And working on the problems that matter to them. Look around you. Just about everybody here in this whole town and whole country is doing the same thing, competing for the faces you see around this room that are bright, have a future, up to date. We have to do the same if were going to stay the best military. Lets take a concrete case, which is north korea. Not agility. No. Just checking. The Missile Defense system that the pentagon has been working on for many years is shall we see not perfect. So my question is when you think about what youre trying to do with diux and other acquisition, what do you imagine would be outcomes that would be applicable to the north koreans, frank . Well, first of all, north korea is just to be deadly serious about it for a moment, bill perry is someone who himself tried very hard to get on a different get us on a different path with north korea but it wasnt to be. They are what they are. Its not a game. Its not in the headlines a lot and so forth. But we every day, the slogan of u. S. Forces in korea as many of you probably know is fight tonight. Not because thats what we want to do but because thats what we have to be able to do. We are ready to do. So we have a very strong presence there. Our south korean allies get stronger every day. Thats not the rock army it was. They are extremely good. We have a strong ally in japan. Unfortunately the diplomatic predict is bleak at the moment. And we continue to be open to an improvement in that and try to get russia and china and others interested down that road but hard to project thats where its going. Therefore for me as far into the future as i can see, we need to stand strong in deterrence. Now, you mentioned Missile Defenses as well. Im going to differ with you just a little bit, because we do try to stay ahead of the north Korean Missile threat. Youre right, Missile Defense is a difficult mission. And when it comes to a Major Nuclear threat like that posed by russia we know and have long known we have no way to protect our selves except deterrence. But we dont accept that with respect to north korea and were not going to for as long as we can possibly avoid it. We do aspire to protection of our selves. We invest a lot and try to stay ahead of what they are doing numerically and qualitatively, but its youve got north korea, youve got iran, youre talking about problematic situations. Russia, asiapacific generally, isil which we need to destroy. So weve got plenty to do today. North korea is one of these things that never seems to go away. I worked on it once, once upon a time, 1994. I at least spend half of my time as assistant secretary of defense working for bill perry, 1994. It was deadly serious back in those days. Can i play you a bill perry story i have to get out before i need to go . Because its really aimed at some of the hoover people here. And its really aimed at some of the people here who are trying to figure out where to go with their lives. To do what, you know, what bills done, what i do as secretary, and more importantly, our, you know, 2. 8 million folks which i think are the noblest kind of way to spend your lives that you can have. Which is protecting our people, frankly, to make a better world. Theres just Nothing Better to go home and tell your family what youve been doing all day than that. But a little story, bill may have known this, i may have told you this story before that you didnt know at the time. I was totally in physics, not knowing anything else to do with physics, i went tote scientist conference. Here in washington. I came in sessions and sessions and sessions about physics. Which is my field. Is and there was one sort of physics and Public Interest kind of panel. Or not panel. Speaker. And i had some work. That hour was free, i sat down, and theres a person from the Defense Department, bill perry i realized later, probably years later. And he was being essentially badgered by the audience about smart weapons. And that the question that they thought was a gotcha question to bill is, what are you going to do when one of these complicated microchipenabled things breaks . Ill never forget the phrase, by the way, sergeants today would be furious hearing this. You know, how is some sergeant going to fix that chip . Bill said, he looks at me, theyre not going to fix it, theyre going to throw it out and get another one. And i remember the audience. I thought thats an interesting guy. A smart guy, look what hes doing. Look what hes doing. And a little light went off that later down the road when i got kind of lured into this. By that offer, just do it for one year. Here we are, 38 years later, Something Like that. And there was a little spark in there. I said, wow, that guys something else. Im sure you dont remember that. Maybe you gave that speech a million times. But for one young person in the audience that said, wow, connecting mission and understanding. Pretty cool stuff. So when one thinks about autonomous weapons, fully autonomous weapons, even semiautonomous weapons like were using today where we have nucleartipped missile as board unmanned submarines controlled by machines, that something you can imagine. Well, i believe that in the matter of use of lethal force, there will always be speaking of the United States, a human being involved in the decision making. I think thats necessary. And i dont anticipate that not happening. A system is better that have greater and greater degrees of ability to carry out certain functions for themselves. Or increasingly autonomous. In most cases, you really need to continue to think of a human machine, overall system, even though the machine gets more complicated. So how did and interestingly, before all of this discussion started, i issued a directive. This is sort of eerie, i was deputy secretary, too. As defense secretary four years ago, i sent a directive that says exactly that. That there always needs to be a human being in the decisionmaking involving the using of