Is behind the scenes pictures and videos. booktv is our handle. We kick off the savanna book festival with retired air force Major GeneralRobert Latiff on the future of technology and war. Live coverage on booktv on cspan2. Good morning. My name is nancy leads. Im delighted to welcome you to the 11th annual savanna book festival presented by georgia power, david and nancy cintron, that she and family, many thanks to jack and mary, the glorious venue, the Trinity United Methodist church. And members and individual donors who have made and continue to make saturdays events possible. 90 of revenues come from donors just like you. And and it would be very helpful today. Following this presentation, Robert Latiff will sign festival purchased across the way. And as it empties so ushers can count available seats. Please take a moment to turn off your cell phone. And we ask you to not use flash photography. During the questionandanswer portions. I will call on you and one of the ushers will bring a microphone to you. In the interest of time and to be fair to others, limit your self to one question and dont tell a story. Robert latiff is with us courtesy of hugh and fran thomas. Robert latiff is an adjunct faculty member of the university of notre dame, director of Intelligence Community programs at George Mason University school of engineers, and therefore study board and Intelligence Community studies board in the National Academy of sciences, engineering and medicine. Please give a warm welcome to Robert Latiff. [applause] i think the savanna book festival for having me here. This is an awesome event. First of all, appreciate your interest in my work. The savanna morning news, a really nice review, interview she had with. As a retired military person, i have done a speeches standing in front of a group talking about a book is like talking about your kids. This is a really important topic. Probably more so than it has ever been, if you read the news you hear this talk, i saw an article yesterday or the day before in one of the publications talking about drifting toward war, very much like we did for world war i. It is a frightening time and a very timely time to talk about my book. I will talk a little bit about why i wrote it, how i came to write it which is a really cool story i always like to tell. And some of the that are in it. If it isnt immediately obvious to you, i grew up in rural southeastern kentucky, never did get rid of the accent. I was a product of the sputnik era. I was all about science and technology, was interested in the space, and, strangely enough, Nuclear Weapons. Somehow or the other, i got into the university of notre dame, never figured that one out. They let me in and it was immediately obvious to me i had no names to pay for it. The center in the army, rotc, i was going to serve my four years to get out and become a nobel prizewinning physicist. That didnt work so i stayed 32 years in the military, 6 in the army, 24 in the air force, strained for infantry, to go to vietnam. And after my phd in notre dame, stood facing 100 divisions of soviet infantry. Who we are going to nuke when we come across the border and to that i commanded an Army TacticalNuclear Weapons unit that was going to hand out nukes to the firing battalions, switch to the air force and became involved in research, development, reconnaissance, space, intelligence, Nuclear Weapons and all very high tech stuff. My career is all about hightech. Why did i write the book . As a young, 26yearold army captain trying to give Nuclear Weapons to people caused me to about their role in war. Fastforward 20 or so years, had the opportunity, if you call it that, to be involved in reducing Nuclear Weapons should that ever happen. And many other things. At the fall of the berlin wall, fall of communism, about that time, we went into kuwait, kicked Saddam Hussein out of kuwait. You would have thought with that and the fall of communism that we had won world war iii, the way we were acting. After that we were the strongest nation on earth, the only remaining superpower and let everybody know it and that bothered me. Fast forward again, 2003. That was the crux of what bothered me, the invasion of iraq. It is Public Knowledge that i was very concerned about that. I will get to that. I retired from the air force, went to work with the industry, began immediately thinking about all this stuff. Called my friends at notre dame and said i have got some issues, can we talk about it . Sure, you can develop a course for us, which i did. Then now that you developed a course for is would you teach it . Still today, ten years later, i am traveling back and forth to notre dame to teach our students about war and ethics and technology. I dont know if anybody watches notre dame football, but if you do through halftime they always highlight student and faculty member and my course was so popular they highlighted me on television which was kind of cool, two minutes, and that got the attention of the New York Times. Sam friedman, a wonderful editor of the religion section of the New York Times, interviewed me. Great article. And that caught the attention of random house. If you know anything about the publishing business, jonathan siegel, his authors have 6 or 7 pulitzers to their credit, probably going to disappoint this one. John was a wonderful editor who did marvelous things, was very nice to me and patient. The teams of the book, several themes. Number one, war as we knew it, as i knew it, is changing. War and technology have always gone together. It is critical to soldiers. There is a big chasm between the American Military and American People. You are saying really . Not only that, our political leaders. Some of the sub themes, there is unfettered technology innovation, has some downsides, this from a lifelong