At 6 30. I apologize in advance for cutting off any moments of brilliance on their part or any of yours because of timing. My name is john yoo, i am a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise institute and coauthor with Jeremy Rabkin who is already at the other end of this book after 20, by yours now before supplies run out. That is a joke, supplies will never run out. Striking power. We are proud to have our commentators. Bios in front of you, mister lewis is a fellow at the center for strategic and International Studies which is almost next door to us. A long background on these issues and governmental agencies, just complaining, the United Nations. And professor andres at the national college, deep background in Cyber Security issues, really grateful to have them with us. What we are going to do today, i am going to drive the themes of the book. We will hear from rich and jim and Jeremy Rabkin will respond and we will have 25 minutes for your questions and our answers and discussion. With that said, let me welcome all of you to our new building. I couldnt think of a better place to talk about future technology than our prototype bridge of the starship enterprise. This is an amazing facility, looks like we are already in the space age. Welcome to all of you who are not from aei. I would like to thank Lindsay Weiss for organizing the panel and everything ran so well and the aei leadership and staff for providing a nice home for Jeremy Rabkin and i to do our research. The book has three points to it. A lot of the Rapid Advances we are seeing in technology and the economy are coming to military weaponry. If you think about some of the major advances youre seeing in the civilian world, autonomous cars, great advances in robotics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles we have seen for more than ten years are just the leadingedge of the advances robotics are going to provide to military affairs, much more complex drones, naval vessels that dont need large groups, drones that can operate in the air autonomously, ground vehicles, antimissile defenses which are in the news and our thoughts with regard to north korea. Cyber also present the aggregation and rapid manipulation of data in the civilian world, the use of algorithms to carry out everything from trading to electrical systems, social media and the military world. The virus that was allegedly created by the United States and israel which delayed the uranian Nuclear Program by several years. The United States has been on the receiving end of cyber with alleged tax into the Government Office of Personnel Management database and other alleged russian interference with the us electoral system. Also on the defensive in cyber. Space, we have seen in the course of a few years a rapid drop in the costs of launching satellites into space thanks to private enterprise, spacex. There is a lot of reluctance and concern about the deployment of these technologies in warfare. Elon musk who himself is the head of space x and head of tesla recently issued a letter two weeks ago signed by 100 other ceos of Tech Companies calling for an outright ban on the use of Artificial Intelligence in weaponry. Two or three years ago he was joining a letter by stephen hawking, the famous english physicist and steve wozniak, one of the founders of apple and thousands of other scientists to call for regulation and even prohibition of the use of Artificial Intelligence in weapons. They fear a future where robots will make decisions how to wage war, robots will make decisions whether to try to assassinate enemy leaders or attack specific ethnic groups or invade and occupy territory. The book Jeremy Rabkin and i rose is a response to these efforts to create a ban or heavily regulate these new weapons. One is historically we think such efforts are doomed to failure. Every time there has been a big advance in economics or technology, productivity married to similar changes in military affairs, there has always been an effort to stop orban those efforts and almost invariably fail. We have a discussion about why they failed. Think about world war i which deployed for the first time in a broadway economic progress made during the Industrial Resolution where you saw mass production of weapons, the introduction of aircraft, submarines, longrange artillery. People called for the banning of a lot of these new weapons, but in the end the only one that succeeded was the ban on biological or chemical weapons. All those other mass production type weapons survived and were widely used. We should actually not fear these weapons. Because the effect of these weapons is different than past revolutions. Past revolutions the effect of these new technologies has been to make war cheaper, more massproduced, more destructive and less discriminate in the sense that weaponry discriminated less between civilians and combatants. We think these new technologies have the opposite effect. With drones, cyber, space weapons, the use of force can be more precise, less harmful, less destructive, much more protective of civilians, more discriminating between targets and civilians. The third thing we argue is the main critics of these new technologies that come from technologists themselves, the tech ceos from United Nations leaders, not all the many academics in the field, officials of other governments. Their main argument has been that war has become too easy when you can launch it by pressing a button or when you can send a robot to do the fighting. Why not ban these weapons to make war harder and more difficult to reduce overall . Our argument is that is not an argument about the technology. That is an argument about the purpose of war in the modern age, whether there has been too much war or too little more. One thing is north korea or rwanda or syria, examples where countries feel stuck between passivity, appeasement