Point. He is the author of many books in and many coming out on cyber war, military robotics, history of prisoners of war and a load of other topics. He has been on cnn, npr, fox, the history channel, the National Geographic channel. He is really one of our most popular lecturers. We have asked him to speak on revolutions and military affairs, which will give you a quick survey of military history from the 13th century up until today. All in one hour, so im sure you will enjoy it. Please welcome Paul Springer. [applause] mr. Springer good morning. I would like to extend a thank you. Wonderful organizations i support and love working with. It is a great opportunity to speak with you today. Well see if i can review terrified for the weekend with leave you terrified for the rest of the weekend with some military robotics information. I am an historian, by definition that means i have to backup way to far to tell you the beginning of the story. Before i get rolling, do not worry about reading the small disclaimer at the bottom. These are my views, not the views of the air force or the department of defense or the u. S. Government. They are solely mine unless you really like them. All right, so this is the only slide up i will throw at you with an enormous amount of text. I dont expect to read and and im not going to read it to you but my point of this like your, my fundamental argument, is that the world right now is in the middle of a revolution in military affairs. The mode of Human Conflict is altering and that alteration is going to change virtually every aspect of the way the Human Conflicts propagate. It will change how we decide whether or not we decide to go to war. It will change how we behave in more. This is due to technological changes that are on the verge of upsetting human society. In the end, there will be some countries that adopt these changes. They take the new technology and learn how to utilize it in to some that do not. These will be the haves and havenots of the future in conflict. There is any moments advantage in being one of the first adopters. If you have a revolutionary change in conflict, it becomes possible to dominate your rivals in a short time. The originator of the term revolutionary Nuclear Affairs is soviet and it gives me pain to give credit to a soviet. But there are times when fundamental changes occur and they occur so rapidly they make everything that has gone before completely obsolete. It is my contention that is occurring right now. Let me give you an example that people are probably more familiar with. If you go back to the middle ages, this is what characterized were. Tassels, modes, heavily armored war. Tassels, modes, heavily armored knights. If you wanted to capture something belonging to an opponent, that would likely take human months of siege. Unless you were lucky enough to find them at the gates open, the walls unmanned, the moat drained, and no preparations at made. Appear we have three successful sieges in the 14th and 15th centuries. These were major undertakings which required a lot of time. This characterized war in that time. However, when gunpowder became the norm in europe, the situation changed. It suddenly became possible to battered down the defenses of a high walled castle from a safe distance and the attacker had the advantage because the capital and its defenders could not leave its position while the attacker had more mobility and to choose where and when to fight. Suddenly, being inside the castle was a disadvantage because you became an obvious target. As a result, here are some successful sieges. And the siege duration is suddenly measured in days. It was possible to redesign fortifications, to make them less vulnerable to gunfire and thus it became possible to defend a static position. This is what one of those fortifications looked like in the 1600s. As you can see, it is a. M. In enormous fortification full of geometric designs. The idea behind this fort was that it could not be approached on any side without the attackers coming under heavy fire from multiple anger angles from the defenders. The result was really long sieges. And these were the sieges that really succeeded. It became a major undertaking. And it shifted back to a static approach. As you might imagine, those who had not changed the new situation of found themselves quickly overwhelmed. It became a impossible for an army that did not use gunpowder to withstand one that wielded firearms. If siegecraft became an entirely impossible, you had to have some fights outside the castle. Sometimes armies were going to meet in the fields. In the 16th century, reloading a firearm could take two minutes. The effective range of a firearm at was only about 50 meters. I am not exactly, it we could say, a paragon of physical fitness but even i could cross 50 meters in the under two minutes. I could crawl 50 meters in under two minutes. Which means if you are using firearms and to shoot and miss, there is a reasonable chance i could run across the field and hit it was something sharp or heavy. As a result, we get mixed formation. This comprises musketeers on the outside and pikemen on the center. The musketeers open fire. After they shoot, the pikemen come to the front while they reload. This made it impossible for musketeers to overcome calvary men in minutes. It swept everything before it on me battlefield because it was better. Better than anything through that time using firearms in the field. It teaches us something. It teaches us sometimes it is not the technology that matters, it is being the first one that figures out how to use it effectively. That is what is going on here. The spanish end up using it to become the dominant land power in europe. But nothing lasts forever. This is one of the rare times you will hear a historian talk to about swedish military dominance. It is not particularly what they are known for but it was the swedes who figured out how to counter the terse year. It was unwieldy because it was getting in the way. It was hard to move around. You could have thousands of troops screaming to be