you see the same thunking thing on the republican side. senator rob porter who is son is gay and he is one of the few supporters on that side of marriage equality and he was said to be betraying principles when he did this. so the extensions to the other side in the polarized error is risky for politicians and don't have a lot of upside often. so they are difficult to do and becoming less and less easyism >> reporter: patrick egan, new york, "partisan priorities" thanks for being with us on booktv. >> guest: thank you for having me. >> every week booktv has shows

focused on non-fiction authors and books. keep watching here or go online and watch our past shows. booktv asked bookstores about the books they are excited about being published this fall. former secretary of state henry kissenger's thoughts on international affair. and in this changings everything, a report on how climate change affects the economyi economy. and examining how humans transformed the human age and we reecount the director from

tinseltown. visit the store in pasadena, california or online at romansbookstore.com. >> three different women in term of age and who they had voted for. michele voted for nadir and then bush and debby does want vote because she doesn't think politici politicians are any good and they deploy together and once they are in afghanistan the differences between them don't seem as important anymore and what becomes important is what are their personalities like.

debby takes michele under her wing and mothers here. she is a very maternal figure and mothers every. but she is trying to affirm michele. they are working for a tense, testy ex-marine who is upset with michele who is wearing a ranbow anklet and you see him make a bet at one point about whether they can turn this women into a good soldier and michele is found and determined that will never happen and debby is trying to show her this is maybe not the easiest way to go about things. so there are they in afghanistan serving on camp phoenix. and the armorman team when michele and debby the youngest and oldest of the three women are on the armor team and

weapons mechanics. the armor man team runs out of american weapons to fix. they are in a support battalion, do maintenance work and support infantry soldiers and their weapons are not breaking enough to have anything to do. and the very driven man and superior come up with the idea of why don't they work on this interesting un project. the united nations facilitated the collection of a hot of old, broken ak-47s which are going to be repurposed and given out to afghan soldiers. and the idea is if they help arm the afghan army they can save money and help the process of building a viable army that could defend afghanistan and the

u.s. soldiers would be able to ideally leave in the future. i wanted to read a little bit about what is happening in afghanistan with these weapons. there is a huge contract of michele's idea of what it means to be working on the weapons and debby's idea but i will get to that after this. michele and debby worked out a system for documenting this stream of ak-47s that were passing through their hands. they work on 20,000 of them over the course of year. miller drummed into the soldiers they needed to be able to account for every single ak-47 but they were hard to identify. michele and debby took over the task of deciphering the eroded numbers on the side of the weapon and recording the identity of the gun they repaired. if the team got a difficult box

they will focus on repairing and then document after the repairs were completed. if the bock was easier they would split off and two would fix and two would try to write down the numbers. they came to know which countries made more reliable versions and which were likely to be broken. the chinese were the worst and they tossed many of them. the others helped up well some being made in the 1950s. they checked the function of the firing pin making sure it would strike the bullet. if the trigger didn't feel right they would replace the entire mechanisms. the safety wasn't often working. frequently the springs were bad

and they replaced those. ...

>> next time a journalist dream to talks about the rise of the predator trainee. the trainee became a primary weapon of choice after the big abuse by the air force and cia after 9/11. this event was held at the army navy club in washington d.c. it's just under an hour. >> the technology will talk about today as impact did the political environment in a sense deangelo -- substantive way. who knows what further opportunities these technological lead the lives will produce.

there may well be applications for civilian use of the transportation and dear. that is why we are interest to learn more about richard whittle's research. equally important however is the fact that richard and i have been close personal friends for a little more than 30 years. we have worked together on a number of projects over these many years and i am delighted and it's a real privilege and tea for me that i can welcome our author, richard whittle and you interested in this work product, his most recent book on the development of drugs. richard whittle is a global fellow at wilson center appeared in a research associate at the national air and space museum where he finished writing this

book is a fellow during the academic years 13-14. most of you know that richard has written about the military for more than 30 years, including 22 at the pentagon correspondent for the "dallas morning news." this book which came out just two weeks ago or so has accumulated quite some accolade from very different and very authoritative raiders and media outlets. amazon selected the book as one of the best 15 history books reasonably. kirkus reviews davida stark review for books of exceptional merit. "the wall street journal" called the book "predator" fascinating. the "washington post" said that

richards promoting is methodical and credit though. no small feat given the little silence that the air force, the obama administration in general atomics have welded after their operations, even the trivial part. the post review added that whittle's best material appears in the final chapters when he delivers action-packed details about how the cia and the pentagon used arms to hunt for al qaeda leaders immediately after 9/11 based on interviews with numerous participates. ladies and gentlemen, we are in for a special treat. richard, welcome. the floor is yours. [applause] >> well, thank you, wolfgang for that very nice introduction.

