I got bad memory loss, man. Its all good. I have to see a face. Never forget face putter in i forgot in the name of the guy we talking about. Pierce. Im serious. Get it started. Ready to talk about the book. Definitely. Are you guys . Lets too it, man. All right so i was going to give everyone front row, stand up and come up and then okay. Oh, okay. Got it. Daily. And this is booktv on cspan 2. Its television for serious readers. Heres a quick look at our primetime lineup for tonight. Begin agent 7 45 p. M. , political cartoonist gary trudeau discusses his mock struck pie downs bury and hissy of donald trump as character. Then at 8 30 we sit down with senator jeanne she heaven that talked about the book that influence head lower and arrive, and former attorney general a alberto gonsales generals booktv for ore after Words Program at 9 00 p. M. His book is called through faith and allegiance about his time as attorney general in george w. Bush administration. And at 10 00 p. M. , john strauss beau details how new york city was both helpful and hurtful to the union during the civil war. We wrap up our sunday primetime lineup at 11 00 p. M. With a along at the positive and negative aspects of studying abroad. That all happens tonight on cspan 2s booktv. Next on boar after words protect you hear from rosa brooks discussing her book, how everything became war and he military became away. She exams he change in how america fights wars and the growing role of the u. S. Military in ongoing conflicts. Well, its great to be here with you and to discuss this book, which is a long time in the making and a great resource for folks who are interested in Civil Military issues in the United States, and some of the contemporary issues that were facing with regard to the role of the military. Lets start with one of the key premises of the book, which have we in the United States back to dependent on our military to solve problems . Guest i dont know if we have become too dependent but have become very dependent on the military to solve problems. One of the thats that blew my mind when i got the pentagon and you have spent longer in that world but when i got there i, like many americans, assumed that what the military does is prepares to fight wars 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 amongg afghan women or training judges or producing radio callin shows. You name it. Somebody at the pentagon wasdu doing it. N it was half amazing and inspiring and halve a little bit scary. Host well, you very much in the book talk about your experiences inside the pentagon you. Go beyond that. But lets pick up on how the heck did you end up at the pentagon . Lawyer by training. Your parents were activists in the 60s and that was the last place they probably expected to find their daughter. You were a writer. Talk about coming to the pentagon, what brought you there, and what led you to write a book about that experience. Guest you know, never thought i would end up at the pentagon. Never thought i would end up marrying an army officer. I did come from antiwar family. Some of my earliest memories involve dish remember at age 4 in central park sitting on the grass, celebrating the end of the vietnam war. My parents had taken me to the end of vietnam war celebration and protesting when i was 10, 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 ended up working after law school for various human rightsts organizations and i 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 sierra leone, British Military interventionam helped bring to a close a really horrifically brutal civil war and so for the first time in mys life more or less i was boast meeting lots of people who were in the military and seeing up close the fact that military power could be idea for good. And it really shook up my own stereo types in a lot of ways 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 did previously on military efforts to build the rule of law in the wake of conflicts and how i ended up at the pentagon, quite frankly, was so eager to work in at the obama administration, i was doing what lots of people in washington were doing, when he was elected, which i sending emails to everybody i knew, saying i would like to sweep the floors, make the coffee, raley would like to be part of this and one of the people emailed was Michelle Flournoy, who was then knock nailed to be undersecretary of defense for policy and she was the first person foolish enough to say, sure, okay, i think we can make michigan work at the pentagon. Come work for me there. Host so, i want you 20 describe what your job was, what range of issues that led you to see while there, because its a really fascinating portfolio you have. I went in without really a clear portfolio at all and i had worked obviously for human Rights Groups and on rule of law, humanitarian law and human rights issues. Was also a writer. Had been working on a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times for several years at that point, and when Michelle Flournoy 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 speeches and congressional testimony, and well figure out what else you should do as time goes by. We wil 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, so one week youre on afghanistan and youre helping to draft testimony on afghan and the next week its pirate si so it was a crash course in major policy issues and what happened over time, as you know, michelle was a fantastic boss, and she was the kind of boss that says whatnot 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 that are in my background that i care about a lot. And so i began to work on those issues as well, which was really satisfying. Host so in that set ofas experiences while you were there, obviously im sure these ideas in this book came throughout your history as youdi talk about your time in kosovo and what in that set of pentagon experiences criminalizes for you this dilemma you talk about in the book how the military became everything. Were there experienced that started to crystallize for you the problem . Guest yeah in some weighed i suppose. 2009 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 wag does pretty much everything you can think of from sponsoring peace concerts in africa and producing soap owe operas and comic books and do more stuff that is in the covert realm, designed to influence and i was both again impressed by this range of projects and impress bid many of the people i met and yet also couldnt help but think, wife why is the pentagon doing this . That was the attitude of my colleagues from the state department who had come over and would get quite angry and sigh why are you peep doing this stuff . You dont know what yourerey doing, you shouldnt bev doing it. We should be doing it. It sort of put up front and central the dilemma of well the pentagon is doing it because somebody feels that eneutz needs to be doing it. Whether that right or wrong is another question but somebody peoples the United States needs to be doing it. The civilian agencies, state usaid, have in many ways been defunded for a period of 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 turned to the military because the military is big and its got 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 or are they just have to do it. The not true of the civilian agencies. So it turns into a vicious circle where the more we look around and we say, wow, its a complex world, threats dont competely packages, not just from foreign military. Theyre coming from cyber space, from terrorism, theyre coming in the future from bioengineered