Just released. Hes a former staff director for the Senate Armed Services committee and prior to that he was advisor for john mccain and previously held other positions in the government. Right now he is the chief Strategy Officer that builds capabilities for the military as well as the department of Homeland Security and we can talk about that as we go through the interview thank you very much for being with us today. Its great to be here. So just to start off with what led you to do this book . Youve been thinking about these issues for a while and obviously this is something youve encountered a lot during your several years on the Armed Services committee and with senator mccain as a policy advisor what was the genesis that led to you sitting down and writing an entire book . Its a great question and i asked myself that constantly, why did i get into this every day i was working on it . I guess it was basically two things. One was and both of these were a product of the many years i spent working on these issues when i was in the senate and just thinking about this stuff on a daytoday basis. The first was just the growing realization in the years that i was there that we just had a fundamental problem that i felt was underappreciated. Not only that people didnt appreciate that we were losing competitive advantage, that we work where we needed to be from a technological standpoint and to a certain extent an operational standpoint. It was mostly just the sense that i didnt think there was urgency to get after that problem that weneeded considering how fast that problem was closing on us and in some respects actualizing how far behind that problem we are. The second was then again, the thinking i had been doing around what do we do around this. And on the one hand, theres a lot of talk about the threats and operational problems prevented by your competitors like china. Theres a lot of talk about technology and the importance of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and autonomous victims to being essential to enhancing americas competitive advantage from the military standpoint. It didnt feel to me though that there were concrete answers coming together so its like what do i do with this new technology . How does it allow me to build new kinds of capabilities and operate in different ways that are going to create competitive advantage for the United States military. Theres sort of a sense that we were talking about these technologies as we were layering them on top of the things weve had in theway weve always operated and were going to be able to do it better. So from my standpoint, i sort of was living at thenexus of these worlds. From the technological standpoint, really i think on the hill looking at the emergence of these technologies, kind of the dods treatment of them, attempt to develop them and obviously looking at the operational problems and press briefings and discussions with the department of defense. So my view on it was is there a way to sort of prejudice divide for this gap between what it is we think we might be able to do with new technologies and what are the things that we are going to need to do or what to do differently from an operational standpoint and then in a broader strategic context where are we going , what is this next youre going to look like so that was essentially the origins of it and it was more of an attempt for me to get my own head around these problems. As it was the sort of say heres my contribution to what i think the answers look like. I totally agree we are at a kind of juncture where we need to make the decisions as a nation and as a department of defense on how were going to deal with the problem that in particular china poses but any hightech competitor will close because we are still lugging around a legacy military its not quickchange how it operates or changes its posture to take advantage or exploit new technologies that are becoming available so it seems like one thing you focus on is the idea that is not just about using these technologies because arguably been around a few years. Its about changing the way that were going to use, that we were going to fight and use these technologies in terms of the operational concepts and you talk a little bit in there about the idea of human command and machine control which is an interesting way of describing the apartment often characterizes as man unmanned teaming which makes it seem like a man system and the unmanned system are on par with one another and theyre going to go out and act as a team and if they get separated they can operate independently and if they come back together they can team up again which is not the correct way to characterize or consider the introduction of unmanned or Autonomous Systems so how do you think of that new way of operating that were going to then need to embrace with the advent of Autonomous Systems and then maybe we can talk about ai asan added element to that. Sure so. To give credit where credit is due in command and machine teaming was your phrase that you point with dan which i give credit to both of you in the book for you and it encapsulated the way i thought about it very nicely which is why i gave it proper place. The reason i dont like man unmanned teaming is the sense that this manned and unmanned system isequal. And that theyre somehow on equal footing. Which i just dislike. I think the other piece is there sort of is this tendency to believe that these new technologies are so fundamentally new and different at the way that weve always thought about the control of military operations, all of the law policy norms and procedures that have sort of covered this in the past are somehow going to be thrown out the window because this stuff is fundamentallydifferent. But my own view is that it just isnt. Its going to be much more of a movement along a continuum from where we have been into some brandnew era. And ultimately i think it really does kind of come back to this question of command and control which is a very familiar military concept and i