under the bog and dwell that many of the units of the fellow chiefs are under. and be he was very enthralled with that. we're hoping we can institute that. so if you take those 5,000 forces of coast guardsmen that are ready to go but we break it up to a bog and dwell of 1 in 5, but if this is your year, it hate them over the five-year period ready to go. >> one last question in this session, as i mentioned earlier, we're stuck -- i think, unfortunately, we're stuck -- by the way, we're not going to give up fighting the sequester. those that on a bipartisan basis support coming up with the kind of balanced compromise that chairman levin talked about, and that's really the only way we're going to get out of it. no one's giving up, but so far we don't have the votes. we'll keep working it. but let's assume that, unfortunately, we may be stuck with these lower level resources, think smarter not richer, what are we doing and what can we do on the rc side to tighten our belts a little bit, and what missions might be candidates for either increased or decreased rc participation? and i'm going to hit j.j. and then marcia up because, frankly, the air reserve and the army reserve are caught up in some of these issues right now with the headquarters. so, j.j., i'll start with you. >> yes, sir. and like i mentioned in my opening comments, you know, you can see what's going to go on for at least the next two years. so we're trying to put a stake in the ground that aligns with the vision of 2023, the technology air force can basically go into -- [inaudible] type of environment, do the high-end fight and how do we get there? and provide the global vigilance the that the air force does on a daily basis. as we look through all of our mission sets -- and we're very diverse, every single one of the air force active duty service core functions, but some of those are enclaves of excellence that even don't have capability for a member to move out to the senior officer ranks. so we're looking at those and trying to make a determination of what's been used, what's a good strategic type of capacity that we need to retain and whether some need to be moved into cyber, isr or possibly space. >> well, before i turn it over to general anderson, could we save money by merging the air force reeveryone and the air guard -- reserve and the air guard? >> no. [laughter] [applause] >> thank you, mr. chairman, for teeing that up. [laughter] in terms of looking at our structure, we do recognize in the army reserve that we have some structure that needs to be repurposed, i'll put it that way. we're looking very closely at some of our training structure and assets to see whether they're being fully utilized. so we can find some savings in terms of force structure. but we also don't, again, want to sacrifice our ability to be responsive to cocom commanders and to any con tin general requirements. >> great. so let me say as i turn it back over to drew to more questions from the audience, obviously, you can see we're very blessed to have these very talented, capable and engage ld leaders at a time of critical decision making in the d.. number two, the reserve force's policy board, our next meeting is september 5th. all these leaders have been tremendous apartments in all of our session -- participants in our quarterly meetings. we pumped out a lot of hard-hitting recommendations to secretary hagel, a number of chive adopted. we have a meeting on september 5th, it's open to the public. we're going to have many of these same leaders participate, we're going to hear from the secretary of the army, from the vice chairman. so any of you that are interested in attending one of those sessions, we really need to get the input from the field. we're very fortunate because we're statutory, independent commission that reports directly into the secretary of defense. and i think you've gathered from our conversation here this morning and particularly our members, we are not shrinking violates on any vumght -- violets on any summit, and we call it as we see it. i think it's important for the people at the top of the decision making chain. there's a therm allayier in the pentagon, and a lot of things that are happening at the deck plates never make it up to the top. and we want to make sure from the rfpb that secretary hagel and ash carter and be general dempsey and admiral winnefeld are getting the objective information they need to make some of these critical decisions. so thank you for your continued support and look forward to your help on the rfpb and, drew, thanks again for allowing us to be here. and with that, take it over. >> a great discussion so far. we now have a number of questions from our members and attendees at this symposium. let me kick it off by continuing the question that general poe narrow offered up on -- to narrow on the nature of the guard and reserve. we heard emphatically from general jackson. general anderson? >> no, it would have been hell no. [laughter] >> there might be some efficiencies gained. we're talking about that across the department of defense, and general talley believes the guard and reserve both bring information to the table, so that's all i'm going to say about that. [laughter] >> general mott? >> i'll defer to my boss. [laughter] >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> this was, actually, my next question for general grant. [laughter] how do you -- general grass. how do you handle this issue as an honest broker of for joint chiefs? and as an adjunct question to that, is there any wisdom to the idea of rotating your billet with a reserve officer? >> wow. [laughter] let me start by, i came to the job last september, and one of the fist things that the staff talked to me about was you've got to establish a position on the topic of combining the guard and reserve. and i thought about it, i looked at everything, we were getting ready to go into the skimmer process, everything going on. my first thought was we've got to stay tight as a reserve component here, and i think this decision is not for us here. i think this decision is a policy, a political decision that has to be made. and it comes up about every four or five years. and the decision is made in the past, you know, we have seven reserve components for a reason. so my position has been i'm going to stay focused on keeping a strong reserve component in the army and air guard as a part of that, and we work together as a team. >> so can i -- >> how much the idea of rotating the billet? [laughter] >> i think if you look to the future and you think about how we do business as a nation, you know, the governors and what we do every day in support of the governors in the states, you know, we've made some minor changes that are pretty major when you look at how they impact our response capability with now being able to use the reserve under 12304 alpha. it lends it to think about that for the future. but then how do you get beyond the title 32 discussion? and you have to bring these forces together if you're going to get there into the future. i think everyone from a business case if you think about it and you were in business, you wouldn't have seven separate organizations and, you know, a number of them doing the same thing. but politically and for all the people in this room, you each bring a different capability to the fight. and a different way to get to you. so all of that has to be deconflicted if we're ever going to try to bring them all into one. and if we ever did, you would have to rotate the position. but it still would have to be, you know, have both 10 and 33 authorities. >> thank you, sir. >> if i may to finish up on my hell no part -- [laughter] no, seriously, just like general grass said, we as an air force are looking at this. and what is the good news of having three components? i depress what ill like to say is up until this point and in the foreseeable future both the outgoing secretary, the acting secretary and the chief have said there's goodness and value in what all three components bring to the organization, which is our total air force. so that allows us obviously, though, to bring in other opportunities for mission sets and discusses that allow us to say where can those efficiencies and abilities be enhanced? when i go over to the hill, i tell them there's goodness in three options, and the chairman can probably speak more eloquently than i can, but one-third of them, just like smoother levin talked about, the -- senator levin talked about, the guard and reserve dud not. we had the active duty members current and qualified on the mobility air force side by using our appropriation to keep those folks ready. and some of that on the air force's side also. so we mitigated some of the effectses of this draconian cut. and if you combine that all into just two or one air force appropriation, you wouldn't have been there. so my closing comments on that, thank you. >> general mill, and the marine corps -- olaf laugh during the part of the discussion we talked about the potential for accessing ac service members into the rc as we have a reduction in ac forces. at the same time, we had a question from the audience about how do we manage the outflow from the reserves so that we can get rid of the nonperformers, those who are overweight and who aren't progressing, all showing up for drill. we all know we have ghosts in our units. how do we pick the right people coming out of the ac to fill spots that we open up from the outthrow. >> general mills? >> well, i think we're going to enter a really golden era of being able to hand pick some very, talented individuals who are leaving active service for whatever reason, whether because there's no longer any room for them on active duty or because they've been through the excitement of the past 12 year, and they choose to go on to pursue other things. i think that we can really have a larg talent pool coming in. the challenge, i think, will be to attract them and to make sure they understand, a, the importance of what it is the reserve component does, the good training they're going to receive, the modern equipment they'll be be able to work with and the good leadership that they will be b receiving. so i think the opportunity is there. we have got to make sure that we make it an attractive alternative to what other aspirations they may have. but i think in the marine corps side of the house, there's never been a pool of junior officers, everybody below the rank of lieutenant colonel, so talented and experienced as the pool we have right thousand. and it's going to be a shame because we're going to have to force some solid combat leaders off the active rolls, and we'd be foolish not to take advantage of them as they reintegrate into life. >> admiral braun? >> i agree. i think this is important to not do across-the-board, equal cuts between the active and reserve component. i think this is a perfect time to look to see what missionaries we can move into the reserve component, and then as we draw down on the active component site, take advantage of those great sailors who are leaving the active component and bring them into the reserve component. i think it's very important to do that. and those are some of the discussions we're having right now in the navy, because there are people who say, well, if the active cut 10 be, then the reserves should be cut the same. but i think when you rook at it -- when you look at it. why debt with rid of those -- why get rid of those active come possiblies? take advantage of all that great training and experience that they've had over the past 5-10 years. >> there's a dca for that also. i mean, if you keep the access in for life -- a citizen in for life, you retain that half a million dollar investment over the fist six to seven years of that training. why throw that all away? you can't bring them in we don't have the positions, so we need to look at that hard. >> general anderson, let me -- if you would also talk about ways that we can streamline the process for getting rid of the deadwood. >> well, uh-uh think we complicate matters by the fact that we currently have over 0 different duty statuses $30 different duty statuses for the reserve and component, and we need to reduce that number to as little as six to provide the kind of ability for people to move back and forth between -- airman for life, soldier for life, the continuing service needs to be a little bit more attractive to people, because it can be difficult to transition from active duty to reserve component. the army is looking at it, they have some tools that are in place now, but i think we could add to that discussion and be engaged with them in helping them find ways to shape those tools a little bit better. because many of those tools are designed simply to call folks from the force and they're not really targeting some of the unique skill sets that we need in the reserve component. so i think as a reserve component be, we have a duty and obligation to be engage inside that discussion and help our respective services come up with really good shaping tools. .. when we are back in reserve status, we are spread from alaska to puerto rico, and often remote from either the va or quality military care. and then there is the added tragedy of suicide rates. that subornation may contribute to. comments on improving, sustaining, building the quality of reserve medical care and medical readiness. >> i would comment that in the readiness one of the things we learned as we activated the reserve units was to have a good family readiness officer at each location who could serve as the family is left behind and steer them the right direction whether it be medical care or any issues they had. now with the cutback there is the propensity to say not many units are going to be activated and doing as much. perhaps we can save money by cutting the family readiness programs and reach out. i think we have to resist that to the greatest extent possible because in some ways some of the units are going to have medical problems extended well into the future with ptsd. there is a process to make sure that the research community understands how they can go get that medical care. >> how do we bridge that time and distance and tyranny? are there other comments on that? >> one of the things we are dealing with in the air force is standing up basically the case management sell at the air force medical organization down in san antonio. for the last 24 months we have been working this issue to say how we take care of the title ten members and who's going to give the individual member when they go back to the location? that isn't really available. and so we can to the conclusion that we need to stand up the case management cell for the orders and that is where the air force is going trying to provide some kind of reach out and touch with the case management officer. we are not there yet. we only have it managed to about 50% but that is what we have come up with with the air force in trying to handle that. >> any other comments? >> sure. one of the other things that concerns me today on the medical side, and of course suicide are tremendous, tremendous problem and it's an epidemic in our society especially when you look at the age group. there was a note this week in the early bird about 50% of the suicide have never been deployed. so if the problem in the society has to deal with that we've reached out to health and human services and they are providing us some research money and we are going to look at how can we join forces and the community, using some of the assets and the volunteers we have out there that they are providing in the medical health professionals. so, i think there is some opportunity. and i think we have to get after that because as about 100,000 commodity army, the marine corps, and they are coming back to our home town across america. and there is going to be medical professionals that haven't dealt with this at the level that we have had to deal with. so i think somehow we have to use our reserve components and armories to make that happen. what really concerns me today the ways the same money that we need to do that is the money that is drawing up and the same money that we used for the soldier readiness process and the airmen readiness process is taken us to a level that our readiness in the guard today is higher than it's ever been. so how are we going to sustain that and all these competing demands? and we have to get at that. and part of this is the compensation discussion. you know, what portion can we continue to afford across all accounts? and some of this -- and being a member of the joint chiefs we talk about this all the time -- that every program we send up to the hill you want to curtail, not really cut but you want to curtail some of the spending that we look to the future to try to save. example, it's hard to sell that on the hill. when you are going to get after it if you are going to maintain a strong military and all volunteer force. or at some point our salaries and compensation. i think there is a study out there that says if we don't do anything, separate from budget control. if the defense doesn't change compensation, raise benefits, more in line with the civilian world today, if we don't buy 202180% of the total obligation authority of defense will be going to sell the trees and compensation. >> we had a couple of questions about new emerging missions for the reserve and then we will ask for the reserve forces. a couple examples were cyber, and i think somebody brought up uav. what are each of your service is doing to prepare for these new battlefields for the future? >> we are looking at cyber. i was at the cyber guard exercise two weeks ago. there's a real interest to have the coast guard sign to the seibu command working that issue. the other piece that is going to be an interesting one for us is we see the arctic has an opportunity where during those times when we've got our forces up there, active duty forces, it's to utilize the coast guardsmen that have the skills that are needed up in the arctic. we are looking into that at this point. but nothing is definitive at this point. >> sign me up for that duty. [laughter] >> i mentioned earlier in the air force reserve we look at all of our missions. with no surprise, it appears in about a third of what we think would be a good fit. the discussion we have in the air force is how we are going to fill the requirements for cyber calm. it's about an 1800 manpower position which the air force cannot fill. so it makes sense to look at that and we talk about the capacity and capability in the air national guard and fulfilling that requirement. the of their position we are looking at is this is quite be a specialized skill set that has to be on the cutting edge everyday. and as a civilian, you can do that. by the way there is a company that will do most of the training required. so why take on to the dod budget when you don't have to do that? so we're pushing ahead to build the structure. we have ten squadron is being put together and set up the first operational cyber group and we're putting together a pyramid to try to support this requirement. >> we already have the cyber structure in the army reserve and as it is diluted to those are some perishable skills sets, and if you don't exercise those in a daily basis, they can the road. so i think the reserve component is ideally stated to have more cyber access because there are things you do in your day to day civilian profession that i think can only enhance the capability. >> i think the challenge is because the long training cycle it takes to get a cyber warrior ready to go. i agree that the research community has a lot of challenges that really apply directly to what you need in this labor challenge we are finding on the side of the house is you have to bring those folks on active service and there's a long training cycle before the even more used to it as a sires warrior so there is a balance that you have to strike. >> what about with the ponytail in a garage who is perhaps -- >> i wish i had one. [laughter] but the civilian contractors very attractive, however -- >> i'm talking about joining them in the reserve. >> well i think i have the high side on the hair cut. but what i would say is in visiting the cyber guard, at the cipher command, washington guardsmen were there and they were the educators and they worked for microsoft or they worked for the software companies. and that's my take away from that experience was to get with my fellow research and say interest in what the competencies' are that you need for your cyber folks and then whether or not there is another ad for admiral, not my brother but there was another that said get those competencies' and what is the realistic thing we can do with their 36 days of training for the reserve men to do that but take those skills sets from the civilian and put them in there. so that is what we are really looking at. >> excuse me. go ahead. >> we had a task force on monday ipb. he's a businessman in this area kind of looking at the future. and general mills makes an excellent point. you look at the amount of money at the train them and all the services, and unfortunately with say they serve six years' active duty and we have a huge investment in them. then they decide for a lot of reasons they don't want to be on active duty anymore. so my thoughts, one of the thoughts that i charged the subcommittee with is that instead of losing that talent to the department of defense, because i guarantee you that the microsoft, google of the world are going to be able to pay them a lot more than they will be able to make from year 62 year 12 or in the military. but can we come up with a research contract where we do as general mills said. they train them, give up their time, do what they are supposed to do. and even though we like to keep them on the active site, how to restructure some of the reserve components where they can come into those units and this is another challenge in that it was mentioned that by general grass and others we have these incredibly talented youngsters and officers that are going to leave. and in the reserves, how do we get them in there and maybe we have to take as many not prior service personnel and get a little richer and spend a little bit more time because to get the kind of talent that we are going to be paying for s taxpayers in these critical skill areas like cyber, it would be a great disservice to the war fighting skills the tax payers to let them leave active component altogether and not have an opportunity to continue to serve. i know a lot of them would come in and you know, we want point out any particular units, but i know that in the marine corps reserve to be open-minded enough that if they want to ask leave to have purple hair during the week as long as they get it cut -- [laughter] when they come on drill we are okay with that. >> we actually had the short hair rigs in the 1970's. [inaudible] [laughter] >> i was going to say that with cyber, the program about 700 billets for cyber. what we found is because of the growth of the active component and the reserve component, the throughput in the cyber training schools just isn't there. we do not have the capacity. so we are looking at how to mitigate that right now because there is such a huge demand coming and we need to grow that training capability. so that is what we are looking at. we are also looking at unmanned systems supporting the fire scout. right now the challenge for us is because of the sequestration and the budget challenges. we are not sure when those, when those systems are going to actually come on line. it's tough to program and you don't know if you're going to have to push that program held another two or three years. so it is exciting though when you get the potential. so, we are working on it but at this point we can't really say how soon it will come online. >> general grass? >> there is room on everyone to talk about this. i was there where we participate every year at fort meade. we have active guard reserve, dhs, fema, department of education, and since you can't determine at any given point where the cyber problem besides, you have to have all those problems. what general alexander and i talked about from the guard perspectives, the governors are interested in he would like us to maintain the authorities we have so that the state government can do some things. we have some of our cyber warriors in the state going out to the doing of the vulnerability assessments on the state emergency management that works. because of something pops in the state we still have to be able to function even though it may be a civilian dot come or dot gov that we are dealing with. we have a test case that we'll working with right now but i do think -- if i think about the active component and the guard reserve, every weapons system we are going to need a cyber experts. you start talking about the f35 and what's going to come out of that, so there's going to be image capabilities. then you have the national and international peace of that. what we are investing right now, we have 12 units in the guard that are some of them are already working cyber network warfare squadrons, for example, that are scattered across the states. most of them reside close to a major metropolitan area that has those skills sets. and they are doing very well. so, now what we want to do is we want to look at how the air force and the army are going to create the doctrine for the future, create the structure and the training. so, whatever we put in a traditional reserve unit has got to look like the service, and it's got to be trained and certified to this service so we don't create something ad hoc that we can take anything from a state mission to the guard all the way to the federal side. >> all right. we have a hard stop in five minutes. i would like to talk to each of you. a tough question brought up by senator levin and then we will turn it over to general punero. on sexual assault are you doing for that? >> we are constantly reinforcing that almost every meeting if needed. it is his top priority if he were to ask him. that is his top priority. >> what are you doing on the drilling level? >> on the drilling level again, we are integrated. he requires to talk about the commanders responsibility. it goes through the area through the district commanders right down to the field level. and when he speaks he looks at all hands as reserved and active duty and makes sure he is sharing the same expectations and accountability and consideration. >> general jackson? >> the air force has stood up and in these times we aren't doing this anywhere else. it's in the air staff, the major general maggie woodworth, and the top priority is to fix this. there are too many reports and instances and we will fix it. within the reserve component of the air force and putting us and the national guard took a stand down date to have that discussion and also pushed out the tools the commanders can use and so that is what we have been doing. >> he's very concerned about it. we had a stand down with three stars. every three-star had to address all. i went to the reserve center in texas to address the reserve component. and we are stressing three things. first of all, the real emphasis on the east coast training at every level, both in the entry level training and then continuing our pme and the list of officers to talk about expected conduct and the ethos of being a warrior and treating everyone with fairness and dignity. the last thing is we are taking a hard look at being able to harden the target if you will by getting the supervision back on the reserve component, getting supervision into the places like hotels where they spend their time during the drill weekends to ensure the proper level supervision is there and that you ensure the folks that would come in and do harm are identified quickly and separated just as quickly. >> the navy is doing the same thing as the marine corps. we are very much into the barracks come in to where our sailors are on the drill weekend and throughout the week. we found that about 50% of the reports have to do with alcohol, and so we are pushing a campaign of keep what you alone. basically you don't keep the rink that you alone. trying to curb the alcohol use and the incidence that we have not only with sexual assaults, with alcohol the involvement and also dui and all of the misconduct that comes with too much alcohol. so i think that really we have done a number of stand-downs' in the navy and navy reserve. and so, when this last round that was directed we do stand down i think everybody really had the opportunity to realize okay, this is my responsibility. every sailor knows that it is their responsibility to help turn this around. and every commander knows that it is their responsibility to help fix this. so, i think that we finally have gotten it down to the individual level to say not in my navy come off in my service. basically it is part of the solution to this. but i do think that all -- alcohol is such a big factor in this that we have to continue to push that responsible drinking is important if they are going to do that. so, that's really where the navy is right now. i think the opportunity to get down to into hotels is good where the reserves are staying. i think that's really important to do. and the good thing is we are seeing increased reporting of events that happened years ago, months ago and years ago, so i think that shows people are feeling more comfortable standing up to report what's happened so there's a lot of that past incident reporting right now. >> the army is doing much the same as the services. we have had a stand down and there's a lot of enhanced tools on the web site that has been devoted to this from the leaders of the senior level down to the company and the detachment level to utilize in their units. it's general odierno's number one priority and i think to speak to your point, admiral braun, for the old soldiers and young soldiers as well we are all part of a team and have to respect one another. if you see something you have to say something. that speaks to the reporting of people feel comfortable whether they have then a victim of harassment or assault or they know something is going on and they have a responsibility to report. >> national guard? >> a few months ago the president called all the joint chiefs and with the unlisted and the secretaries to talk about this problem and he wanted to understand what help he could provide the defense to tackle this and put his focus on it. since that time, secretary hagel meets once a week with all of the services and putting my vices and he has a series that he looks at. he gets briefed on the issues of the macrolevel. he expects all of us to be working below