Andy hird is a special assistant to the noras university provost, he talks about expanding to students so that you may learn what it is like to travel abroad. He has done a tremendous amount of things, part of that has to do with him being stationed here for rotc and his hopes in helping each of you become better leaders and meeting here today is moderator of this panel. His bio is extensive. I could spend a lot of time writing about the things he has done but i will keep it short. He is retired, United States air force, went to the air force academy, university of north carolina. s. Eric career includes 3 commands. For those that will be aviators, 6000 flying hours and combat missions in four conflict. Please welcome colonel andy hird. [applause] or smack thanks, travis. Thank you for attending the North University military writer Symposium Panel of warfare in the 21st century. Future battlegrounds. My name, andy hird. You and i are privileged at the peace and war center to organize this panel, to engage with experts of the 21stcentury conflict. The experts on the panel are global thought leaders who are intimate with battle in planning and in direct action. They understand the evolution of conflict and how that conflict shapes policy, contemplation of the future influences national power, planning and decisionmaking through the careers of research, writing and debate. Your norwich experience is to develop you to lead. Whether you lead in business, the community, government or military service, preparing you to lead in the Twentieth Century 21 steuben century is essential. This panel is part of that mission in these writers have spent years thinking about the evolution of warfare and how 21stcentury battlegrounds will impact society. From our conversation with them today you will have an expected insights about your future challenges. You may feel 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 your data, your personal data can be a threat, your dna, search preferences, social posts can be used for great purposes but can be used to manipulate or threaten you. Todays conversation is about the future you will live and work in and we are here to explore the future of warfare. Your phone is a powerful communication tool. It is a potential method of tracking and exploiting you. Artificial intelligence is changing our lives, impact future jobs, impacts transportation and politics. Robotics, revolutionized industry already and war. Combined with ai, big data and instant communications, robotics is a 21st century agent perhaps like none other in history. You cannot be on the technological sidelines, whether you are a schoolteacher or platoon leader, what is expressed today by this panel. Your job as leaders will be open to new ways of thinking and be proactive. That is what today is about, the imperative to study the technological environment within which you must lead. Some of you must contemplate the very direct threats from which you must defend us in battle. Today most of us are connected in realtime to the internet. Immediate notification is beamed into your own pockets. Your cell phones in the norwich Emergency Notification system, and exercise notification early this morning. Anyone notice that . I am sorry if it woke you up. The system could direct you to act. Hunker down. Run. Report in. Alert somebody. This is an amazing capability for our Safety Office to trigger action throughout norwich. How would you respond to a directive to evacuate your building and due to some threat. As you leave your dorm at midnight, you should ask himself why is it there. A suspicious package. Perhaps it is a local reporter getting content from tv news. Maybe it is Law Enforcement monitoring the safe evacuation and 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 do you lead men and women in that environment . Finally, what if this drones programming, incompletely analyzes the situation or as a coding error, what will you do or what will it do if you are standing in front of its target. These are the questions you should ask each time you get a suspicious email a directive text message or fuel your car automatically bumped away from the side of the highway or when a drone buzzes overhead. What do these technological advances mean beyond their prima facie purpose. How far has this point gone in the funded laboratories and what capabilities are fielded, how are you going to wield those capabilities how will you lead people against threats who are faster, fearless or devoid of empathy . These are Game Changing technologies was yours is a leadership future but cannot rely on studying the past. This drone is a fraction of a capability that exists today. Tomorrows tech will be exponentially more powerful and for 21stcentury leadership youve got to be immersed in the future. You have to become futurists. Fortunately we are joined by three futurists today to get you started. You should have already read their biographies. If not, scanned them now while i am finishing these words. Plan to engage each of them after the panelist book signing. Doctor Benedetta Berti is the head of policy planning in the office of the secretarygeneral at nato. Shes a policy advocate for human security, stabilization and peace building. She has written extensively on the future of terrorism and nonstate actors. Contributions earned her the order of knighthood from birth country italy. Peter warren singer is strategist and senior fellow at new america, a leading expert in 21stcentury warfare advising the Defense Department industry and entertainment, including Software Call of duty. He has written nonfiction and fiction on future conflict and the impact of cyber and