He is the chief officer building capabilities for the military and department of homeland security. We can talk about that as we go through the interview. Thank you for being with us today. Just to start, what led you to do this book . I know you have been thinking about these issues for a while and it is something you have encountered a lot on the Armed Services committee and senator mccains policy advisor, but what was the genesis that led to you sitting down and writing the entire book . Great question. I ask myself that constantly. Why did we get into this every day i was working on it . Basically two things. Both of these were a product of many years i looked at these issues, just thinking about this on a daytoday basis but the first was the growing realization that we had a fundamental problem i felt was underappreciated that people didnt appreciate that we were losing competitive advantage, we werent where we needed to be from a technological standpoint or operational standpoint. Mostly the sense that there wasnt the urgency to go after the problem considering how it was closing on us and in one respect how far behind the problem we are. The second was the thinking i had been doing about what do we do about this . Theres a lot of talk about threatened operational problems by up your competitor like china. A lot of talk about technology, the importance of emerging technology to really being essential to enhancing americas competitive advantage. It didnt feel to me there were concrete answers coming together. What do i do with this new technology. Build new capabilities, operate in different ways that will create competitive advantage for the United States military. There is a sense we are talking about these technologies, layering them on top of what was operated and do it better. From my standpoint, i was living at the nexus of these worlds from the technological standpoint, really uphill, looking at the emergence of these new technologies, attempt to develop them and looking at the operational problems and threat briefings and discussions with the department of defense. My view is maybe there is a way to bridge this divide or gap, what we might be able to do with new technologies, things we want to do differently from an operational standpoint and in a broader strategic conquests, what is this next era going to look like. It was more of an attempt to get my head around these problems, here is my contribution to what i think the answers look like. We are at a juncture where we need to make decisions as a nation, the department of defense how to deal with the problem china poses been any hightech competitor is opposed, still lugging around a legacy military that has not changed how it operates or posture to take advantage or exploit new technologies that are becoming available. One thing you focus on is it is not just building new technologies but they have been around a few years. Not it is about changing how we use these technologies in terms of the operational contest and you talk about the idea of human command and machine control. The unmanned system on par with one another and going to go out and act as a team and if they get separated they can operate independently and then team up again. They will consider the introduction of unmanned or Autonomous Systems. What did you think of the new way of operating the we need to embrace with the advent of Autonomous Systems and we can talk about ais as an added element. To give credit where credit is due, human command and machine is your phrase which i give credit to both of you in the book for and it encapsulated the way i thought about it very nicely which is why i gave it a place. The reason i dont like command unmanned teaming is the assumption they are equals and there is somehow on equal footing which i dislike. The other piece of it is this tendency to believe new technologies are so different that the way we have thought about control of military operations, all of the norms and procedures and governance in the past were going to be thrown out the window because this is fundamentally different. My own view is citizens. It is going to be movements along that continuum rather than a brandnew era and ultimately i think it does come back to this question of control which is a familiar military concept. It takes the system out of it and gets the question out of it. What we are ultimately talking about his performance of military tasks. Those tasks will continue to be performed but the question is who or what is performing them. You are going to have superior actors controlling subordinate actors, traditionally that has been human superiors controlling human subordinates but the systems to become more autonomous, lower, more technical, repetitive tasks or mundane tasks take and ordinate amount of human time in the us military, we have tens of thousands of humans doing processing, exploitation, dissemination, increasingly more of those tasks are performed by more autonomous machines. It doesnt mean they are doing it on their own. It will be the same architecture or framework where humans set very clear parameters for the control of military tasks you are going to test significantly and train significantly the subordinate actors who are going to perform those tasks in the process of training and testing you will build trust that they can do the things youre giving them responsibility to do. You talk about Autonomous Systems if there is such a thing. Autonomy describes the relationship between the human that is delegating tasks to someone or something other than that. It is more, what are the standards we are going to come to trust machines to perform tasks that previously only humans could perform. I dont think the way we do that is different from the way we evaluate humans in that respects or less Intelligent Machines we have been relying on for a long time. We have processes in place to do that. That is going to be something we should spend more time thinking through as a construct for how to help the use of these new technologies. In terms of the systems that are exerting control over their own actions, there are a couple different flavors, higher sophisticated systems that are very expensive, relatively small numbers that can operate relatively independently, to respond to the stimuli in the environment and you have cheap systems that are expendable or disposable and they operate independently but the scope of action is strained. All these things are a role for both of those but when you think about new ways of operating that exploit Autonomous Systems how do you see the relationships being used, are you trying to do a war of attrition, enters game, and overwhelm them . Do you see that as a component of a larger force that uses that episodically but more traditional maneuver actions and that is an element of that. How would you see the different types of Unmanned Systems