heard. And maybe, the pikes that protect musketeers could for tech them without standing amongst them. The idea was called the brigade. And when the brigade swept onto the battlefield under gustavus adolphus, it it drove them from the field. They entered the 30year war knowing it was one of enormous carnage but he had this new idea that for a brief time the swedes could turn the tide of a war that had effectively engulf the entire european continent. This thing was a bloody mess. As much as the 25 as much as 25 of the european population died, a much higher percentage than died in world war ii. This tells us these new forms of weaponry, even though they seem archaic today, could be extremely effective when used en masse. If we flashforward a few centuries, we reach world war i. Once again, gunpowder is the dominant weapon of the time. Each individual wielding a machine gun can fire 600 rounds are and they can sustain that rate of fire as long as they have bullets and they can fire relatively accurately for a distance up to two miles. I cannot cross two miles in under two minutes. There is no way im going to be able to do it with a couple thousand bullets flying at me. This caused warfare to once again become very static, very positionoriented. For all intents and purposes, to stagnate. But progress continued. World war i at the time was the bloodiest war in history. Millions of people died. There was a Significant Movement around the world to say, we never going to do that again. At one point, leading nations attempted to ban the practice of warfare which did not last very long. Technically, the United States has never repealed the act where we swear we would never use warfare against an opponent. There were other attempts to mitigate the aspect of warfare. A lot came out as the result of the gunpowder revolution. You had prominent thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries to said, there are limits to what you can do in warfare. There are things that are not acceptable behavior. For example, you should not go out and poisoning your bullets before firing them at someone. You should not deliberately kill someone after you have captured them. You should not deliberately spread the disease amongst your enemies. Yes, they are your enemies but when wars and, you have to go back to at least being able to coexist. Unless your objective is the complete and utter annihilation of your opponent. Which is flat wrong. You should not do that. Annihilation is bad. Even though we are innovating these new net these new technological ideas and concepts, we are also saying theres something to just do not do. You do not invent weapons that are designed to maim. You accept the enemies surrender of they offer it in good faith. Over time, it becomes the norm in european warfare that there are specific limits. These thinkers also considered, when is it respectable to go to war. They come to the conclusion there are times when war is an acceptable policy option. The right to go to war to defend yourself, your citizenry, your territory. There are other circumstances in which warfare is also in acceptable alternative. As we move forward into the 20s century after world war ii, there was a Significant Movement once again to never allow a conflict like this to happen. When the United Nations charter was written, a key component was that Member States of the United Nations shall not make war upon each other and if you violate that the expectation is that all of the other Member States will come to the aid of the big. As you all know, it has not always worked out that way. But there is an enormous body of International Law governing what you can and cannot do in war. Most is encapsulated in the Geneva Convention. There are four key components that will matter later in the lecture as to what are the ultimate limits of warfare in terms of who can and cannot anticipate. The Geneva Convention can make this clear. You must bear arms openly. Youre not allowed to make war by hiding your weaponry, pulling it out, attacking the enemy, hiding it again. You must wear some form of uniform or recognizable device. It may be the uniform of a country with a flag on it. It may be something as simple as a green headscarf, to hamas. And hesse b recognize more and distinct so i know you are representing yourself as a combatant. And you are expecting me to follow the rules of war. You must be part of an organization of a hierarchical structure where the leadership is responsible for the behavior of these subordinates. There has to be a form of command and control. Someone that is ultimately held responsible for the behavior of troops in the field. And, you must follow the laws of war. If you do not follow the laws of war you cannot claim their protection in any form of combat. Why does this matter . The United States is currently in a fight with the Islamic State. With al qaeda. We are fighting terrorism into the concept. And the organization with which we are in conflict do not bear arms openly. Do not wear a recognizable uniform. Do not have a command structure where the leadership is responsible for the behavior of subordinates and they certainly do not although the laws of war. So there are outside of our traditional understanding of who is a an acceptable combatant and who is protected by the laws of war and if the United States and its allies choose to extend additional privileges such as accepting surrender and restraining ourselves, that is our option. But we really effectively have to follow the rules of war even though we are facing an enemy who does not. And that can be an incredibly frustrating situation as this cartoon illustrates. We have to follow the laws of war for one fundamental reason. If we do not follow the laws of war, then the laws of war themselves become largely irrelevant and the enemy we are currently facing has its primary goal being the destruction of the existing world order. You can conceive of the Islamic State and al qaeda as a global insurgency. Its goal is not necessarily just to bring down individual governments, its goal is to destroy