i think we also need to point out besides the fact the coincidence that dhl started its partial operation in my book is about the predator is not armed. anyway, i am very grateful to you for your hospitality today and for your friendship. thank you all for coming to hear about my new book, "predator: the secret origins of the drone revolution." it is an honor to speak to such a distinguished audience as this, especially when we have to former air force leaders with us today. former secretary which peters and retired lieutenant general jack rice who was the judge advocate. i am honored you are here today. i am also honored that retired general jack daly is here in addition to being former assistant, none of the marine

corps and deputy administrator of nasa. general daily stretch of the national aerospace museum or at then enjoying his hospitality so to speak since the poll of 2013 is a research fellow and now researched associates. thank you for being here. i appreciate it. let me add that neither the airspace museum nor general daily parenting responsibility whatsoever for anything in my book or anything will say today. they are innocent. [laughter] it is also an honor to talk about drones at an event hosted by dhl which is now doing what others have been talking about. i hope that in addition to the madison that someday the madison then they'll start delivering

books. [laughter] my book tells what i thought was going to be the story of an extraordinary airplane, but turned out to be a story of invention, a story of war, a story about the air force in a story about the cia. and i believe the story about how new age aviation came. five years ago i set out to write a book about the new age aviation and at first i thio take a comprehensive look at unmanned aerial systems or unmanned aerial vehicles coming uavs as many experts like to call them. and then i read an article in aerospace smithsonian magazine describing 10 aircraft to change the world. one of the 10 and the only uav was the predator and that brought things into focus for me. the predator was the uav that changed the world.

and to think about what that meant, you seem to me more and more evident that the predator not only change world were fair, but opened the door to today's unmanned civilian aviation revolution. and that was a story i made story i mediate leno wanted to write, the story of the predator and the origins of the term revolution. and as i found out in the five years writing this book took me, the story of this little trainee to change the world is a strange is the aircraft is though in many of who created this technology were just as unorthodox as the predator. take the predator's adventure. abraham carol, the former aeronautical engineer many people regard was born in baghdad in 1937, but he grew up amid the socialist idealism they they characterized israel than

1840s and early 1950s. by his early 30s, karen was director of preliminary design and special projects at israel aircraft industry, the country's most important aerospace manufacturer. but he grew frustrated by the corporate climate in cynicism he saw in the early 1970s and after working on a true decoy to pool area, he was going to strike out on his own. kerr emigrated to the united states, land of opportunity and like all american inventors, went to work in his garage. [laughter] is within los angeles. now is a young man in israel, abe had been a free flight modeling and the sports principles stuck with them. free flight competitions to make a model airplane that can launch banking are towed into the air like a kite and then stored as

long as possible without any remote or automated controls to keep it in the air. they knew all the tricks to making a plane that can soar while and in his los angeles karachi goes to uav technology demonstrated that was truly innovative. they called it the albatross come the albatross, naming it after one of nature's greatest soaring her. his albatross, up to 48 hours without refueling, which was far longer than any military uav ever flown at that time. based on his albatross demonstrator, he got a contract from the fan safety darpa to develop a larger uav in a similar configuration for the services. he named that drove amber. in 1889, a single darpa official wrote in a magazine article that

provided in order of magnitude increase in the flight times recorded the previous uavs have led the joint chiefs of staff to establish a new endurance category and an unmanned aircraft master plan ordered by congress. yet largely for personal or bureaucratic reasons that i detail in the book mccarran was unable to sell to the defense department and the company he created to build them what encrypt when he was 90. but thanks to some other unorthodox thinkers, abe karam's ideas, his revolutionary ideas didn't die when his company did. those ideas were rescued and his top engineers were hired by a pair of brothers who had a genius for business to match karem's genius for aeronautics. i think i turned it off. their names are neil and linda

blue. they're the private owners of the san diego general predator subatomic than while they are now in the late 70s, they're still very active and fascinating in their own right. in 1957 when the blue brothers during the early 20th and still statements on the cover of life magazine by flying a paper try peace or around latin america during summer vacation. they decided to make the trip by delay before they ever took their first flying lesson. and that is because they weren't just sightseeing. the blue brothers were born and bred entrepreneurs and latin america they hope to find business opportunities they may pursue after college. as a result of the trip, after they graduated, neil and linda blue had a plantation on the east coast of nicaragua in partnership with the ruling.