that level. i would guarantee you we all are. it's a top priority. what we've done in the national guard is we have taken two hours out of every conference that we have now. we do it once a quarter and bring in experts from the field to talk about the problem in this society to talk about how it translates to the guard men and women and then also i think what is happening in the court system and how we make an effective case on some of the ones that we may not be able to prosecute. we are also giving a stand down across all of the army guard, air guard armories and we have to have those reports back that everyone has been recertified as recruiters, the medical professionals we use and everyone has been briefed by the end of september. we have to certify back. i would tell you that the hard part for us in the guard -- and i'm not sure if the other research chiefs deal with the same issue -- took the title 32 issue on the steep active duty if something occurs and there is no ucmj on that date we have to turn over local prosecutors. i would tell you as the chairman said cut if there is alcohol involved a local prosecutor won't touch you. so we have to keep ucmj. we are pushing the states that don't have the title 32 ucmj to put it twice a week and prosecute to the across-the-board we have trained 31 special investigators so if a prosecutor won't take it we will send someone that these and even from that state or community out to do the investigation to begin and end if nothing else we will go after if we can prove the victim's or prove the case we can administratively processed. >> thank you. closing words? >> so you have heard about a lot of headaches and positive opportunities and here is the key. each and every one of you share today in a representative democracy of this great nation can make a difference both individually and collectively. and i use as a prime example my colleague from the commission on the guard and reserve, the colonel don out there slaying dragons every day and keeping us all honest, if that is you in uniform raise your issues up for the chain of command. you have the opportunity as the reserve guard and personnel to speak to your elective representatives. the people in this country have always made a difference. and so, if you don't speak out, if you are not engaged and you also have a tremendous talent as you have seen on the stage here today, the military leaders of the guard and reserve defined as the group that we have in my 40 plus years of working these issues, they are carrying the fight everyday in the building and they need your support and the need your active engagement. so the bottom line is if we don't want these things to go in the wrong direction, each and every one of you can and should make a difference. so we thank you for being here and for giving us the opportunity to visit with you here this morning. don't be a stranger. let us hear from you. thank you very much. [applause] >> we have a valuable thank you under the threshold. please hold your seats after i had these out because we have some important notices that we need to pose with you. general anderson. why is that bigger? [laughter] it's not a tiffany's box. general grass. come on, are me. let's go. general grass you are recognized in uniform. general punaro. and we have general mills. why don't you get it together. [laughter] thank you. general jackson. admiral day. thank you. [applause] this is a huge story because the first time that a true digital native has stepped into one of the legacy media businesses and newspaper broadcasting company, and if he acted in any way like he did and disrupting the book publishing business, the bookselling business, the ability of distributing the media and certainly the e commerce, then he probably will disrupt and reinvention what it is to be a newspaper in the 21st century and how that business remains a business need >> journalism itself is changing. it's manifesting itself in different ways with is a blog or through twitter even for that matter. so the intersection between video and newspapers these days. it's hard to see where it is headed. i think we are at this stage it is still being figured out. and by teeing the post i think that is one stark example of here is one possible future for the newspaper. >> the of all of the handsome young officers surrounding my grandmother who was 23-years-old at the time and very beautiful my grand father had been trying to talk to her but he couldn't because of the hand some men are around but when he took ship they all watched them go upstairs to do what they had to do and left her standing there. my grandfather started going up the steps and the sort of came running back, her father is dead. when she heard that my grandmother fainted right back into the arms of the president. he caught her tenderly and gently. >> influence and image, looking at the public and private lives first lady's week might all this month at nine eastern on c-span. so-called lost boys spoke at a summit held by the u.s. agency for international development. abraham awolich is the founder and president of the sudan foundation. he was displaced from his village in 1988 during the sundaneese civil war. he and other refugees during the conflict. it is also includes remarks by the former unicef director carol bellamy. this is about half an hour. >> i appreciate you all coming today. those of you that will present, and those of you that were here as consumers of information we appreciate having you here. thanks so much. let's just get right into it. i would like to introduce carol bellamy who's been the director of the peace corps, executive director of unicef and ceo and president of world of learning. she's retired as the chair partnership for education. her personal accomplishments and education are of precedence. she's been a pioneer leader in global education and a leader among women of my generation and generations of younger women as well. but behind her title is the hard work of leading organizations dedicated to making the world a better place to be a child. what better work is there? i am honored to have known her and worked with her for a very short time. please welcome carol bellamy. [applause] i appreciate the comment about generations that the older you get you will appreciate it. [laughter] i occasionally stalled it stopped on the street by somebody that says my grandmother thought that you were just wonderful. thank you very much. you have a very substantive day ahead of you. i always like the first session because it is the one that you are finishing your danish and wondering what section you were going to participate in today. i will go through this as painlessly as possible and i told that genie is coming so you will hopefully get to hear from gene. i've been asked to talk about how we got where we are today. how we have a stronger focus on education and conflict than we had a say a decade or even five years ago we were just talking about. and it's really only in the last five years if you will. it seems to me that yes, they're has been a rapid and significant shift in thinking here. isn't that long ago that education during the conflict was something of an afterthought. today the attitude is very different with education seen as a central pillar in the response to any conflict alongside the shelter and food. as a pillar of conflict prevention and a fundamental importance in the wake of the conflict and emergencies. how this attitude plays out in the actual practice, however, is another matter. but at least now there is a global consensus that education matters for the future peace, security and prosperity. and that wasn't always the case. i can see various milestones of the changes in attitude and so just a threat this is actually my personal view based on my unicef years and global partnership years if there is nothing scientific or offical and indeed it is seldom anything that is scientific and official. back in the 1980's and 1990's, the priority would seem very much as survival. survival itself. hardly surprising when you consider a around 13 million children died from largely preventable causes before the age of five in 1990. there was down from roughly 20 million in 1960. it is still the entire population of the state of illinois. if the whole state of illinois disappeared somebody would notice but nobody was noticing that 13 million children were dying from preventable causes. the focus is on the survival and revolution after this cause. that helped push down the number of children dying from easily preventable diseases and conditions. at the same time the development is the second key element in the revolution starting to come into the ever sharper focus as people realize that survival alone is not enough. survival for what? for the life of ignorance and poverty. education was increasingly position that the very heart of the development of creating better prospects for individual children and for their nation. the whole raft of commitments came into place to spur the process. it would be 1989 u.n. convention on the child crc and the commitment in 1990 and of course the millennium development goals in 2000. the accessing completion of primary and the gender parity in primary school. serious promises that were made to educate every child in every country peaceful or not. a member of development organizations at that point for putting tolls in place to keep education growing in emergencies unicef school in a box became a standard part of its response to the emergencies. like all the best ideas come if this one was quite simple a box packed with everything a teacher needs to work with for up to 40 children. text books, pencils, posters, sleet boards coming even a can of paint with which to paint a chalkboard. the team to get schooling up and running again in just 72 hours of an emergency. and the response of children and families to such measures was part of another shift. a growing recognition of the importance of education and conflict. not only as a vital tool pulled out of the drawer marked development where it had been left alone for much too long. but also as a key part of child protection. a tangible and effective way to get a scared and uprooted child a sense of normalcy. to give them one safe, secure and fixed point of reference in a world gone mad. succumb education became increasingly part of the to do list when in the emergency and the conflict erupted. okay. that is the good news. but we can't say that everything was rosy. worldwide, as you know and all of the materials the number of children out of school has dropped from over 100 million in 2000 to 60 million in 2008 to 50 million in 2011. more good news. but there are two problems with this. again as you all know first progress is slowing and in africa it is flat lining. second, product has bypassed children in conflict. as the recent save the children report attacks on education shows, these children account for one-quarter of the world's primary school age population. but about half of those out of school. what's more, the account for a greater share of children out of school today than they did just a few years ago. up from 42% in 2008. the impact is appalling. children in conflict deflected countries are nearly three times more likely to be out of primary school and the children and other low-income countries. secondary enrollment rates are one third lower. these countries have some of the largest gender disparities and the lowest literacy rates in the world. the schools are still in the firing line with classrooms, teachers and people seen as legitimate targets that are caught in the -- caught in the crossfire. mali. in june of this year, unicef estimated the education of 700,000 children had been disrupted by the conflict of the past 12 months. syria. conflict shattered what was almost universal primary enrollment. by the start of this year almost 400,000 schools had been destroyed, occupied or used for something better than education. by april of this year, 22% of the country's 22,000 schools were unusable for education purposes. 1500 schools had been destroyed or damaged. shifting back again to a little bit of good news. so as i said when i started, we have come a long way. there is a general consensus among policy makers that any disruption of schooling as a result of conflict must be at rest. immediately alongside food, water and shelter. there is consensus keeping education going through thick and thin during the conflict and long term tension is something that must happen. it is not just an optional extra. and there is consensus on the importance of education and prevention of conflict. and there is a consensus that schools shouldn't be used to foster intolerance and so the seeds of conflict in the future. but there is one big fat gap between all of this consensus, welcome though it is coming into the reality for too many children on the ground, their teachers and their communities. why the gap? in my view in the rush to reach the 2015 deadline i think there's been too much emphasis on reaching the low hanging fruit. the children who are the most easily reached and most easily documented. obviously this doesn't include children caught up in war zones, hence their dominance among those out of school. then there is the lack of investment. we back in 2001, they pointed out the sector was receiving just 2% of humanitarian aid. today the situation is even worse. according to the gm our team, the global monitoring report, the humanitarian aid for education is falling. in 2012 education accounted for just 1.4% of humanitarian aid. what's more, education has hit twice. not only does it get a small share over all, it gets the smallest proportion of the amount requested in any sector. again an example. the education sector requested $45 million in january this year. by june it had received $9 million. so some challenges. and again i know today you are going to be drilling down on these issues. so i am giving you not the natural down version that some thoughts about what we need to do. first we need to recognize that overall progress on access to education is not making a big enough dent in the proportion of out of school children in the conflict affected countries. yes we can applaud the progress that has been made, but we need to drop the complacency that i see creeping into the the date on education. we need to stretch just that little bit further to reach the children that are thought to be beyond our grasp. second, we need to focus on quality. even in the war zones as an essential part of access. it is quality that keeps children learning and it is the quality of education and education that nurtures open debate, tolerance and conflict resolution that paves the way for the more secure and prosperous future. it is self-evident that what happens in the classroom is absolutely fundamental for the collective future security of our global families. a good education helps children make good traces for themselves and for their communities. they learn that the ordinary conflicts that are part of everyday life do not need to spiral out of control into violence. they learn how to cope with pressures, how to respond with grace and how to value each other. third, we must make the case to policy makers and here i'm talking about donors and developing countries and all the policymakers, parliamentarians and others. we need to make the case to these policy makers using bottomline members. let's keep it simple. and we need to keep it simple. the worst thing about education is they can see it and in the 100 words they say it in a thousand. [laughter] it's simple. don't done it down but simple and clear. keeping the school and ran it down -- enrollment down and the conflict by 3%. and the length of the conflict calls as male enrollment rates increase. we need to talk to policy makers about waste, the waste of lives, prospect, pope. but we also need to talk about the sheer waste of resources with 21 developing countries spending more on arms and primary school. fourth, we need to shift the priorities for such investment so that education funding is all about education. rather than any external security interest. finally, we need to acknowledge that education is everybody's business. not just the business of administrative education as important as this. governments are still the key players that they are no longer the only players whose investments are important. we have a private sector whose investment out strip aid and we have new donors that are working in partnerships across the global south. we have an ever stronger civil society that is shaping the local solutions and most importantly, we now see and hear a thanks to the new technology the most marginalized and vulnerable people in the most desperate circumstances telling us what the need. we need to be guided by them and respond to them. so that's why i want to commend usaid for the conflict of the goal. i know those numbers may be aspirational but you need those numbers to push progress. and for this session because the session, not this session but that follows this session because it really is going to the issues that have to be dealt with in a very serious way and to learn initiative. i can't conclude without also a acknowledging the global partnership for education now is taking education and conflict or serious despite the talks for several years and is working with that. there are other signs of the renewed determination to address this, certainly the secretaries first initiative and the education cannot wait to call for action. all of these are particularly encouraging. children cannot wait for the war to end. there is no pause button when it comes to education. the conflict in the lower income countries from 1999 to 2008 lasted for 12 years. this is longer than most children in the country's what typically spend in school. the modern conflict is overwhelmingly the internal and long term. today's war is never decided by one decisive battle or campaign. war is also fueled by ethnic or religious or tribal fault lines and the need to the solution that solves everything for everyone is extremely unlikely unless the fault lines are addressed once the conflict is over. this requires all of us to position education front and center as a crucial part of peacebuilding and state building. as an effective way to help the country's heal their wounds and prevent violence in the future. we need double-fault to play the game. thank you very much. [applause] nobody knows more about the subject than she does and nobody says it better. i feel like i am almost in the way by coming back up here because when you said at the end is such a transition to the next speaker. actually, south sudan is one of our to learn a country is and it's appropriate that we have our next speaker here. abraham speed is the founder and president of the sudan development foundation. he received a master's degree in public education from the maxwell school of citizenship and public affairs at syracuse university. his experience in international development, ngo management and his entrepreneurial spirit provide the engine to propel his foundation to meet the critical challenges of south sudan. his unmatched commitment to the development of his country and community lies at the heart of his unwavering drive for change. abraham is one of the lost boys that founded the sudan default and foundation for his commitment to rebuilding south sudan communities. please join me in welcoming abraham awolich. [applause] >> thank you very much. good morning everyone. i just want to acknowledge and not an expert on education per say, but i'm involved in education. and this morning i'm going to share with you just a little bit about my story about the things i am working on and how i came to work on these things. many of you are aware of the conflict that has been going on in sudan for so many years. millions of people have been displaced and many lives have been destroyed and they continue to be destroyed today. why was one of those people that had been displaced by the conflict in sudan. i was displaced and got recruited into the sudanese people. the first time fi was introduced to the school was when i was a refugee. we were denied the schools in our own country and i had to break every record in my family. i was the first person to go to school and my family and i was the first person to finish primary schools in my family. the first to finish secondary school and first person to go to college and the first person to get a master's degree. so you can imagine that is just my family. some families have not broken any record yet in these areas especially in integration. so my experience the trauma of being displaced and having to move from one to another in east africa turned different. when i returned home in 2006 after 18 years of displacement and suppression from my family i found that people in the village where where they were when i left. none of my friends have ever been to school and so that generation, my generation is completely lost. i'm not even talking about my parents' generation. so i was traumatized by this because the opportunity that i got learning from the refugee camp to read the first time that i learned to read and i began to look at things on paper, the first thing i saw was usaid on a box. [laughter] i am not trying to plug her, it's true. the food that was supplied to us in the refugee camp came in boxes or bags and they said usaid on it. i didn't know what it was or what it meant, but i could see somebody shaking somebody's hand and there was something written like that. i couldn't make any meaning of it that is the first thing i learned to read. so you can imagine that this effort, they make a difference. so the fact that i am standing here today shows i am a product of this international system through the unicef and the usaid we support in those refugee camps and we went to school. it didn't have to be a nice school. it could have been under the trees or in some shelters. but at least it produced me and i am here today to testify to that. after a number of years in the refugee camp i came here to the united states as a refugee and i finished my school in kenya where i was a refugee for nine years and so i came here and i felt prepared and i was able to go to college and finish my college at the university of vermont. and then later on i went to syracuse university for my graduate studies. but then i went back in 2006 like i mentioned in and i found the conditions in the country were really bad. and there was a agreement that was just signed and a prospect that south sudan would become a new country, which it did in 2011. but there was not much preparation in terms of human capacity to run the country. many of the people that are running south sudan right now were produced and there were only a few that were accepted into the high schools in sudan and mabey colleges. but there are not that many. and then a number of people now that are able to make south sudan and a number of people producing the refugee camps. but the country still is not in place to produce people that can run the government or run the society which is why we continue to have a lot of problems. so we started a program that would try to contribute to education. so from 2008 through the program that we call the education initiative we were able to build a secondary school, a secondary school that was able to recruit students, mostly fema students in the curriculum also specialized skills. and what we named the school is of health sciences. some students were learning how to become nurses or productive health advisers regular community health workers. because it wasn't just about education. was also the need to train people on specific things that are needed in the community. so, we are involved in this idea of the technical education because the need in south sudan and the generation gap is so high so that the young children now are going through primary education there is another generation, my generation. it's very hard to sit them down in first grade and get them to learn. so you kind of have to deal with them by giving them every technical skill so that they can get jobs and become a useful force in the country and if this number of young people are unemployed most likely to fall prey to a number of war lords that are looking for the force. so these are some of the activities that we are running right now. and of course when you have an opportunity like i did and you go to a country like south sudan and you have to multitask so i worked on the post in the program that we created and what it does is it tries to inform the government to develop policies that our core to building a stronger foundation for the nation. in making the specific laws like education and health. so i'm involved in that in a number of us are involved in that policy because the country means that as well. if the politicians are left alone, many of them have not been exposed. based on how they feel but not on what information is out there. so i would not along my talk today but i would just say that usaid and the u.n. and other agencies involved in the conflict zones are providing vital educational services. that is applauded because if you do that, it may not be possible to get everybody, every child that is in the conflict to graduate from college or to have a master's degree, but you will have individuals like myself that will make it through and they will turn around and they will give up their communities. and i am very sure that if you have a number of people like that in those communities they will change lives because they will know exactly what those people need because they were there at that time. thank you very much. [applause] site of the media business is a huge story because the first time that a true digital native has stepped into one of the media businesses, newspaper or broadcasting company and if he acts in any way like he did in disrupting the book publishing business, the bookselling business, the delivery of streaming media and certainly e commerce, then he probably will disrupt and reinvention what it is to be a newspaper in the 21st century and how that business remains a business. >> journalism itself is changing. it's manifesting itself in very different ways with their it is a blog or tauter even for that matter. so the intersection between video and newspapers these days. so it's hard to see where it is headed. we are have a stage it is still being figured out. with jeff basos combining the post here is one possible. in just a moment we will take you live to the senate floor meeting at the top of the hour for what should be a brief pro forma session going in and out quickly. they continue their august break. we expect the senator is back for work at 2:00 later that afternoon 5:30 would be the first votes of september on a pair of judicial nominations. we will take you live to the senate floor here on c-span2. the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c., august 12, 2013. to the senate, under the provisions of rule 1 paragraph 3 of the standing rules of the senate i hereby appoint the honorable benjamin cardin, a senator from the state of maryland to perform the duties of the chair. signed patrick j. leahy, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order and pursuant to the provisions of s. con res. 22, the senate stands adjourned 22, the senate stands adjourned >> and just about an hour from now attorney general eric holder expected to announce that nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large drug operations will no longer face severe mandatory sentences. that part of a series of prison reforms he's expected to unveil during remarks to the american bar association. >> on whether goth public affairs offices are a help for the government. the panel will include journalists and media communications firms. >> booktv in prime time continues this week. tonight after "the communicators" we'll bring you authors from book fairs and festivals. at 8:30 p.m. eastern, we begin with oscar goodman at freedom fest. he talks about "being oscar: from mob lawyer to mayor of las vegas." after that we'll go to this year's chicago tribune printers row literary festival on "the cooked seed." then on to bookexpo america in new york city with err ya jong -- erica jong. and we finish with author and radio talk show host larry elder at the los angeles times festival of books as he discusses his memoir about his troubled relationship with his father in "dear father, dear son." booktv in prime time all week on c-span2. >> of all the handsome young officers surrounding my grandmother, who was 23 years old at the time but very beautiful, my grandfather had been trying to get to her and talk to her, but but he couldn'. but be they all rushed to go upstairs to do what they had to do they're trained to do and left her standing there. well, she fell in behind them. my grandfather fell in behind her going up the steps to the deck. she came back don't let mr. gardener find out her father is dead. when she heard that, my grandmother fainted right back into the arms of the president. he caught her tenderly and gently. >> this week the encore presentation of our original series, "first ladies: influence and image," looking at the public and private lives of our nation's first ladies. "first ladies," weeknights all this month at 9 eastern on c-span. and during tonight's program, join in the conversation with colonial williamsburg historian taylor stoermer at facebook.com/c-span. >> former u.s. coast guard commandant admiral thad allen says in crisis situations the federal government has no choice but to act immediately and sidestep barriers that exist day-to-day in nonemergency situations. mr. allen's comments came during a discussion on managing the federal government at the partnership for public service last week. mr. allen directed the federal response to hurricanes katrina and rita and served as the national incident commander for the deepwater horizon oil spill. he joined other officials with the government accountability office and defense and homeland security departments. >> for those who aren't familiar with the partnership, we are a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that's dedicated to trying to make our government more effectively through people. we are a talent organization, and we believe that good government begins with good people. and i am really very, very excited about the release of today's report because i think it's a fundamental issue for us about how we can do more not just with less, but in a world that is changing and ever more complicated and dangerous ways. and we think we have provided a framework that can help answer that question. before starting on the report itself, though, there's a lot of work