the entire international system. It is trying to hold down the system we have with the United Nations where there are nations that are considered haves and havenots. They have the ultimate tool, a veto over the use of violence. The United States, britain, france, and china. None of them are in the middle eastern region. So imagine if you will, if we were to redesign the permanent Security Council, choose new membership. Would you put the same five countries in there . Not on the basis of economics. Not on the basis of population size and probably not on the basis of geography. Nell imagine if the islamic now imagine if the Islamic State achieves everything and pushing for. It creates a caliphate that stretches from north africa all the way to the pacific ocean. Would they have cause to claim membership in this most elite of fraternities . Or4y m they might, they might instead choose to it creates a caliphate that stretches from north africa all pull down the system because they believe chaos and anarchy will more effectively serve their and goal. That is our starting point. When it comes to 21st century conflict and military robotics, the heart of what i want to discuss today i need to establish definitions. The media is a big fan of the term drone. And drone has a specific meaning. It is a preprogrammed machine. It does whatever it is told to do. It does not think. It does not react. It does not choose from a host of options. It simply does what it is told. You preprogram a route, it flies the route. You tell it to strike a certain point, it strikes a certain point. It is not a thinking machine. A drone by definition is not and drone has a specific meaning. It is a preprogrammed machine. It does whatever it is told to do. It does not think. It does not react. It does not choose from a host of options. It simply does what it is told. Being driven by some other intelligence. You fire it, it flies off. You do not control it on its route. You might have the ability to stop it, to abort its mission, but theres no intelligence hiding its actions. It has already been done. A robotic system incorporates some degree of its ability to sense an environment and make decisions. You were probably familiar with a predatory. A predatory is being flown by a human operator but it has some functions it performs automatically. Which makes flying it a lot easier. It does not choose to kill. A human being chooses to fire a missile from a predatory. It does not choose where it will fly, a human being chooses where it will fly. But it does some things on its own. Some of these other devices, this has become most wellknown as an explosive ordinance removal disposal robot. It allows you to avoid putting humans and the worst of harms way. It does not disarm bombs on its own. It gets close to the bomb and does what its operator tells it to do. Incredibly useful to reduce as youll tease. Reduce your casualties, because at the end of the day, nobody cries every robot dies, does not die. It just gets rendered into small pieces. On the right, more terrifying. This is the larger, uglier cousin. It weighs about 200 pounds. It is remotely driven. It is not driving itself around and shooting off guns and causing chaos. There is in a operator driving it from a distance using a camera. As you can see, it can be armed. You can put rocket launchers, grenade launchers, machine guns on it. It does not suffer from a lot of the problems that trigger in accuracy in humans when using weaponry. It does not have a pulse. It does not breathe. It instantly calculate it instantly calculates the wind. It does not feel bad if it is shooting at a house of children. It just does what it is told. There is a human operator telling it to do that, but there is a certain divorce there. The human is a little further away from the intimacy of killing. A robot, for all intents and purposes, robots do not exist yet, not in the way the military means when it uses the term robot. It makes decisions on what it is going to do on the environment and senses and right now there are no weapons that are true robots in the classical sense, wandering around causing headache for everyone. They do not exist yet that they are on the immediate horizon. I am going to show you some examples of how close we are getting and what we could do if we chose to. Final definition, a cyborg. A cybernetic organism. That is, a human or any kind of critical but usually a human that has incorporated robotic elements into themselves, usually as a form of an enhancement. Rush limbaugh is a cyborg. He has an implant in his ear that has restored hearing to him, without which he is completely deaf, which as i understand it is a problem for radio hosts. There are other cyborgs out there. You may be surprised some of the things we can do now with mindcontrolled implants. Artificial intelligence. The notion you could create a machine that would be capable of processing information in the same fashion as a human. To a certain extent, Artificial Intelligence is a red herring. There is not a compelling reason to create something that is artificially intelligent. Robots give us the advantage we can choose specialization. We can design them. There is not a particularly compelling reason to produce a humanoid robots with all the frailties and weaknesses of human beings. If i was designing the next human being, this is not the shape i would choose. I am a very picky guy, apparently. Alan turing was a british cryptanalyst during world war ii. He posited the idea of the touring test. Turing test. If you can query a computer into human being through some mechanism where the sound would not tell you which was which. Maybe youre using a keyboard to ask a question. You could determine whether or not you had created Artificial Intelligence by having a question asked and as they could not determine which was which, you would have created Artificial Intelligence. Microsoft a few weeks ago thought they would run an experiment. They created an Artificial Intelligence. They created a twitter account and turned it over to a computer and hypothetically,