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