think its hopeful to take the system out of it and really get to the question of what were ultimately talking about is the performance of military tasks. Those tasks are going to continue to be performed. The question is who or what is going to beperforming them. Youre still going to have secure superior actors are controlling the board actors. Traditionally thats been human superiors commanding human subordinates. But i think as these systems become more intelligent and more autonomous, some of those lower more technical repetitive tasks, more mundane tasks, take an enormous amount of human time in the us militaryright now. We have tens of thousands of humans doing processing explications to censor information just as one example. Increasingly more of those tasks could be performed more intelligent, more autonomous machines. That doesnt mean that theyre going to just be off doing it on their own. Its still going to be again, to the same Architecture Framework of command and control now where humans that very clear parameters for the control of military tasks, youre going to test significantly and train significantly the subordinate actors who are going to perform those tasks and then the process of training and testing your book to build trust that they can do the things you are giving them responsibility to do. We talk about Autonomous Systems as if there is such a thing. Reality is autonomy describes the relationship between a human who is delegating tasks to someone or something other than them. So in that respect think its more around sort of what are the standards by which we are going to be able to come to trust machines to perform tasks that currently work previously only humans could perform. But i dont think the way in which were going to do that is going to be any different than the way that we sort of evaluate humans in that respect or evaluate less intelligent machinesthat weve been relying on for a long time. We have processes in place to do this. And i think thats actually going to be something that we should spend more time thinking through as a construct for how this can help us govern the emergence of and use of these new deck technologies. Absolutely. So in terms of the autonomous customs or the systems that are exerting some control over their own action, if theres a couple of different flavors and you talk about a little bit in the book about you essentially hire sophisticated systems and global hearts and systems that are very expensive relatively small numbers of them. They can operate relatively independently and do something own Mission Planning and to respond to some of the stimuli in the environment and then youve got these systems that are somewhat expendable , maybe even disposable and they operate independently but there is scope of action is very constrained. Theyre not really allowed decisions by themselves. Obviously theres a role for both of those but what im curious about is when you think about new ways of operating that exploit Autonomous Systems , Unmanned Systems, how do you see the relationship or how would you see both of thosefamilies of Unmanned Systems being used . Are you looking to essentially do like a war of attrition, and theres game. Imgoing to throw a bunch of disposable cheap things at somebody and overwhelm them. You see that as being an opponent of a larger force that uses that episodically maybe the rest of the force is pursuing a set of more traditional maneuver actions and these expendable robots are just an element of that . How would you see the different types of Unmanned Systems being employed in military operations as opposed to just kind of throw a bunch of robot waves people . Its a great question and i think perhaps the sort of point that unifies the two certainly in the present sense is whether its a global hawk or something smaller and cheaper, we talk about them as Unmanned Systems but theyre pretty exquisitely manned when you look beneath the hood and see all the different particular tasks being performed by human beings remotely. In order to make them operationally useful and i think to me the big change is going to be rather than having one unmanned system or one manned system that requires an exclusive amount of human beings behind it to make it operationally useful, its actually the inversion of that commandandcontrol relationship where you can have a single human being in command of large quantities of systems. To get your question i think the real opportunity is getting math back on our side. For many years we have made the choice around being qualitatively superior even in the face of a quantitatively superior adversary. And weve been able to dothat because we had kind of exquisite technological over maps that allowed us to hide, evade detection, penetrate into enemy spaces. Fire a limited number of times but exquisitely accurately. To me i think the opportunity of flipping this back to say from an operational standpoint hiding is going to be become harder. I am going to have to confront larger waves of systems coming at me and i think autonomy opens up the possibility of being able to put math back on our side and to your point, these wars of attrition smarter and cheaper , then maybe we had been expecting two. In terms of how that allows us to also then fight differently other than we are going to grind each other down and the last person standing wins. Which i think theres something to be said for that. I do think the ability to operate faster is going to be another critical component of this and youve written eloquently in terms of this about a decision centric model and thats why i focused on the chill chain as an organizing concept of the book in which its not the particular platforms or the pieces of the system that are interesting , whats ultimately the ability to understand whats going on. To rapidly make decisions and take relevant actions and sort of increasing the quantity and quality of that. The speed and scale bywhich you can operate. Where again as youve written you create so many different dilemmas for the