that goes into these things. i want to thank booz allen hamilton for their extraordinary support for this effort and their great partnering with us at the partnership. and in particular i want to single out ron who is sitting up here in front who you'll hear from in a second who's himself an extraordinary public servant, who has done some great things in government and has been a great partner. and also dave mater who i don't think is here right now but has been, again, a great public servant and a great friend. on the partnership side, again, these things take a lot of work, and there are several people that i want to thank and identify. sally jagger, who is back here, long, long time gao senior executive who generously decided to retire to work even harder with us at the partnership and has done some great work with us. ann laurent, a new addition to the partnership team. again, wide, wide range of experiences and and great commitment to these issues and contributions as well. so great to have you here. seth melling, who is older than his years appear and has also been a great addition to our team. and bob cohen, a very experienced and exceptional journalist who has been taking his journalism skills to help make us more effective. and the leader of that whole team and all of our research effort as well as our communication effort is lara shane, who you also will be hearing from. i cannot resist noting that today is her eighth anniversary at the partnership, so if i could have a great round of amaze for lara. [applause] so president obama recently called for, quote, an aggressive management agenda that, quote, delivers a smarter, more innovated and more accountable government for its citizens. we believe that this report answers the call by proposing nine strategies that can create a more integrated and effective government. these strategies actually address two different areas of opportunity here both around the mission achievement side of things, so how do we get the core objectives of government done, but also the mission support activities as well, the i.t., the procurement, etc., and again, you'll hear in greater detail from ron and lara about what those strategies are. but we titled the report building the enterprise because the central theme is together we're going to achieve much more both more effectively and more efficiently than we can as we currently run 100-plus separate entities off on their own, doing their own thing. the best metaphor i can think of in washington is, obviously, right before us right now. we have some amazing talent on the nationals, we have the great switching with strasburg and great hitting with harper, but it doesn't work if they don't work as a team. that's fundamentally what this is about, how do we get government to work percent as an integrated -- better as an integrated team? this is serious. this is about the most important things we face as a country, and achieving our goals as a nation through the hard work of our government. so with that i'm going to turn it over to lara and ron and have them do a presentation about the findings of the report. >> thanks, max. >> thank you. >> hi, i'm regis, and this is kathy lee. [laughter] >> we figured that since this report is about multiagency collaboration, we are going to take a collaborative approach to this presentation. but i wanted to start by telling you guys that we launched this initiative about a year ago, and we started by interviewing about 40 of the smart best people we could find that were former reformers, current reformers or academics who had been studying reform for a long time. and we were hopeful that there would be this easy consensus, and we'd come up with, you know, the five things you can do today to fix government. and it was a little harder than that. [laughter] so, but consensus did emerge, and it emerged around two core themes. and the first was that today's fiscal environment provides more than just an opportunity to change, but really an imperative for change. there are -- and we really feel like there's tremendous opportunity and a tremendous need to take a really hard look at this topic. and so we're excited by that. the second area of con census was that really that today government operates largely as a set of holding companies that are each doing their own thing. and that what we need is a more whole-of-government, interagency approach to our government. except in times of crisis where you do see government able to respond as an enterprise. and in a time of crisis, government brings all of its assets to bear down on a problem to great effect. and our core belief is that this needs to be the standard way that government does its business. this needs to be the way that we get all of the work done on today's complex and intractable problems. so that that's why, that's how we arrived at the central premise of this report, that we can be more effective and more efficient both on the programmatic side and on the efficiency, kind of mission support goals if we take this enterprise approach. >> so those of you that have worked in government or studies government, reported on government know that it's organized vertically. some characterize it as cylinders of excellence. the idea of working together as an enterprise is almost an unnatural act. you can declare it, but you've got to build a management infrastructure to actually make it happen. management infrastructure isn't all that sexy, but those are the things that keep the engine of government working. so let's start with the definition of terms, what enterprise is and what it is not. so max and lara have already made reference to this. this is, essentially, the whole greater than the sum of the parts. individual agencies working together. if they work separately, the big problems our nation faces won't get solved, if they work as an enterprise, there's a much better chance of that not just in crisis, but for those enduring, endemic challenges that the nation faces. but enterprise is not centralization. it is not one size fits all. in fact, we are not going to argue that government should massively restructure to change those vertical stove pipes. we all know what happens with a reorganization. some of its objectives get accomplished, but more often than not there are an order of magnitude more unintended consequences. so we're not talking about rearranging the boxes. keep the vertical structure, but build some management infrastructure that horizontally cuts across government not in a way of centralizing, but in a way of getting agencies to collaborate and coordinate that it and integrate towards common end. >> great. and i would just add to that, that our approach was a fairly practical one. we didn't want to reinvent the wheel, and we know that there was a foundation laid for this approach with the government performance result act, modernizationing act. [laughter] so, you know, with the goals. they have established cross-agency priority goals, they've established goal leaders, and we wanted to build on that foundation rather than add additional layers. so that's what this report does, it's really trying to build on some great things that are already happening and to commend some prior efforts. >> i'll underscore that. this is not about completely new start. there are -- everything we're going to talk about today has been done somewhere in government. in some cases interagency, in most cases within a single agency, but these are tried and proven strategies that we're suggesting just need to be taken to scale. >> with right. so the first one is to develop an enterprise performance plan. you know, what we're really looking here is to articulate those areas where government needs to act like an enterprise to take on the most challenging goals beyond the current identified goals. the cap goals. and we believe that this plan needs to be developed and implemented by the pmc but needs to be owned by the president and the cabinet. and the reason we arrived at that conclusion is i'm going to play fortune teller for a second, and you might be thinking this can't be done, it's too hard, or we already or have a strategy document, and it's called the budget. [laughter] so i'm going to take that on. this was done. it was done in the late 1990s. i am assured it was a very laudable effort, but it kind of died on the vine because of the fact that it didn't have the leadership sponsorship. and that's why we feel very strongly that with leadership buy-in and ownership this can succeed and needs to succeed. was the budget does not -- because the budget does not suffice as a strategic government. it is a list of everything that government is going to do, it does not establish priorities, and it is vertically organized meaning, you know, it perpetuates the status quo. so we need this enterprise performance plan. and, you know, we really think that the pmc is who is the right place to own b this because the gpmra established the coos as this kind of board of direct. >> yeah, they need to be the champion, and they're chaired for the deputy director of management at omb, we think that's the driving body here, they've got to own it. all right, so how do you organize it? a strategic plan, again, organized around the budget, is just a collection of numbers. we're talking about an enterprise plan organized around a set of portfolios, a portfolio-based approach to this. just like an investment portfolio, take three areas -- presidential priorities like the cap goals, but also cross-cutting missionaries, everything from food safety to counterterrorism and everything in between -- and offer common mission support functions; hr, finance, i.t. all of those things are amenable to an enterprise approach. all of those things would find their way into an enterprise strategic plan, all of those things would be organized in portfolios. let's take the food safety portfolio as an example. you'll hear from gene dodaro later, there are dozens of agencies involved in the food safety mission, and there are probably a dozen different departments. and while they all play nice together, they're still vertically oriented. think of food safety as an enterprise portfolio. looking at all the programs in that portfolio, the ones that work well, the ones that are risky but have a high payoff, the ones that are not risky but don't really contribute to the larger goal. if you manage their portfolio as a balanced approach to getting the enterprise goal accomplished, you're going to approach it in a far more integrated, holistic way rather than looking at each of the individual pieces and parts. but a plan and portfolios only get you so far. you need to lead it. >> right. so as with most efforts, you know, this is going to -- the success of this approach will be contingent on the leadership of it. and so we're talking about both designating and empowering enterprise goal leaders. as we've mentioned, this has been done. right now most of the goal leaders are officials at the white house or in the president's executive office. and, you know, that's great. but i think to take this to scale, it may not be possible that a goal leader is always going to be a cabinet secretary or part of the white house staff. so what we are envisioning is a way to empower goal leaders that may not have necessarily the backing of the white house office. and so what we want is for them to have a performance, we want them to be appointed by the president and have a five-year term contract, performance contract with the president or pmc. and what we also really belief that they need -- believe that they need and, again, to take this to scale and to be really successful is dedicated full-time staff. because right now the current goal leaders are white house aides in, many cases, they have a ton of responsibility -- >> they have a day job. >> they have a day job, and they're pulled in a thousand different directions. so it's imperative that they have some support. and we'll talk about some additional support that we think they need. but, you know, we want them also to have input into budget submissions of the portfolios of all the programs in the portfolios, major i.t. requests for, to support one of the programs in the portfolio. we want them to have into. and we want them to be able to offer feedback on the individual performance of the executives that lead the programs in their portfolio. and we believe this is very important for them to be effective. you know, right now you have an example of two goal leaders that are doing a great job with the veterans homelessness initiative. and, of course, that is secretary shinseki and secretary donovan. and this is an example of where they have had dedicated staff to this goal, and they've reduced veterans' homelessness by 17% which i think is quite remarkable in the current fiscal climate. the economic climate. and so, you know, what we want to do is to make sure that the success of this isn't personality-comment. you know, ron and i get along -- >> we do. [laughter] >> we do, we're best friends. so, of course, this is going to work. we want to headache sure that there is structure and support in place so that this can succeed in an environment where it's not necessarily personality-dependent. >> and here's how you sustain it, and i put dibs on this particular strategy because it's a favorite of mind. it's great to have cabinet and subcabinet officials as goal leaders. as we've argued, this isn't just about presidential priorities, those are important, but it's cross-cutting mission areas and common functions. you need senior career leadership to sustain focus on those. and some of you are going to think, well, isn't that what the senior executive service was created for? this is, in respects, a back to the future strategy. because as we know, that vision has never been fully recognized. you can't just declare it, that was one of the flaws of the civil service reform act over three decades ago. they just sort of said it. this is about building the infrastructure to make it happen. to find those who have intergovernmental, even international perspectives. you can't just say we want you, and they'll magically appear. so we'd even go so far as to create a sixth executive core qualification. as you know, opm has five, all of which focus on leading an agency. we'd create a sixth that says leading the enterprise. we'd even make it mandatory. maybe not for all executive positions, but certainly for those involved in the strategies we're talking about. and we'd create an enterprise executive resources board. every agency has an erb. it's chaired by the deputy secretary or some other senior official equivalent. they're the ones that move the chess pieces around making sure that the leadership pipeline is robust, that they have the talent, the succession pool, but also to make sure that the career talent is in the right place doing the right jocks. but those are agency centric and, frankly, most agencies look at their core executives as their property. you need an enterprise be resources board that's going to look at at least some subset as corporate resources, make sure they're developed so they have that corporate perspective. the military has done this for now almost three decades with their version of joint duty. the intelligence community, something i was involved in, has five years ago made this a mandatory prerequisite for senior, executive ann of at least a year of duration or more. that's what gets you that perspective, helps you build those relationships that cut across those cylinders of excellence. and be an eerb -- we apologize for the acronyms -- but an eerb is the mechanism. the pmc, we'd also put career executives on that eerb. that's the body that would actually insure that enterprise executives were there to support goal leaders. >> and the, one of the things i mentioned before was the support that the goal leaders are going to need in evaluating their portfolio. and we want these goal leaders to really look at the president and look at the office of management and budget and say i'm not getting what i need, or i have what i need, but i would like to make some changes in this portfolio. here are some programs that are working really well. i've got some programs that are underperforming. i want to eliminate this program, and i want to invest doubly in this program because this is the one that's really succeeding. i think this is a challenge for government. we don't always know which programs are really showing the result and which ones aren't. and i know a lot of people are paying a lot of attention to how we measure be performance better. we would propose providing the goal leaders with more support with this regard by establishing an independent office of evaluation either in the eop or in omb, but we want it to have the very clear directive of supporting the goal leaders to say i will help you figure out if your portfolio is succeeding and which programs inside are helping drive that success. so we want this to be staffed with big data expertise, and we want these career -- to be led by a career on a seven-year term. >> and you'll notice what's not in that title, it's not an office of program evaluation. again, that's that bottom-up, piece-part perspective. this is about outcomes, enterprise outcomes, presidential priority, common mission areas, etc. all right, we've talked about how to improve the effectiveness of government in accomplishing its big goals and important missions. let's switch tracks a little bit now and talk about how an enterprise approach can make government more efficient. so we've got a couple of strategies that we think will do that, leading off with information technology. if there was ever a common function be, it's i.t. the networks, the data center, the cloud, the licenses, all of those things, every agency has an enterprise resource plan. but they define enterprise as the agency. while omb has made great strides in making sure each agency consolidates its licenses and data centers, what we haven't done as much of and what we would argue is look at enterprise with a capital e. interagency data centers, common clouds, true enterprise-wide software licenses so that you can leverage the government's great buying power. we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. and, again, i.t. as a portfolio of services run by a goal leader, supported by career enterprise executives to drive these things horizontally across all agencies. >> and another place where we really feel like on the efficiency side there are already some very strong things happening in the area of shared services, and we should commend anybody in the room that's working on these issues. a lot of good stuff is happening. but again, we see an opportunity to take this to scale. a lot of the shared services is still happening at the agency level and, again, it's the same thing, how do -- you know, let's look at it from an agency level, and that's a great start. but how can we take that across the enterprise? you know, the first lobs were created in 2004 to do payroll, and some of them were transactional operations. but there is an opportunity to move beyond transactional and provide shared services in writing your job description or helping you get ready for promotion decisions and more of the, you know, more sophisticated personnel actions. and, of course, this administration has done a good job to say there are opportunities to use shared services in the finance and accounting areas as well and is are drive anything that direction. so what we're really, again, encouraging is not just at the agency level, look across the enterprise. air force has done this well. it's consolidated almost all of its personnel support services for 500,000 people. irs is doing it for 100,000 people that are geographically diverse, and 800,000 civilians covered by the same hr information system. so it is happening, and it can be done more so. >> that's the theme here, more so. [laughter] this is a glass half full report. almost everything we've talked about has been started, and it's all about taking it to scale. this is another good example, strategic sourcing. gsa and ofpp, the office of federal procurement policy, are driving this. there's even a strategic sourcing council. we want to put it into second, third and fourth gear. there are four common functions that that strategic sourcing council has teed up, things like domestic parcel delivery. the efficiency is there that can be achieved with government's massive buying power -- think a costco on steroids -- the efficiencies are just off the charts if we just push the edge of that envelope. so a great start, but we think more and with both strategic sourcing, looking at those common commodities that everybody uses and everybody buys, i'll give you a great example that gene dodaro's staff found, cleaning products. every agency buys cleaning products, paper towels. they found one example where one agency paid $30 for a case of pape or towels and another paid $60. that's not quite as exciting as a $700 toilet seat, but it's still pretty exciting. [laughter] and strategic sourcing strategy applied across the enterprise would help squeeze the those prices down and get a better deal for the taxpayer. >> as we have more transparent pricing data. so just giving insight into what did you pay, what did i pay and beyond just the surface level, but on more sophisticated contracts as well. just sharing. >> i have to tell you, i had this experience literally yesterday afternoon where we're working on a bid, and there are some parts of the government that make pricing data and other buying patterns public and others that don't. that forces us to sharpen our pencils. if we know what our competitors are doing, with other going to sharpen -- we're going to sharpen our pencils, and the alternative taxpayer profits. >> hopefully, you guys are familiar with the partnership's mission, good government starts with good people. and that they, too, need to be managed at the enterprise level and not at the agency level. and so, you know, our feeling is that today's civil service is not adequate to support the civil service. civil servants. and it hasn't been upgraded for 40 years, but the nature of work is dramatically different, and career patterns are dramatically different, and the system doesn't support that. we are actually working on another report that we'll release later this year with a lot of nitty-gritty details that i won't get into today. >> this is the movie trailer, right? [laughter] >> but, you know, this is a -- we really, you know, believe that we've got to take a more enterprise approach. we'd like to see opm develop a strategic human capital plan for those occupations that all agencies seem to be struggling with. so, for example, s.t.e.m.. how can we look across and instead of, you know, i'm at ag and ron's at homeland security and we both need biologists and we're fighting for the same people, how can we would be together to get -- work together to get a great pool and bring them onboard? so we really would like to see that a happen, so we'd like to start with this, you know, on the human capital plans for these occupations that we're all fighting each other for, like cybersecurity professionals. and then we'll come back to you with a vision for what the civil service needs to look like, but we want it to be a more agile system that is market sensitive and promotes the ability to move in and out of the system more easily. so -- >> the system so old that most agencies, many, have tried to cut their own deal with congress, get their own flexibilities. i'll plead guilty to that in three different agencies. and the net result is haves and have nots, fractures and fissures. this is the glue that holds the enterprise together and, again, this is the movie trailer. you're going to see something far more detailed in a month or two. so those are our nine strategies, an enterprise approach that we think will make the government more effective and efficient, and now we're going to hear from some experts. so, max, over to you. thanks, everybody. [applause] .. in my view api will also add he is on my board. but thad will comoderate. i will follow in his wake. but, one of the things i wanted to note, he told the "washingtonian" magazine that he uses music as inspiration for his writing and his speeches and i want him to know when we were working on this report we were listening to sister sledge's, we are family. so, we are family, dhs, dod, dot, something like that. i'm not a singer as you can tell, but you get the idea. so thank you very much. we also have beth mcgrath, who is laughing at me right now, who is an extraordinary leader in her own right at the defense department. when you think about the scale that dod has to confront, the challenges of bringing together its disparate elements, that's really her job and it give as sense, i think the real sense what this kind of effort really takes. so it is great to have her here as well. we have gene didero, who is sitting here. so much what we're talking about today really has been driven by the fabulous that gao does. and, you know, all of the reports identifying duplication, and as ron discussed earlier the collaboration that already exists is so important. one of our observations is that we have a system of a lot of different cylinders of excellence. in part we don't have anything besides gao which is frankly part of the legislative branch that actually consequentially looks across the whole enterprise and that is one of the real challenges and that is why we propose the evaluation office and more beefed up residents management council. gene, we very much glad to have you here and appreciate your engagement in this effort. by last no least, challenge this gentleman faces but rafael boros, who has, the job of knitting together, you know, the last great reorganization effort that we had here with the department of homeland security. as the undersecretary of management there he comes to that job with a very deep, set of experiences and he is doing some terrific work there. so, both with rafael and beth we'll get the perspective of the immense job it takes to integrate intragovernment, intraagency and i'm looking forward to it. so if you all want to come up we'll start with that and ask some questions of the we will open this up to the audience as well. so be thinking about what you want to hear from them directly as well. thank you. so, thad, you start us off. >> thanks for being here this morning. gene, i will put you on the spot right away here. we talk a lot about complexity and the growing need to look beyond the authorities, jurisdictions, abilities of one particular agency to solve complex problems and the need to network and collaborate. you guys actually produce empirical data that led to some of these conclusions. you want to make general comments about the state of the world the government is operating in from your view? >> sure, thad. there are at least two main drivers, why i think it is really important to focus on the enterprise level. if you look at high-risk list we produce every year at beginning of each new congress. we've been doing this since 1990. since 2000 most of the areas we added have been areas and weaknesses that cross agency boundaries. whether it is modernizing the financial regulatory system, managing and sharing of terrorist-related information. ron mentioned overseeing the food safety program. modernizing disability programs. most recently we added limiting the federal government's exposure to, by better managing climate change risk. all these areas require multiple agencies. what we found as we're looking across the federal government, as max mentioned, we have a broad scope, there really isn't effective means to be able to manage these programs. so we've been trying through the high-risk list to high heat these areas of vulnerability. i think it is very important. we need multiple age is to solve very complex problems and need partnerships beyond the federal level with the state, and local level and cooperation internationally in many areas. we've been trying to highlight this i think it is more urgent with the fiscal pressures. with the budget control acts targets, in effect by 2023 discretionary spending as a percentage of gross domestic product will be lowest in 50 years. i think urgencies and problems and fiscal pressures call for a change in the paradigm. >> if we take the level of complexity in the current fiscal environment as entering arguments i would be interested what rafael and beth think about when they approach that in their jobs and they both operate in very large organizations with autonomous components and their own budgets. this issue of mission execution and mission support across those intragovernmental stovepipes can be quite a challenge but i look forward to your views. >> so, thank you. and appreciate you all coming here today and sponsored bit partnership to bring this conversation together. i've been in the federal government now for 25 years. so i sort of not only seen the movie but been in the movie. i think for all of that time, and i do think it is incredibly important to have the right perspective on i will say the approach to these very challenging, call them opportunities that we have. i think that the strategy, clarity on strategy is probably the almost the most important thing. we talk a lot about the silos of excellence. i think what we were referring to them and the department of defense certainly has many different components within it. each with its own mission, but at the end of the day, you know, department really does, i'll just say act as an enterprise. and with the, active guard and reserve, with our military component and our civilian, we're about just over 3 million people. if you take all of our numbers and where we are all around the world, and you know, we are the 16th largest country in the world. and so, when you talk about the enterprise from a defense perspective, it is massive. then add the rest of the federal government and say, what is the best way to manage and approach, you know, trying to hit some of these strategic outcomes that we're talking about and it really is, you know, a heavy lift that starts with strategy and clarity of outcome. what outcome are you trying to achieve and how do you do it? i mean simply put that's what we're talking about but i think when we focus too much around the organizational aspects of it and not around the outcomes and that you might lose the perspective. you get too caught up in the organizational dialogue and you sort of forget. you started conversation in the first place, which is why the things like high-risk area are very helpful because they highlight areas, not necessarily organizations but what outcome are you trying to achieve. and then obtain