lethal force by the United States military. So, you know when we think of technology today, were also finding the downside of technology and the loss of privacy, particularly. So, as you launch the programs, what are you doing, if anything, to try to also launch consideration of the legal, political and perhaps even moral questions that will be raised by new defense technologies . Well, i just gave you an example of us trying to look this is now four years. Were talking about Autonomous Systems and people. So, we do we do look ahead. And think ahead, in so far as privacy is concerned, in particular, internet privacy, one thing i would say to you is that we are enormous consumers of information protection technology. Because theres nothing more important to us. That is our principal cyber machine. That is what i tell our cyber people, cyber commanders, that is job one. Because theres no point in having all of those ships and planes, and everything else, theyre all connected today. So we have to have our network connected. So were big supporters and big sponsors of network protection, the largest in the world, by far, in terms of what we invest, and level of protection we demand. You know, i think we see almost weekly stories of supposedly impervious systems that are hacked. And it raises a specter of a future in which defense operates so heavily through these systems that they are vulnerable to attacking. Bill often talks about a miscalculation and possibly having a nuclear war. You know, arent we going to potentially leave ourselves in a situation where some of these systems can be taken over by foreign powers or terrorist organizations . No. We not in the case of nuclear arsenals. A special case in which we have special safe guards i do have confidence in for other reasons not to be gone into here. But in general, youre right. We worry about it. Were concerned about it. Anybody who thinks theyre invulnerable is kidding themselves. So, for us, that means its a constant battle. Were constantly looking. Ill give you an example in a minute. But you also have to be thinking what if i lose that connection or i lose that ability. So we train our people to, we call it operating through an attack of that kind. So you have a fallback operational mode and style that is not complete frustration if that happens. And in protecting ourselves, as i mentioned, one of the things ive done is innovation which im always looking at suggested to me by people outside. One of the things i try to do is talk to people who are not part of our world but care about their safety, their familys safety and their childrens safety. And who will take an interest and a little time. I set up an innovation board, eric schmidt. The chairman. Jeff bezos, reed hoffman, weve got some personnel things that we do. What i said to them is i dont expect you to know anything about defense. Thats not the point. But you do know what agile forwardlooking companies and people are thinking. Tell me some things that might be valuable, might be useful. We cant use everything because were not a company. Were the public sector. But in one of the ideas i got early on this is the kind of thing ive asked eric to provide me more of. It turns out nobody in the entire United States government has ever done a bug bounty which is what a lot of countries do. What a bug bounty is when you go out and invite white hat hackers to have at you, and report for a reward of some kind, vulnerabilities that we find. Nobody in the entire government we did it its called hack the pentagon. It was spectacular, we got for free, a friendly, very thorough examination of tax service for which we were able to make hundreds of adjustments. The kind of thing you can pay for but it wouldnt necessarily have been as good. In our case, we cant give people rewards or people their rewards to having to hack the pentagon. So, weve got lots of people who did this for us. Now, theres an example of something that isnt novel about it in the rest of the world. But that we, for some reason, our people have fun. Thats the kind of idea i want to get. As i said, i cant do everything because were the professional. So there will be things that companies do that well never be able to do, its not appropriate for us to do but there are lots of things that we can do. Thats a part of adapting our style, as well as our technological content to today and in the future. Even as bill did so brilliantly back in the carter administration. I think we have exhausted the time that you can spend with us. So, you get to be with bill. Im afraid i have to go do something else. I appreciate it. I want to repeat what i said about bill. Bill perry was, if i as i think about myself now talking to audiences and trying to draw people, at the tech Conference Last Week in san francisco. Im looking out at these faces. And a great majority of them have not served in the military. This isnt like the world war ii generation. The draft generation or anything like that. You look at them and say how can i connect to them and inspire a generation to do something in public life. Ill just say that bill perry was a big inspiration to me. Many other people, many other people, in my generation. But certainly to me. He not only represented that connection of thinking and understanding to service. But also great civility. And decency. And that matters a lot. Heres someone i always knew would do the right thing, stand for the right thing. Stand behind people. And i think thats important, too, that we all be, you know, morally solid for the next generation, to the best of our possible abilities, and he was. So, he had all of that. And were just very lucky to have him. I think our country and our world are lucky to have him. Bill. Thanks, ash. Good to see you all. [ applause ] i feel like were on a relay race. Yeah, right. Ash crust passed the baton. So, my apologies for not bringing you into the conversation, but the time with sitting with the defense secretary is