adversaries that it traps their abilityto make decisions. We found in the working we didnt looking at these concepts is that the players, they like the idea being able to do the attrition attack and threw a bunch of something at the adversary and overwhelm their defenses. What they like is having the ability to do that as well as to some exquisite attacks while the abhisit is busy dealing with the attrition battle thats happening elsewhere, they can focus a smaller number of platforms that might be autonomous but they will go to the pin point strikes against the committee control nodes, the longrange sensors, those capabilities that are the things that a Game Changers in terms of the way the battle is going to proceed. Getting that, taking away his eyes while keeping his hands busy with something in the wargames we found very helpful. Just to build on that, i think the point i tried to stress in the book is whats best is really putting the focus on the outcomes we are trying to achieve rather than getting overly consumed with what type of system is going to be most relevant. I am prepared to believe the best answers to these problems of how to build the effective Battle Networks that will solve these operational problems, it could be all legacy systems used in new ways. It could be a mixture of old technologies and new technologies. At the end end of the day it cd be all brandnew things. At the edge of the date it shouldnt matter how you combine these things but the point you have made so welcome you have to be able to combine them in in a more elegant, more dynamic way so that you can build these different Battle Networks that are not just entirely all brandnew things or explicit point to point connected old things really get those interesting synergies between a 40, 50yearold platform and some brandnew Autonomous System that was developed yesterday. Lets talk about whether u. S. Has a competitive advantage. You talk about, we could talk about how you would implement this kind of force and what we could leverage in terms of the u. S. Ecological base, but also were to use the fundamental advantages with the u. S. Would be able to better exploit these emerging technologies than an adversary like a china . In a lot of these technologies we still as a nation still have considerable advantages and considerable capability. The challenge is just a lightning the advantages and capability we have with the actual military problem were facing. This is a familiar conundrum of how do you get companies and the kind of founders and others are working in these technologies that are focused on commercial applications and not interested or actively opposed to working on military problems. That is going to be a conundrum for us. One of the biggest advantages the United States has is just the operational expertise and excellence that we have in the United States military. Separate and apart from the technology area. Its hard to replace just the amount of time we have spent solving operational problems, actually digging with these types of changes in combat. Its not something we should be overly reliant upon because a lot of these problems are going to be new and different, but from the standpoint of thinking about how you solve operational problems, bring the joint force together to do that, we have a lot of ability there. At the same time we need to be realistic there are a lot of aspects of china is going to develop and use these technologies that could give it a leg up over us when it comes to scale, when it comes to Data Collection and retention. Certainly when it comes to being shall we say less interested in some of the ethical concerns that we spent a lot of time rightly focused on that we have government that is founded on a distrust of its own people, my sense is that would be a lot more willing to delegate these decisions to autonomous machines than the United States is. It is going to be a longterm competition where we will have to look for areas of advantage and we may not always be the leader in these areas. The question is how quickly can we bring these technologies in an integrate them to make them operationally relevant. Thats something we have done quite well in recent years but this this is a very different type of challenge and we need to be mindful of the fact that much of what we learned over the past 20 years may not all be transferable to this Great Power Competition era. One interesting thing that comes out of the way you were describing how Autonomous Systems might get you send out some of the wargaming we did played out with that. If youre going to use your unmanned system to try to gain a decision advantage, meaning you will use them to operate faster, operate faster time but also faster by operating at scale and giving the adversary more things to look at. If you can speed up your decision cycle and approve its quality like that and hopefully youre creating a deception and confusion on the adversary side that he is slowing his cycle, then it seems like one thing we may be able to rely on this Mission Command. The idea i u. S. Force has been trained in such a way they are willing to improvise, use their own initiative when communications are loss, willing to accept tactics that might not ordinarily be what they return to based on doctrine. It seems like the willingness of u. S. Leaders to be able to take advantage of their own initiative and ability to improvise might be an advantage if you look at decision centered fight where youre having to use your own Unmanned Systems under your command and come up with a tactic in the absence of a planning staff or some higher direction. It seems like that might be a form of competitive advantage as well. I think thats right. I think the challenge is at the United States military will have to we learned a lot about Mission Command as well but i think to your point where much better positioned to do that than an adversary thats very topdown, the inherent distrust in the lower ranks. I think that is 100 kind of an advantage we have, but that something