the strategic alignment associated with that. and i know we'll have a lot more opportunity for me to, i'll say, expand upon the approach we take within the defense department, certainly on the support side, we do take an enterprise perexecutive that we look both horizontally and vertically. we execute in a very horizontal way. we are end to end. finance touches logistics. finance touches hr. we can not just look at stovepipes to function. we have to look how we do what we do, what outcome we're trying to achieve and what means and mechanisms we use to get there. >> okay. appreciate beth's comments. pick up on a sort of related point. it is important, clearly to start with the focus on what are outcomes you want to generate. also i think it is really important to have a good perspective how you want to look at the enterprise. i would say that often times we fall into the trap and i do as well, that we, when we talk about enterprise we only talk about sort of a headquarters view. a very washington-centric view of organizations. at dhs, i often tell people, how do you look at us at dhs? do you look what we do at headquarters and extrapolate from that and make a determination how well we're integrated? or do you look at us from sort of a field, point of contact with the delivery of our services and look at that and extrapolate from that? i would say if you look at us from the outside in, you see a much better enat that greated organization than we're given credit for. the men and women of the coast guard, of customs and border protection, i.c.e., fema, et cetera, work extremely well, not only with reach other but with their federal partners in their local environments. where we don't work well together is here in washington, at headquarters. you have to define the problem. where is the problem that is inhibiting us to act in an enterprise way? when i travel out to the field, i told this story before, i go out in the field, most people don't understand what an undersecretary is, and that's okay but when they sort of figure it out, they go budget and that sort of stuff. the question i often get, why is it so difficult for us to do things here in the field? why is it that the coast guard and i.c.e. and fema, et cetera, if we want to share resources, or if we want to find innovative ways, if i spend money on coast guard but i can share that with i.c.e. and fema and vice versa, they always say, who gets in our way is you guys at headquarters. can you fix that? so, when i think about sort of fixing the enterprise, first we've got to identify, what is the enterprise we're talking about? if it is just here in washington, just those of us who sit here in the nation's capitol, then we've got a number about challenges. we have a very fragmented management structure throughout all of the cabinet agencies. none of us look-alike. and i think that's a, that's a tremendous challenge in trying to find a harmonious way to do business as sort of the federal or the at the enterprise level. can it be done? absolutely. i think we're doing things at homeland security quite frankly don't often get a lost attention but are beginning to knit the organization together but very, very important to sort of set sort of timelines and expectations clear. you know, you can not do this overnight. you probably can't do it. in a year or two. it takes time. and one of the things we've got to have is sort after temporal sense. how long is it going to take to do these things? what are the right things to be looking at sort of year in, year out, that demonstrate progress? there's a tendency here very much to look at, for example, the fine work of this report and say, well, if you can't do it within six months it is not worth doing. you really have to have a long view. it takes time, it takes efforts. that's where we're finding in many of the federal agencies. we actually get along and cooperate much better thanker what given credit for. >> can i jump in on that one? first fair warning to thad serving both as comoderator as far as i'm concerned participant too. you may get a couple questions thrown your way. rafael, i think that's a great jumping off point. you talk about some things you're working on. are there one or two things you think you find as bright spots inside dhs that might have broader applicability in the u.s. government. >> two things come in mind. my name is rafael, you gave me a handheld mic. i can't talk with one hand. this is really hard. this is really hard. >> there we go. >> put it here. can you hear me. really hard to talk with, having rafael talk with just one hand. two things i would point to. this is the first time i've seen gene laugh. this is great [laughter] >> i'm italian. i'm having the same problem. >> two things i would point to, max, very quickly. for us, one of the key, and clearly i borrowed a lot of this from my experience in the private sector, was to create an enterprise risk view of the way we conduct business at dhs. we created an organization to help us do that, but it really was about streeting environment in all of dhs, to be focused on risk. we need to look at our acquisition programs as investmented. very, very important distinction because these are the investments, that the taxpayer make in us to be able to deliver in our case homeland security benefits. and we should treat them, we should act as stewards of those investments. but creating this enterprise risk view, to be able to think about what are factors that contribute to a very elevated risk scenario, and what can you do to mitigate and manage that, and also, how do you drive the probability of success up. that is is part of the nomenclature. we talk invests. we view on programs based on a risk matrix. we evaluate risk ratios and tools we're building out. but this is quiet but what served to do this create ad common language within the department, where we all talk about acquisition programs in the same way. we use similar tools, departmentwide. are they perfect? of course not. it will take time, to build these out but are they useful? absolutely. >> thank you. >> maybe a more specific example of that because i think this is really intriguing line we're on to here. we talked in our deliberations leading up this report about carrots and sticks and how you manage autonomous components. i was reminded during the conversation of the recent intelligence community information technology efficiency program or isip what it is called that seeks to collapse a common domains and interfaces for people's work tops but that was accompanied with pretty severe budget reductions to make sure it was carried out and saved and personnel costs could be -- [inaudible] i'm interested in your collective opinions how you manage that dynamic your department. >> i think having the right balance of both carrots and sticks is important but i also think that just, sort of transparency is key. so often people think they're being penalized. i think we need to sort of break that cultural stigma. it really is about, how do we optimize the investment of the organizations to accomplish the mission we're asked to accomplish. and a great way of really putting everything on the table is actually putting everything on the table in a transparent way. so that you have a leadership forum that says, you know, what do we as an organization need to accomplish how we're going to get there? what investments are we going to make? it will mean we need to shed some of the stuff we already have. the nomenclature we use in defense, at least on the business side is to, is to establish a more simplified business environment. i want to invest in the future but in order to do that, i need to sort of shed some of the status quote and tell people, it won't be, they won't be left without capability. it is that we're replacing sort of this old antiquated with the new. in establishing, you know, call them sunset dates. taking the budget for those legacy systems to push the organization, to a more modern state. but, there's a trust factor that must be, i'll say established or overcome because, we are so accustomed culturally, you know, to holding on and information is power and my information is mine and it is not yours. i mean we have to get over that, both within each of the respective organizations and also at the federal level, and we, load everything in a common tool and a allow everyone to see it. so army sees navy, navy sees air force. this is about us. not us versus them. it is about the collective enterprise stepping forward. we can't afford to each have our own, pick something, you know, it might be, i'll say the right thing to do so establish an enterprise solution for a particular business area, or maybe data standards are the way to achieve the outcome. really depends on the, where do you want to go, how fast you want to get there and what is the business case that drives you. i think it all starts with transparency and trust. >> in addition to that i would say a very key component to this is discipline. one of the things we lack is organizational discipline. trust, transparency, absolute key requisites. in order to be successful you need to establish the discipline to be able to execute in a way that is repeatable and sustainable and certainly that's an area, where, for example, gao is very helpful to all federal agencies because they point out just not obvious missteps, et cetera but they also provide recommendations that say, here is a course of action. here are some steps that you can take. but, what is really needed discipline to execute against that. that takes time. so, the carrot and stick is a very interesting question. what do you do to influence behavior, to control or target or focus behavior and incentives are important because, in our case, meaning in the federal government, we're living in a very constrained fiscal time right now. let me just say one thing, about, the cliche we often use we need be a i believe to do more with less. i don't buy that at all. i don't buy it at all. i always say we have to do the right thing with less. this notion that we'll do everything that we do today, we'll find a way to do it with less, pardon me, says that everything is equally important. and we're just going to find ways to do everything we currently do in our portfolio and do it, cheaper. absolutely wrong way to think about it in my mind. we have to be able to again make those choices which requires discipline to say what are the high value add, where is the low risk associated with the investment and where do you have sort of very low value, very high-risk, dump it, okay? can i get more plain than that? dump it. stop doing it. it is not just in our case just within dhs. this is where i think an enterprise view is very, very helpful. there are things we do across the enterprise in the federal government we've got to look and say, you know, it is over. it is time to do something else. >> have to use one of my favorite words, transparency. i used to have a motto when i was working transparency of information breeds self-correcting behavior. i think that is kind of where you were going. i like to talk about transparency in two years. one for you, gene and if i could. you recently convened a meeting talking about fiscal liabilities not included on our budget or our balance sheet that are pending that don't have a lot of transparency associated with it. i hope you can summarize for everybody that is aggravating circumstance in the fiscal environment. for the two managers i would like to talk about transparency of data and how that is an enabler and doing functional integration and cloud architecture and data consolidation and so forth. but, gene. >> in terms of transparency on fiscal exposures to the federal government, something we've been working on for a long time now, and we've worked to include more information in the consolidated financial statements of the u.s. government to show those fiscal exposures long term. most of them are not highlighted long term in the budget. only limited time when you look out. we've been looking at long term and have concluded even with the recent changes in the budget control act, the american taxpayer relief act, which helped in the short term, the federal government is still on a long-term, fiscally unsustainable path. and those financial statements have shown the long-term, obligations of, for medicare and social security, social insurance programs. but there is still a lot more that needs to be done that, the to flesh out the exposures to the federal government both on a the budgeting side as well as on the financial reporting side. on the budgeting side i will give one classic example is that we only budget for emergencies and disasters that will be 500 million or less much. most of us know that the number of disasters and the amount of money hasn't been there. so which means that it doesn't get budgeted for and comes in supplemental appropriations. 80% of it over the past few years. that just adds to the deficit. there is not enough transparency making decisions up front and budgetary process and long-term consequences of some of those decisions. and then financial reporting has gotten a lot better. i'm very pleased about that but there is still continued evolution need sod that policymakers understand both the long term and short term consequences. >> we're dealing with fiscal liabilities of shortfalls. national flood insurance program from hurricane katrina. gene is following that closely. so transparency and data. >> i love them both, especially when they're together. and the, i mentioned both on through the major defense acquisition programs or major i'll say weapons system, over time we've gotten more transparency not only on cost schedule and performance of those programs but also on vendor performance. that is also a very interesting discussion because i think that if we all, again, government and contractors have the data on the table and clarity again of outcomes, performance objectives, those kinds of things we actually collectively are very much stronger, working together to achieve the delivery of those capabilities. on the business side, we know, we, it is the i.t. and business side is $7 billion annually, which is small compared to the overall defense budget but still is a very big number but in order to achieve both transparency of investments and, you know, to go after the stovepipe nature and parochialism associated with the business environment because those tend to be sort of not necessarily the, at the forefront of everyone's mind yet those are things that eat our lunch at the end of the day. if payments are not right for personnel or vendors aren't paid or we're paying interest penalties or you name it, the back office is not the most exciting place to be but we spend a bunch of money there and so, i get to see it every day. and so, you know what we've done is create an integrated business environment we're looking at all of it together. so it is our strategy from a business perspective. how does it align to you, the national security mission that the defense department has and how do we make sure we have the right number of, pick something, financial system, learning management, hr systems. because you can really achieve process optimization in fishcy and effectiveness so when our military members are deployed overseas, their paychecks are right and they are right every time but it doesn't, i mean there's a thoughtful process that has to happen. so what we do is ensure we have the data transparent to everybody. it is not that, again i just mentioned, the army and air force, everybody can see everybody's stuff. it is not because i'm looking to sort of play the ah-ha game or gotcha, but it is how we as an enterprise move forward in a way that makes sense and optimizes the taxpayer's investment. that is what this is all about. it's a cultural challenge, cultural challenge, to expose all of the data. and i say, hey, it's not about, i'm going to highlight where you do bad. i'm going to say, hey, is there a there there that we as an organization ought to take action? if the answer is yes, let's figure out collectively what that is. it is establishing and maintaining coalitions across the enterprise, aimed at a particular outcome. i think i've said it, 10 times here. i think clarity in outcomes, clarity of purpose, the, i think max mentioned the baseball, he used the nationals as an example. i like basketball, a lot better. there are fewer players you have to keep track of. but, and but it's an active game but everybody has the role on the court. everybody understand what the contribution is supposed to be. that is what a team sport is all about. that is what we're talking about, what the outcome and role of each individual organizational component, agency, whatever it is. you have the disciplined approach to accountability, you know. if you're supposed to, you know, achieve, x, are you doing it? if yes, great, if not, why not? what needs to happen. it is all about how do you enable forward momentum and progress in a very transparent, accountable way? >> yes. >> yes. i love working with rafael. [laughing] >> it is really hard work to be able to get to this state because we all have organizations that have data, that has questionable integrity and we know that. so the question is, sort of that chicken and egg thing is, when do you have sufficient insight and clarity on the data before you can start using it? and, often times what we do, we say, well it's not clean so let's not use it. our view, what we did, which was a little, maybe aggressive and progressive, we recognized the data was a little dirty but we started accumulating it and building systems to be able to capture the data. the feeling if you expose the data, that would be greatest incentive for people to clean up the data. the is. put it in the sunlight and let they see. when they complain that doesn't accurately reflect the performance of my program, why is that? well the data is wrong. the data, if you start to clean up the data you're going to do it. we force them by putting it in, using transparency, openness that sharing of data and it created tremendous incentive over time. so i would say three years ago, maybe the fidelity of the data was roughly 30%. that's not good. today we're probably closer to about 80% or so. because of effort that has been undertaken to clean updateta. not perfect of the not 100% but useful enough to be able to start now making decisions. as a tool, to help us make decisions. now, let me just comment very quickly on these tools for decisions. one of the things we've got to control is our impulses around are these stats, stat meetings. this stat, that stat. pretty soon we'll have a stat stat meeting to judge the relevancy of stats. . . >> so this is terrific, and i want to turn it over to questions from the audience, but one quick one for you, thad, not so quick, maybe. want to come back to a statement lara made which is we see government operating in a great enterprise fashion when we have crises. and you might look at hurricane sandy or the, you know, the work that you did with katrina, and it comes back perhaps to some of the things, you certainly have claire clarity of objective, but what are the other elements that make government work well as an integrated whole, as an enterprise in a crisis environment which we need to see translated into regular course of business. >> >> well, i believe that the right way to run government is the right way to run government. i think the only difference has to do with time compression, scale, media coverage, all the things that create pressure that can galvanize a response or make a whole-of-government response mandatory so there's no, government has no recourse but to get their act together, if you will. we shouldn't have to do it with a gun to our head. that could be a immediate. >> gun or -- media gun or whatever. i found that the tenets of unity of effort, whole-of-government response, transparency contribute not only towards an effective crisis response, but are excellent principles for day-to-day operations. the two best examples i can give you from the oil spill is the decision to flow that video live from the well. that was painful to watch, but it was necessary for the american public to understand the gravity of the situation and that we were dealing with an uncontrolled well 5,000 feet below the surface with no human access. it was closer to apollo 13 than hurricane katrina. it's also necessary that we make everything transparent as possible, so we took, actually, a common operating picture with a global information system on where the projections for the oil were at and actually gave -- [inaudible] fuel platform.gov. i think those work in a crisis, but they can't work on a day-to-day environment. but you've got to create the infrastructure that makes that happen rather than mobilizing troops to go to metaphorical war to do that, and that looks at interoperable systems where the data can be shared, it means taking a look at not only stovepipe systems, but systems where you have proprietary software that handcuffs your data. and this gets back to scale and shared services, having a common set of standards so when you go out and acquire that data, you can make it liquid and get a return on investment from that data when you need. >> and if i can just pile on for a second to what thad said, in a crisis mode we can galvanize and overcome policy barriers so quickly. and i, i often wonder why does it take so long for us to breakthrough the policy barriers that exist sort of day to today when i know we can do it, we've demonstrated we can work through, breakthrough the policy barriers that exist. we have highly regulated government. it is a government of checks and balances which is intended to be a good thing. but at the end of the day, it does slow us down in order to, in our ability to execute. and i do think, again, clarity of purpose and with a time box, you know, i want to get to this by this time frame really helps then identify those barriers. and there are so many policy barriers that exist across government. and i'm not saying it's sort of malice aforethought, it's just people locally decide either on the standards they're going to use, the policies you're going to drive which makes sort of the whole-of-government, transparency initiative, if you will, that much more challenging. if i just look in defense, you know, we have so many things in the defense department, and it's not because someone said, oh, let's figure out how to make this organization as complex as we possibly can and localize every solitary decision, it's just how things happened over time. and it really is about looking at your total environment, understanding what you have and then challenging the status quo constantly, tenaciously, transparently. about, you know, how do we move forward if our quest for -- in our quest for, again, the outcome we're trying to achieve. so i think the, you know, how we can mobilize and move in times of crisis really should be the benchmark that we then measure ourselves and our day to day. because i think the art of the possible exists. we've proven we can do it. it's just applying that to other areas. >> it's a powerful point, beth, and you're doing it within agencies as well. i think in addition to clarity objective that you see in a crisis, i think the very senior leadership focus is another critical element driving the organization. but, again, we start in our report today with the notion that you need that plan which is, in essence, clarity of purpose that is backed by the very top leadership. and then that's where you begin, and you've got create all the infrastructures. and the points you made about transparency, etc., are really, really powerful. i want to make sure that we hear from anyone here who has a question. hard for me to believe that -- we've got one right here. here we go. sir. i think you've got a microphone coming to you, and it might help since we've got some media coverage as well. >> thanks. we talk about crisis management, i think that's a great point getting back to the report that we just heard about earlier. so when we're looking at setting up an enterprise-wide approach to government, so what's the crisis that will get us to that point? we heard how things work well at katrina, and so is it the budget situation? is it competing against china? is it climate change? so i'm just wondering, what's going to be the tipping point for us to take on what you outlined in the report? >> so that's a good slow pitch over the plate here. [laughter] try to figure out who most wants to -- >> no, i play basketball. >> okay. [laughter] so that's a pass the rib here. >> no, i think -- frankly, i'll start. the fiscal environment, you know, to say it can't be ignored doesn't even come close to, i mean, we're all with certainly feeling the impacts of the furloughs within the defense department, the, you know, the operations and maintenance budget, the things that we just cannot afford to do any longer i think really has put focus on really assessing not only sort of how we do what we do, but the things we are doing to the point rafael made earlier. it's just, you know, we can't afford to do everything we've been doing. we really have to assess, you know, all the things we're asked to do and what can we afford to do in the budget environment. and if things sort of play out the way they're currently looking, you know, it tightens the, our ability even more. and so i think it is important to say with the top line projections the way they are and the missions that we respectively have across the government, you know, for national security what can we do within those top lines effectively. and then, you know, what can we no longer afford to do. so i think the fiscal environment really has been -- not that it will be, it has been and is -- a, i'll call it a terrific opportunity to be the galvanizing effect to really bring the whole of government but certainly at the agency level together. >> i think it's the common realization that why should it take one of those events to prompt this action. because i'll tell you, i tell everybody it's sum of all market failures. [laughter] you have a bureaucratic failure, two things happen. you lose discretion, and terms get dictated to you by the congress. this is organizational wellness. we ought to be about it, because you can do it on your own terms, or somebody can dictate it to you. >> i think there are a lot of factors, but the fiscal picture, i think, is the overriding backdrop that will create the pressure necessary to do this. you know, if you realize right now debt held by the public is over 70%, 73% n. the last 40 years, it's only been about 39%. so we're highly leveraged right now. going into a period of time when we're having a demographic wave going to hit the medicare and social security systems. between mow and 2029, every day on average 10,000 people will turn 65 in the united states. the percentage of people 65 or older will almost double during this period of time. and that will create enormous pressures beyond the more immediate fiscal pressures down the road. so that will be with us over the next several decades. and i believe that constant fiscal pressure will create the imperative for changes that would not have otherwise occurred. the other factor is that the government performance modernization act of 2010 requires now performance information to be made available to the public quarterly on a web site. there's a lot more information being made available. so this transparency that we're all talking about today is becoming more evident. there are pushes in the congress to require more transparency on federal spending, to take off on the examples that were in place on the recovery act, transparency that occurred there, recovery.gov. and so i think the push for transparency will continue. the fiscal pressures are going to be tremendous, and i think those two factors will be the overriding imperatives. >> here's a point i'd like to make then, i'll use a medical analogy, you know? let's suppose you go to the doctor, you're diagnosed with high cholesterol, all right? so what is going to be the approach to get well? are you going to take a staten and that's going to be your solution, or you're going to get well? you're going to change your diet, exercise, etc. my concern with sometimes focusing on very limited that, oh, we'll look for the magic pill. and if we're going to be successful, we've got to get well. and that means, you know, changing the way we behave, change our diet, changing our attitude. we've got to change the climate, quite frankly. we have got to move away from the current climate which continues to demoralize public service not just in this community, but around the country where it's okay to bash civil servants and lump them all together. it's incredibly demoralizing. at the same time, we're asking our public institutions to do more, to be responsive to the needs, we're trashing them at every moment we get. now, that just has to stop. people have to step up and say just enough. stop it. >> i can't resist adding my own -- you've offered a lot of compelling reasons, but i think part of the answer is it's not actually happening, it's not happening fast enough, and that's the reason why we've done this work and this report. there are a lot of good reasons, a lot of good things that are happening, but it needs to accelerate dramatically because we do face all kinds of issues from the fiscal pressures as well as the demands that we see in our own position globally. i mean, there's a lot of competition we face at a level that we've never had to address before, and that requires our public infrastructure, our government to top its game, and that's why the enterprise piece so important. got to be some other questions from folks. what else is on your mind? we've got an incredible panel here. any other thoughts you have? up front here and then we'll go back. and, please, if you wouldn't mind let us know who you are and where you work from, that would be terrific. thanks. >> bill -- [inaudible] i'm at the federal motor carrier safety administration, department of transportation. and in the report you had mentioned the idea of sharing funding across agencies for cross-cutting purposes which sounds very good. but we have the certain accountability, of course, to the congress which appropriates dollars to the department and to the subagencies for very specific purposes. and so we have this, you know, reporting back. does the report or address the need to bring congress into this so that if we are sharing funds, let's say from our agency with federal highway administration, national highway traffic safety administration for some shared, you know, issues that, you know, we don't get caught up underneath the