robotics it is listed by foreignpolicy as one of the worlds top 100 innovators. Paul scharre is senior fellow and director of the technology and National Security program at the center of a new american society. Previously he advised in the office of the secretary of defense on unmanned and autonomous systems, served in the army third rangers leading special operations reconnaissance teams in iraq and afghanistan. Bill gates named his book one of the top five books to read in 2018 and is this years award winner. Panel members, life is busy. We fill our days with work, studies, relationships and having time to contemplate the future is rare especially when trying to think about battlefields. What is happening right now which may have Significant Impact on the 21st century warfare . Benedetta berti, would you please leadoff on this topic . Thank you very much for the kind introduction and thanks to everybody for being here today. I will start by saying part of my job today has to do with looking at future trends like the secretarygeneral of nato and one of the main jobs is to look at the future, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years down the line, look at how the trends we have seen on geopolitics, economics and security will affect our ability as an alliance to deal with the worst of the future. That is the question that takes up quite a bit of our time and thinking in brussels. I will start with a couple points. I know i am here looking at how emerging technologies are going to affect the way we fight wars. Im not going to go there. I will talk about the nontechnology did that is very important when we look at a future conflict. That point of order, nato as an alliance, very much thinking about threats and conflict of the future. Our first assumption is those conflicts are unlike the consequences in a few dimensions, when is the fact that we expect this conflict to be multidomain. Not just on air, land and sea but operational domain like cyber, information environment and making a number of decisions and amending those decisions so that we are ready to fight on the operational domain. As a researcher i would add another point that is forgotten when we think about the future of warfare in the future of conflict, more and more we are called into a position that we have to question where does conflict begin and where does it end . Is conflict in the sense that we will face more activities below the threshold mixing and matching connecticut and nonkinetic means for military affect so it is a world in which all tools in the toolbox of geopolitics or Foreign Policy, a number of tools we traditionally thought of as separated from pursuing military and Security Policies that will be mixed and matched together and we have a number of political and military adaptations that we have to undertake to really be able to deal with conflict. The last point i would make is conflict also looks increasingly more unclear where the conflict begins and where does it end and we live in a world where i would call us witnessing the number of no war no peace scenarios none of which are given any indication of going away, we look at the map of Political Violence today and track civil and humanitarian crises occurring from south sudan to iraq to syria to afghanistan to yemen to somalia and i could go on. One of the characteristics is we are in protracted political conflict in which the beginning and the end looks increasingly more blurred, a number of important dilemmas when we do peace building or development, when do we use the military more effectively. That is a trend that is only going to increase. We are going to have a world where frozen conflicts through political crises are not going to go away, they will become more entrenched and that place is upon us serious dilemmas in terms of how to intervene and how do we mitigate these. Then there are a lot of other things, making this point that the battlefield is not won but is one of many. It is increasingly more blurred. It is increasingly more undersigned. It is a big dilemma. Theres a lot of complexities in that story, what trends are happening right now that are realtime for future leaders. I begin by thanking you in the organizers for having myself back here. Honor to join you. I think one of the other areas in terms of the future of warfare is the emergence of a series of technologies you might think of, think of a different buzzword, revolutionary technology, disruptive technology. Technologies the change the game, a generation ago we thought of as Science Fiction are now poised to change the world and when i say change the world, everything from society, business, to what plays out on the battlefield. Think of these, i was at the museum earlier today. 150 years back, led the United States navy adapting to the new steam engine and the idea of an armored vessel, the wing that shows the first graduates of the School Wrestling with the flying machine. You have i visited a Cyber Security course. That is not thought of as the computer circuits 1980, not thinking about its weaponization and what attended that moving forward. And and it is about robotics, it was the various size and shapes. It is Artificial Intelligence, Machine Intelligence that is simulating human decisions or doing them better, taking in more data etc. The change in the internet, the internet of things. We have wave where witches new Energy Sources but energy becoming a weapon itself, the ray gun is no longer just something in Science Fiction and Human Performance modification using technology to change what we can do, tech we carry on the body, exoskeleton, fit bit, you name it, it might be technology in the