being deployed in military operations as opposed to throwing a bunch of robot waves that people. Perhaps the point that unifies the two in the present sense whether it is global hawk or something smaller and cheaper we talk about them as Unmanned Systems, you look beneath the hood and see all the different particular tasks performed by human beings remotely, in the case of many of these Unmanned Systems to make them operational. The big change is going to be rather than having one system that requires a lot of human beings behind it to make it operationally useful the inversion of the command and control relationship where we can have a single human being in command of a large system, the real opportunity is getting masks on our side. For many years we made the choice around being qualitatively superior even in the face of a quantitatively superior adversary and we have been able to do that with exquisite technological over match, fire a limited rate accurately. The opportunity of flipping this back to say from an operational standpoint it will become harder, i am going to have to confront larger waves of assistance coming at me and autonomy opens up the possibility of getting back on our side and to your point, fight some of these wars of attrition smarter and cheaper than we had been expecting to. In terms of how that allows us to fight differently then grind each other down in the last man standing wins, there is something to be said for that but the ability to operate faster will be a critical component of this. In terms of the decision centric model that is why i focus on the kill chain, it is ultimately not the particular platforms or pieces of the system but the ability to understand what is going on to make decisions and take relevant actions and increasing the quantity and quality of that. The speed and the scale you operate, you create so many dilemmas for the adversary of fractures the decisions. That is something they will provide us, real capability advantage separate and apart from we are going to grind each other down and at the end of the day have more systems about it, that is the outcome. A do the attrition, they overwhelm their defense. They do some acquisitive tax that while the adversary is bidding busy with the attrition battle that is helping elsewhere, they have a smaller number of platforms but they will do the kind of pinpoint strike against the command and control nodes and longrange sensors. What type of system is actually going to be most relevant. Again, im prepared to believe the best answers is how to build a effective Battle Network to solve these problems. It could be our legacy systems used in this way it could be Old Technology and new technology. At the end of the day could be all brandnew things. The end of the date should not matter how you combine these things. But again the point youve made so well has to be able to combine them in a more elegant and dynamic way so that you can sort of build these different Battle Networks that are not just entirely all bran new things about exquisite pointtopoint connected old things. But really be able to get the interesting synergies between 830, 40, 50yearold platform and some brandnew Autonomous System that was developed yesterday. So exactly. Lets talk a little bit about where the u. S. Has a competitive advantage here. We can talk a little bit about you and how you would implement this in terms of the technological base. But also where you see the fundamental advantages for the u. S. Would better exploit these emerging technologies than an adversary like china . Think that a lot of these technologies we still, as a nation have considerable advantages, considerable capability. I think its aligning that capability of what we do have with the actual military problem we are facing and its a familiar conundrum of how do you get companies and founders and others who are working in these technologies that are really focused on commercial application, not interested or actively opposed to working on military problems. I think that is going to be a conundrum for us. I think one of the biggest advantages the United States has is the operational expertise and excellence we have in the United States military sort of separate and apart from the Technology Areas it is hard to replace just the amount of time we have spent solving operational problems, dealing with these types of challenges of combat is not anything we should be overly reliant on because a lot of these problems will be new and different. From the standpoint of thinking how you solve operational problems how you bring the joint force together to do that theres a lot of ability there. At the same time we need to be realistic there are a lot of aspects how china will develop and use these technologies that could very well get a leg over us. When it comes to scale when it comes to retention, certainly when it comes to being shy we say less interested in some of the ethical concerns that we spend a lot of time, rightly focused on, we have a government thats founded on distrust of its own people my senses there will be a lot more willing to delegate these types of decisions to autonomous machines, the United States is. So i think it is going to be a long term competition where we will have to look for advantage we may not always be the believer in these advantage but how quickly we can bring these technologies in make them operationally relevant. I think that is something we actually have done quite wellin recent years. This is a very different type of challenge we need to be mindful of the fact that much of what we have learned may not all be transferable to this era. So one interesting thing that comes out of the way you are describing how economist systems are used in some of the wargames we did are played out, if you are going to use your own man systems to have an advantage which manger going to use them to operate faster, not only faster in time but operating faster to scale giving more things to look at, if you could speed up the decision cycle and the quality like that hopefully you are creating enough perception and confusion he slowing his own cycle then it seems like one thing we may be able to rely on his Mission Command. The u. S. Forces been trained and away they are willing to improvise, use her own initiative when communications is lost they may accept tactics which they may not ordinarily be according to a doctrine. But the willingness of u. S. Leaders to be able to take advantage of their own initiative and ability to improvise. An advantage if youre looking at where you have to use your own Unmanned Systems that are under your command to come up with a tactic in the absence of a planning staff or higher direction. Seems like that might be a form of competitive advantage as well. I think the challenges the United States military will have to relearn a lot about Mission Command as