wheels of, you know, some ada matters. >> right. and let me just jump in on that one only because it's specific to the report rather than general issues, so we're actually not advocating for a sharing of funds across agencies. what we're suggesting is that you can actually with the leadership of a goal leader, an individual who's looking across the set of portfolios that continue to exist within their current architecture, that you can have a better coordinated, collaborative approach to trying to achieve those clear objectives. so it's not that we see funds being moved from one accounting to another which, obviously, you can't do. by and large, almost every recommendation we make within this report is actually within the control of the executive branch as opposed to the larger civil service package we have later which is more legislative focused. this is really how do we do within the executive branch what we need to do across the organization to maximize that collaboration. now, we hope that we'll deliver also information about what's working, what's not better in a way that can influence congress to make funding decisions that will actually direct resources to where they're going to be most effective. but at the end of the day, those are, obviously, congress' choices. so we are careful about ada issues and more fundamentally, what are things that literally can be done now? as ron said earlier, this is all based on things that are happening. we're talking about building it across the whole enterprise. so, gene, please. >> i would say that the -- and i recognize the report's parameters they're putting around and for the executive branch, but in my opinion the concepts embodied in the report cannot be effectively implemented without better consultation and communication with the congress. we just released most recently our study of the initial implementation of the government performance results act modernization for 2010. and our conclusion, there was little meaningful evidence of effective consultation with agencies' strategic plans with the congress. there were explicit requirements added to the 2010 legislation to require more consultation, that consultation be reflected in the plans. the 1993 original act contemplated consultations with the congress, but they -- it wasn't happening on a consistent basis. so the requirements were heightened. and i think that it's just very important, talked about outcomes, rafael, thad, action and i, but you have to have common outcomes that include the congress in terms of making sure these are common objectives that we're all trying to achieve as a government. and that's the only way that you're going to get them funded properly over a period of time and have a effective oversight and meaningful achievements of everybody pulling together for common objectives and national priorities. >> thad, you wanted to -- >> let me know before i speak that one of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission that has not been acted on yet is the organization of congressional oversight, how you deal with these complex situations. i think that remains throughout as a question to be dealt with. that said, i think there are certain issues related to the economy act that guide how agencies work with each other and how money's exchanged where you might be able to tweak that. but through, and it's still called defense business operating funds, or do they have a new name for that? capital working funds, industrial funds, there are mechanisms whereby the funds could be allocated to achieve a greater scale, and as max said, there's no inhibition from doing that right now. in fact, i was going to ask rafael, there's currently an initiative inside the department of homeland security to actually move to shared services. that doesn't unpack the source of funds, it's how you acquire it. >> yeah. that's a great question. as you know several years ago, the plan for d. of homeland security was to build a large, completely integrated financial management system sort of end to end covering procurement, all of the functions. and that sort of the best metaphor for that, it just collapsed under its own weight. could not be financed, implements or organized in a way that made sense. so what is the new strategy, and, you know, i've been here now three and a half years, so almost three and a half years ago i remember going to omb and saying, look, i don't want to build an end-to-end system. there are good federal systems, there are good financial systems in the federal government, i just need to be able to call a may and say i want to go over here. help me do that. if you help me do that, i can refashion this strategy to implement a financial management system in the department using existing systems that are certified and good systems and then repair those that need to be repaired. here we are three and a half years later, and the strategy hasn't changed. i'm glad now that everybody's talking about shared services, but i still haven't got -- i still don't have a quick way, to use a sport metaphor which i don't pay much attention to anymore these days, to call a play and just go. there's, there's any number of road blocks and requirements and restrictions to just saying can i just go over there and buy my financial management services. and knit that together with this analytical tool that we're build being out anyway, and that'll tie all these systems together. so, thad, we're still waiting. [laughter] >> and i might adjust federal motor carriers, you can just cooperate. i know for a fact that the ports of entry between the united states and mexico, regulations by the federal motor carriers act are carried out by department of homeland security folks that do dual inspections at the same time. >> last question. jason miller, federal news radio. i'm glad the issue of congress came up, because i wanted to pull the string on what rafael borras was saying about not doing more because it's a silly cliche, and i happen to agree with that. but how -- so let me throw it open to gene but then move to everyone else on the panel. congress is the problem, and i can say that because i don't have to answer to them like you all do. [laughter] but how do you get congress to act? like, for instance, gao has reports of overlapping federal programs, senator coburn puts out his tweets saying we could get rid of sequestration if we did this, but nobody seems to be listening. start with jeep, -- start with gene and then move to ms. mcgrath and mr. boras and mr. allen, how do you guys deal with the overlap? i know, ms. mcgrath, you've been dealing with overlap in i.t. systems and that's been a bear to get consolidated a little bit. so i know it's kind of a complicated question. >> first of all, i would say clearly people are listening to the reports. we've included every year in our overlap and duplication report a scorecard of how well both the executive branch and the congress have acted on recommendations we've made to both branches. in this past year we reported something like a notable example for congress is they allowed one of the ethanol tax credits to expire that we said duplicated the renewable fuel standard. that tax credit was, had about, over $5 billion in revenue losses. so they've acted. the moving ahead for progress act, map 21 act, consolidate canned over 100 transportation programs and set more performance goals for the federal and state and local levels. so our report demonstrates there's actions that have been taken both by the congress and the executive branch. but there's a lot more that needs to be done, clearly. bills have been introduced to consolidate the employment training programs both in the house and the senate senate, and we've had a lot more inquiries and involvement with issues going forward. so i think clearly people are listening. i think the fiscal pressures are requiring, you know, people to pay more attention to these issues. and with the budget control act caps coming into place, i've noticed a much more interest on the part of a wider range of committees in the congress than we've seen in the first couple areas. so i, i'm encouraged by that. but i think there's a long way to go in order to deal effectively with these issues. and a good place to start in cases, and i've said this when i'm testifying before committees, there's a lot of commonnalty between the 14 cross-cutting priorities that the administration put forward under the gpra modernization act and our overlap and duplication report. for example, the scientific, technical engineering and math, the training programs, data center and consolidation strategic sourcing, and those areas are where both, you know, the gao reports and the administration has said that changes need to be made. and, you know, i'm encouraged more hearings, more joint hearings on congressional committees to deal with many of these issues. >> and i'm not sure i would encourage hearings. [laughter] but i would agree that i think there is a lot of interest, and i think from everybody to be honest with you. both certainly with the executive branch, with the legislative branch and, frankly, within our own organization. i can speak specifically to defense. i mean, we've been, say, looking at efficiency initiatives and various things over the last few years, but to do a sort of salami-sliced cut, to me, isn't the most effective way to really strategically go at effective reductions. and so what we're, what we have been doing is really seeing from a strategic perspective, well, what do we have and then what is the best way to reduce spending, increase or optimize a particular area. so it's much more strategic in nature. i think it all starts with knowing what you have. there's a lot of unknown unknowns. so when gao does reports, we bring with everything together in a very transparent way. it really educates the population into sort of what do we have, where do opportunities exist to reduce duplication or redundancy across the enterprise be it the federal government or within a component. we have found that, again, in the business space the transparency -- jason, thank you for mentioning the i.t. systems systems -- but some of it was just understanding what we have and data standards. at the end of the day, if you're not using standard data across your organization, you can only get so far. and so these practices that have been in existence for a long time take some time to then move from sort of very flexible data to more standard data. and it requires investment in strategy. and so, you know, we really have been using the tools like architecture to say, hey, why do we need -- i'll pick one -- ten learning management systems in the department of defense? surely, we could use fewer. and the answer's probably, yes. then it's getting at, well, how do we all define those things? i can tell you, we have ten, and all ten are different, and it's really at getting the strategy behind a rationalized, simplified business environment, doing it in a much more strategic way. but it really is starting with an understanding of what do you have, put your arms around it. there's a ton of interest, pick a place either at the congress, within the executive branch or at the agency level. i think we really are trying to find out how do we optimize in a way that just doesn't break things. i think we're all to the point that we've done cuts sort of across-the-board cuts. to do more across-the-board cuts you then break things. so you have to be much more strategic, much more thoughtful around what do you do or not do or how you do things differently going forward. >> whether you know, a lot of these gao reports are very complex and very difficult to understand, and if they're taken too quickly or too easily, what can happen and oftentimes either members of congress or other overseers will draw conclusions that are very limited. and then set, create a set of expectations that are off times inconsistent with -- often times inconsistent with even the conclusions reached by gao. so what i've tried to do, what i've done is when many times -- gene, i can't remember how many times we've done it, probably a half a dozen or more times we have gone up after a report like the high risk report with gao where i've invited gao, we go together and brief the congressional committee staff so they can hear from the both of us at the same time. so it's not, you know, certainly not an argument, it's not -- it's just a clearing of expectations, an understanding so that the staff gets a really good sense of where we agree. and often times we agree with most of the recommendations, all the all the relations, and where we either have a different point of view or would like clarity from gao, the staff has an opportunity to hear that realtime. i think that's a wonderful example. i don't know how many other agencies and departments do that. but i think, quite frankly, i'm very proud of that. and i'm very, very pleased and proud that xao sits -- that gao sit there is with us. because often times that's breaking expectations that we can't sit together or talk together, we have to be viewed as adversaries. and we walk in really arm in arm because we're both dedicated to exactly the same thing, good government. it's very simple. you know, thad talked about oversight. beth and i were on a panel a couple of months ago with chairman and ceo of general motors, and he was talking about all the things that he did to be able to turn gm around, and one of the things that he'd mentioned was that i believe it was some 28, 29 committees and subcommittees of board, board of directors. and when he became chairman and ceo, he just wiped them out. and i said, wow, we've got at homeland security about 108 committees and subcommittees, and all i can do is shut my eyes. [laughter] >> jason, i'm going to resist the urge to answer you by the negative synergy between the lack of campaign finance reform and redistricting. [laughter] let's talk about transparency for a minute. a lot of people don't realize this, i'm a recovering budget officer, by the way. there is an asymmetry right now between the amount of people and data and congressional justifications that are generated either for authorization bills or budget and the amount of staff that can absorb that on the hill. i've had very personal conversations with appropriations clerks that say we have a certain amount of time to absorb this significant amount of material and then position ourselves either for an authorization bill or an approps bill. i'll give you the example of homeland security because i'm particular with it, we have never rationalized the structure between the components that were moved over in this compartments in 2003. so a general lack of comparability between operating capital and personnel costs across components that would lead you to be able to do the things rafael wants to do, and i know he's working on that. if you go to the hill, they say they know that needs to be done too, but it has to be done by the components where it becomes in their self-interest to create greater transparency to get more coherent response from congress. >> so, look, this has been a fabulous conversation. i very much appreciate all of you, gene, beth, rafael, thad, thank you. if we can get a great round of applause. [applause] sort of last word from me would be take that report and create more push to see more interplease approach in government -- enterprise approach in government. so thank you for your time. >> tonight on c-span2 at 6:30 p.m., the national press club's press freedom committee holds a discussion on whether government public affairs offices are really a help for open government. the panel includes journalists and media communications firms. >> booktv in prime time continues this week. tonight after "the communicators" we'll bring you authors from book fairs and festivals. at 8:30 p.m. eastern we begin with oscar goodman. he talks about his autobiography, "being oscar." after that we'll go to this year's chicago tribune printers row literary festival to hear on the memoir "the cooked seed." then on to bookexpo america in new york city with erica jong who talks about female sexuality and feminism in "fear of flying." and we finish with author and radio talk show host larry elder at the los angeles times' festival of books as he discusses his memoir about his troubled relationship with his father in "dear father, dear son." booktv in prime time all this week on c-span2. >> of all the handsome young officers that were surrounding my grandmother, who was 23 years old at the time but very beautiful. my grandfather, he'd been trying to get to her and talk to her, but he couldn't because of all the handsome young naval officers around. they all rushed upstairs to do whatever they were trained to do and left her standing there. well, she knew her father was up there, so she fell in behind them. my grandfather fell in behind her going up to the stairs to the deck. they came back saying don't let know ms. gardener find out her father is dead. when she heard that, my grandmother paymented right back into the -- fainted right back into the arms of the president. he caught her tenderly and gently. >> this week, our original series "first ladies: influence and image" looking at the public and private lives of our nation's first ladies. anna harrison to eliza johnson, weeknights all this month at 9 eastern on c-span. and during tonight's program, join in the conversation with colonial williamsburg historian taylor steormer at facebook.com/c-span. >> now from the george w. bush institute, two panels from a july forum on immigrants' contributions to america with first discussion on immigration and state economies. stephen moore from the "wall street journal," a labor economist from the federal reserve bank of dallas, and u.s. hispanic chamber of commerce president javier poll mar rez in the hourlong event. >> wonderful. thank you, jim, for the introduction. thank you, ambassador, thank you, immigrants who are joining us today, and thank you to our audience both here and also watching us online. this is being live streamed on bushcenter.org, and we also want to certainly acknowledge those people who are joining us, so thank you. as the ambassador mentioned, we're here in texas. this is an especially relevant topic to texas. it's relevant, we're finding, to america nationwide but especially so here in the lone star state. and it's an interesting comparison. so our project here is the 4% growth project. we're trying to get u.s. gdp about double the rate that it is now. in recent times we've been growing at about 2-2.5% a year. we think that's too slow, and we know we can do better. one way is because in the past we've grown a lot faster. we've grown at least 4% about a third of the years over the past 60 years. we also know that 4% growth is possible because in states like it's where we are today, they grow at 4% or even more. texas grew, i believe, at 4.8% in the last calendar year, that's the latest data. if you compare that to the u.s. growth which i said, again, is between 2-2.5%, so we know we can do better, and we know there are lessons out will in america that can show us how we can do better. we're here today to talk about immigration as well in addition to growth. and as the ambassador said, we know there's some sort of relationship between immigration and growth. and we really want to hone in on that. in texas it's home to 4.2 million immigrants, to give a little perspective. there are more immigrants in texas than there are people in oklahoma. [laughter] so i find that's a good thing to -- another thing that texas can brag about. texas, so the 4.2 million people, that means that about 10% of all immigrants living in america are here nor texas. -- here in texas, the third most of any state behind california and new york, almost, essentially tied with new york. and be so that means -- so that means that 16% of the texas population is an immigrant. that means about one in six -- that's quite a bit. about one in six people you see here in texas will be an immigrant. and in america it's about one in eight. if you look here in dallas county where we're seated now, it's about one in four. so really, i think, we couldn't be at a much better place in america to have this discussion right now. and i'm joined by a fabulous panel of experts both on texas and nationally, and they're going to enlighten us and sort of unpack this relationship between growth and immigration here in texas. so i'll start with steve moore. many of you have probably seen him on tv, he's an editorial board member of "the wall street journal." he writes about immigration, taxes, fiscal policy and many things. i'm sure you've read his articles, you've seen him. he's been an advocate for years and a scholar on immigration even before he was at "the wall street journal" and we're just very privileged to have you here, steve, so thank you for coming. >> thank you, matt. >> something that you do well is you look state by state a lot. you do things we like here. you talk about growth and you look at the states and the evidence. so which states are growing, and what role is immigrants, you know, what are they playing in state economies around the country? >> well, you know, first of all, when amity called me and asked me to come out here to dallas to speak at the bush institute, i just leapt at the opportunity because i'm just such an admirer of george w. bush. and so thank you for the invitation to come. jim, you kind of stole my thunder a little bit when you talked about 4% growth. i would add to what you said about i don't think we can accomplish 4% growth without immigration. you know, i think it is a precondition to getting to that higher growth rate. and by the way, the only problem i have is i think 4% growth may be too low. we're now in the fourth year of nonrecovery, right? in the economy. we, there's no reason the economy can't be growing much faster than it is. and even aspiring to 5 or 6 or 7% growth for several quarters which, by the way, we had in the early 1980s. now, it's interesting if you look at the period what i call the kind of quarter century of spectacular, unprecedented growth in america from 1980 to 2005. that was a period when we had, we averaged almost 4% growth, and yet over that same time period we had unprecedented immigration. we allowed into the country legally well over 20 million americans, new americans during that period. and people say that immigration is bad for the economy or depresses wages or causes high unemployment. i mean, the actual evidence shows the opposite, that the biggest boom period in american history was also the period of the greatest immigration. that doesn't mean immigrants caused the growth, but it certainly is circumstantial evidence. a second point is with respect to states. it is so interesting, we do a lot of work at "the wall street journal," we've probably devoted at least ten editorials over the last few years comparing california and texas. [laughter] it is a good if you're in texas, a good comparison if you're a texan, if you believe in free markets. >> a lot of people moving from california to texas. >> well, that's right. >> they're reading editorials. sorry. >> so what you've seen over the last five years roughly, these are just rough numbers, about a million new jobs in the state of texas in the last five years. and roughly a million lost jobs in california. that's amazing. in fact, one of the points that art laugher and i made, we're writing a book on this, what we're really seeing right now is one of the great wealth transfers in history geographically from states like california that don't get it right, my home state of illinois being another example and states that do get it right like texas. and this is one reason to be very bullish on the future of texas. now, the interesting thing also is that texas and california are the two highest immigration states. and one of the interesting things is that texas does a much, much better job, in my opinion, of economically assimilating immigrants so that they're successful here. california is much more of a welfare state. it indoctrinates immigrants into the welfare system at a much higher pace than texas does. people come to texas, in my opinion, for jobs. people go to california for welfare. and so you're seeing, i think, the differing economic outcomes as a result of this. texas is the model that other states should be, should be emulating. a last point, if i may, just because this is on the top of my mind, if you -- i would urge all of you if you haven't had a chance to read our editorial this morning about immigration which i was lucky to get here last night, because i wuss working on this -- i was working on this until late at night. one of the points we made is that the united states of america has such an incredible opportunity that is so much larger than any other nation has because most of the people in the world who are talented and skilled and educated and ambitious, their first choice where they want to go to if they want to leave their home country is to come to the united states. they don't want to go to israel, they don't want to go to germany, france, japan, they want to come to the united states. and we have such an incredible opportunity to, if i can use the word exploit that opportunity for the benefit of american citizens. and that's, i think, what this whole immigration debate is and should be about is how do we have an immigration policy which is good for the immigrants -- which is obvious -- but also good for american citizens? and i'm very worried that this immigration debate in washington is migrating in the wrong direction. we -- last point be i'll make, i hear a hundred times a day in washington what are we going to do about america's immigration problem. immigration problem? america doesn't have an immigration problem. we have an immigration opportunity and an immigration advantage over the rest of the world. and that is something that needs to be exploited. i always say when people say, you know, china is going to surpass the united states, i've said this a hundred times, china's not going to surpass the united states economically because our chinese are smarter than their chinese. [laughter] this is an enormous advantage, and we ought to exploit i. so thank you for having this. >> to follow up on one theme, you talk about where there are a lot of immigrants a lot of times there's a lot of growth. a lot of people don't realize the growth and immigration to different states has gone away from states like california and new york, but to states in the south like louisiana, mississippi. you know, what's happening in some of those states in terms of -- is that helping or hurting? >> that's a really important point. this is kind of one of the interesting demographic changes in america over the last 25 years. richard vedder is the expert on this who you'll hear from later. traditionally, immigrants have shunned the south other than texas. in fact, that's been a problem for growth in the south for a hundred, since the end of the civil war. now you're seeing dixie attracting the immigrant states like north carolina. one of the states that has had the biggest percentage increase in immigration over last 15 years has been georgia. and georgia actually has become a high growth state. and this gets to the point people ask are immigrants more attracted to a state that has high welfare went fits -- benefits or to a state that has jobs. and so we rooked at some of -- we looked at some of this evidence, and what we found was on balance immigrants are much more likely to go to states with low unemployment rates than they are to go to the states with high welfare benefits which is an important finding, i think, because it says people are coming here because they want a job, not because they want a welfare check. >> which seems to make logical sense, too, right? if you're going to leave your home country worldwide, not that many people do that, if you're going to make out somewhere new -- >> it makes sense, but you wouldn't, you know, there are so many on the other side of this issue who think immigrants come here for welfare. look, some do, some do. but the vast, vast majority don't. they want economic opportunity and a job. >> that's a very important point. so next we're going to focus in even more on texas and we're all incredibly lucky to have pia orrenius, she's the author of a chapter in the bush institute's fist book, "the 4% solution," looking at growth and immigration broadly and presents a lot of great evidence. she's the author of a fabulous book called "beside the golden door." but she's also at the federal reserve bank of dallas as a senior economist studying immigration. so, pia, i want to ask you where's the growth in the texas economy coming from? we've heard so much about it, we hear the numbers, the percentage increase, where's the growth coming from? >> when i talk to the media, i try to sort of simplify it by saying rather than going through each sector that's responsible for growth in texas, i sort of say, well, there are three main components of growth to texas, and then there's what steve was talking about. but the three main innate components besides geology which is really oil and gas which is huge right now -- >> which we'll have a conference on in september, i'll just plug that real quick. [laughter] >> and -- i talk about geography which is, so that i can talk about manufacturing -- [inaudible] >> pia maybe hold on just one second so we can actually hear your wisdom. one second. sorry, everybody. >> we thought you were going to tell us whether ben bear man cu was going to ease. >> i'm a little distressed, you guys have been studying up on your texas economic statistics. you're kind of stealing my material. but that's all right. i've got more stuff. >> okay. so you were telling us about some of the sectors in a way that our audience can understand, we don't need, you know -- >> so international trade, manufacturing, international trade, the downstream industries like petro chem calls have been huge -- chem calls have been huge in texas. and the third factor really is demographics. so not only a high natural population growth rate, but also lots and lots of immigration to the state and not just international, but domestic like from california and so forth. in the recent years, in the 1990s, international immigration really took off to texas and became extremely important. in recent years domestic migration has been even more important than international migration to the state. it just shows the growth differential with the rest of the united states is broadening. in fact, if you look -- and i'll admit the 4% growth project, i mean, it sounds like a lofty goal, but it's amazing to look at texas in the economic recovery exact