body. The Research Project on brain machine interface technology, using your brain to connect to a computer. This was not a Science Fiction class. This is one of the technologies that are happening out there. Real quickly and the first is what makes them revolutionary is they give us new questions on what is possible that wasnt possible before. Its not just that it creates in terms of battle multidomain, but these technologies, unlike the ironclad for the aircraft character, they have really lw barriers to entry. Its the fact multiple other actors will have them. So a nonstate actor, Insurgent Group now has a little miniature air force. Saudi arabia experienced this. They have the thirdlargest Defense Budget in the world and yet it got hit by a combined drill and Cruise Missile attack. The other part is its not just the idea of sort of the great space of conflict and knowing when it begins or ends. Its the speed of conflict has changed, so a eye, part of the goal of it is it moves to quicker decisionmaking that humans come so much going on we may not be able to wait and in ways we used to let the flipside is that it means conflict may be continual use example of ukraine and we played with his in the ghostly book, cyber war effectiy was lost by ukraine before the first armed troops crossed into their territory. So the lost the war before the actual war began because of what is happening in their networks months before the fight even began. An interesting thing, 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 whats happening inside a Computer Network or even inside a microchip manufacturer. Youve mention speed. One thing that is not been traditionally fast is government policy. Theres a lot about in your writing. Could you tell us a little bit about some of the realtime policy successes or things we need to be thinking about right now that impact 21st century warfare . The real challenge that we face from a publicly post template is where just so much slower than the pace of change after in the world. I think its worth, when you think about future conflicts, worth thinking hard about what do we need to know . In the last 30 years since the end of the cold war weeds in u. S. Military forces deployed to iraq, to somalia, haiti, bosnia, kosovo, afghanistan, iraq again, syria, to iraq again, to elsewh, to libya. We dont actually need to know where were going to fight in the future. We are not going to know that and thats heavily dependent on a lot political uncertainties and sort of specific bits that may happen and thats okay. Thats fine. What we need to know is what mike war look like . Need to get close enough of the forces we train and equip are not grossly unprepared. We have felt the pain and the cost of soldier and to Service Members when we send forces overseas that are not ready. With saw this certainly a prior wars come in world war ii and korea in early phases but we felt it in the early phase of iraq and afghanistan where we fought a type of conflict that was different from what the army has been focusing on. When we think about the military as a set of toolkits for National Security decisionmakers we want to have the right tools in our belt. That we are ready to address whatever conflict were in. As peter talked about we are seeing these explosion of Digital Technologies that are fundamentally changing different ways in which we are fighting. But one of the things thats interesting about this is we also seeing the pace of this is so incredibly rapid. Its interesting it feels away to people who may be of a certain age, but when you look at data and innovation, it is changing and proliferating faster than used to be. We continue to see expenditure growth and many of these digital systems, so our policies really struggle to adapter for 20 years for now, for example, 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 our military forces the project power and lethality. Things that render our aircraft carriers, our short range fighter aircraft, our air bases significantly less useful in future conflicts. We have done very little and thats because its a lot of lock in inner system both in congress, with independent proxy and also culturally with our things that might have to change how we fight. You mention the shift from sale to steam. That was a challenge inside the navy. Shifting from horses to tanks in the army. There are lots of historical examples were adopting technology requires changing how we fight and thats a real issue. I often see culture can get in the way because we have a lot of prediscord which is sometimes attached every carry out a task rather than maybe the mission were trying to perform as i could hinder military effectiveness. So with the pace of change so rapid, youre going to 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 are going to be deputies, Field Grade Officers and perhaps even business partners. So to our panel could you please address what these men and women will face ten years out when they are advising, and each of you has been an advisor in many sorts of ways. So mr. Scharre if you would first tell us to the future advisor of Senior Leaders what should they be preparing for . I think one of the real fundamental challenges was this plenty of what we traditionally think of war and not war. Not only create catholics but the emphasis of nonkinetic means of warfare information attacks, cyber attacks. There is a high degree of transparency in military operations that i dont think were prepared for. We saw for example, u. S. Navy seal raids against bin laden. That was reported in realtime on twitter. Where operating in a world where theres great for transparency about what our mili