viruses who are knows what. If we want to respond and if we wanted 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 repression. Looking at Economic Development. We have to be looking at the information domain and cyber space. The more youve do that, you need member to do it, you ask the military to do it, the more the military does it the less you need the civilian agencies, the moral you have to fund the military and five it resources so to do, the less the civilian agencies can do and that becomes the vicious cycle. Host right. There have been efforts over time, secretary rice, secretary clinton, both two of the state secretaries who tried to grow capacitying, strengthen the civilian role and rule in many of these areas. Are those kind of efforts doome to failure . Is there a general inequity . Sunny have mixed feelings. Think like many good liberalled started out thinking, the military just shouldnt be doing this stuff. We need to rebuild the capacity of the civilian sector, and it is quite shocking how little funding the state department gets relative to the military. But over time i became i dont know whether you call this mores mess stick or more crazily optimistic. Depends on your perspective. In the early years of the obama administration, both president obama himself and then defense secretary robert gates and then secretary of state hillary clinton, made a lot of speeches saying we need to rebuild the civilian sector, we node restore more funding to the civilian sector and gates said, from the perspective of the secretary of defense, the military cant do its job unless we have civilian partners who can do their job, and we dont want to be doing all these crazy Governance Development and so an. Want civilians to do them well, 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 nerve washington was saying we need to rebuild the civilian sector, real ya without to do that and never happens and i started asking people, do you think this is like lie to happen in our political lifetime . Any political will in congress to change this . And everyone would say, no, not really. At a certain point it seems to me you got to stop running out and saying, this ought to happen if its not going to happen. World peace ought to happen but if its not going to happen chaotic we do . The plan b become if we just have to accept the political reality is this congress is not going to say, lets triple the budget. Trip the foreign assistance budget. Ud if the military for the foreseeable part us going to be continued to asked to take on this witness range of tasks lets make sure the military guess at it. Make sure the skills and years of expertise you need becomes resident in the military whichar hat profound implications for everything how we cute to how we train, to how we manage military personnel, the military personnel system. 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 to leadership have followed and then obviously are there wases where youre more worried that they havent guest i think were doing better on things like cyber. Partly because thats closer to traditional military exceptsy and Electronic Warfare for instance. When it comes to the governans and Economic Development sphere, that the military is still really floundering in part because the civilians floundered too. Its just harold. Not that the military ifs band its. Its part live that me tailer is bad at it because everybody is bat its 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 exceptions. We heart shoulder courses and loaded of people trying really hard to figure out how to adapt. What we need to do differently. Got myself in hot water a few years ago because i wrote a tongue in cheek kole plumb for Foreign Policy magazine, arguing that we ought 0 military ought to start recruit a little aarp conferences, the American Association for of retired people. And i was joking, partly, at least, but the more serious point is that the u. S. Military still recruits as if this is the 19th century and what what we 1 need are brawny young men, and theres nothing wrong with brawny young men, and some of our military personnel, as we speak, are out there crawling around in the dirt and carrying heavy packs and doing exactly what infantrymen have done for centuries more or less. But were in a world now where already 8 a 5 of military personnel north in combat, occupational specialties. Anywhere various types of support roles little even those in combat roles may not ever be deployed into combat, or if they are they may find themselves work ago on governance project or Economic Development projectp and if you know for a fact that many of the Service Members are going to be asked to do everything from wright computer code, to designing radio call insure soap operas, well, why are we still focusing all of of recruiting energies as if theyre all going to be infantrymen. You still need them but make we need to think differently 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 make surely we have the military personnel system that lets i bring people in and out to get needed skills in, that lets military personnel go out, work at google, work, a at big company or university and come back in without harm to theyre careers. We have this very ridged system still and its not serving us that will at a moment in timeth when we need much more flexibility and we need a really wide range of skills. Host right. The other major premise in your book is not just how thepi military became everything but how everything became war and theres a human rights lawyer, i have a feeling thats the issue set that is that has been dearest to your heart. So, on that issue set, i wonder if you can talk about coming in in 2009, the Bush Administration ended, its a very complexion landscape in terms of issues about detention policies, issues about direct targeted attacks by the the direct United States. Made a decision to view alli our responds to the 9 11 attacks through the Legal Framework of war. 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, Legal Framework we have for war is really different than the Legal Framework we have for the rest of the time, peace, not war. Whatever you want to call it, ordinaries 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 present evidence. In peacetime we have lots of safeguards for due progression and to protect individual rights in peacetime were very intoll rapt of government secrecy, weto require loot lotts of checks and balances for anything the executive branch does that would infringe on individual rights in wartime its the opposite. Nc in wartime, peacetime you till somebody, youre charged with murder in war crime if youre a combatant and you kill another combatant you might get a meta. Youre supposed to do that. You have combatant immune you dont get prosecuted for killing the enemy because youre supposed to. Once youve shift to that Legal Framework for war, we tolerate a lot more government secrecy, government coercion, government use of lethal together andmo opposite the Bush Administration sort of made that decision to say, ahha, terrorism is in that box we call war, and the legal rules for war will apply to everything with do, youve got things like u. S. Plucking up people all over the world outside of combat zones ands knea, nigeria, afghan, saying we think theyre terrorists and sending them to in many cases to guantanamo, saying theyre not entitled to lawyers northh entitled to any kind of due process and early on you get lots of people journalis and u. S. Officials saying. Wait, wait. How do we know who these peopler center some of the are no