the grease recession -- great recession act and see we're actually averaging 4 growth. >> the state. >> the state of texas, yes. so it's an amazing growth time especially now that it's been traditionally over time. i mean, since the 1970s, basically, when the texas economy took off and the ore point i want to make is there's also been a big transformation of the texas economy. in the 1970s and most of the 20th century we were the oil, the cotton and the cattle state, and it really wasn't until the '80s and especially if '90s that we transformed ourselves into a modern industrial service sector-based economy. and this transition, you know, it came really, i think, thanks to two factors. one was $10 oil. if you remember in the '90s in the late '90s, oil -- >> about that, yeah. >> so that decimated our oil and gas industry at the time and forced us to change. and luckily for texans, texas is a state that's been able to change. but that's also been because of immigration. immigration in particular of high-skilled immigrants which tend to have a shortage of. >> so high-skilled immigrants here in texas are in a bit of a shortage. it's is awe week from other states where a large percentage don't even have a high school degree always. are they good for the economy too? you know, a lot of peoples people will agree, sure, we should bring in every ph.d., scientist that we can find to start new googles, right? who would disagree with that? but what about those without even high school degrees? what role do they play in the economy? >> well, i mean, it's just because it's all good news, especially now. and even -- so we have, when we look at our immigrants, while 60% of our immigrants are from mexico and nationally it's less than 30% of immigrants nationally are from mexico, and mexican immigrants tend to have low levels of immigration. and that's true in texas, and they also tend to be less likely to speak english fluently. so we see all that. but what's amazing about texas when you look more closely, they have much higher employment rates than low skilled immigrants nationally, and they have much lower unemployment rates than low skilled immigrants nationally, and their wages are stable, their wages are stable and especially compared to the rest of the nation, they do very well. >> wages have been falling. >> yes. right. and so in texas on average wages have turned up in the last couple years, and i was sort of speculating the ore day about the -- the other day about the shale boom, are places ramping up in texas. so it's just testament to really the success story of the economic miracle of texas and not just in the recovery, but even long term. we have lots and lots of low skilled and they've contributed tremendously. >> back to the high skilled for just a moment, we hear about so many businesses moving to texas, has that brought more high-skilled immigrants in the last several years? >> well, the bringing in of the high-skilled immigrants goes back to the 't -- '90s. it's been crucial, the immigration of high skilled. but what's -- so we've brought, basically again, texas, you know, as a commodities-based economy for a long time, we were light on low-skilled labor, and we didn't have a huge need for high-skilled leader, but that's all changed now, and they've been instrumental in the high-tech sectors n telecom, research and development, in health care, in education. in education our teachers and professors and so forth that are high skilled and, obviously, international immigrants. >> great. and now i want to give a little bit of context, and we're lucky to have javier palomarez representing businesses across america, many of them here in texas. we've heard facts and numbers and percentages and all sorts of things, but you represent actual companies, real people here on the ground, so i'm hoping you can tell us about some of the businesses you represent here in texas and what role immigrants are playing in helping them be success. >> yes. well, first of all, thanks for having me, matthew, and thank you to the ambassador and what the institute is doing. i think it's a real service to the american public. >> thank you. >> we're very thankful to be part of this. the united states hispanic chamber of commerce represents some 3.1 million hispanic-owned firms in this country that together contribute about $465 billion to the american economy every year and growing. the fastest-growing segment of american small business is the hispanic business community. we also advocate on behalf of about 198 major american corporations, and we do our work through a network of over 200 local chambers of commerce and business associations throughout the united states. we're particularly proud of the fact that we advocate on behalf of those people who are the practitioners. we appear, write, talk and advocate on behalf of business owners, but it's always kind of thrilling to meet the practice tiggers, the ones -- practitioners, the ones who are actually creating the jobs. and i'm very happy that we have some members of our association here. we have four of those 3.1 million hispanic-owned firms or members, and i can't see them here, but i know they're in the crowd. first of all, patricia stout is with us today. patricia began a company called alamo travel group. patricia is -- her company's headquartered in san antonio, texas. she immigrated here from mexico. last year her country did about $1 38 million in revenue and she employs a hundred texans. luis' company is here in dallas, and he owns a company called azteca enterprises, and if you've ever crossed the beautiful trinity river bridge that just came up that everybody's talking about, or if you've visited jerry jones' house, the the stadium, it may be jerry jones' house, but -- >> we all wish we had built it. >> luis' company last year did about $122 million, and he employs over 250 texans. we have with us frank who, while not hispanic, is the grandson of czech and german immigrants who came to this state looking for opportunity. and today frank manages and farms over 3200 acres of dryland sorghum in south texas. and finally we have nina vaca with us. nina is from dallas, but she immigrated from ecuador, and she runs a company called pinnacle technical resources. pinnacle last year did about a quarter of a billion dollars, and she employs over 3700 people, about a thousand of them are texans. these are the practitioners, these are the american dream incarnate. they are the ones driving the texas economy forward, they are the ones paying down the tax bill. and at the end of the day, what this is about is what they do every day. and so i can't see you, but if you would stand up and be acknowledged by the group, that would be wonderful. >> thank you for being here. [applause] that's the american dream right there. every one of them could have choseen any state in the nation to start their business or continue their business, and the fact is they chose texas for all the right reasons. and be i think they're living proof of what this state has to offer to the immigrant entrepreneur. >> so why did they choose texas? in your estimation? you know, we could ask all them, but for the sake of time, we'll ask you. what are some things about texas that makes it, you know, especially friendly for immigrants or other people who are coming here and want to start a business, they can grow to that kind of level and really drive the growth and we all benefit from it? >> well,s in case of these four individuals and, again, i'm in no position to speak for them, but i can generally, i think, surmise in the case of these four individuals, the conversations i've had with them, you look in the sectors they're in. they're in technology, they're in services, travel, they're in construction, they're in agriculture. so you're looking for people who want to work -- >> both and low-skilled. >> absolutely. and they're at every, you know, both spectrums on the skill, both ends of the spectrum in terms of skills from very highly-technical positions such as the jobs that pinnacle technical resources has to -- by the way, i wouldn't say low-skilled, i would just say differently-skilled work that happens in the agriculture and the construction sectors. but in all of these cases, they recognize that this is a state where workers are ready, willing and able, because the state makes it possible for them to get engaged, for them to work and for them to build their own individual wealth as a family and an employee. but at the same time, help that enterprise continue to grow. >> one more follow up for you, javier. it seems like we hear this everywhere, and it's--- it kind of irks me. seems welcome like conventional wisdom, and i don't think it is. we hear we have to make these protections for american workers, this idea that -- and it just sort of facilitates this myth that immigrants come and take jobs. we always hear this, they take jobs. and even our leaders in washington on either side, they seem content to always just -- to kind of buy into that by saying, yeah, we need to build in protections for american workers. but, i mean, ignoring the protections. what do you respond to people who say, well, immigrants take jobs? you know, i think that we would do well to really kind of look at what has transpired in some other states, neighboring states. you look at what happened in alabama recently, that state passed what i considered to be a fairly draconian, anti-immigrant piece of legislation. and the fact of the matter is when it's all boiled down, you look at the end of the, at the end of the case here, they had some 40,000 workers just get up and leave the state. what ensued is that the state lost about $10 billion of revenue and about a half a billion dollars of taxes that it could have garnered had those workers stayed in the state, worked the crops, worked in the plants, worked in the construction sites. and so i think there's a lesson learned. i think that sentiment was part of what happened in alabama. i'm hopeful that that will never be the case in the state of texas and, frankly, i think that governor bush, then president bush really illustrated some real leadership in terms of his understanding of the immigrant communities in terms of the work that immigrants come here to do. i think he welcomed immigrants to the state of texas. i remember very fondly his relationship with president fox be, then-of mexico. and a very, i think, clear and clear-minded understanding of the contributions that immigrants make to the state of texas. so there are lessons to be learned when you study what's happened in states that do believe that immigrants are there to take their jobs. >> right. >> the fact of the matter is no one came back and filled those jobs that those immigrants left untended. >> right. that's a perfect segway. i want to come back to you, steve, and ask, you know, what are some lessons for other states? if f/x has had this great both, a lot of it driven by demographics and immigrants, what areless szobs from other states -- lessons from the other states? we need some help. >> well, you know, one of the things when you talk about where the growth is in this country, and texas has had so much growth and in migration as you were talking about, and whenever, you know, people who disagree with my free market philosophy, you know, they say, well, yeah, you know, people are going to southern states because of, you know, the nicer climate, you know, the snowbirds from minnesota and michigan and illinois. >> sure. >> and, you know, it's interesting, i guarantee you, as wonderful as dallas is, i guarantee you people are not moving from san diego to dallas -- [laughter] when it's 100 degrees. >> especially in july. >> it's 74 degrees in san diego. texas has, and i just think this is fascinating, and you probably know more about this than me, why is it that texas does such a better job assimilating immigrants into the society in a much better way than california does? and i think it's something we need to really study more. and i think it's partly because texas, this is the supposition, but texas has that kind of free enterprise mentality that some of these states like california don't. .. and it's really an amazing phenomenon, they've got taken over those occupations. past events and job placement? probably. used to be whites and blacks that have those jobs. now they're going to eastern europeans. when you l
chief's chair says about america's military capabilities. that's all this hour. we begin with breaking news. i'm harris faulkner in for shepard smith. a live look now at the white house where president trump is expected to sign an executive action on china's trade practices at any moment. worth mentioning real quickly, he wants to look closely at alleged theft of american intellectual property. we'll show you the event live once it gets underway. the timing of this, just three hours ago, the president condemned the deadly protests in charlottesville, virginia over the weekend specifically calling out the kkk, neo-nazis and white supremacists among growing pressure from both sides of the political aisle. >> racism is illegal. those that cause violence are criminals and thugs. including kkk, white supremacists and neo-nazis. >> harris: the attack happened over the weekend after the removal of a statue of general robert e. lee. james fields,jr., mowed down counter protesters with his car killing 32-year-old heather heyer and injuring 19 people. video captured the moment it happened. we are learning the suspect apparently had a fascination with nazis and hitler. more on him and that part of our coverage ahead. first, both democrats and republicans criticize president trump for no coming out against white groups. the governor senator lindsey graham from south carolina says the president missed an opportunity. >> these people don't see me as a friend in the senate and i urge the president to dissuade these groups that he's their friend. >> president trump announced the department of justice opened an investigation into the deadly car attack. the president, rick, will be arriving in a few hours. the president met with jeff sessions today and his fbi director. >> that's right, harris. we want to give you a quick look at fifth avenue where security has been beefed up dramatically, similar to what people may remember from before the election. as you mentioned, the first time the president will be returning here to trump tower since he took office in the white house, extra rows of barricades out here an now a series of sanitation trucks parked in front of each other to create a wall there. we expect the president to arrive this morning. he left his new jersey golf club to head to washington d.c. for the meeting with the attorney general, jeff sessions, who the attorney general loudly criticized from recusing himself from the russia investigation. also in presence, christopher wray from the fbi. we're told the meeting at the white house was about charlottesville and the government's pursuit of federal charges. sessions appeared on "good morning america" and said the charlottesville attack does meet the definition of domestic terrorism and federal charges are likely along with state charges that have already been filed against the suspect. >> it does meet the definition of domestic terrorism in our statute. we're pursuing it in every way that we can make it, make a case. you can be sure we will charge and advance the investigation toward the most serious charges that can be brought because this is an unequivocally unacceptable and evil attack that cannot be accepted in america. >> harris, we should point out that domestic tearer is not a specific federal charge but can be used to bring other charges and at sentencing. >> harris: i also understand the ceo of a major pharmaceutical quit president trump's advisory council after the president's remarks saturday. in fact, we saw in a tweet from the president, so there was a little back and forth with this. >> there was. kenneth fraser is the man's name. he said he resigned his position on the president's american manufacturing council. he said he was reacting to the president's original statement saturday which critics said didn't go far enough. in a statement, fraser wrote "america's leaders mishonor our fun mental values. back to you. >> thanks, rick. we appreciate that. breaking news right now in washington. president trump signing a measure to launch an investigation into china. i mentioned we would go live. right now the president is talking, i want to include our broadcast along with our cable. let's watch together. >> they have not been looking out at all. this is what i promised to do as a candidate for this office and this is what i am doing right now as president. ambassador, you empowered to consider all available options at your disposal. we will safeguard the copyrights, patents, trade marks, trade secrets and other intellectual property that is so vital to our security and to our prosperity. we will uphold our values, we will defend our workers and we will protect the innovations, creations and inventions that power our magnificent country. thank you and god bless america. thank you very much. very big move. thank you. and this is just the beginning. i want to tell you that. where is raytheon? congratulations. [applause] >> mr. president, can you explain why you did not condemn the people by name over the weekend? >> they have been condemned. >> we are we not having a conference today? you said friday -- >> we just had a press conference. >> can we ask you more questions? >> thank you, everybody. >> heard you spread a lot of fake news yourself, sir? >> harris: we're watching together and i was watching and listening to see if the president would take more questions. he was asked why he would not condemn white supremacist groups over the weekend when the violence happened in virginia. he said they have been condemned. they wanted further questions with the president. you saw him walk out. he had just signed the men random asking the trade office on capitol hill to take a look closer at the practices of trade with china and whether or not they are abusing their rights or taking our intellectual property as americans. he wants a closer look at that. he can do that with an executive action. it's not an executive order. he asking for the consideration of an investigation. the white house says this has nothing to do with what is going on to try to pressure china to help us out with a nuclear threat, a new one from north korea. however, the timing of this is interesting. so that's all of that for what happened there with the men random. we're going to talk more later on about what has gone on with regard to the president's words about charlottesville. that's coming up. analysis continues on fox news channel on cable and satellite. you're watching as some of you on broadcast. more later on your local news on this fox station. i'm harris faulkner in new york. >> harris: back here on cable. rick leventhal was about to give us a rundown of what the president was signing there. he's getting ready to look at an investigation of the trade practices with china. rick, what i was telling the audiences, the timing is interesting even though the white house says no, they're not doing this to pressure china but we have to with regard to north korea and their nuclear threat. >> it would appear that everything is mingled on some level, harris. this signing taking place before the president is scheduled to meet with his national commit council at the white house. members of his cabinet are scheduled to attend that meeting along with outside companies. one of them, raytheon and general dynamics represented at the white house this afternoon. the president said the focus of the meeting is on renegotiating trade deals and economic reforms. the subject of trade with china could come up during this economic council meeting this afternoon. of course, it's been an ongoing struggle between the super powers, especially after the u.n. voted to restrict sanctions on korea that could cost north korea $1 bill. china does 90% of the trade with north korea and they signed off on the sanctions, but there's concern that the sanctions would be enforceable. vice president pence who is traveling in south america weighed in on the ongoing tensions between the u.s. and north korea weaving all of this together. here's what the vice president said. >> now for several decades, the united states has embraced the failed policies of strategic patience with regard to north korea. successive administrations in both political parties have believed that negotiation and patience with north korea would achieve the long-term objective of the denuclearization of the north korean peninsula. it has utterly failed. >> the united states obviously relying on china's help in dealing with north korea. this morning the chinese government responded to the news of the possible investigation into trade improprieties. china said there would no winners in a trade war. so there's a lot going on with regard to china this afternoon. >> harris: thanks, rick, a couple topics there. breaking news in the middle of the live hit atop the hour. thank you. all right. we have our political panel coming up and the word battle over words that were said and unsaid by president trump has really heated up today. did the last few words that he used help or hurt him in the white house in terms of addressing what happened in charlottesville, virginia? we'll talk about it with the panel. i ask you to stay close. this is joanne. her long day as a hair stylist starts with shoulder pain when... hey joanne, want to trade the all day relief of 2 aleve with 6 tylenol? give up my 2 aleve for 6 tylenol? no thanks. for me... it's aleve. but prevagen helps your brain with an ingredient originally discovered... in jellyfish. in clinical trials, prevagen has been shown to improve short-term memory. prevagen. the name to remember. >> announcer: no one loves a road trip like your furry sidekick! so when your "side glass" gets damaged... 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[dog barks] ♪safelite repair, safelite replace.♪ when this guy got a flat tire in the middle of the night. hold on dad... liberty did what? yeah, liberty mutual 24-hour roadside assistance helped him to fix his flat so he could get home safely. my dad says our insurance doesn't have that. don't worry - i know what a lug wrench is, dad. is this a lug wrench? maybe? you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™. liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. having mplaque psoriasise is not always easy. it's a long-distance run. and you have the determination to keep going. humira has a proven track record of being prescribed for nearly 10 years. humira works inside the body to target and help block a specific source of inflammation that contributes to symptoms. in clinical trials, most adults taking humira were clear or almost clear and many saw 75% and even 90% clearance in just four months. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal, infections and cancers, including lymphoma have happened as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you've been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you've had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms, or sores. don't start humira if you have an infection. join over 250,000 people who have chosen humira. ask about the #1 prescribed biologic by dermatologists. humira & go. >> harris: more now on president trump's response to the charlottesville attacks. let's bring in our political panel. republican strategist, nick is here. and michael tobman, a former aide to chuck schumer and from taubman strategies consulting firm. we're going to jump in and the words the president didn't use saturday and the journey we have come. michael? >> we were talking during the break how it seems that nobody wants us to get passed this and get along. there's always something to fight about. in this case, we're fighting about that. a dollar late, a day short. something that should have been said 24 hours ago and it wasn't said and that there was a need to strategize i think conveyed the president doesn't have the emotional attachment to these sorts of horrific acts that he should on behalf of the country. >> this is the problem. this is a problem. and i like you, but i have to tell you -- i want to set that up -- but i want to tell you this is what mainstream media -- here's what the left will spin. they're going to say oh, he finally called out kkk, white nationalists. he finally called it out. but it's a day late. so what. >> harris: two days according to the critics. >> it gives the president an opportunity to say he's being treated unfairly by the mainstream media -- >> they want this to go on -- >> should have been done right the first time. >> do you really in your heart think that donald trump is a fan of a white nationalist -- >> i think he's trying to parse this too much and it's not the thing that required the heavy lifting. >> harris: i'm glad you got that out. i'm taking blazed fiery heat on twitter right now for something i said on "outnumbered." i believe it. my dad was fighting for our country at a time when he couldn't drink out of a water fountain. but i come by this honestly, this is america. more words, not fewer. can we multitask? can we as americans pull together? so that's where i stand today. anybody that would divide at this point is not on our side. i don't care which party they're from. when you tell me the president looked like a victim and they can play that card, that is disturbing. it's about words. about people saying really -- we want what is right. not how it's being said. let's get back to charlottesville and why this is that we can't concentrate on what is being charged? i'm going to have a lawyer later. i don't know if you know this, but it's second degree murder which is not premeditated. i don't want to go too far down that road. we're too far afield from what matter, the violence that took heather i've life. >> as an attorney, when you drive a car into a crowd, you don't necessarily know. that will be discussed later on. >> harris: wow. >> we're getting too much into the details. i agree. too much into the weeds when we should be looking at the horror surrounding the things and focusing on that. i agree with you. >> this is a great opportunity for donald trump, sessions, everybody that has been labelled as somebody that is in favor of kkk, white nationalists and whatever. this is a great opportunity for them to press and press hard to get, you know, the person that drove into the crowd, hold him accountable to the fullest extent of the law. press it home. you can't argue if they're all full force behind this guy that did such a travesty. >> i know i'm getting back to it but there was a better opportunity for that to happen yesterday. >> harris: and republicans are saying that the president missed not just one opportunity but a whole weekend filled with opportunities. it's 48 hours later. >> it is. the multitasking is important. now we're talking about china. >> harris: let's talk about china and what happened just a few days ago. charlottesville, virginia stepped on what we thought would be the precipice -- i don't know if it was nuclear war. some were saying this, but the precipice of a nuclear confrontation of some sort. as democrats, you think there will be bipartisanship behind this president if he chooses to do something about that if necessary? >> there will be bipartisan support for all diplomatic efforts, including what we saw with the executive medium toe -- >> harris: the white house sid they didn't do that in response but it's the timing. >> it's fair. >> they say they didn't. you have to take them at their word. they didn't. the timing is strange. especially when we weren't getting the results we wanted with north korea and we were very dependent -- >> harris: right move for the president to make? >> absolutely. >> harris: you agree on this. >> yes, ma'am. >> okay. >> harris: look at, this last week we had a battle over other words by the president. action moved it forward. you used to work for chuck schumer. have to ask you a quick question about healthcare is. he sincere when he said he will work with republicans? >> i think now he is. before it wasn't timely, it wasn't right. what he saw with the senate vote, now is the time for them to come together and fix what was wrong with the aca. >> harris: we have to go. nicole told me, she doesn't believe any of that. >> we got along anyway. >> harris: we'll see what happens. >> that's right. >> harris: good to have you both. coming up, we're learning more about the suspect accused of ramming his car into a crowd in charlottesville this weekend killing one person and injuring more than a dozen others. we'll hear from the people that knew him, including a former teacher that said the suspect was fascinated with hitler. stay close. growing up, we were german. we danced in a german dance group. i wore lederhosen. when i first got on ancestry i was really surprised that i wasn't finding all of these germans in my tree. i decided to have my dna tested through ancestry dna. the big surprise was we're not german at all. 52% of my dna comes from scotland and ireland. so, i traded in my lederhosen for a kilt. ancestry has many paths to discovering your story. get started for free at ancestry.com. we asked people to write down the things they love to do most on these balloons. travel with my daughter. roller derby. ♪ now give up half of 'em. do i have to? 