Hosted this 90minute event. Now its a pleasure to introduce my colleague and friend, Paul Springer, who is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy research institute, but also from his day job at the air command and Staff College in alabama. He also taught at west point. Hes the author of many books and many coming out on cyber war, military robotics, the history of prisoners of war and a load of other topics. Hes been on cnn, npr, history channel, discovery channel, National Geographic channel, and hes one of our most popular speakers. Weve asked him to speak on military affairs, which will give you a quick survey of military history from the 13th century, all the way up to today all in an hour, so im sure you will enjoy. Please welcome Paul Springer. [ applause ] good morning. Good morning. Id like to extend a thank you to dale and allen, from the New York Historical society and the Foreign Policy research institute, both wonderful organizations that i support and love working with and its a great opportunity to come speak to all of you today. Well see if i can leave you terrified for the rest of the weekend with some military robotics information for you here. But im a historian and that means i have to back up way too far to tell you the very beginning of the story. Before i really get rolling, because i work for the air force, dont reworry about readg the small discloser. These are not my views of the air force or department of defense, these are not the views of the u. S. Government. They are solely mine unless you really liked them, in which everybody else can take credit, too. All right. This is the only slide im going to throw at you that has an enormous amount of text and i dont expect to you read it, nor am i going to read it to you, but the point to this entire lecture, if you walk away with nothing else, my fundamental argument is that the world right now is in the middle of whats called a ref luvolution in mili affairs and that is going to change virtually every aspect the way human conflicts are pop you populgated and change how we go to war and how we behave when were in a war, all due to technological changes on the verbal verge of upsetting all human society. In the end there will be some countries that ad opted to new changes that take the technology and know how to use it, and these will be haves and havenots when it comes to the conflict. There is an enormous conflict. If you have revolution change in the way conflict is occurring, it becomes possible to dominate your rivals in a very short period of time. The originator of the term, revolution and military affairs was nikoli argokoff. It slightly pains me to give credit to a soviet thinker, but he had a really great idea, and his idea was there are times where fundamental changes occur and they occur so rapidly that they essentially make everything that has gone before completely obsolete. It is my contention that is occurring before our very eyes. Let me give you an example people are probably more familiar with. If you go back to the middle ages, this is what characterized war, castles and moats, and heavily armored knights and if you wanted to capture something, that was an undertaking that would take you months of siege craft unless you were somehow lucky enough to find them with the gates conveniently opened, the walls unmanned, the moat trained. As you can see each one of those was a major undertaking that really required all of the resources and all of the time of an entire campaign season. This is what characterized war in that time period. However, when gun powder became the norm in europe, it became possible to batter down the defenses of a tall, highwalled castle from a safe distance and the attacker had the advantage, because after all, the castle in its defenders could not leave their position while the attackers had a certain degree of mobility, could choose where to fight, could choose when to fight, and suddenly, being inside a castle was a disadvantage because you became an obvious target. As a result, here are some successful sieges and youll notice were still in the 15th century. But the siege duration is suddenly measured in days, rather than being a multimonth undertaking with no guarantee of success. But the situation didnt replain stable. Gun powder had certainly changed the approach to warfare, but it also was possible to resign your fortifications to make them less vulnerable to gunfire and became possible to once again defend a static position. This is what one of those fortifications looked like in the 1600s, full of geometric designs, and it could not be approached on any side without the attackers coming under heavy fire from multiple angels from the defenders. The result, were back up to really long sieges. And these are the sieges that actually succeeded. The vast majority of siege attempts in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were doomed to failure. It became once again a major undertaking and warfare shifted back to a static approach. But as you might imagine, those who had not adopted gun powder, who had not changed to meet the new situation, found themselves quickly overwhelmed. It became impossible for an army that did not use gun powder to withstand one that we wouldield firearms f. Siege craft became almost impossible, it guaranteed you were going to have some battles from static positions and could not build a 40 kag fortification and sometimes armies were going to meet in the field. Reloading a firearm in the 16th century could take two minutes and the effective range of a firearm was only about 50 meters. Now im not exactly, shall we say a paragon of physical fitness, but even i can cross 50 meters in under two minutes. I can crawl 50 meters in under two minutes, which means if youre using firearms, and you shoot and miss, there is a reasonable chance that im going to run across the field and hit you with something really sharp or something really heavy. As a result, we get mixed formations. This