Twitter and instagram for behindthescenes pictures and videos at booktvs or handle. We kick off this year savannah book festival with retired air force Major General robertbo latiff on future war. Live coverage on booktv on cspan2. Good morning. My name is nancy lieb and im delighted to welcome you to the 11th annual savannah book festival. Isto presented by georgia power, david and nancy cintron, the gm family and mark metcalf. Many thanks to jack and Mary Raimondo our sponsors for this glorious venue the Trinity United Methodist church. We would like to extend special thanks to wire litter rowdy members and individual donors who have made and continue to make Saturdays Free festival of them possible. 90 of our revenue comes from donors just like you. Thank you. We are very excited to have savannah book festival this year for your phone. Please look in your program for information on downloading it. It just takes two seconds and it will be very helpful to you today. Before we get started by a couple of housekeeping notes. Immediately following this presentationlp Robert Latiff wil be signing purchase copies of this book just across the way it tell fair square. If youre planning to stay in this venue for the next presentation please move forward as it empties so ushers can give available seats. Please take a moment to turn off your cellle phone and we also k that you do not use flash photography. Y during the question and answer portion please raise your hand and 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 all of the other please limit yourself to one question and please dont tell a story. Robert latiff is with us today courtesy of unfriend thomas. Dr. Robert h. Latiff is a faculty member at the university of notre dame and hebe is the direct or of Intelligence Community programs at George Masons University school of engineering. He is a member of the air or studies board and the Intelligent Committee studies board of the National Academy of sciences, engineering and medicine. Na please give a warm welcome to Robert Latiff. [applause] let me thank nancy and the savannah book festival for having me here. This is really an awesome event. First of all i appreciate your interest in my work. Also i dont know if any of you saw on the Savannah Morning News news. Andrea did a really nice review of the interview she had with me. As a retired military person i have probably done a thousand speeches. Standing up in front of a group talking about a book is a little bit like talking in front of kids. Its harder but this is a really important topic. Now probably more so than it has ever been. If you read the news you hear all this talk. Perhaps you saw an article yesterday or the dayay before in one of the publications that talked about drifting towards war very much like we did before world warng i and so i think its a frightening time in probably a very timely time to talk about the book. I will talk a little bit about why i wrote it and how i came to write it which i think is really a cool story. I always like to tell it and then some of the themes that are it. If it isnt immediately obvious to you like grew up in rural southeastern kentucky. I never did get rid of the accent. I was the product of sputnik era era, so i was all about science, technology and was interested in space and strangely enough Nuclear Weapons and somehow or the other i got into the university of notre dame. They never figure that one out but they let me inve and it bece immediately obvious to me that i had no means to pay for it. Thus i enter the army, rotc and i was going to serve my four years and get out and be a nobel prizewinning physicist. That didnt work so i stayed 32 years in the military, six of them in the army and 24 years in the air force or 26 years in the air force. I trained in the infantry to go to vietnam. After my ph. D. At notre dame i went to germany where he stood facing 100 divisions of soviet infantry. I thought we were going to nuke when they came across the border border. For that i actually commanded in armyke tactical Nuclear Weapons unit that was going to hand out nukes to the firing battalions. I switched to the air force and became very much in involved in research and developmentin recognizance intelligence, Nuclear Weapons, all very hightech stuff. It was all about hightech and weapon systems. So why did i write the book . Well, as a young 26yearold army captain having to give Nuclear Weapons to people really cause me to think about my role inca war and fastforward 20 soe years i again have the opportunity to be if you call it back, the opportunity to be involved with the release of Nuclear Weapons should that ever happen and many other things. But really at the fall of the berlin wall global communism. Right about that time we went into kuwait to kick Saddam Hussein out of kuwait and you would have sought booklet that and you would have thought we had won world war iii the way we were acting. After that we sort of became bullies. We were the strongest nation on earth and the only remaining superpower and we let everybody know it. That really bothered me. Fastforward again to 2003, that was the crux of what bothered me was the invasion of iraq. And its Public Knowledge that i was very concerned about that. So i retired from the air force and went to work with the industry and began immediately thinking about all this stuff and all my friends at notre dame had said ive got some issues here. Can we talk about it . A said oh sure you can develop a course for us which i did and now they said now that you have developed a course for a skinny teach it . Still today 10 years later im traveling back and forth to notre dame to teach students about war and ethics and technology. I