precious. Bill, knowing what you know about innovation in the military. Knowing what you know what ash is trying do, what would be your advice for him . What should he avoid, and what should he be on the lookout for that would surprise him and upend his plans . Let me start off, we talked about how important Autonomous Systems today compared to 23 years ago. I dont know about autonomous, its a remotely controlled situation. We dont give machines authority to cyberlaunch nuclear weapons. And a certain standout as well. We have great improvement and effectiveness in having a machine with autonomous capability, almost in all case as with nuclear weapons. We keep a people in the loop in the decision making. Thats an important consideration. Some of you here are old enough to have seen the movie where they had the doomsday machine. The thing you have to argue with this, not only do people err, machines error. O, machines error, machines error. The best designed machine can err. So, we have people in the loop as well. When i told you about it, many times, about the time i was at the head of Defense Command where the computers were short, ibms on the way to the United States. The point i want to make about that story now, is that our computers are making an error. But our system understood that machines make errors sometimes. Therefore, we require a human being to be there. Luckily for the country and all of us, the human in the loop that night was an astute thoughtful general. So, thats a very, very important point. You and ash didnt bring it up but i wanted to bring up that point. What do you think the trapdoors are for ash carter as he moves ahead with this program . Or his successor. Since youve werent down this road before with new technologies. What are the things to look out for that could turn into problems . He mentioned already one of them, which is introducing state of the Art Technology into the systems does require working with industry. We do not have state of the art. We do not have capability within the government to make stateoftheart systems. We go to industry to get that done. And industry is different than ours when i was secretary of defense getting things developed. People then understood the importance of what they were doing. When i was undersecretary, it was easy to get people to go out in industry and get people to do things i asked them to do. Its not so easy for ash. He is creating Defense Industrial experimental yes, Defense Innovation unit experiment. Yeah. And one of the main points to that is to get industry on our side and doing these things. Its a tough job and hes works as hard at it as anybody could possibly work, and i think well have good results. But it is very different. When i was the undersecretary of defense many, many years ago, in the 70s, 1970s. When we did the opposite strategy. More than 95 of military equipment had electronics in it. Electronics for vacuum tubes. And its hard to think of that today. And so, one of my jobs wasnt just to bring in these concepts like smart weapons and so on, it was simply to get the American Military equipment upgraded to modern electronics. For the cost advantage. For the weight advantage. For the liability advancing. Advantages. Advantage the industry was receptive. We had a Semi Conductor industry on one side and the defense industry. And they never talked to each other. So, i created one program called very integrated highspeed circuits. Nominally, the purpose was to advance the next level of military equipment to i forget what dimension, micro, i guess, feature size. So, we put out money, invited companies to bid on this. We did get that. We got the program in the advance. More important than the advance was i required anybody that bid on this program which was a very attractive program. Anybody that bid on this program had to be a team, on the team had to be one Defense Company and one Defense Company. It forced two companies to get together. The good to that was far more important than the feature side of the Semi Conductor side. So, secretary carter allude excuse me, thats what ash is trying to do today. Right, right. So, he alluded in his comments early on in his appearance to the cold war, sort of balance of power with the soviet union. And it was really a bipolar war in those days. Oar in those days. Worar in those days. Lar in those days. Dar in those days. R in those days. In those dayin those days in th. For anyone like me who spent any time in the soviet union, i was based there for three years in the mid to late 80s. It didnt take long to see the technology was technologically backward. They may have been a superpower. But technologically they were nowhere, not even in the race with United States those days. Today when you think about the things that ash carter is trying to do with artificial intelligence. And the kinds of startups that spring up in Silicon Valley, i think about other countries of the world, specifically, china, which is going to have probably as astute, Technological Progress as the United States is going to have in areas like ai. When you think about this, how does that change the sort of stability issue when youre trying to develop the American Defense of the future . Thats a big difference today from when i was undersecretary. Still, i remember i went after i got out of office, in 1981, my first visit to the soviet union. Prior to that, i got all of these Intelligence Briefings about how the soviets were ten feet tall and so on. What we would look at in missiles they were damn good. Nuclear weapons they were very good. I went there, went around and visited with people. Went to factories and talked. And i finally concluded this is a third world country with a first World Military system. Even that was wrong. It wasnt a first World Military system, it was labeled as nukes. I think that was kind of backward as well. I dont think thats true today. Right. I dont think russia compares technically well, no country compares te