is the spanish tercio. It comprises musketeers on the outside, and pikemen in the center. The musketeers open fire after they shoot, the pikemen come to the outside to protect them while they reload t. Made it impossible for a calvary charge to over whelm a group of musketeers. It was very unwielding, and swept everything on the battlefield because it was infinitely better than anything else someone had come up with to that time to use firearms in the field. And it teaches us something. It teaches us that sometimes its not the technology that matters, its being the first one that figures out how to utilize it effectively, and thats whats going on here. The spanish wind up using the tercio to become the dominant land pour in if europe, but nothing lasts forever. This is one of the rare times where youre going to hear a historian talk to you about swedish military dominance. Its not really what theyre particularly known for. But it was the swedes that figured out how to counter the tercio. They realized it was very unwieldy because everybody was getting in each others way, it was hard to move around. You could have thousands of troops within the hearing of one person who is screaming to be heard of them moving around, and maybe the pikes could protect the musketeers without standing amongst the musketeers. The idea was called the brigade, and when the brigade swept on the to battlefields of europe, under gastavus adolfus, is drove the tercio from the field. He entered the 30 years war knowing that it was one of enormous carnage, but he had this new idea that for a brief period, allowed the swedes to turn the tied of a war that had effectively engulfed the entire european continent, and this thing was a bloody mess. As much as 25 of the european population died in that war. A much higher percentage than died during world war ii. So this tells us that these new forms of weaponry, even though they seemed very arkayichaeic t today could be extremely effective when used in mass f. We fastforward a few centuries, we reach world war one. Once again, gun powder is the dominant weapon of the era. The difference now of course, each individual wielding a machine gun like this can fire 600 runs per minute and sustain that rate of fire as long as they have bullets, and they can fire relatively accurately for a distance of up to two miles. I cannot cross two miles in under two minutes. Theres no way im going to be able to do it with a couple thousand bullets flying at me. And this caused warfare to once again become very static, to become very positionoriented, to for all spents and purposein, stagnate. World war 1 at the time was the bloodiest in history. Millions of people died and there was a Significant Movement around the world to say, oh, well, were never going to do that again. At one point leading nations attempted to ban the practice of warfare which did not last very long, though technically the United States has never repealed the kelon breon pact, where we shore we wouldnt use that as policy. A lot of which came out as a result of this gun powder revolution. So you had very prominent thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries that effectively said, there are limits to what you can do in warfare. There are things not septemberabacceptable behavior. You should not poison your billet before firing them at someone. You shouldnt deliberately kill someone, or shouldnt deliberately spread disease among yourenmes unless your objective is the complete and thor utter annihilation of your a opponent, annihilation is bad. So even though were innovating these new technological ideas, were building these new concepts, at the same time were saying theres some things you just dont do. You dont invent weapons that are designed to mamim. You accept the enemys offer, and becomes the thing if there are specific limits. These thinkers consider when is it acceptable to go to war and they come to the conclugsion there are times warfare is an acceptable policy option. Obviously you have the right to defend yourself, to defend your territory, but there are other circumstances in which warfare is also an acceptable alternative to these thinkers. Now as we move forward into the 20th century, after world war ii, there was a Significant Movement once again to never allow a conflict like that to happen. And when the United Nations charter was written, a key component of the charter was that Member States of the United Nations shall not make war upon one another. If you violate that norm, the expectation is that all of the other Member States will come to the aid of the victim. As youall know, it hasnt always worked out that way in practice. But there is an enormous body of International Law governing what you can and cannot do in war. Most of it is in capsulated in the geneva conventions, in this terms of the ultimate warfare in terms of what cannot and who cannot participate and the geneva conventions make that clear. You must bear arms openly. Youre not allowed to make war by pulling it out, attacking the enemy and hiding it again. Two you must wear some form of uniform or recognizable device t. May be the uniform of a country with a flag on it, or may be something as simple as the green head scarves plausible to hamas, so i know you are representing yourself as a combatant and you are expecting me to follow the rules of war. Third, you must be part of an organization with a higher arc cal structure where the leadership is responsible for the behavior ofsubordinates. There has to be a command of control, someone that ultimately can be held responsible for the behavior of troops in the field. And fourth, you must follow the laws of war. If you dont follow the laws of war, you cannot claim their protections in any form of combat. Now why does this matter . Well, the United States is currently engaged in a fight. Were fighting the Islamic State. Were fighting alqaeda, were fighting terrorism as a concept and the organizations 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 