Andy hurd, United States air force retired. Colonel hurd is a special assistant. He integrates University Departments to expand opportunities to students so that you may learn what its like to travel abroad and lead abroad. He has done tremendous other things here and part of that has to do with him being stationed here for rotc, but also for his hopes and helping each one of you become better leaders. His file is extensive. I could spend a lot of time reading about some of the incredible things he has done, but i will keep it short. You tired really hundred United States air force. Military career include tree commands and for those of you that will be a v8 or thousand flying hours and combat missions and for conflicts. Lets welcome colonel hurd. [applause] thank you, travis. Thank you for attending the military writers symposium. Panel of warfare in the 21st century. Future battlegrounds. My name, andy hurd. You and i are very, very privileged today that the university and peace and war center have organized this panel to engage with experts of the 21st century conflict. The experts on the panel are global thought leaders who are intimate with battle both in planning and indirect action. They understand the evolution of conflict and how that conflict shapes policy. Their contemplation of the future influences powers, planning and decisionmaking through their careers of research, writing and debates. Today we are fortunate to join them for 90 minutes of their professional experience. Your experience is to develop you to lead. Whether you lead in business, the community, government or military service, preparing you to lead in the 21st century is central to this universitys mission. This panel is part of that mission. These writers have spent years thinking about the evolution of warfare and how 21stcentury battlegrounds will battlegrounds will impact society. From our conversation with them today, you will learn unexpected insights about your future challenges. Some of you may feel very comfortable conversing about cyber or Artificial Intelligence, robotics or data, todays conversation is not just about products you can purchase and you should already know that your data, your personal data can be a threat. Your dna, your search preferences, your social posts, they can be used for great purposes. They can also be used to manipulate or threaten you. Todays conversation is about the future that you will live and work in. We are here to explore the future of warfare. Your phone is a powerful communication tool. It is also a potential method of tracking and exploiting you. Artificial intelligence is changing our lives. It impacts future jobs, it impacts transportation and politics. Robotics have revolutionized industry already and war. Combined with ai, data and instant communications, robotics is a 21st century change agent perhaps like none other in history. You cannot be on the technological sidelines as leaders. Whether you are a School Teacher or a leader, you must continue to reflect what is expressed today by this panel. Your job as leaders is to be open to new ways of thinking and be proactive confronting challenge. That is what today is about. The imperative to study the technological environment within which you must lead. Some of you, you must contemplate the very direct threats from which you must defend us in battle. Today, most of us are connected in real time to the internet. Immediate notification of events is deemed into your own pockets. Those students who registered their cell phones in the norwich Emergency Notification system received an exercise notification early this morning. Anyone notice that . I am sorry if it woke you up. The system can direct you to act punk are down. Run. Report in. Alert somebody. Triggering action throughout norwich. How would you respond to a directive to evacuate your building late at night and report in due to some threat. As you leave your dorm at midnight, you see see this droned. You should ask yourself, why is that it there. Is it security intending to search the building for a suspicious package . Perhaps it is is a local reporter. Media content for the tv news. Maybe it is Law Enforcement monitoring a safe evacuation or using facial Recognition Software to search for a suspect. Is it programmed to kill a target . What if there were thousands of these on the battlefield. Automatically seeking targets wearing your countrys uniform. How are you going to lead men and women in that environment . Finally, what if this droned programming and completely analyzes the situation . What will you do or what will it do if you are standing in front of its target . These are the sort of questions you should ask each time you get a suspicious email or directive text message or you feel your car automatically bump steer away from the side of the highway. Or when a drone buzzes over head. What do these technological advances mean beyond their purpose. How far has this already gone in the governmentfunded laboratories and what capabilities are already fielded . How will you be ready to wield those capabilities . How will you lead people against threats that are faster, fearless or devoid of empathy . These are Game Changing technologies. Yours is a leadership future that cannot rely on studying the past. This drone is a fraction of the capability that exist today. Tomorrow will be exponentially more powerful. 