The title is have we in the United States become too dependent on our military so solve problem snooze i dont know if we have become too dependent but have become very dependent on the military to solve problems. One thing that blew my mind when i got the pentagon, and you have spent longer in that world but when i got there, like Many Americans issue assumed that the military prepares to fight war in the traditional sense of blowing stuff up and shooting at people, and obviously the pentagon does do that, but it was just amazing to me how much else people in the military now do, whether its planning programs to prevent Sexual Violence in the congo, to programs to encourage microenterprise among afghan women or training judges or producing radio callin shows. You name it, somebody at the pentagon was doing it and it was half amazing and inspiring and have a little bit scary. Host well, you very much in the book talk about your experiences inside the pentagon. You go beyond that but let just pick up on how the heck tide you end up at the pentagon. A lawyer by training, your parents were activists in the 60s, and that was the last place they probably expected to find their tower. You are a writer. So talk about coming to the pentagon, what brought you there, and what led you to write a book about that experience. Guest you know, i never thought i would end up at the pentagon. Never thought i would end up marrying an army officer. I did come from an antiwar family. Some of my earliest memories i remember at age 4 in central park, sitting on the grass, sell braying the end of the vietnam war. My parents had taken me to the end of vietnam war celebration and protesting when i was ten the requirement that young men register for the draft. I think for me what ended up happening, coming from a family that was very critical of the u. S. Military and the way it had been used, was that i end up working of law school for various human rights organizations and ended up for a time at the state department and the human rights bureau, and i found myself in places such as kosovo and sierra leone during the civil war, and in kosovo, nato forces led by the u. S. Had had used air power to stop an imminent Ethnic Cleansing Campaign in sear ya leeopen, britt British Military intervention helped bring to a close a really horrifically brutal civil war. So for the first anytime my life more or less i was both meeting lots of people who were in the military and seeing up close the fact that military power could be used for good, and it really shook up my own stereotypes, and left me much more aware that its a more complicated story. So i think for me that then led to an interest in the role of the military in post conflict reconstruction, led to a book that i tide previously on military efforts to build the rule of law in the wake of conflict, and how i ended up at the pentagon, quite frankly, was so agoer to work in Obama Administration i was doing what lots of people in washington were doing when he was elected, which is sending emails to everybody i knew saying i would like to sweep the floors, make the coffee. I would like to be part of this. And one of the people i email was Michelle Flournoy who was nominated to be in the undersecretary for defense policy and the first person foolish enough to say, think we ick make something work at the pentagon. Come work for me there. Host why dont you describe what your job was, what range of issues that led you to see while there, because its a really fascinating portfolio you have. Guest i went in without really a clear portfolio at all and i had worked obviously for human Rights Groups and on rule of lieu, humanitarian law and human rights issues. Was also a writer. Had been working writing a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times for several years, and when initialer in now brought me in she said to me i dont quite know what you should do but why dont you start out by you can be my speech writer. I dont have a speech writer. And help me with congressional testimony, and well figure oust what else you should do as time goes by. And for me it was a terrific education because i hadnt particularly wanted to be writing speeches but one of the good things, and the bad thing about writing speeches and testimony for someone is that you have to learn a little bit about everything and you have to go out and you have to talk to everybody, and youre constantly moving from issue to issue. For one week youre on afghanistan and helping to draft congressional testimony on afghanistan and youre meeting afghanistan experts. Next thing its piracy and it was a crash course in the issues and you know michelle was a fantastic boss and she was the kind of boss who say, that do you want to be doing . Why . Okay. Tell me how you want me to help you do that. And over time, i said, id like to work on some of the rule of law and human rights issues in my background that i care about so i began to work on those issues as well, which was really satisfying. Host so, in that set of experiences while you were there, obviously im sure these idea thursday the book came throughout your history, as you talked about your time in kosovo. But what in that set of pentagon experiences krisalizeed for youve this dilemma you talk about in the book in terms of the at least the first half of the dilemma, how the military game everything. Were there experiences that start tote crystallize for youve what the problem is . Guest yeah in some ways i suppose. One of the many portfolios i took on at the pentagon was looking at the Defense Departments Strategic Communication and Information Operations program. And that was an area, too, where who knew . The Defense Department was doing everything you could think of. From sponsoring peace concerts in africa, to producing soap operas and comic books and also doing some more stuff thats in the