held accountable for the behavior of subordinates and certainly do not follow the laws of war. So theyre outside of our trade i gue igzal understanding, 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 surrenderers accepting surrendererurrenders, restraining ourselves, that is our option. But we really effectively have to follow the rules of war even though were facing an enemy that doesnt and that can be an incredibly frustrating situation as this cartoon illustrates. We have to follow the rules of war for one fundamental reason. If we dont follow the laws of war, then the laws themselves become irrelevant and the enyem we are currently facing has its primary goal, the destruction of the existing world order. You can conceive of the Islamic State and alkiqaeda as a glob sale insurgency. Its goal is to not bring down individual governments. Its goal is to destroy the entire international system. Its time to pull down this system that we have with the United Nations where there are nations that are considered haves, and nations that are considered havenotes and none of the haves resemble the organizations pushing it down. Consider the permanent members of the Un Security Council as the ultimate International Relations tool. A veto over u. N. Presideuse of e and those are the United States, russia, britain, france and china none of them are muslim, none of them are in the mid eastern region. So imagine if you will if we were to redesign the permanent security council, if we were to choose new membership, would you put the same five countries in this there . Not on the basis of economics you wouldnt, not on the basis of population size. Probably not on the basis of geograp geography. Now, imagine the Islamic State achieves everything that it claims to be pushing for. It creates a panislamic 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 fraterniti fraternities . They might. Or, they might instead choose to simply pull down the system because they believe that chaos and anarchy will more effectively serve their end goals. So thats our starting point here. Now when it comes to 21st century conflict, and military robotics, which is the heart of what i want to discuss for you today, i need to establish a few definitions for you first. The media is a big fan of the term drone, and drone has a specific meaning. A drone is a preprogrammed machine. It does whatever its told to do. It doesnt think, it doesnt react to its environment t doesnt choose from a host of different options. It simply does what its told. You preprogram a route t fliers the route. Its not a thinking machine and a drone, by definition, is not been driven by any other intelligence. You fire a cruise missile, it flies off. You dont control it on its route. You might have the ability to stop it to abort its mission, but theres no intelligence guiding its actions. Its already been done. A robotics system, a robotics system incorporates some degree of the ability to sense in an environment and make decisions on the basis of it. Youre probably familiar with a predator. A predator is being flown by a human operator, but it has some functions it performs automatically on its own, which makes flying the system a lot easier. It does not choose to kill. A human being chooses to fire a missile from a predator. It does not choose where it will fly. A human being choose where is it will fly. But it does some things on its own. Some of these other devices here, this is called a pack bot. It has become most wellknown as an explosive Ordinance Disposal robot and allows you to avoid putting humans in the worst of harms way. It does not disarm bombs on its own. It gets close to the bomb and tells us what to do, in c ecrey useful if youre trying to reduce destruction. It gets rendered into smaller pieces. On the right, this is a little more terrifying. This is the larger uglier cousin. Its called a talon. It weighs about 200 pounds. This thing is not driving itself around and shooting off guns and causing chaos wherever it goes. There is an operator that is driving it from a distance using a camera. As you can see, this thing can be armed. You can put rocket launchers, you can put grenade launchers, you can put machine guns on it, and it doesnt suffer from a lot of the problems that trigger inaccuracy in humans while using weaponry. It doesnt have a pulse. It doesnt breathe. It instantly calculates the wind. It has a laser range finder. It doesnt care what its shooting at. It doesnt feel bad if its shooting at a house full of children. It just does what its told. Now theres human operator telling it to do that, but the human is a little further away from the intimacy of killing. A true robot, as you can see ive used a lot of pop culture references here. And the reason why is for all intents and purposes, robots dont exist yet, not in the way the military means when it uses the term robot. It makes decisions on what its going to do on the basis of the environment it senses. And right now there are no weapons that are true robots in the classical sense wondering around and causing headaches for everyone. They dont exist yet. But they are on the immediate horizon, and im going to show you some examples of how close were getting and what we could do if we chose to when it comes to fielding this type of device. Final definition, a siborg, a human, or any other kind of critter, but usually a human that has incorporated robotic elements into themselves, usually as a form of enhancement. Rush limbough is a siborg. He has an implant that has restored hearing, which makes him not deaf, which is a problem for a radio host. There are other ciborgs out there. You may be surprised some of the things we can do now with mindcontrolled implants. Artificial intelligents. Artificial intelligents is 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. Theres not a particularly compelling reason to create something thats artificially spell gen intelligent. We can design them. Theres not a