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>> just at this very moment, we learned that he's been accused in the past of beating his mother. and so that's the latest. we'll have more on that as the day progresses obviously. it's standard procedure as you know in jurisdictions where there are security concerns that the suspect does not appear in the courtroom, that it's done by video link from a jail. that is what happened with james alex fields today. he appeared in a black and white striped prison jump suit and answered with a simple "yes, sir" if the judge asked him if he knew what was going on, if he understood the proceedings around him. it was understood that he would be represented by a public defender but turns out someone in the public defender's office who had a relative that was at the scene of saturday's crash, so the public defender's office elected not to represent him. so fields will be represented by a long-time charlottesville attorney by the name of charles weber. bond not set, a second hearing is set for him august 25. in a sign, harris, of how small this town is and typical of the legal system in small towns across america, turns out his new attorney, charles weber, is a plaintiff in the removal of the lee statue that was the subject of the rallies. mr. fields is a deeply troubled man, he's been accused of beating his money and described as a loner and booted out of the army and had a fascination with adolph hitler and national socialism. >> it was clear he loved hitler and he loved the nazi movement. they were all geniuses. you know, the whole white supremacy thing. >> and that new information about him beating his mother, take that into consideration as you listen to this interview done by the associated press with his mother saturday before she even knew what her son did. >> yeah, again, right now, he's accused. but there's video of him running his car into the crowd -- >> running his car into a crowd of people? >> yes. >> did it hurt anybody? >> she tried to defend her son as difficult a way as she could given the circumstances by saying that she knew that he had an african american friend, harris. >> harris: wow. of course, a lot of people thinking today about heather heyer. her mother made beautiful comments. we feel the pain of the family, pray for them. what more have we learned about heather? >> heather heyer, yeah. 32 years old. paralegal. she was with friends when she was mowed down. they called her a gentle soul. her mother displayed remarkable composure when she described her daughter, her now deceased daughter. >> i'm extremely proud of my daughter. i'm extremely proud that she stood for what she believed in, that she not only gave mouth to it but gave heart to it. she gave soul to it and now she's given her life to it. >> meanwhile, the city of charlottesville is vehemently denied that it pulled back on aggressive policing which might have nipped this rioting in the bud. a statement from the mayor's office said no stand down was ever given on saturday. back to you, harris. >> harris: thanks, doug. this is coming in. fox news has learned that the feds are casting a wider net in the deadly attack in charlottesville. our chief intelligence correspondence catherine herridge will give us an update for their search for additional suspects. stay with us. it's just a burst pipe, i could fix it. (laugh) no. with claim rateguard your rates won't go up just because of a claim. i totally could've - no! switching to allstate is worth it. >> i'm lea gabrielle with the fox report. more of today's headlines. monsoon rains triggering a landslide burying two buses and killing 46 people. happened in northern india late yesterday. government officials say bad weather delayed the rescue mission, keeping first responders from reaching people in need. officials warn the number of victims could rise. a wild fire in southern california coming dangerously close to a university of california campus. the fire started yesterday near u.c. riverside, which is east of l.a. local media records say the dry brush spread to more than 1,000 acres. hundreds of firefighters battled the fire before bringing it under control. a space x capsule is on its way to the international space station. the unmanned cargo ship left kennedy space center this afternoon. it's loaded with supplies for the floating lab and set to return next month. the news continues with harris faulkner after this. i was active. then the chronic, widespread pain drained my energy. my doctor said moving more helps ease fibromyalgia pain. she also prescribed lyrica. fibromyalgia is thought to be the result of overactive nerves. lyrica is believed to calm these nerves. woman: for some, lyrica can significantly relieve fibromyalgia pain and improve function, so i feel better. lyrica may cause serious allergic reactions or suicidal thoughts or actions. tell your doctor right away if you have these, new or worsening depression, or unusual changes in mood or behavior. or swelling, trouble breathing, rash, hives, blisters, muscle pain with fever, tired feeling, or blurry vision. common side effects are dizziness, sleepiness, weight gain and swelling of hands, legs and feet. don't drink alcohol while taking lyrica. don't drive or use machinery until you know how lyrica affects you. those who have had a drug or alcohol problem may be more likely to misuse lyrica. with less pain, i can be more active. ask your doctor about lyrica. >> harris: all right. so this information was breaking as doug mckelway came to us. before we go to catherine herridge, i want to say the charlottesville suspect, which doug mentioned, the associated press is now reporting james fields jr. was previously accused of beating his mother. the a.p. is citing records from 911 calls that show field's mom called police in 2010 and 2011 and reported one case where he smacked her in the head and locked her in the bathroom. another saying he threatened her with a knife. his mother is disabled, use as wheelchair. she appeared unaware of the accusations her son faced until reporters filled her in. we told you about that during doug's report. that's part of the widening information that we know about the investigation. let's move on. president trump today confirmed that justice department officials have opened their own separate civil rights investigation into what happened in charlottesville over the weekend. a senior justice department official is telling fox news that that probe is not limited to the driver. that suspect fields, that i just mentioned. chief intelligence correspondent catherine herridge is live in washington. we're learning more. what can you tell us about the doj problem? >> we were told the justice department is exploring whether others were involved. for example, did that know about the suspect's attack in advance and did nothing to stop him or did they help to facilitate his plan? the attorney general left open the possibility mentioning the one fatality by name. >> you can be sured we're going to take the most vigorous action to protect the rights of people like heather heyer to protest against racism and bigotry. we're going to protect the rights to assemble and march and protect everybody to the fullest extent of the law. >> the fbi has teams on the ground in charlottesville. they're not commenting, but it's standard in this case to look at the electronic trail, which is often vital and standard practice to review the suspect's electronics to answer the questions, harris. >> harris: there's the tough about the definition of terrorism and how the attorney general said that what happened is in fact that. >> harris, based on the evidence, the attorney general said the attack meets the definition of domestic terrorism, which is an act of violence to intimidate or promote a political end. while field's motive is not clear, the official told fox they have enough evidence to be suspicious that the suspect intended to send a message. domestic terrorism is a criminal act that appears to be done to intimidate or cooers. domestic terrorism say they're covered under firearms charges or hate crimes. domestic terrorism is used at sentencing as an aggravating factor to increase the sentence if the individual is found guilty, harris. >> harris: that's perfect as we go into our next guest. catherine, thank you. let's bring in doug byrnes here. a former federal prosecutor. so basically the doj is putting on a case that would enhance the penalty portion for fields, you know, depending which way it would go. the two cases don't interfere with one another. >> no. there's two reasons why doj would get involved. one is to bring to bear federal resources which can be very extensive and bring to bear more and more to look into this. the other one is like a legal insurance policy. in other words, the doj has what is called the petit policy. if a state prosecution leaves states rights unvindicated, the feds will step in. they're going to let the homicide prosecution run its course for the state. you said second degree murder. why is that? >> >> harris: i was going to ask about that. >> it's unusual. my late dad used to say premeditation can be formed in an instant. can it. this doesn't have to be planned out weeks in advance. it's a red herring. so i'm not sure. there might be a back story that they charged it that way now and may ramp it up later. >> harris: you can understand, critically looking at this case and focusing on the racist violence that went on there, why would you take a second degree murder, that stance, when you know you can bump that up and go for more? just speaks to the issue are they taking it seriously? that's a fair question. >> you're making a great point. we do have hate crimes statutes. they are difficult to prove. you have to prove the violence was specifically targeted at a member of a group. >> harris: and that's why the dodge wants a wider look. >> motive is not ordinarily a part of a crime. here it's an additional element. you have to show it was done against that group. on the domestic terrorism as you discussed and katherine quoted out of the statute, acts of violence against human beings designed to intimidate or cooers. the other part, which is to affect government policy, it's or. one or the other. so intimidate or cooers does seem to fit. that's why the attorney general said it fits the statute. >> harris: thanks very much. vice president mike pence is in south america and he's promising to put a stop to the crisis in venezuela. watch. >> we will not stand by while venezuela collapses into dictatorship. we will not stand by as venezuela crumbles. a failed state in venezuela threatens the security and prosperity of our hemisphere and the people of the united states. >> harris: vice president met columbian families that escaped the violence. president trump suggested a crackdown. but the president of columbia, a close u.s. ally said a military option shouldn't be considered and would not "acceptable." trace gallagher is here with us now to bring us the news on this. trace? >> harris, even though president trump's threat of military action in venezuela was criticized by every leader in central and south america, the vice president made it clear that the president says what he means and means what he says. pence said his primary mission is to generate support from countries across latin american to use peaceful means of restoring democracy in venezuela. so in other words, the hope is to use diplomatic and economic pressure to isolate the government of president nicholas maduro who sees power in venezuela last months and violently begun cracking down on dissent. here's the v.p. listen. >> it's extraordinary to think one of the wealthiest countries in south america has emerged as one of the most prosperous is now collapsing into dictatorship and poverty and deprivation. >> 11 latin american countries and canada have signed a resolution calling the venezuelan government illegitimate. separately we should note that the "miami herald" is now reporting that venezuelan lawmaker cabello did order to have republican senator marco rubio assassinated. the florida senator is getting beefed up security now. >> harris: before i let you go, i know the vice president faced questions about michael flynn and the russia investigation. >> yeah. the vice president reit rated that during his experience on the campaign, he never once witnessed any evidence of collusion. vice president mike pence said this. >> we'll fully cooperate. and are cooperating with special counsel. we'll provide them with all the information. >> pence was asked about being misled by michael flynn concerning flynn's conversation with russian officials. pence said he repeated what flynn told him and said the president was right to move him out of the white house. harris? >> harris: trace gallagher, thanks very much, this coming from the joint chief chairman, joseph dunford that said that america is looking for a peaceful way to calm the tensions with north korea. if that doesn't work out, he says our nation's military stands ready. general dunford's words of warning when we come back. >> harris: the united states' top military officer says the u.s. want to peacefully resolve the escalating situation with north korea. general joseph dunford, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff also says today that the u.s. is ready to useful range of its military capabilities if necessary. he made the comments while meeting with senior officials in south korea. general dunford is currently making his way through asia with additional stops in japan and china after this. rich edson is live in washington following this. rich? >> harris, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff says diplomacy is the preferred response. if that fails, general dunford says the u.s. military is prepared. >> it would be a horrible thing for war in the peninsula. that's why we're focused oncoming up with a peaceful way to denuclearize the peninsula. nobody is looking for war. our job is to make sure our leadership, the korean leadership and the u.s. leadership have viable military options. >> general dunford mitt with political and military leaders and is travelling to china and japan. >> harris: secretary of state argues china needs to do more. i think everybody is saying that at this point. >> right. he hand the secretary of defense james mattis did that in a joint piece in the "wall street journal" saying china should use their influence to show the world how a great power should act to resolve this problem. they say if china wishes to play a more active in securing regional peace and stability for which all of us derive great ben fit, they have to help. the trump administration has showed china's willingness to vote for sanctions. harris? >> harris: we'll scoop up more on this. ahead, u.s. officials putting pressure on china to deal with north korea. what does that look like? we'll talk with the white house correspondent for the washington examiner who said president trump is starting to use trade as a stick instead of a carrot. boost. it's about moving forward, not back. it's looking up, not down. it's being in motion. boost® high protein it's intelligent nutrition with 15 grams of protein and 26 vitamins and minerals. boost® the number one high protein complete nutritional drink. her long day as anne. hair stylist starts with shoulder pain when... hey joanne, want to trade the all day relief of 2 aleve with 6 tylenol? give up my 2 aleve for 6 tylenol? no thanks. for me... it's aleve. >> harris: all right let's talk north korea and the threat. the united states top military officer said today, the u.s. wants a peaceful resolution to the crisis. but is ready to use the full range of the military capabilities if necessary. vice president pence echoed the comments saying right now all options are on the table. the vice president said there's no future for north korea with nuclear weapons. let's bring in sarah westwood, the white house correspondent for the washington examiner. interesting that he would start with no future for a place that already says they have nukes in their arsenal. where do you put the white house in its messaging with north korea and china? >> i think in an important way to view president trump's response to the north korea threat is to look at his former criticism of obama. he was critical of the way obama responded to international provocation in the way obama had this tendency to telegraph in advance what his next move so the recipient could prepare and a way the international knew with certainty that obama would never use military force. so trump has tried to correct by that by a refusal to telegraph what options he's considering and two, trying really hard to convince north korea and other world leaders that he's ready to use military force at the moment's notice if he believes it's necessary for america's national security. so that explains a lot about the way you see trump, general dunford, secretary mattis and others continuing to keep the military option on the table, even though analysts are saying with a nuclearized north korea, it's virtually possible. trump says it strengthens his negotiating position and why military action has been mentioned in every statement even though the declaration diplomacy is the preferred route. >> harris: and we know that president obama knew about the nukes capabilities before he left office. so focusing on that part of the puzzle right now might be really important because we know that what he did as you laid out was not necessarily working. now we'll see what the president is doing. he did something today that the white house says wasn't necessarily, you know, cause and effect but the timing is interesting. he put an executive action, signed the memorandum and we covered it earlier saying i want my trade office to look at alleged theft of intellectual property from america by china. what does that do? >> initially with china, president trump used trade as a carrot rather than a stick. he used it in an effort to try to convince china that it was in their best interest to deescalate tensions with north korea. now you can see the president circling back to his original toughness on chinese trade. he's paving the way to crack down on china's economic misbehavior if they don't produce results from north korea using trade more of a stick than a carrot as this conflict has dragged out with china not doing as much as it could to enforce these sanctions. >> harris: talk to me about the timing, if you will, of what comes next. we're nearing the end of the summer now. >> well, china has responded to president trump's overtures in this area by announcing they're going to suspend imports from north korea of iron or and coal. so you already see them starting to make moves. but at the same time, it will accompanied with a warning that trump could overstep his bounds. >> harris: thanks, sarah. we'll be right back. 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"your world" with neil cavuto today, trish regan and we'll bring you all the news. stay with us. >> the police chief in charlottesville, virginia is about to hold a news conference. that's coming up following this weekend's violence. let's go to doug mckelway in charlottesville who has the latest. what do we expect to hear? >> it's hard to say. i know reporters will be asking tough questions. they're chomping at the bit to understand what the motivation of the police department here and their associated forces was as this thing began to get out of control early saturday morning. i know for a fact that we have heard from a senior law enforcement from another county nearby, this one, that says that some of his underlinks that attended
comey's book "a higher loyalty" offers new revelations on his dealings with the president. this morning the president fired off five tweets on comey alone calling the former fbi director a slime ball, among other things. this ahead of comey's first public interview since his firing, and that interview sure to further anger the president with material like this. take a listen. >> honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but i don't know whether the current president of the united states with prostitutes pooing on each other in 2013. it's possible, but i don't know. >> and the comey back is one issue the white house under siege. the president's personal attorney due in court tomorrow where he'll be met by a special spectator none other than stormy daniels. there's speculation he's ready to fire deputy attorney general rod rosenstein and new poll numbers out today on whether the president's legal drama couple pact the republicans come the mid-term elections. joining me now is the white house reporter for "the daily beast" and maria mca. former federal prosecutor and evan siegfried, a republican vat gist. in addition to the president's tweets in person, the white house and its surrogates, have really gone on an attack all throughout the day. watch this. >> comey will forever be known as a disgraced partisan hack. >> you know, i'm disappointed in jim comey. i'll be honest with you. this book should on the fixion shelf. >> you're a pompious egotistic patronizing holier than thou political operative. >> i think this book is salacious. when you read it he discredits him sdwlefl have you read it? >> no, i haven't read it. >> today a "washington post"/abc poll shows more americans find comey, believe it or not, more believable than the president. so let's talk a little bit about how effective you think this strategy has been from the white house against comey. how would you rate it? >> well, i'm not sure how i would rate it in terms from an a-plus to an f-minus but in terms of some of the footage you were showing there, within the white house and without it, if not under the direct direction from the president of the united states himself is done with his sometimes explicit blessing. that first clip you showed of sarah huckabee sanders at the friday white house afternoon press briefing, according to people i've been speaking to in the white house over the past couple of days, the president had a meeting with sarah sanders in the oval office shortly before she went on as he usually does, but what made this meeting in the oval office different from others is that president trump specifically told press secretary sarah huckabee sanders to basically tear james comb i apart when she got in front of the cameras, to mfa sympathize he is by their estimation, a leaker, a shameless self-promoter, someone trying to line his own pockets with this book and subsequent tour and basically get in the mud with the fired fbi director. >> seems like the president as well is getting into the mud with some of the terminology he's using like slime ball. >>an marie, let me ask you about former deputy attorney general sally yates because she had some strong tweets yesterday, at least one tweet i wanted to read. in it she says in part you can't fire a prosecutor because you're unhappy he approved a search warrant that relates to your own conduct. again, this was from the former deputy attorney general sally yates who president trump fired. i'm curious to get your thoughts on something. we tend to focus pay lot on the possibility that president trump may fire special counsel robert mueller, but in reality, would it be just as egregious to fire rod rosenstein? >> the reality is he can essentially fire any of them. he is the head of the executive branch and the doj reports into the president so he can get rid of sessions, can get rid of rosenstein. there's some questions about whether there are some conflicts as far as rosenstein was the one who actually wrote the memo saying comey should be fired, so if there's an obstruction of justice investigation around the fact that comey was fired and whether he should have been fired, then potentially rosenstein may have to testify which is a problem having him run an investigation essentially or oversee it where he's actually somebody who could become a witness down the line. >> up to this point he would have known all the various aspects of the mueller investigation to some extent. >> and he's the one mueller is reporting into and he's the one who picked mueller to be the special counsel and appointed him special counsel. >> even his firing would be extremely significant as sally yates has warned. >> it certainly would be significant, but, you know, the other thing that usually happens when a new president comes in is most of the top positions get replaced, and that didn't happen this time. it was -- he was left in that position, so -- i mean, it would be interesting to see, you know, but it's -- the president certainly could do it if he wants to. >> as you can imagine, all of this talk of firing, whether it's rod rosenstein or bob mueller, it has a lot of people on capitol hill nervous and despite all of that, we're not hearing too many republican lawmakers say that they want to see some legislation to actually protect the bob mueller investigation and the special counsel. take a listen to what paul ryan told my colleague chuck todd. >> i don't think he should be fired. i think he should be left to do his job, and i don't think they are really contemplating this. it's not in the president's interest to do that. we have a rule of law system and no one is above that law of system. i don't think he's going to be fired. i don't think he should be fired. >> you're hearing outgoing speaker paul ryan with the strong words that he shouldn't be fire. the investigation should go on. why are we not hearing more from gop members to want to ensure that the mueller investigation continues by putting legislation forth? >> well, first of all, we're on the verge of a potential constitutional crisis. if the president were to take any action against rod rosenstein or robert mueller or try to impede this investigation further, we would be in very serious uncharted waters, and it would be the duty of the congress to stand up. but why haven't republicans? >> it would be too late by then. >> it might be. >> they still have the impeachment proceedings which they would not do at least until summer is. we understand as republicans that the republican base isn't about the republican party anymore. 59% of republicans say they are more loyal to donald trump the man than they are the party or the party ideology, so if you are a republican congressman or senator who stands up to donald trump and says no, this is a line you should not cross, you know what ends up happening? you end up getting a primary challenger who is supported by the base and you get run out of office and you'll get somebody who is even worse and more on the trump train than somebody else. look what happened to jeff flake. he's gone. only people who are speaking up are the charlie dents, the trey gowdy who are saying lines that should not be crossed. bob corker as well. i think we need to see leadership that comes from people who are up for re-election. >> not those that are just simply walking away at the end of their term. >> let me ask you about mike rall cohen. expected to be in court tomorrow. he's hoping the judge will approve his restraining order to stop prosecutors from reviewing some of the material taken during the fbi raid on monday, and he won't be alone in court. take a listen to this. >> stormy daniels is going to be in court on monday with michael cohen, is that what you're saying? >> yeah. she will attend at 2:00 in new york on monday. it's intended to send the message that this is a very, very serious matter for her, and she wants to make sure that the american people know that she's behind efforts to bring to light as much information and documents as possible. >> so give us a sense in how concerned the white house is about this particular story. there are some reports in fact that some of president trump's advisers actually see the cohen case as a bigger threat now than the russia investigation. >> i believe you're citing a "new york times" report which actually correctly notes that many of trump's advisers both in and outside of the white house do seem to agree that at least in the immediate future this is more of an immediate threat if not to trump's presidency to trump himself than the mueller investigation because of how much michael cohen knows and everything he's been involved with and what potential dealings, whether untoward or not, that he most certainly has been deeply involved with over the past years and decades, and, look, i spent sometime talking and communicating with michael cohen. i and my former colleague at "the daily beast" wreath pretty long profile of him a month or two ago, and i must say that out of trump world is littered with like absolute abject sycophants. that's not a passing judgment here. that is just an objective truth to this situation, and i really -- and i know this is a high bar to clear. i don't think i've ever encountered anybody so gleefully willing to hurl himself on a grenade than michael cohen. >> let me ask you about another one of the president's tweets in which he climbed attorney/client privilege was now a thing of the past and said all lawyers are deflated and concerned. as a former federal prosecutor how do you analyze that president's accusation, that charge, with what you've seen in terms of how this case has developed? >> well, it's certainly very unusual to have an attorney's office raided by the fbi and have materials taken. and it is something that gives i think a lot of lawyers a moment of pause for thought to think, you know, that their files could be turned over at some point by court order to the fbi. so we don't know how much of it is attorney/client privilege. they are going into court tomorrow. the allegation by the government is that he actually was not acting most of the time as an attorney, and that he had no other clients other than trump. >> yeah. >> so the question is if he was acting as an attorney they be the privilege hopefully will still be there, but for the materials that are not covered by attorney/client privilege, those will then be ostensibly given to the government. >> a chance to respond to that question, particularly with the charge if he's hiding criminal activity then attorney/client -- >> first of all, i want to point out the ridiculousness of donald trump saying that attorney/client is dead when donald trump jr. went before investigators a few months ago and said he couldn't answer their questions on the russia probe because he had attorney/client privilege with his father. there is no child/parent privilege, only spousal privilege and attorney/client privilege. judge kimba wood, the southern district of new york's judge presiding over this case is an incredibly well-respected judge and she's going to make sure all parties involved adhere to the rule of law and everything is done by the book. >> do you know if a decision will come out tomorrow or a few days afterwards? >> she's likely to take evidence and then make a decision after. >> all right, guys. thanks very much. great to have all of you with us this sunday evening. tonight at 9:00 p.m. eastern, msnbc headliners takes an in-depth look at james comey. chris matthews hosts this special hour-long series providing insight into this controversial public service before the release of his revealing new memoir. the office of former president george h.w. bush about the wife of his health. mrs. bush, now age 92, has decided not to seek additional medical treatment land instead focus on comfort care. the former first lady spent much of the last year in the hospital dealing with copd and congestive heart failure. we're told mrs. bush is surrounded by her family. and we've got a lot more coming this up hour. the trump administration deeming the syria missile attack a complete success. the president himself declaring mission accomplished. two words he's defending today as critics ask what exactly is the mission in syria? more on that straight ahead. if you feel like you spend too much time in the bathroom with recurring constipation and belly pain talk to your