well. I think your point we are much better position to do that than an adversary thats very topdown the inherent distrust in the lower ranks. I think that is one 100 of an advantage we have. Lets also something will have to relearn after 20 years we certainly practice a lot of Mission Command in a lot of places but not necessarily the way a lot of these conflicts were structured. That brings me to it a point they think a lot of people ask is how do we actually make this transition . You discussed, we discussed in our own writings on this subject that you dont have to transition to a robot force of Autonomous Systems right away. This could be an element that gradually gets built up over time you make 10 contribution to the force makes a difference in your operational outcomes. Other than just going back to the defense contractors and saying building a bunch of Unmanned Systems is there a way you could be trying to take advantage to the United States to field Unmanned Systems and ai enabled control management tools more quickly than it would if it was the normal acquisition pipeline. To me this is the 64 milliondollar question. It certainly one thing to talk about all of this, think the much harder challenges how to do it. That is something that really hit home for me it was really eyeopening in the course of doing the book, how so many things were saying over the past 20 to 30 years. All rings true and very similar to i think in many of the things are being said and written now he have to go back and ask why did we fail to do or not do somebody things that we said were important for so many years. Part of it i think we havent gotten the incentives right. That was a main emphasis i put in the book. I am a big believer in incentives. Think to a large extent we got exactly what we paid for. I think the way you begin to change that is you have to focus on the actual things youre trying to buy. Some of big fan over a measure outcomes instead of player inputs. Much of the same way you get into a position where theyre actually competing out but that are measured on the outcomes we are trying to achieve said there is an actual process and kind of a repetitive process every year they certain amount of money held in sort of a reserve at the beginning of the air by the Senior Leader of the department of defense to say we are trying to reduce the time to close kill chains. We are trying to enhance the decisionmaking of u. S. Forces. We need to measure it against specific operational problems that those forces will have to confront. We have to get away from these broader buzzwords. Are the Main Operations which we could have an informed debate about what they need. Chapter really boil them down to the specific military problems are going to have to solve against real world adversaries. The general competitors. Think of you actually begin competing that out every year, you have an ability to see what is performing that. That is the best way to navigate this transition where much of that force is going to bear legacy force. On the knee . How can these technologies enable that legacy force to be faster, to scale more significantly, how current operations, current force and eventually were new technologies will replace legacy systems because they are capable of performing better is part of the integrated Battle Network. But unless youre measuring thing youre actually trying to do, and its every man for himself and it doesnt get you the data driven out books you want to direct she can ultimately direct with the decreasing amount of resources towards the force youre trying to build. The other peace of that it begins to create incentives for industry to really understand that if they put their own money towards solving these problems they have a path to getting into have a meritbased competition where they go out and find a new Battle Management system or a new aircraft or weapon is actually the prospect that the department of defense has a mechanism that very quickly. And by the way fencing do this you dont where you have the opportunity to come back next year. You will be limited with more programs like the aircraft carriers and the like. Should be a lot more attempt spit competition back in the sense of acquisition but constant operational competition they should be putting resources in and scaling them considerabl considerably. Again you can begin to see the department of defense is moving towards the things they say are important. I think that is the thing that i looked at with my time on the hill of what they say is interesting what they spend money on is actually going to move the needle and programmatic choices and Investment Choices on the part of private industry. That brings up a couple of interesting points there is a fascinating discussion right there. What are requirements with the department of defense builds requirements today having a System Engineering approach where it determines how things is going to be configured in the future, it determines what it thanks the future scenarios will look like. And then they essentially do an analysis the assumptions from 20 years theres a bunch of assumptions built into it what youre trying those very different which is a point solution that youre driving toward more of a bottom up attempt to improve mission outcome. The defense would establish here our admissions we think are important here outcomes we think will happen heres a range of environments which those outcomes are needed. The South China Sea or the baltic or something. Sounds like thats what youre talking about here comes up with outcomes and military problems to address the lot the department of defense is to harvest ideas and assess their ability to improve those outcomes. Most were focusing on the joint outcomes are trying to achieve for those who may or may not achieve those outcomes. Part of my problem with the outcomes process, is just just kind of baked into it which is befitting its experience weve just had 30 years postcold war top of the heap thats not going to hold up for us in the future i would have the best flip phone in america right now. Got to get be on the idea if its not in the defense establishment its cooked up in the department of defense its no good. Ill be much more interested in every year being able to say i have to be able to defend forward basis 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 things will drive the expensive resources. Will probably require that to reiterating on that there is an understanding of what ever lives will get funded welcome that brings me to it initial Property Rights and how do we Design Software theres part of systems of systems. Went to incentivize people to do this you dont give up all of your it in the process of competing theres opportunities to create a model or environment were companies can maintain their Property Rights. Try to integrate those with your own thats