were also going to have to relearn after 20 years where we practice a lot of Mission Command in a lot of places but wasnt necessarily the way a lot of these conflicts were structured. Right. So that brings me to a point that i think a lot of people ask is, how do we actually make this transition . You discussed and we discussed on the subject that you dont have to transition to the robot force of Autonomous Systems right away. This could be an element of the force that gets gradually built up over time and even to 10 contribution to the force of Unmanned Systems or Autonomous Systems makes the difference in your operational outcome. Other than going back to defense contractors and say build a bunch of Unmanned Systems, are there better ways dod could be trying to take advantage of this enormous Tech Industrial base in the United States to try to field Unmanned Systems and ai enabled command and control management tools more quickly than it would if it goes through the normal acquisition pipeline . Yeah, to me this is the sort of 64 milliondollar question. It is one thing to talk about all of this. I think that much harder challenge is how to do it. And again that was something that really hit home for me and was eyeopening in the course of doing the book is how so many of the things we are now saying are things we have said over the past 2030 years. Networkcentric warfare and it all sort of rings true and similar to many of the things that are being said and written now, got to go back and asked why did we fail to do or not do so many other things we said were so important for so many years. Part of it is we havent gotten the incentives right and that was a main emphasis i put in the book. Im a big believer in incentives and to a large extent weve gotten exactly what we paid for. The way you begin to change that is you have to focus on the things youre trying to buy. Im a big baseball fan. Big fan of the, were now measuring key outcomes rather than player inputs. In much the same way getting into position where we are competing out the things were trying to do, measured based on outcomes we are trying to achieve so that theres an actual process and a repetitive process every year with a certain amount of money held in reserve at the beginning of the year by the Senior Leaders of the department of defense, Congress Supports that say were trying to reduce the time to close kill chains, trying to enhance the decisionmaking advantage of u. S. Forces. We need to measure it against specific operational problems though sources are going have to confront. We have to get away from these broader buzzwords like commandandcontrol or military operation which we can have informed debate about what they mean but you have to boil them down to the specific military problems that joke when its assault under the conditions you have to solving against realworld adversaries, not general sort of generalized competitors. If you begin competing that out every year, you have an ability to see what is performing best and thats the best way to navigate this transition where initially much of that force is going to be our legacy force. The question is going to be how can these technologies enable that legacy force to be faster to steal more significantly. That will be the question of how Technology Enables current operations, current force. Eventually you will start to see areas where new technology, new capabilities will replace legacy systems because theyre capable of performing better as part of that integrated battle network. Unless youre measuring the things are trying to do, then it is sort of every man for himself and it doesnt get you the kind of datadriven output that you want to see you can direct what is ultimately going to be a decreasing amount of resources towards the force through trying to build. The other piece of that is that begins to create the incentives for industry to really understand if they put their own money toward solving these problems, they have passed to getting in to have a meritbased competition where if they go out and find a new Battle Management system or a new aircraft or weapon, theres the prospect of department of defense has a mechanism and the congress has a mechanism for on ramping that at scale very quickly. And by the way someone shows up with a better capability than you, dont worry because you have the opportunity to come back and compete next year. This will not work for everything. You are going to be limited larger more capital intensive programs like aircraft carriers and the like. There should be a lot more attempt to put competition back into not in the sense we mean acquisition composition at the front end but constant operational competition to determine what other systems you should be putting resources in an scaling them considerably so that again you begin to see the department of defense is moving money towards the things they say are important. Thats the thing that i look at and look at from my time on hill, what Senior Leaders, senior members of congress its interesting. What they spend money on is whats going to move the needle in terms of programmatic choices and Investment Choices on the part of private industry and investment community. That brings up a couple interesting points. That was a fascinating discussion right there. One is requirement. The department of defense builds requirements using a System Engineer and approach where it determines how it thinks its going to be configured in a future, it determines what things the future scenarios are likely to look at and then they do an analysis to figure what other capability gaps, given that assumption, the assumptions for the threat looks like and assumptions for what my available forces will look like in 20 years from now. Theres a bunch of assumptions built into it and its come up with a point solution. What youre talked but is a different, not a point solutin of driving towards but more of a bottomup attempt to improve mission outcome. The defense would establish your submissions we think are important, heres