covert realm, designed to influence and i was both, again, impressed by this range of projects and impressed by many of the people i met and yet also couldnt help but think, why is the pentagon doing some of this stuff . And that was the attitude of many of my colleagues from the statement depth at the time who had come over and would get quite angry and say why are you people doing this stu . You dont not what youre doing we should be doing it and it put up front and central the dilemma of, well, the pentagon is doing it because somebody feels the United States needs to be doing it, whether that right or wrong is another question, but somebody feels the United States needs to be doing it. The civilian agencies, state, usaid, have in many ways been defundedded for a period of many, many decades and have really lost a lot of their ability to put programs on that they might have had during the peak of the cold war, for instance, which means that the white house, and congress turn to the military because the military is big and has people who you can send anywhere in the world on very short notice and they dont get to say, no, i dont feel like going to iraq. They just have to do it. Thats not true of the civilian agencies so it turns into a versus circumstancell the more we look around and say, its a complex world, threats dont competely packaged. Not just from foreign militaries. Theyre coming from cyber space and terrorism. Theyre comping in the future from bioengineered viruses or who knows. If we want to respond and if we want to be preventing conflict, then the United States has to be doing everything. We have to be addressing the root causes of terrorism. We have to be looking at political preprogression, Economic Development, have to be looking at the information domain and cyberspace. The more you do that you need somebody to do it, you ask the mill tier do. , the more the military does it, the less you need the civilian agencies, the more you have to fund the military and give them resources and the less the civilian agencies come do and it backs a vicious cycle. Host thats very true and there have been efforts over time, secretary rice, secretary clinton, both two of the state secretaries who tried to grow capacity, strengthen the civilian role and rule in many areas. Are those kinds of efforts doomed to failure . There is just an inequity that a gap that cant be closed or there is more we can be doing . Guest i have really milked feelings itch think like many good liberal is started out thinking the military shouldnt be doing this stuff. We need rebuild the capacity of the civilian sector, and it is quite shocking how little funding the state department, relative to the military. But over time i became anoint know whether you call this more pessimistic or more crazily optimistic. In the area years of the Obama Administration, both president obama and then defense secretary robert gates and then secretary clinton made a lot of speeches saying we need to rebuild the civilian sector, restore more funding to the civilian sector, and gates said from the perspective of the secretary of defense the military cant do it job unless we have civilian partners who can do their job and we dont want to do all these crazy we want civilian dozen who do them el, and nothing really happened. Nothing really changed at all. I think i eventually found myself shifting to a position where they would say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting Something Different to happen. That everything in washington was running around saying we need to rebill the civilian sector, and it never happened, and i started asking people, do you think this is like liely to happen in our political lifetimes . Is there any political will in congress to change this . And everyone would say, not really. And certain point it seems to me you got to stop running around and saying this ought to happen if its not going to happen. World peace ought to happen but if its not going to happen, what do we do . Plan b becomes if we just happen to accept the political reality is congress is not going wake up one morning and say, hey, lets triple the budget, triple the foreign assistance budget. But if the military for the foreseeable future is going to continue to be asked to take on this very wide range of tasks, then lets make sure that the military is good at it. Make sure that the skills and areas of expertise you need become resident within the military, which has pretty profound implications for everything from how we recruit to how we train, to how we manage military personnel. The military personnel system and so forth. Host are there places where you experienced that we have done that well, where the military has been given a task and the training and the resources and the leadership have followed and then obviously also are there cases where youre more worried that they havent followed . Guest i think were doing better on things like cyber. I think because thats closer to traditional military competencies and electronic warfare, for instance. I think that when it comes to the governance and Economic Development spheres, the military is stale really floundering, in part thats because the civilians flounder, too. Its just had. Not that the military is bad its it bit bad at it because everybody is bad at it. But that being said, we obviously still recruit and train military personnel as if the world has not changed that much since 1955. And there are exemptions lots of people trying really hard to figure out how to deadapt, what would we need to do differently . But i got myself into a little bit of hot water because i wrote a tongue in cheek column for Foreign Policy magazine, arguing that we the military ought to start recruiting at aarp conferences. The American Association of retired people and i was joking partly, but the more serious point is the