or doing that and momentous step of deploying large amount of troops, resources and we argue these technologies can provide nations with options, in between doing nothing and going to fool world war that hopefully will be to use as a force that promote International Order and stop human rights abuses or allow great powers to negotiate their disputes before they reach a shooting war. Let me just close before turning it over to our two commentators. Last thing, seems like a lot of the fear of the new weapons is because James Cameron is too good a director and convinced us the terminator movies are what we should fear. You can see it in the rhetoric opposed to new technological developers, the headlines, articles, if we go down this route soon, it will lead to terminator robot and skynet will take over and humanity will be lost. That sounds great. I love science fiction, sounds like a great episode of many star trek series which i highly recommend, but is it really a serious concern . Do we have evidence of that happening . Has it ever happened before . Why cant we take safeguards as we do with the development to make sure it doesnt happen in the future . With that i would like to turn it over to richard first, you will go first. We look forward to your comments. Coming at this a little differently having worked for the permit of defense for quite a few years and taught at the National War College. What we try to do is figure out how to best use the technology. When i read in the book about efforts to ban or discriminate against using these technologies, i thought that doesnt sound like a good idea. That would make it harder to win. There is a different perspective from the department of defense side. Let me take this to a different level. One of the things we need to do from the perspective of america being a representative of the American Government is we need to be concerned about how best we can win. If we use technologies that help us stay at we can reserve this system we have built and sustained since world war ii for a longer time, our system wont last forever, no system does. States with different system of government we dont agree with will begin to prevail. We maintain for a longer period of time. This other thing that is going on along these lines is our system, this International System, peaceful, stable, democratic system depends on having allies. It works as long as we have the moral authority and have allies behind us and if we start doing things which make our allies uncomfortable or unwilling to work with us we will have problems. There are two sides to this even from the perspective of some like me coming from his affirmative defense wanting our country to win on the battlefield and on the bigger political and diplomatic table. We have to take into account what our allies and friends are saying but im worried with this technological debate, this is serious and we have to be careful about going along with what our allies and friends, american constituencies are trying to do in banning this technology or stopping technologies like robotics on the battlefield or the use of cyberspace. I dont think what they are trying to do is necessarily logical. There is a constituency out there that makes its living, mostly International Lawyers, who make their living by being antius. That is what they do. Doesnt matter what the issue is. We cant take the argument at face value. I dont for the most part these guys are totally serious at the end of the day. When we hear what they are saying we shouldnt do we are doing almost all of them. We have banned weapons in the past but usually as weapons that have a horrific effects of chemical weapons biological weapons, nuclear weapons, weapons that dont have a horrific effects are not banned. I think that is one of the things we want to think about. Its not clear to me that johns points are wrong, that if anything the new developments will change warfare significantly so youve seen the blend of antisatellite in space and cyber precision and hypersonic strikes. Will be a different kind of battlefield just as in 1990 we saw different kind of battlefield from that new set of military technologies. Not clear to me existing international law, one doesnt apply. I think everyone agrees it does. They dont agree how it applies but theres agreement at least among u. S. Members that it applies and second wont reinforce some of the key principles of the laws of Armed Conflict proportionality distinction and discrimination. Sip it premature to be worried about this. When you think about there i would say to audiences. The audience we just heard about the International Lawyers but another one to bear in mind is an old arms control trick. As an old arms control i can say that. Amended treaty that bans for europe on it is doing and not what you are doing. That is respected. Id be upset if they chinese didnt try to do that. A classic example of course is the Chinese ForeignMembers Ministry was staunchly denouncing the weaponization of space and antisatellite weapons up until the morning they woke up and read in the paper that they had tested an antisatellite weapon. We have to expect that our opponents will take advantage of efforts to constrain the u. S. Without themselves being constrained and of course biological weapons are classic example of that. When you think about russian behavior. The other thing ive been thinking about and i was thinking about this largely in the context of cyber attack, why are we so risks diverse . Why do you have people writing about technology that do not exist or if they do exist theyve been around for a long time. The patriot has an autonomous mode. Some of the antiship defense satellites have not autonomous mode. Not the end of the world. Its preferable i think you have machine shot it as opposed to having a human shot at but you have people who object seriously