dont know if anybody watches notre dame football but if you do during halftime they always highlight the student in the faculty member and my course was so popular that they highlighted me on National Television which was kind of cool. Two minutes of fame and that got the attention of the news york times. Sam friedman a wonderful editor of the religious section of the news york times interviewed me, great article and then thats caught the attention of random house, knopf and if you know anything about it Jonathan Segal is sort of, his authors have seven pulitzers to their credit. Im probably going to disappoint him withhe this one but john waa wonderful editor, just did marvelous things and was very nice to me and very patient. So the theme of the book, there are several teams. Number one that war as we knew it and design new it really is changing and that sort of obvious. War and technology have always gone together. Ethics are critical to soldiers and theres a big chasm between the American Military and the American People. You are saying to yourself, really . Notu e only that our political leaders. Some of the sub themes, there is on feathered Technology Innovation has downsized this coming from a lifelong need. We were often as i said militaristic, hubristic, eric and about our technologies and i think arms control is hugely important. So we are mesmerized by war. We are mesmerized by technology. Steel, gunpowder, submarines, stealth technology, Nuclear Weapons, the computer, the internet. It was not al gore to invented the internet. All of these things are military encouraged his technology and technology encourages the military. We are seduced by it. One of my favorite pictures is a picture of the apple store in new york city when the new iphone comes out. There y are lines a mile long. If you asked people why they are there, because theres a new iphone. Just because. We are seduced by it. Robert oppenheimer the father of the atomic bomb recently said we were just seduced by it. We worried about it after we did it and marine general james mattis who used to be one of my heros often said to his youve got to forget about technology. You got to be able to operate on your own. I dont say that anymore but we have the largest Defense Budget in the world, larger than the next 800 countries combined and we are the largest proliferator of weapons in the world, twice as much as russia. Terrorism, guerrilla warfare, cyber warfare, and church and in our election systems and advanced technology is like cyber and other things are more available to more people all over the world. People worry about cyberattacks in our vector grid. We saw what happened with sony. If anybody has read about stuxnet, the virus that somebody did. War is going to be closer to home as we have seen and others are going to have the same technologies we have. It used to be we were way, way ahead. Now its fairly obvious that countries like china are beating us badly in hightechnology areas. So machines in some form will watch for us. I worked in an organization that bills spy satellites that they are going to be watching all th time. Pretty much everything in the world now is virtually connected to the internet so i go on the internet did look at the data. Machines are going to think for us. The military and in the intelligence business Machine Learning and art of racial intelligence are going to sort of give us the answer 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. Robots on the battlefield and the drones are controlled by humans now but thats not always going to be the case. Soldiers are going to be different and ill talk a little bit about that. War is going to be fast. Its going to be subtle. We may not even know its happening or it may happen in the blink of an eye and its going to be global. So, some of the technologies. Ive actually heard the military being described as a giant armed nervous system so everything is connected to everything else. Things like informationto technology, we are now at a point where we can put literally billions of transistors on a tiny ship. Advanced in datamining Artificial Intelligence. If you have seen the news that dod just asked for another 18 billion to put into things like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Weapons will have decisionmaking capability. We are ready have weapons that have the pager system the aegis system antimissile system but more and more offensive weapons will sort of sneak up on the decisionmaking capability. Right now the human will always be able to be on the loop or at least bought ching the loop but war will be sor fast that humas will become irrelevant and we may actually slide into the case of decisions being made by machines. Weapons will go to a target area slides to the hill and take action. They might seek permission first and they might not get theres no communication. These things are good. Dont get me wrong. Drones and all of these technologies to make our soldiers better are good. They keep the soldiers out of harms way but they need to come with a little bit of thinking. Enhancements, i talk in the book about soldier enhancements. There is a yuck factor involved in this. Exoskeletons to help soldiers listen. Pharmaceuticals. Right now we giveli airplane pilots drugs to keep them awake. Theres talk about giving soldiers drugs to make the more courageous and less fearful, feel less pain. We need to think about that and then theres this whole area of neuroscience. This one is really interesting. I was able to talk to the Research Projects agency about some of the work they 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 have also learned that they cann enhance normal soldiers. They can make soldiers