geek. We were often as i said militaristic, arrogant about our technologies and arms control is hugely important. We are mesmerized by war, we are mesmerized by technology. Steel, gunpowder, stealth technology, Nuclear Weapons, the computer, the internet, it was not al gore who invented the internet, it was the defense advanced projects research agency. All these things encourage technology and technology encourages the military. We are seduced by it. One of my favorite pictures is in new york city when a new iphone comes out. There lines of milelong, ask people why they are there, there is a new iphone, just because, we are seduced by it. Robert oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb basically said we are seduced by it, we worried about it afterwards and marine general james mattis who used to be one of my heroes often said to his soldiers you have got to forget about technology, you have to operate on your own. Not saying that anymore. We have the largest Defense Budget in the world, larger than the next eight countries combined and we are the largest proliferator of weapons in the world, twice as much as russia. War is different, we all know that, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, cyberwarfare, intrusion in our election systems, advanced technology is like cyber and other things, more available to more people all over the world. People worry about cyberattacks on our electric grid. We saw what happened with sony. Virus somebody did, war is going to be closer to home as we have seen, others are going to have the same technologies we have. It used to be we were way ahead of people. Now it is fairly obvious countries like china are beating us badly in High Technology areas. Machines in some form will watch for us. I worked in an organization that builds by satellites. They will be watching all the time. That is not it. Everything, pretty much everything in the world now is connected to the internet so all you have to do is go on the internet and look at the data. Machines are going to for us in the military and the intelligence business Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are going to give us the answers and it will be up to us to say yes or no. They are going to fight for us. We even today see robots on the battlefield. The robots and drones are controlled by humans now but that wont always be the case. Soldiers are going to be different. I will talk a little bit about that. War is going to be vast, maybe subtle. We may not even know it is happening. It may happen in the blink of an eye. It is going to be global. So some of the technology. I actually heard the military described as a giant, armed nervous system. Everything is connected to everything else. Things like information technology. We are now at a point where we put billions of transistors on a tiny chip, advanced data mining, Artificial Intelligence, if you have seen the news the dod just asked for another 15 billion to put into things like Artificial Intelligence. Weapons will have decisionmaking capability, we already have weapons with decisionmaking capability, they are defensive in nature, the patriot system, antimissile systems but more and more, offenses weapons will sneak up on decisionmaking capability. The human will always be in the loop according to the part of the fence or on the loop or watching the loop. War will be so fast that humans will become irrelevant and we may slide into a case of decisions being made by machines and not really even know it was weapons will go to a target area and take action. They might seek permission first and they might not because there is no communication. These things are good, dont get me wrong. Drones and all these technologies to make our soldiers better are good. Enhancements. There is a yuck factor involved in this. Exoskeletons help soldiers lift things more. And airplane pilots drugs to keep them awake, talk about giving soldiers drugs to make more courageous, less fearful, feel less pain. We need to think about that and this whole area of neuroscience. This one is interesting. I talked to the advance Research Project about some of the women we are doing. Mostly for treatment of soldiers with traumatic brain injuries. Good stuff, they are able to restore function to soldiers. But you know what . They also learned they can enhance normal soldiers, make soldiers learn faster, and treat they have gone to the point they can identify the structure of the brain and what some thoughts our. If you can read a thought, you can write a thought. This is very scary stuff. There is an increasing concern about biological enhancements, biology, synthetic biology. If anybody has read about crisper, probably won a nobel prize. The worry, the director of National Intelligence said crisper is a defense threat, and intelligence the rest. The worry is bad people create viruses that are not amenable to treatment so we worry about that. Cyberwar, talk about power grids, dams, there was a case in which a man sitting in the back of an airplane was able to hack into the cockpit so hacking into airplanes and weapons is of huge concern and this is another area, the dod will be spending 12 billion next year on cyber. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. Anybody read the book one second after . And electromagnetic pulse, pretty bad. You can do it without a nuclear bomb. That technology is out there, being developed. Hypersonic weapons, weapons at 15 to 20 times the speed of sound, no defense against. Technology is moving really really fast. If you look at Technology Adoption curves becoming more frequently, things getting into the public much faster. Even i, phd in engineering, what do you expect of the American Public . They look at this technology and go got it. The problem is the us is technologically pretty illiterate when it comes to the rest of the world. This is okay in civilian life. If we dont understand how netflix gave us the recommendation to the next movie it doesnt matter. But it does matter in the military. When we are going to kill people it matters a lot if we understand what is in our weapons. We have to understand the consequences. I dedicated this book to a friend of mine, retired former navy, was in vietnam, exposed multiple times to agent orange and so we have to think before we employ these things what the consequences are. We knew what the longterm consequences were. With the against technology or what . Technology is good. Healthcare, everything we have done is wonderful, antibiotics. The problem with antibiotics we got used to demand now we are having a hard time trying to find ones that work because we overuse them. The food industry. We have more food than we know what to do with. A lot of drugs in our food. Ai. Ai is the technology eating the government. We need to understand because we dont actually know how ai works. Even specialists dont know. I moved on, talk about technology, that was fun, talk about technology again, that was really fun. I was teaching the course at George Mason University to a bunch of master students, one who was a chaplain, an Army Chaplain just come back from iraq, 16 soldiers in the unit were killed and hundreds were wounded. He talked to me about how difficult it was to treat the wounded souls of soldiers. They are people. When they go out and kill others, maybe even civilians, it bothers them a lot. Talked about how important it was for soldiers to understand what is correct and what is not correct in warfare. I talked about Armed Conflict and he was very interested in that. And that chapter i tried to take those Cool Technologies we were talking about and bounced them up against the laws of war, the laws of Armed Conflict and say are these things right . Do they satisfy the proportionality and distinction and so on and so forth. That is just so much talk which is actually important, leadership is important. I talk about some of the things we in the United States did in bombing civilian targets and massacres in vietnam and other places, then i talk about the good leadership. For instance robots. The example i use, there is this idea that humans and robots are going to fight together on the battlefield. I am sitting in a foxhole with my robot and somebody throws a grenade in. Is my robot going to jump . Am i going to jump on the grenade to save the robot . The courage and loyalty and camaraderie and all those things come into question when we talk about machines. Enhancements, drugs, neuroscience. Is that soldier operating with free will . Can it make a moral decision . I dont know. We are trying to make machines more like people, trying to make people more like machines. Somewhere in the middle it is going to be a mess. My editor asked me besides you, who cares about this stuff . Well, that sends me on a rant in chapter 4 and my answer was unfortunately almost nobody. A few writers like myself and others but not very many people. I go on to this discussion in chapter 4 about how arrogant we are about our technologies. After the fall of the wall we were everywhere. Shock and are, remember that in 2003 invasion . That didnt work out very well. The media, by the way i love the media, dont talk about fake news. Media gets it wrong. They focus on the wrong things and dont focus on the important things. The internet is an awful place for people to do bad things. We are deliberately ignorant, we dont try to educate ourselves. There is a chasm. The public is just not involved. No knowledge of the military, people ask me did you ever kill anybody . No, not everybody in the military is a killer. Out of sight out of mind. Leaders actually use the military as a toy, their own itll private back to this education thing, i read an article, remember when russia went into criteria crimea and then ukraine . There was a survive by harvard professors. 2000 people, what do you think the United States should do. 60 said we should go in militarily. Those same 60 , when asked if they knew who where ukraine was, they said no. They knew nothing about the military. I would like to use the phrase the big t. Most people dont realize that the us spends 3 quarters of 1 trillion a year on the military. About 250 billion of that on new weapons. They dont realize the impact of all the deployments our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines face, the psychological scars of war. Have no idea how the military gets missions and what the threats are. What they do know, what they do, dont get me wrong, i appreciate it, they thank us for our service. We do halftime shows and believe me, that is wonderful but it isnt enough. We allow our politicians to employ our military. Congressional Research Service basically pointed out in the 70 or so years since world war 2 we have deployed our military 60 times, over 60 times, almost once a year. A recent article in Time Magazine pointed out we have special operations forces, 143 countries. Maybe all of those things are legitimate. I question whether they are or we just like to use our military. So i say we kind of disrespect our military. I wrote an article, no one has published it, we disrespect our military. We have halftime shows and other things but i say a sign of disrespect is ignoring somebody and we are ignoring them. That has to change. There has to be a national conversation. I had a novelist friend in Silicon Valley who actually wrote what i thought was a pretty good description of my book. We ask our fighting men and women to go into battle ever more frequently trusting that the tools we hand them are somehow vetted as the right ones, their orders are honorable and their actions are sancti