to the spread of the select capability. Why are they so risk adverse and i think in some ways its because society itself has changed. Western society, American Society so we are much more riskaverse than the nuclear president which is a new demonic technology. That was the source of the godzilla movies and this is kind of her replay of this. We worry about catastrophes that probably wont happen and this might be one of them. When i look at these things for me it is just a further continuation of the technologies that have made military is more effective. We are not alone. Everyone i assume knows the leading expert of drones in the world is china. We are not in first place. But there is this larger debate about how these weapons bring unknown perils to the future of conflict. I will stop at that but we could have a larger discussion about improved military capabilities. He could make the case it seems to make great powers more cautious about about going toward it reduces the risk. My own belief is we will never see another world war Something Like world war ii where you have mass mobilization, industrial warfare on a global scale. Think most countries want to avoid that and one of the reasons they want to avoid that is precisely because the increased capabilities provided by the military systems makes it so costly. That isnt an argument for banning them. I want to just briefly address one issue that has come up and go onto two aspects other than that is a be a lot of this talk about banning control talk, no one is taking it too seriously. Im open to that but just so you have a frame of reference in the cyber area nato sponsored a project coming up with a manual on how the Armed Conflict applies to cyber and they did it not officially nato document but the nato center for excellence in talmet estonia broad and scholars from around the world, most of them people affiliated with government and they came up with this quite bulky, stuffy how Armed Conflict applies to Cyber Operations and they serve confidently. Of course it does in all the rules have to be applied in the cyber context than you might think well, thats a sight worth seeing. Therefore competing treatises that have been written by scholars probably not working for governments. Mostly people at universities and this original manual is now in its second edition in the second edition is longer and more detailed than the first. I went to the book party, the launch for the second edition of the manual here in washington which was interestingly sponsored by the dutch government for the finnish government. Some european country was associated with it. Dutch, yeah and people who werent all that is said well we came up with the second edition three years later because governments express so much interest. Everybody now sees maybe these arent exactly the rules but there must be rules for a second edition. Im not sure anyone could tell you confidently what would really happen if we started going back and forthwith disruptive cyber attack spot i think its not real good to have everything channeled to a fairer rules lets make them far more detailed. I think the point of that is to be inhibiting and i think the way governments work there are lots and lots of lawyers basically giving a lot of material for lawyers to save no, we cant do this because you are the rules. It makes it look like this is all been worked out. By the way no one is proposing a new treaty. They are all saying lawyers can extrapolate how this works. The first thing i want to say the least in some areas to cyber teen example whole lot of people generate a whole lot of things that look semiauthoritative and serious so its not a few people saying things on tv and they are just kidding. The second thing i want to say to a followon, it discourages people who need to think about this from thinking in a serious way. The point of our book is not lets just cut loose in the wild that is not the point at all. Its that new technologies put up in many ways in many contexts into a different situation and we should think about how this works. Let me just give two examples. The main treaty going back to the 1970s make a distinction between military targets which are permissible and civilian. Not only civilian human beings but civilian infrastructure should not the adults are your target. Proportionality is literally its not like theyll be excessive. Its, if there is going to be incremental harm to civilians objects, civilian infrastructure and has to be incidental because they cant be the thing you are aiming at. If its incidental and still cant need, cant be excessive in relation to the military advantage. When you are going after military targeting up to hit some things nearby. That whole way of thinking is basically a few bomb cologne with 1000 bombers you break a lot of stuff. You kill a lot of people. It had better be worth it. This whole way of thinking about it which makes certain sense if you are sending in a lot of numbers to hit a city with 1943 technology so basically couldnt get within a fivemile radius of the intended target. More than half fell outside of the fivemile radius of a were not close to the actual target which is why they needed so many bombers. If you think about cyber you can just say the iranian, the Iranian Program will find uranium. We are going to hit that installation and we are going to blow anything up. We are just going to target the industrial control on some important pieces. No one was killed. It just incapacitated this particular piece of equipment. If you step back and ask the lawyers questions were the military lawyers questions are still fall was that i permissible target . Was it a military target and the iranians swear up and down, was a Peaceful Nuclear there. Actually thats a complicated dispute. Is it military or is it civilian . That itself is somewhat disputed and even if you said th