learn faster. They can actually treat them. They have gotten to the point where they can actually identify the structure of the brain. Think about that if you can read a thought, you can write a thought. Its very scary stuff. Then there is an increasingry concern about biological enhancement and c synthetic whie a g. Ifs, anyone has read about crisr crisper. Virus editing. The worry is and the Director Director of National Intelligence said christopher is a intelligence threat. The worry is that people will create viruses that are on amenable to treatment so we worry about that. Cyber war, we talked about power grids, dams. There was actually a case in which a man sitting in the back of an airplane was able to hack into a chemical so hacking into airplanes and weapons is of huge concern and this is another area that the dod is going to be spending 12 billion next year cyber. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. If anybody read the book one second after and electromagnetic pulse, its pretty bad and you can do itoo without a nuclear bb bomb. That technology is out there. Its being developed. Hypersonic weapons, weapons that travel 15 to 20 times the speed up sound. So technology is moving really really fast. If you look at technology adoptionll curves they are comig more frequently and things are getting into the public much faster. Even i ph. D. In engineering really cant keep up. What do you expect the normal American Public . They basically look at all this technology and go, okay. The problem is the u. S. Is technologically. Alert or it when it comes to the rest of the world. This is okay in civilian life. I get it. If we understand how the net that gives us the recommendation or next movie it doesnt matter but it does matter in the military. When we are going to kill people it matters a lot that we understand whats in the Nuclear Weapons. We have to understand the consequences. I dedicated this book to a friend of mine retired former navy in vietnam on the mekong delta expose multiple times to agent orange and died of agent orange. So we have to really think before we employ these things about what the consequences are. We knew what the longterm consequences were. Is he against technology or what . Echnology is goodue health care, everything that we have done just wonderful things like antibiotics. The problem with antibiotics is we got really used to them and 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 but a lot of drugs in our food. Ai is the technology thats eating the government. Everyone f did interested in ai. We need to understand because we dont actually know how ai works works. Even the specialist dont really know. So i moved on. So i talked about technology and that was really fun. I talked about the knowledge again and that was really fun. I was teaching a course at George Mason University to a bunch of master students one of whom was the chaplain, an Army Chaplain who had just come back fromteud iraq where 16 of the soldiers in his unit were killed and hundreds were wounded. Antitalk to me about how difficult it was to treat the wounded souls of soldiers. Believe it or not they are people and when they go out and kill others and maybe even civilians at bothers them a lot. So he talked about how important it was for soldiers to understand what is correct and what is not correct. I taught about just war theory and the laws of our conflict and he was very interested in that. In that chapter i tried to take those technologies, all of those really. Cool technologies that e are talking about and balance them against the wars of Armed Conflict and third these things right . To be discriminate . He might say well thats just so much talk that its actually important. Leadership is important. I talk about some of the things that guess we in the United States did and bombing civilian targets and massacres in vietnam and in other places and then i talk about some of the good leadership. For instance the example i used theres this idea that humans and rove bots or ask a going to fight to get on the battlefield. While im sitting in a foxhole with my robot and somebody throws a grenade in his my robot going to jump on the grenade . Am i goingin to jump on the grenade to save the robot . Courage and loyalty loyalty in camaraderie and all those things that come into question when we are talking about machines. Enhancements, drugs, neuroscience. Is that soldier operating with free will . Cannot make a moral decision . We dont know. We are trying to make machines that act more like people and we aree trying to make people act more like machines. Somewhere in the middle its going to be a mess. So my editor asked me, john asked me, besides you, who cares about this stuff . That sent me on a rant in chapter 4 and my answer was unfortunately almost nobody. Few writers like myself and others but not very many people. So i go onto this discussion in chapter 4 about how arrogant we are about our technologies. Like i said after that we were everywhere. Remember shock and. In 2003 . That didnt work out very well for us. The media and by the way i love the media. I dont talk about fake news but i think the media gets it wrong. They focus on the wrong things and they dont look us on the important things. The internet is an awful place. Its good but its an awful place for people to do bad things. They think we are deliberately ignorant. We dont try to educate ourselves, and there is a chas. The public is just not involved. They have 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 sort of a boy their own little private toy. To come back to this education thing i read an article. Remember when russia went into crimea and shortly after that into the ukraine