doctor and say yesss! to linzess. ♪ yesss! linzess treats adults with ibs with constipation or chronic constipation. linzess can help relieve your belly pain, and lets you have more frequent and complete bowel movements. linzess is not a laxative. it works differently to help you get ahead of your recurring constipation and belly pain. do not give linzess to children less than 6, and it should not be given to children 6 to less than 18. it may harm them. do not take linzess if you have a bowel blockage. get immediate help if you develop unusual or severe stomach pain, especially with bloody or black stools. the most common side effect is diarrhea, sometimes severe. if it's severe, stop taking linzess and call your doctor right away. other side effects include gas, stomach area pain, and swelling. so say yesss! to help for recurring constipation. yesss! to help for belly pain. talk to your doctor and say yesss! linzess. we, of course, know that our work in syria is not done. we know that it is now up to bashar assad on whether he's going to use chemical weapons again, and should we use it again the president has made it very clear that the united states is locked and loaded and ready to go. >> that was nikki haley making it clear that the u.s. is ready to act again in syria if chemical weapons are once again used against citizens. president trump for his part defending his use of the term mission accomplished in the wake of the syria air strikes which immediately called to mind president bush's disastrous use of that very same phrase. president trump tweeting that he knew he'd be attacked for it, but thought it was such a great term that he'd bring it back. the bush connection isn't the only issue with the use of the phrase mission accomplished. the "new york times" pointing out that it raises the question what exactly is the mission in syria, so we want to break down some key issues surrounding that question. does the trump administration have a goal in syria when it comes to the president bashar assad. how did this missile strike impact the role of russia and iran in syria and how does this impact president trump's stated goal to get out of syria sooner rather than later? to discuss all of this i'm joined by ambassador robert ford, senior fellow for the middle east institute and former u.s. ambassador to syria and debra lee james, former air force secretary. great to have both of you with us. let's start with the term -- the impact of all of this. here's senator angus king today. take a listen. >> i think it's very difficult to say mission accomplished if the mission is to deter the use of chemical weapons. we hope that that will be the case, but we did a strike a year ago for that same purpose and it was deemed a success, but the chemical weapons have continued to be used, so i think it's impossible to say at this point that the mission has been accomplished. >> so secretary james, let me ask you about the stated objective of the trump presidency. they wanted to deter them from caring out chemical weapons. he's used it over the course of the year multiple times since last april when we carried out strikes. was this strike that we saw over the weekend a success in deterring president assad's fuse of chemical weapons. >> can you even measure that. >> time will tell on that. we don't know. i think the message was clear. the targets were selected because the targets destroyed, and by the way it was a successful mission in the sense that the targets were destroyed. they directly related to the use of chemical weapons, the development of chemical weapons and, of course, the u.s. military together were our allies, the french and the british, did get that job done, but my sense is it's happened before just as you said. if i were bashar al assad, i would lay low for a while. i would reconstitute my capability in secret, and i could bring brutality to my people through other means. >> as we've seen with the barrel bombs. >> as a former air force secretary, what did you make of the president's tweeting and kind of projection of the fact that he would carry out the strikes the days running up to it? if you were in the military and pentagon and planning this, do those tweets help you? >> they absolutely do not help. they were injudicious. i think it was very fortunate. if anything the president boxed himself in. he got himself way out on a limb, and the only option alternate point was to strike because to do otherwise would have perhaps made him look weak. >> and not to mention he telegraphed to our enemies that we're going to possibly be carrying out these strikes, something he faulted president barack obama to doing when it came to some of the terrorist groups. >> ambassador ford, let me bring you into this. my colleague pressed a state department spokeswoman heather nauert on the trump policy in syria. take a listen to this. >> what do you say to those who say, look, there isn't a clear policy when it comes to the u.s. position? >> syria is a very complicated country with a lot of terrible actors involved in it that are making this situation worse. look, our policy is to be there for the defeat of isis. we've come very close. had it not been for russia assisting bashar al assad several years ago, that regime would not be able to control part of the country, large parts of the country like it has. >> so ambassador ford, your former boss president obama, his policy was regime change in syria or at least saying president assad has to go. it hasn't yet been asked clear what the policy is of this trump administration. we know he's not for regime change, but do you see a clear coherent syria policy on the civil war side at least in terms of what this administration wants to achieve? >> no, not yet. i think they are still trying to work it out. there are two things we know for sure. one, they are very clear that they want to go and totally defeat, destroy isis in eastern syria, and they have u.s. forced on the ground working on that. that's very clear. they have sort of changed the policy a little bit and now they have added chemical weapons to it, and they are -- they are saying they are going to sustain attacks. you heard locked hand loaded from ambassador haley. if they are now going to say you used chlorine gas, we hit you. you use a little bit of chlorine gas over there, we strike. that's new. that's different. that's something they need to explain to the russians to start with. they need to explain it to the syrian government. they probably need to explain it to a lot of countries. none of that means that they have figured out what to do about bashar al assad. i don't think they like bashar al assad, but how to get him out, it's not clear the americans can do that now anyway. >> you brought the issue of russia into this, and i wanted to pick up on that because today the syrian president was meeting with russian enadvice. how do you think the air strikes that we saw over the weekend impact russia's role at all in syria? does this incline them or push them to double down? does this make them somewhat reserved and staying supportive of the assad regime? >> well, they will be supportive of the assad regime whether or not we strike in order to deter chemical weapons. you know, the strikes actually have the perverse effect of increasing russian leverage and influence over bashar al assad. bashar al assad needs the russians more, and, in fact, there are reports today that the syrian government is asking the russians urgently for more modern updated air defense systems. surface-to-air missiles, show in a sense it may help the russians influence assad a little bit. they do not have full total control over bashar al assad. >> secretary james, i want to ask you about some internal dynamics between the new national security adviser john bolton and defense secretary jim mattis. there were reports there were tensions between them in the spectrum of where these strikes fell. there's such a stark contrast between two very key components of the national security team for the president. how does that ultimately play out and the fact that we saw this operationing? who do you think won out in terms of this round of the syria policy? >> i have no doubt that secretary mattis and the options that he laid upon the table ran the gamut, and, of course, it would be up to the president himself to approve which option to pursue. secretary mattis is i think amongst the entire cabinet extremely well seasoned, very judicious, counterintuitive i think to many americans, people who have seen war, they are the ones who are the most cautious of getting drawn farther in. so, again, time will tell. we're speculating here. we're going forward. the key question i have is are we going to evolve the strategy? just as the ambassador said, our strategy has been to defeat isis, very narrow and that's been for the last four years or so, but isis is almost defeated. are we really going to withdraw those troops fanned so do we think that's going to turn out better for us than it did in iraq because what we find over and over again is failed states with these many, many actors. >> havens for terrorist organizations. >> they become havens for new terrorist organizations. >> great to have both of you with us here on set. thanks. >> slime ball, liar, suggestions of jail time just some of the words president trump used when talking about fired fbi director james koji and his new book. so who is telling the truth? straight ahead i'll talk to the authors of best-seller "russian roulette" which covers some of the very same meetings that comey talked about his book. what they know about what really happened. we're finally back out in our yard, but so are they. the triple threat of dandelions, lurking crabgrass and weak, thin grass! introducing the all new scotts turf builder triple action. this single-step breakthrough changes everything. it kills weeds, prevents crabgrass for up to 4 months, and feeds so grass can thrive, all guaranteed. only from scotts. our backyard is back. this is a scotts yard. it only takes a second for an everyday item to become dangerous. tide pods child-guard pac. helps keep your laundry pacs safe, and your child safer. to close, twist until it clicks. tide pods child-guard packaging. we know that when you're >> tspending time with thelass grandkids... ♪ music >> tech: ...every 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tonight for the first time since he was fired last may by trump and on tuesday comey's book "a higher loyalty" hit stores in which the former fbi director paints a picture of president trump as a mafia boss obsessed with loyalty and revenge. some portions of comey's book are familiar when compared to the book written by my next two guests, authors of "russian roulette,". joining me now are the book's authors david corn and mikealed izikoff. great to have you both with us here on set. i want to start off with some of the excerpts with both of these books. there's a lot of parallels with comey's meeting with the president, fresh, and that's where i want to start. this is when he was president-elect. talked about that infamous dossier and allegations about prostitutes. comey writes i explained i wasn't saying the fbi believed the allegations. we simply thought it was important that he know that they were out interest and being widely circulated are, but in your book you write trump and his team took it a little differently. your report after wrote comey writing trump ruminated some more and in his own mind figured it out. this was a shakedown, he said. comey was trying to blackmail him, letting him know that he had something on him. let me begin with you, david. that's quite a difference of perceptions of the same event. >> well, and what we're talking about is a moment that jim comey didn't experience, didn't witness. we describe in the book how comey and other intelligence chiefs of the u.s. government really thought long and hard about what to tell donald trump about this -- about the dossier which at that point was not public but was circulating, and they knew about it. they thought they could -- it was almost as a courtesy they would let him know after the end of an official jens briefing on the larger report about russian intervention in the election, so comey, you know, takes trump aside and says, that and then, you know, then comey leaves, but what we point out is what happens next. trump was, you know, wassagery, and he turned to his aides, his political aides in the room with him at that point, and said this is a shakedown. what he meant by that was that jim comey and the rest u.s. intelligence establishment was trying to blackmail him, to show him we have dirt on you, so if you don't do things our way, mr. new president, you're going to get it, and it was like -- the way he looked at the world in a very paranoid manner. it wasn't what they were trying to do, but that was the message he took away and i think it poisoned his relationship with comey from the get-go. >> one of the other things you both write about, both comey and you write about in your respective books was trump asking him for personal loyalty. today the president tweeted out a denial of that specific claim saying he hardly even knew the guy. michael, i'm curious to get your thoughts because obviously this is going to be a very important issue going forward. is there someone outside or anyone outside of these two americans president trump and comey who could corroborate what really happened so it's not just a matter of he said verse he shade? >> probably not because if you remember comey's account, this conversation takes place after trump asks everybody else to leave the room which comey thought was odd. in fact, he had asked the attorney general not to be -- the president had asked the attorney general sessions not to be in the room, and that in and of itself made comey uncomfortable, the idea that the president would want to speak to him without the presence of the people he reports to at the justice department, the attorney general and the deputy attorney general, but i think the important thing, and this is where the two books do track is that meeting between -- that initial meeting between comey and the president basically sowed the seeds for everything that would come afterwards. in fact, we write in the book that steve bannon who comes into the room afterwards says -- and gets quite agitated about the fact that the -- the synopsis of the dossier was given over to the president by comey and that -- and that the president accepted that. he's saying by accepting that it becomes an official record. you never -- then to priebus and others in the room, you never should have let the president take that, and bannon believes he planted the seeds for comey's firing in the exchanges after that meeting. >> that's an interesting point. i want to pick up on another thing that's related to the firing of james koji because in his book he also covers trump's attempt to get comey to make a public statement that trump was not personally under criminal investigation. in fact, comey wrote about that saying that he was the one who actually brought this up at the january 27th dinner at the white house. he wrote as he began to grow more defensive and the conversation teetered toward disaster on instinct i pulled the tool from my bag. we are not investigating you, sir. that seemed to quiet him down, but you and comey both write that the president quickly became upset that comey would not go public with that little piece of information, and you write trump was now obsessed with one goal, getting comey to publicly say he was not under investigation. the russia scandal was complicating his job as president. david, do you think, and michael brought this point up about the firing, if comey had said that publicly, do you think that he'd still be the fbi director? >> probably not, butecause i thk it was probably a doomed relationship. he couldn't say it because he didn't know where the investigation would go, and one reason he didn't want to say it publicly was because he felt he had the obligation that if he cleared trump and said he's not being investigated and then something came up that indicated that trump might be under investigation, he would have to come out and say that again and take back the first statement, and that would just get him a situation that the fbi director didn't want to be in. i mean, to me his book and our book, what we see again and again and again is that trump really cares about one thing, the allegations about himself. there's no consideration, no concern, no priority for the actual russian attack on the election, and it seems he never really had a conversation with boh copy about that hand what to do to not allow that to happen again. that to me is like a big dog not barking in comey's book. >> one of the other things that comey wrote about was his handling of the hillary clinton e-mail investigation. he admits that his belief that she would have won may have impacted his decision to go public with the information about potential new e-mails just before the election, but take a listen to this, because in his interview with abc jim comey says this. >> if i ever start considering whose political fortunes will be affected by a decision we're done? we're no longer that group in america that is apart from the partisans and that can be trusted. we're just another player in the tribal battle. >> so how -- michael, how do you square those two things? are those two things irreconcilable? >> they are a bit contradictory, and as you've no doubt noticed the white house is exploiting this to the hilt saying that comey has acknowledged that he let political factors and the latest poll numbers on the 2016 election influence his decision to write that fateful letter. this is -- this is something that i think comey is probably going to be asked a lot about, if not in tonight's interview in all upcoming interviews, and he's -- he's going have some explaining to do how he can reconcile that quote that you just played and what he says about how it did influence his decision-making. the polls influenced his decision-making. >> remember, aiman, he did something that was unprecedented going back to july 2016 when he announced that there would be no prosecution or was recommending no prosecution and took the extra step of chastising hillary clinton and pointing out what she had done wrong which never really happens so, you know, he -- he explains why he did this, but at the same time he took an unprecedented step in the middle of a politically charged environment, and it's really hard i think after the fact to see him skating clean of all of that. >> yeah. it will be interesting to see if any of those questions that you gentlemen brought up will be posed to james comey and, of course, what the white house is going to be doing all week long during this media blitz. guys, great to have you with us. david corn and michael will stick around to talk about syria in just a little bit as well. another reminder to tune into "head lipoers" james comey tonight right here the 9:00 p.m. on msnbc. we know what the u.s. and its allies think about the strike but what does the rest of the world think about the strikes? the assad regime is continuing attacks on civilians which have not gotten more attention. the real impacts of the u.s. strikes and whether it was effective in sending a message to syria and its allies. arrow fast food drive thru lane. but what a powerful life lesson. and don't worry i have everything handled. i already spoke to our allstate agent, and i know that we have accident forgiveness. which is so smart on your guy's part. like fact that they'll just... forgive you... four weeks without the car. okay, yup. good night. with accident forgiveness your rates won't go up just because of an accident. switching to allstate is worth it. searching for answers like where to treat, can feel overwhelming. so start your search with a specialist at cancer treatment centers of america. start with teams of cancer treatment experts under one roof focused on the delivery of precision cancer treatment. start at one of the cancer treatment centers of america hospitals near you. the evolution of cancer care is here. learn more at cancercenter.com/experts appointments available now. welcome back, everyone. time now for we said they said. after a week of threats the u.s. and its allies finally punishing president bashar al assad for allegedly gassing his own people. >> there collective action sends a clear message that the international community will not stand by and tolerate the use of chemical weapons. >> the trump administration declaring the pre-dawn raid on syria's weapons depot a resounding success. >> it seems like everyone is celebrating, that's for sure. certainly everyone is declaring victory. >> canadian prime minister justin trudeau also congratulating the coalition on a job well done. >> also want to reiterate, as i told you directly last night, our support for the unfortunate but necessary u.s., uk and french actions in syria. >> but is this all misplaced optimism? defense officials say their main aim in syria is to defeat isis and cripple the government's chemical weapons infrastructure. no mention to end of civil war, regime change or even a solution to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in that country. the president has made it very clear u.s. troops aren't in that for the long haul. still, the white house touting this latest operation by saying mission accomplished but not everyone taking a victory lap with the president. anti-strike protesters taking to the streets around the world from greece to chile, gaza to jordan. >> we stand against this aggression and we stand with the syrian people, army, president and government. >> in moscow a furious kremlin fired backing a the u.s., uk and france for launching the military assault on syria. >> russia has slammed america, the uk and france over strikes on syria. >> as you can imagine, russian president vladimir putin, a staunch supporter of the assad regime, calling it an actch aggression. iran's supreme court leader branding the u.s. and its allies as criminals. syrian state tv broadcasting images of jubilation. supporters of bashar al assad out celebrating on the streets. as for syria's president himself, it was business as usual with briefcase in hand. he met with russian lawmakers a day after his country was bombed and was reportedly in a, quote, good mood. coming up, a discussion on what that strike means for the stability in the world's most dangerous neighborhood. stay with us. your brain changes as you get older. but prevagen helps your brain with an ingredient originally discovered... in jellyfish. in clinical trials, prevagen has been shown to improve short-term memory. prevagen. the name to remember. a hilton getaway means you get more because you get a break on breakfast get an extra day by the pool get to spend more time together get more from your spring break getaway with exclusive hilton offers. book yours, only at hilton.com he's playno, with us. he's trying to tell us something. let's see what forensics thinks. sorry i'm late. what did i miss? wanna get away? now you can with southwest fares as low as 49 dollars one-way. yes to low fares with nothing to hide. that's transfarency. before the break we ran through many so of the international reaction to this weekend's strikes in syria. to discuss that further i'm joined by the executive editor and founder of syria deeply and the "new york times" correspondent who covers isis and whose work for the past year is the subject of a new podcast called califhate and back with us is michael izikoff, the last journalist to have sat down with bashedad. we showed you some of the images from state tv. i'm not naive enough to think that syrian state tv is the litmus test of the entire syrian population given how divided it is. give us a sense of how are the air strikes that we saw this weekend, how are they likely to be received in syria across the political divide? >> if you are a syrian who supports bashar al assad you're celebrating this weekend. you saw those scenes in the street. not only because he really survived this unscathed but because it's fair to say that even if you take the pentagon's word for the impact of this strike, it really didn't serve as a serious setback to assad or his military apparatus so he came out pretty much unscathed and frankly arguably even close thundershower russia and iran, his primary backers. >> let me pick up on that point. in terms of the deterrent that the united states wanted to send, particularly with the issue of the chemical weapons, the barrel bombs and other weapons also illegal but not on our radar, how much an impact will this have with assad's relationship with russia? does it make them double down horn the? >> according to my sources there was an involved back and forth between dod and the white house about the scope of the discuss going much bigger. were they going to hit military facilities in addition to the chemical weapons depots and the research center? >> they went to the measured approach, specifically, the military insulations have russians and possibly arraign n i -- iranian citizens working in them. we're reasserting the status quo. we are going to allow iran and russia to back president assad in the various crimes he's committing. at the same time, we are going to try to send a message about chemical weapons. >> one of the statements over the weekend that got attention was dana white, the pentagon spokesperson, saying this is going to help the end of the syrian civil war. a lot of people are scratching their heads, how it is going to happen. michael, you were the last american journalist to interview assad. what's your take or how he's likely to respond to these air strikes? we have the video there of the last time you met with him. you know his mindset better than any of us on set. how do you think he is going to view these strikes and respond? >> look, i mean, he had russian backing before. he's got it now. that plus iranian backing is what props him up. i don't see where he would perceive this as being any great setback to him. or, necessarily, cause him to change his calculus, which is the only justification for the raid itself. by attacking, by sending these missiles, the u.s. and its coalition partners would force the syrians to change their calculus about the next time they would use chemical weapons. remember, it was a year ago that the same scenario played out. use of syrian chemical weapons. u.s. military strike. design to change the syrian calculus. obviously, to the extent it made any change at all, it wasn't terribly long lasting because they used it again. >> i know that the white house, at least president trump, has been moved by the images of the young children affected by the chemical weapons attack, as we all have. in the broader humanitarian crisis, i want your thoughts. it was the legal basis for why it carried out this strike. it is hard to believe this administration cares about the humanitarian aspects of the syrian people when they haven't opened their doors to refugees. is that a fair assessment, that this trump administration, when it comes to playing humanitarian caretaker, caregiver for the syrian refugees around the world, it is mostly lip service? >> the obama administration was pretty much the same, to be fair. >> numbers were different. >> millions of syrians have been suffering since 2012. >> we have the numbers on the screen. >> that's just refugees. >> coming into the united states, just to be clear. >> being allowed in. did obama allow in more refugees? yes. under obama's watch, this conflict spiralled to a point where 11 million syrians are suffering out of their homes. you've seen untold suffering. dozens of chemical weapons attacks since the start of this conflict. president trump did take a different tact. actually, even launching symbolic strikes on syria, which obama hadn't done. so, it's hard to say that the u.s. policy has been particularly compassionate or consistent at any moment in the past seven years. >> michael, really quickly, a policy and strategy here. looking at the united states over the past several days, talking to the former air force secretary, she was saying it was a disservice for the president to tweet out what he was going to do with the smart, nice and new bombs and the missiles, and he sell gratelegraphed what he g to do in terms of policy. is that an effective strategy for the united states, to del gra -- telegraph what he was going to do, or did he box himself in? >> once he tweeted that, it would have been impossible for the president not to act. it would be a replay of president obama declaring the use of chemical weapons a red line and then not responding when the syrians used it. can i just make one last point on the refugees? >> of course. >> those numbers, i mean, when i was there in syria, went through the valley and visited some of the refugee resettlement centers, the numbers are staggering. upwards of 4 million syrian refugees. to put that in context, that is more than four times the total number of palestinian refugees from the conflict in 1948, a problem that still haunts the world. think about the long-term impact of what's going on in syria with the refugee crisis. it dwarves anythif vef vef ves >> let me finish up on two important aspects. iran and israel. the growing tension between the two countries in syria. iran sees syria as an existential lifeline to hezbollah. israel sees iran's presence as a major threat that it is not going to go unanswered. >> back to what we were saying earlier, the fact that the strikes were so targeted, only hitting this very small chemical weapons related facility, not going further, not hitting the many other military facilities that have been raining barrel bombs, et cetera, on the syrian people, which are backed by iran and russia, i think that that, in a way, is a statement of impunity. it says they can continue to back this leader without any real world repercussions. of course, that is going to make israel uncomfortable. >> as we've seen, israel has not shied away from carrying out strikes inside syria. >> iran has an extensive footprint in syria, and it is growing by the day, making israel very nervous. >> great to have all of you with us. michael, i appreciate your insights on both of the stories we covered today. >> thank you. that'll do it for this week. join me next sunday at 5:00 p.m. to break down the major stories of the week. you can reach out to me, of course, on social media. join my friend, kasie hunt, at 7:00 p.m., for "kasie d.c." then chris matthews hosts "headliners. he'll look at james comey. but up next, if it's sunday, it's "meet the press." bought a . okay. 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