21stcentury leadership, you have to be immersed in the future. You all have to become futurists. Fortunately, we are joined by three futurists today to get you started. You should have already read your biographies. If not, you can scan them now while i am finishing these words. Plan to engage each of them after the panel at the book signing. The head of policy planning in the office of the secretarygeneral at nato. She is a policy advocate for human security, stabilization and peace building. She has written extensively on the future of terrorism and nonstate actors. Her contributions earned her the order of knighthood from her birth country italy. Doctor peter warren stringer is strategist at new america. He is a leading expert in 21 century warfare. Advising the department, industry and entertainment, including the Software Call of duty. He has written nonfiction and fiction on future conflicts and the impact of cyber and robotics he is listed by Foreign Policy as one of the worlds top 100 innovators. A senior fellow and director of the technology and National Security program at the center for a new american society. Previously, he advised within the office of the secretary of defense autonomous systems. He served leading special operations in iraq and i get a stand. Bill gates is named his book one of the top five books to read in 2018. He has also this years award winner. Panel members, life is busy. We fill our days with work. Our studies, our relationships. Having time to contemplate the future is rare. What is happening right now which may have Significant Impact on the 21st century warfare . Doctor bertie, would you please lead off on this topic. Shortly. Thank you very much for the kind introduction. Thank you, everybody, for being here today. I will start by saying that part of my job today very much has to do with looking at future trends. I sit in the office of the secretarygeneral. I lead the team and one of our main jobs is to look at the future. Look at how the tread that we seem to work today will affect our ability of the alliance to deal with the worst. That is a question that takes up quite a bit of our time and thinking back at brussels where i am based. I will also start with a couple of points. I know that im here with paul and peter on looking at how emerging technologies and Music Technologies will affect the way we fight wars. I will not go there. Very important when thinking of the future. First, that point of order, nato was very much thinking about how to address conflicts of the future. Our first assumption is those conflicts will be unlike at least a few dimensions. We expect these to be multi domain. Not just air, land and sea. Operational domain. The information environment. We are taking a number of decisions so that we are ready to fight conflict. I would add another point, perhaps sometimes forgotten when we think about the future of warfare in the future of conflicts. More and more, we are pulled into a position where we have to even question where does conflict began. Where does it end. We will face more and more below the threshold. Mixing and matching to achieve maximum military effects. The tools in the toolbox from real politics. To foreignpolicy. To a number of tools that we traditionally separated from pursuing military and security qualities mixed and matched together. I think we still have a number of political devastation that we have to undertake to really be able to deal with conflict in the gray zone. The last point that i would make is that conflict also looks increasingly more unclear. Where does conflict began, where does does it end . Witnessing a number of no war, no peace scenarios. None of which are giving any indication to go away. If we look at the map of Political Violence today and we look at civil and humanitarian crisis, to iraq, to syria, to gammon, to somalia, i could go on. One of the on. One of the characteristics is political conflict in which the beginning and the end looks increasingly more blurred. This puts a number of really important dilemmas. How do we do development. When do we use the military more effectively. I think that that is a trend that will only increase. We will have a word where frozen conflicts protect and they will not go away. If anything, they will become more entrenched. That place is upon us a number of serious dilemmas in terms of how do we intervene. How do we act to mitigate the conflict. And then a lot of others by making this point. The battlefield is not one, but it is many. Looking increasingly increasingly more blurred. Increasingly more undefined. Which i think is a big dilemma Going Forward. Thank you. Doctor singer. A lot of complexities in that story. What of that story or what trends are happening right now. Already real time for these future leaders. I want to begin by thanking you and the organizers for having myself back here. Just a real honor to join you. Everyone has shown such spectacular hospitality. I think one of the other areas, in terms of the future of warfare that is a key driver is the emergence of a series of technologies. Think of different buzzwords. Sometimes their revolutionary technology. What we are talking about is technologies that change the game. Technology that a generation ago we would have thought about Science Fiction, they are now real and poised to change the world. Everything from Society Business to what plays out on the battlefields. Think of these, i was at the museum here earlier today and you have distinguished graduates, 150 years 50 years back who led the United States navy adapting to the new steam engine. A wing that shows the first graduates of the School Wrestling with the flying machine. You have, i visited a Cyber Security security course here. Computer circa 1980. You are not thinking about its weaponization. Moving forward, we can see areas that you can break down into something that both paul and myself have worked in. You see an illustration of the coroner. It is robotics. Increasingly, Autonomous Robotics of various sizes, shapes, forms. Inc. About the software space, Artificial Intelligence. Lots of different definitions of it. Machine intelligence that is either simulating human decisions or doing them better in some way, shape or form. Taking in more data. Et cetera. You have the change in the internet. Hardware, software, wave, wave where which is basically new energy sources, but also energy becoming a weapon itself. The ray gun is no longer something in Science Fiction. And then you have Human Performance modification