u. S. Military still recruits as if this is the 19th century and what we need are brawny young man and theres nothing young with brawny young men and some of our military personnel, as we singh, are out there crawling around in the dirt and carrying heavy packs and doing exactly what infantry men have done for centuries more or less, but were in a world now where already 85 of military personnel are not in combat occupational specialties at all. Theyrey support roles, even those in combat roles may not ever be deployed into combat or if they are they may find themselves working on these governance projects, or Economic Development projects, and if you know for a fact that many of the Service Members are going to be asked to do everything from writing computer code to designing radio soap operas, why are we still focusing recruiting energies as if theyre all going to be infan traymen you. Still need but maybe we need to think different live about the kinds of skill sets we want to bring into the military. If we either need to bring them in or need to grow them when theyre there. How do we mak sure that we have the military personnel system that lets us bring people in and out to get needed skills and that lets military personnel go out, work at google, work at a big company, work at a university, whatever, and come back in without harm to their careers. We have a very rigid system and its not serving us that well at a moment in time when we need much more flexibility and we need a really wide range of skills. Right. So, the other major premise in your book is not just how the military game everything but how everything became war and a human rights lawyer, i have a feeling that the issue set that has been dearest to your heart over time, as much as its impressive you learned so much on Civil Military relations, which is phenomenal. So, on that issue set i wonder if you can talk about coming in, in 2009, the Bush Administration its a very complexion landscape in terms of issues about detention policy, issues about direct targeted attacks by the United States through different means, the war in iraq, the war in afghanistan. Theres so much going on. What were the issues that you think were most worrisome to you, that most made you want to join this obama team and get in there and make change . Guest as a bystander during the Bush Administration, i had, like many, many other people, watched in some horror as the u. S. Response to the september 11th attacks became almost purely a military response, and more worrying not so much i think military force should not have been used. Theres a role for military force in course terrorism but the course terrorism but the Bush Administration early on made a decision to view owl our responses to the 9 11 attacks through the Legal Framework of war. It was going to be considered an Armed Conflict for legal purposes, and the Legal Framework we have, both in terms of International Law and domestic u. S. Law, the Legal Framework for war is different for the Legal Framework for not war, ordinary life and basically to put it in a nutshell, during peacetime, the state is not supposed to go around killing people. You only get to kill them if you have put them on trial, you have an elaborate judicial process you have to presented and so on and so forthin peacetime we have lots of safeguards for due process and to protect individual rights in peacetime were very intolerant of government secrecy. We require lots and lots of checks and balances for anything the executive branch does that would infringe on individual rights in wartime its the opposite in wartime, peacetime you kill somebody youll be charged with murder in wartime if youre a combatant and you kill another combatant you might get a medal. Youre supposed to do that. Youve have something called combatant immunity. You dont get prosecuted for killing the enemy because youre supposed to. Opposite once you shift to the Legal Framework for waugh, we tolerate a lot more government zika decrees si, government once the Bush Administration made the decision to say, terrorism is in that box we call war, and the legal rules for war will apply to everything we do, you got things like u. S. Plucking up people all over the world host out of combat zone. Guest and bosnia, nigeria, as well as places such as afghanistan, saying, we think theyre terrorists and sending them to in many cases to guantanamo saying anywhere not entitled to lawyers north entitle to due process and very early on you got lot of people, journalists and ngos and usual i officials saying, wait, wait, wait. How do we knee who these people are. Some of them probably arent who think they are but if gore in the law of war box you dont have to do very much to find out. You can just say, hey, its a war, mistakes happen, get over it. So we started kind of drifting into this world in which the a magic act of waving a wands and eight im going to call this war suddenly meant the u. S. Government was doing in thursday in other universe would have been quite shocking, literally kidnapping people off the streets in countries around the world with which we are not at war and imprisoning them without any access to due process and to say, too bad, tough luck, not even acknowledging who we were keeping or why. That really shocked me as an american citizen. Was shocked our government was doing that. And president obama really campaigned in 2007 and 2008 many ways on a platform of rolling back what he saw as those excesses. Some of his very first acts when he was sworn in were to issue a series of executive orders banning torture, saying that he was going to close guantanamo, and creating a review process to figure out how to close guantanamo, and i think for me, like many other people, i dame into the pentagon thinking, okay, hes going to fix this. Host right. In fact in 2009 i think it was relatively soon aft