outcomes we want to have happen, here is a range of environments in which those outcomes are needed, so like china, the South China Sea or in the baltic or something. It sounds like thats what youre talking about, much more of a joint step comes up with outcomes, the military problems do want to address and in a lot of the job of the department of defense is to harvest ideas and assess their ability to improve those outcomes. Yeah, i think thats exactly right. You said it very well. I think unless we are focusing on the joint outcomes were trying to achieve, we are going to end up buying a bunch of things that make the may not achieve the outcomes. Part of my problem with the environment process, quoteunquote, is just the degree of hubris that is baked into it, which is somewhat the experience we just had of 30 years postcold war top of the heap but i just dont think thats really going to hold up for us in the future. Its kind of a halfbaked example but if i do let my own requirements from a mobile device out at the best phone in america right now. We got to get beyond this idea that if theres not invented in the defense establishment or cooked up inside the department of defense, somehow its no good. I would be much more interested in every year being able to say look, i have to be able to defend forward bases from large quantities of incoming weapons. I dont care how i do that. I dont care with what i do that. The question is can we field a better solution that reduces the likelihood that my forward bases are smoking holes in the ground 48 hours in the start of a concept . And focusing on the outcome and then the capability that would come together as the things that are going to drive extensive resources, expense of resources but it will probably require that. Just iterating on that so every year theres an understanding of whatever wins is going to get funded. Were going to come right back to figure out if theres a better way to do this next year and is going to significantly move the needle on the money were spending. That raises the question of intellectual Property Rights and how do we Design Software so that companies can have that opportunity to compete and win the contract next year even if they didnt win it this year . You were going to have system thats been developed or some parts of the system of systems that you are going to need to introduce your capability into. You want to incentivize companies to do this so i dont want to tell them or you have to give up your ip in the process of competing in this effort to try to provide assistance to the u. S. Government. Theres lots of opportunities to try to create a model or an environment where companies can retain the intellectual Property Rights while also modifying systems on a regular basis. Have you been thinking about that . In terms of bring in other people systems and try and integrate those with your own. And i think, to me this is one of the core problems will have to solve and i think the department is very right to criticize industry or i would argue criticize itself. For too often in recent years becoming a holden to proprietary solutions from industry where there been locked in black boxes where they have been an capable of moving at the speed that technology is allowing them to move. Thats all true and valid. My concern is a backlash against that is going to lead toward the belief that it should all just the government, as if you would say well, our experience of the f35 is been a real downer so the government is going to build its own highperformance aircraft from now on. Its just nonsense. The real challenge is figuring out what are the part of the architecture that the government will have to own, too defined to ensure you do have openness, scalability in the future. So things like the applications programming interfaces, the reference architecture, to certain extent standards. Those are things the government is going to have to define but then really allow industry to be entrepreneurial and creative about how they Bring Solutions to bear. I dont think its terribly difficult. The way we saw this play out with the commercial internet was you had a handful of major movers get together and hammer out a set of architects and standards, and then it really improve it as we go which is why i have an Apple Computer right now which is running a google application while im writing microsoft word document. Nobody admitted that had to be so. It was mostly creating conservatives for people to play together. Its mostly trying to determine what are the core things the government has to define to turn industry and the private sectors on these problems in a way you get the best capability, you get evolving rapidly evolving capability but at the end of the day the government can still have confidence that all of this stuff is going to come together and cohere assignment the assii bought a new center from the house i can plug it into the architecture that in running in my environment. Its a totally doable. This is a thing i come back to in the book is like this isnt witchcraft. This is things the United States military and servicemembers are doing everyday in their private lives. There is no reason why we cant do this in defense and yet we are ten years behind. To kind of close out, it seems like one of those things would like to do is incentivize industry also from a financial perspective. We can make it easier for new players to enter and offer solutions to these military problems but they are used to getting 20 time return. There used to d. C. Money being used to support 10x and 20x return vc money. Companies that are from that will have difficulty seeing the value and try to compete for dod dollars. Is there a way dod or the government can better incentivize those companies that used to much higher returns on the commercial side . I think they can do better as far as creating better incentives. The reality is look, working in the Defense Space youre not going to get the kind of returns that a commercial Software Startup is going to get. To a certain extent theres just going to need be to be a baselt of expectations that may be can do better than the two or 3 , the traditional industry is returning, but youre not going to get to the 20 returns that commercial software is going to get. I think thats a doable proposition but again from the government standpoint they need to get out of this mentality that they so value cost certainty and controlling the profits of industry that they would rather pay 1 billion for something and in the industry y got 2. 