one of the core problems we have the right to criticize industry or argue to criticize itself too often in recent years beholding to proprietary solutions for the lockedin black boxes theyve been on capable of updating themselves moving at speeds or technologies allowing them to move. That is all true and valid. Its leading toward the belief that it should all be government owned. As if you would say our experience of the f35 is been a real downer, so the build their own highperformance aircraft from now on. Its just nonsense. I think the real challenge is figuring out what are the parts of that architecture, that the government is going to have to own and defined to ensure you do have an openness scalability, accessibility in the future. So things like the applications the reference architecture, certain event standards. Those the things the government is going to have to define but didnt really have the industry be entrepreneurial and creative how they bring that to bear. Again, i dont think its terribly difficult. He think the way we saw this play out with the commercial internet was you had a handful of the major movers get together and sort of hammer out a set of architecture and standards and then improve it as we go. Which is why i have an Apple Computer right now thats actually running a google application while i am writing microsoft word documents. No one mandated that had to be so. Mostly create incentives for people to play together and then people can develop application while on top of it, these new things can be developed without a sense of i have to do exactly what the futures going to look like in ten years and build toward that. It is not worked well for us we tried to do that in the past and its only going to get worse we keep trying to do in the future. Its mostly trying to determine where the core things the government has to define to really turn industry and the private sector loose on these problems in a way that you get the best capability, you get an rapidly evolving capability. At the end of the day, they, the government, can still have confidence that all of this will come together and cohere the same way when i buy a new sensor for my house i can plug it into the architecture that im running in my environment here. Its totally doable. This is the thing i come back to in the book is this is not witchcraft. This is things of the United States military and Service Members or drink every day in their lives is no reason we cant do this in defense. Yet we are ten years behind. To close out here it seems like one of the things we like to do incentivize industry from a financial perspective. We make it easier for new players to enter and offer solutions to these military problems. They are used to getting 20 times return used to support 10x, 20x return if you get a 10 return is probably not a very Successful Use of money so companies from that world will have difficulty seeing and trying to compete their way the dod or the government can better incentivize those companies that have much higher returns . I think they can definitely do better as far as creating better incentives. I think the reality is working in the Defense Space youre not getting the returns that commercial startup will get. I think to a certain extent theres going to need to be a baseline set of expectations that maybe you can do better than two or 3 of the traditional industry is returning. But you arent not going to get to the 20 return without the commercial software is going to get. Think that is a doable proposition. Again, from the government standpoint they need to get away from the mentality that they so value cost certainty and controlling the profits of industry they would rather pay a billion dollars for something and know that industry only got two and a half product as opposed to 400 million with industry getting 20 profit. At the end of the day when he should be aligned towards what is really important here. I think from the standpoint of creating those incentives, you are going to see a lot more companies and engineers, and technologists and investors being involved in National Defense if the government is actually buying the Emergent Technology they say are important at these companies and founders want to build. We overthink a lot of this from the standpoint of why is Silicon Valley or the Technology Community not doing more a lot of it boils down to if you are actually buying and deploying this technology at scale youll see a lot more engineers who thought they can make a successful career doing National Defense work. See a lot more Companies Getting founded and a lot more private investment going into modernizing National Defense as opposed to optimizing algorithms for social media. There is a degree of supply and demand here. The government needs to create that demand. I think if they do and actually put money behind whats important, you will slowly but nonetheless significantly start to see industry respond in traditional industry two. Part of the thing i raise in the book issue look at a lot of these earlier attempts it on manned systems, Autonomous Systems Aircraft Systems but are struggling for funding for years they get canceled prematurely they dont exactly send a strong incentive to traditional industry this is something they should be prioritizing in their portfolio when their traditional are getting funded with larger increments, right . Absolutely. Thank you for having with us today, chief Strategy Officer most recent book, the kilt change, defending america in the future of hightech worker it is available right now part time shirts available many places in addition to amazon i think thats where i got my copy. Thank you so much chris for being with us today and good luck on the book. Thank you for having me thanks are everything youre doing this a pleasure to chat with you i hope you saw in the book there is a lot of that thats got your fingerprints and influence all over it. I will give you credit where credit is due but i will also take the blame for the things i mangled and got wrong. Honestly its a pleasure to be with you. Its great having you on and thank you very much everyone for being with us today stay safe everybody. Tonight on book tv in prime time, michael long and pamela horwitz share a collective writing on the late civil rights leader authors and activists offered their thoughts on race, riots and the police. Pulitzer pahrump chum prize winner has influence of milani at trump and republican senator joni ernst of eyelet talks about her life, her military career becoming the first female an economic professor Zachary Carter talks about modern economic theories whether they hold up today that all begins find more information in your Program Guide or online booktv. Org. Hello thank you all for joining us tonight thank you for joining us for our
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