using technology to change what we can do. It may be carrying on the body, exoskeleton, fit that, you name it, or it may be technology in the body that a student here who is doing their Research Project on brain machine interface technology. Basically using your brain to connect up to a computer. This was not a Science Fiction class they were in. It was then your engineering department. These are the kind of technologies that are happening out there. Real quickly, the first that makes them revolutionary is they give us new questions about what is possible that was not possible before. They give us questions of what is proper. It is debates of right and wrong that we were not having before. How do i best organize my military unit. The second one to ping off of what you brought up, it is not just that it creates in terms of battle, multidomain, but these technologies, unlike the ironclad or the aircraft character, they have character, they have really low barriers to entry. Multiple other actors will have them. A nonstate actor now has a little miniature air force. Saudi arabia just experienced this. The third Defense Budget in the world yet it got hit by a Cruise Missile attack. The other part that i would ping off of what you brought up, it is not just the idea of the gray space of conflict in knowing when it sort of begins or ends. It is the speed of conflict has changed. Ai, part of the goal is it that it moves quicker decisionmaking than humans. So much going on. We may not be able to weigh in the ways that we used to. It means conflict may be continual. To use the example of ukraine, and we played with this in the ghostly book, the cyber war effectively was lost by ukraine before the first armed troops crossed into their territory. They lost the war before the actual war began because of what was happening in their networks months before the fight even began. There are people in this room that may deploy into battle years from now and yet the outcome of that battle may be shaped right now by what is happening inside of a Computer Network or even inside a microchip manufacturer. You mentioned speed. One thing that has not been traditionally fast as government policy. There is a lot of that in your writing. Could you tell us a little bit about some of the realtime policy successes or things that we need to be thinking about right now that impact 21st century warfare . The real challenge that we face from a bureaucratic standpoint is we are just much slower than the pace of change out there in the world. We think about future conflicts. What do we need to know . In the last 30 years we have seen u. S. Military forces deployed to iraq, somalia, haiti, kosovo, afghanistan, iraq again. Syria to iraq again. To tamale somalia. We dont know where we will fight in the future. It has not been dependent on a lot of insecurity. What we need to know is what might war look like . The forces that we are trying to equipped are not grossly unprepared. We have felt the pain and the cost to soldiers and Service Members when we send them overseas. We fought this and prior wars and world war ii and korea. We certainly felt iraq and afghanistan where we fought a type of conflict that was very different than what the army had been focusing on. Wiest think of the military as a set of toolkits. We want to have the right tools in our else. That we are ready to address whatever conflict we are in. We are seeing these explosion of Digital Technologies that are fundamentally changing different ways in which we are fighting. One of the things that is interesting about this is, we are also seeing that the pace of this is so incredibly rapid. Interesting that it feels that way to people of a certain age. Looking at data and innovation, it is actually changing and proliferating faster than it used to be. We continue to see exponential growth in many of these systems. Our policies are really struggling to adapt. The u. S. Defense department has been talking about the challenge of adversary innovations in precision guided weapons, sensors, Battle Networks that will allow them to target all military forces. Things that basically render our aircraft carriers. Significantly less useful in future conflicts. Weve done very little to adapt. Both in congress. Also culturally. Things that might have to change how we fight. Shifting from that was a challenge. Lots of examples where adopting technology requires changing how we fight. Culture can get in the way. How we carry out a task rather than maybe the mission we are trying to form. That can hinder military effectiveness. With the base of change so rapid, you will be adapting in just the next few years to start leading across all fields. In just a little more than a decade, each of you will be deputies, officers and perhaps even business partners. To our panel, could could you please address what these men and women will face 10 years out when they are advising. Each of you has been an advisor in many sorts of ways. If you would first tell us to the future advisors of senior leaders, what should they be preparing for. One of the real fundamental challenges that was mentioned was this blending of what we traditionally think of war and not war. Nonconnecticut means of warfare information attacks, cyber attacks, there is a high degree of transparency that i dont think we are actually prepared for. U. S. Navy s. E. A. L. , that was reported on twitter. Now we are operating in a world where there is a great more transparency about what our military forces are doing. Could be reported, could go viral. All of this basically means there is so much to what we think of as war. Not just the kinetic aspect of it. I dont know that that is actually a change so much as it is that it will become overly narrow. Maybe it is because we watched too many world war ii reviews. History actually unbounded. Many methods of fighting other than simply a direct flash of arms. Many of these are actually quite effective. Guerri