5 profit as opposed to pay 400 billion with industry getting 20 profit. We need to be aligned towards what truly important but i think from the standpoint of creating those incentives, youre going to see a lot more companies and engineers and technologists and investors interested in being involved in defense of the government is mine the emerging technologies that they say are important that these companies, founders and investors want to build. We overthink a lot of this from the standpoint of why is Silicon Valley or wiser Technology Community not doing more with respect to the dod, and a lot of it boils down to look, if you are buying and the point is technology at scale you would see a lot more engineers who thought they could make a successful career doing National Defense work. You would see a lot more Companies Giving founded and a lot more private investment going in to modernizing National Defense as opposed to optimizing advertising algorithms for social media. And theres a degree of supply and demand here, and the government needs to create that demand. If they do and put money time whats important you will slowly but nonetheless significantly start to see industry respond. Traditional industry, too. Part of the thing unreasonable just you look at a lot of these earlier attempts to unmanned system, Autonomous Systems, aircraft weapons, things struggling for fun the queers. It doesnt send a strong incentive traditional industry that this is something they should be prioritizing in their portfolio when their traditional offerings are getting funded in considerably larger increments. Right, absolutely. Thank you, chris. Thank you very much for being with us today. Christian brose, most recent book, the kill chain defending america in the future of hightech warfare and it is available right now. Im sure it is available many places, in addition to amazon which is where i think i got my copy. Thank you very much for being with us today, and good luck on the book. Actually thanks and thanks for everything you are doing. Its a pleasure to chat with you and i hope you saw in the book theres a lot of that that has your fingerprints and influence all over it. Thank you. I will keep your credit where credit is due but but i will te all the blame for things that i got wrong but honestly its a pleasure to be with you and appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. Its great having you on, and thank you everyone for being with us today. This of this is bryan clark fore Hudson Institute signing out, and stay safe. On a weekly Author Interview program afterward former Clinton Administration press secretary mike mccurry interviewed abc news chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl about his time covering the trump administration. In this portion he discusses the history of the phrase in any of the people. Every one of those president s complained about press coverage. One of those president s that the press focused on, it was way too negative, didnt see the great accomplishments of the administration. That standard operating procedure, but trumps attacks go far beyond any of that. Literally, so you in the of the people which is a phrase which i spent all of the time in the book about the origins of that phrase. Its a very ugly phrase that is been used by stalin, used by hitler, you know, during french revolution to justify the beheadings of people by guillotine. Talk all of it more about that. That is one the most interesting part of the book is unpacking that phrase. You do that at some length in a couple of chapters and really go to what obnoxious phrase that is if you look back at the history of it, talk about that. I spent some time looking through the origins of the phrase, and it was used quite prominently during the french revolution. Thats really the most significant place. People got beheaded as a result. And basically the justification was that the people that were targeted by the law under which they were found guilty and beheaded, the actual law uses that phrase, any of the people. And i document the use of it during the reign of terror when blood was flowing in the streets of paris. And then the other place, the next place i saw it was with, in germany, the plebiscite that gave hitler his powers. I go back and i find this article, it was an associate press article on the front page of the New York Times and other papers around the world right there in the lead paragraph you see the National Socialist party making the case anybody who votes against this is an enemy of the people. So yeah the nazis using this phrase, and then you see it a bit later used by joseph stalin. Now maybe im not saying donald trump knew that that was, the history behind this phrase but it was pointed out by a lot of people that had this really dark and morbid and deadly history, and he kept using it. To watch the rest of this program and to find other episodes of after words visit our website booktv. Org and click on the after words tab to the top of the page. That all start tonight at 7 20 p. M. Eastern here on cspan2s booktv. Good evening, everybody and welcome to politics and prose to our line new Live Streaming service. Im Lissa Muscatine what of the coowners a politics and prose along with my husband brad graham, and on behalf of our entire staff we welcome you to tonight speaketh which we all have been so excited about amateur all of you are as well. Let me just say a few housekeeping things at the beginning
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