for the blues, that only lasted a couple years, but it was the first of many that by the 1980s had made them on commonwealth. now as the names asked, it began as a nuclear energy company and still is one. that god into the drone business after the blue brothers bought it from chevron in 1886. the number of reasons for thinking uavs might be a good investment but among their motives was the desire to help contra rebel in nicaragua to the sandinistas who in 1979 had overturned the former business partners. the blue brothers first attempt was a modified aluminum kit they were trying to equipped with a gps guided autopilot. neil blues idea was a contrast or in ilog, i'm guessing the cia

could type things knows of explosives and use it as a poor man's cruise missile. neil also thought such a weapon could help deter or stop the soviet invasion of western germany. neil bloom wanted to cause this to bertie because he said it was going to be priced cheap, cheap, cheap. [laughter] but i was surprised to learn as they dug into the history that the man he hired to run his aircraft operations, retired navy fighter pilot admiral admiral and thomas jay cassidy gave his first general atomics uav will later become the famous name predator. this unmanned kit plane had absolutely nothing to do with the predator we know it today except that name. nothing in common. but tom cassidy, who later proved adept at marketing lumpiness with the flying fighter planes like the name

predator and he chose it for both of those general atomic uavs. as i say in my book, if necessity is the mother of invention, war is the invention. aviation technologies, were created the tech knowledge sheet that gave birth to the predator and the key innovations are made of revolutionary. the war in bosnia and the difficulty of finding server telerate of his barbarity in sarajevo in 1993 led to the development of the second-round called predator, which in fact is a derivative of a smaller less capable uav abe karem had designed called the 750. in 1993 the cia but to 750s from general atomics to use than the photo at the bottom, the man on the right is abe karem.

the range of leftist thomas duane pune 293 was the gayest director of operation in the two california to seal that deal for cia or jim walser who had no abe karem for years. at about the same time after conversations, undersecretary created a problem to create and develop the unmanned aerial vehicles for the military. deutch was in a hurry. he stipulated the new uav had to fly within six months of contract and to make that possible, he developed deputy larry ladd had come up with a new rapid procurement message called advanced concept technology demonstration. in january 1994, the defense department gave the very first such contract to. abe karem redesigned the net 750

and six months later the new predator made its first play. and now i would like to elaborate on what i said this book tells a story about the air force and the story about the cia. one of the first things they did when i began work on this book that in 2009 was to find officers who had flown the predator or been involved in the program in some other way and interview them. the more air force people he interviewed, the more i heard that i really needed to talk to a civilian air force official at the pentagon, a former colonel with an unforgettable nickname and i soon found out an unforgettable personality. snake clark knows more about the predator than just about anybody people say. snape was his real name. i don't know. everybody called him snake. well, as former air force

secretary well knows, snake's will name is james g clerk. the air force job title these days is director of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance innovation. but here is how i describe him. in reality, clark worked -- idea lack [laughter] >> at least when you put the laser designator. in reality -- this is what i say the book, in reality clark worked for the service with our chief of staff in civilian secretary of the air force. he was their favorite excerpt, and inside operator how to bypass bureaucracy and relish getting things done as he liked to put it quick and dirty. this is partly and they salute

him. he consciously cultivated the image of the shirt and slippery operator who might be dangerous to the reputation he found useful intimidating component. or rather, sassy and unafraid to step on toes, clark was an acquired taste. he spoke in a training pattern. it was slightly acidic and reminiscent of dcc. and some economists say he loves playing what he called pentagon poker. i will see your three-star and raise you a four star. well, i met snake clark at the annual meeting in september 2009 and visited him. i went back again a month later and back again a month after that nsi talked to snake clark, i began to understand the predator was usually, but also with the capabilities for

improved. initially a secretary which peters pointed out to me when i interviewed him in this project, the predator like the first person on computers is a new technology that some people found interesting but most were sure how to benefit from. over time, a few interested innovators came up with new software, new hardware, new communications architectures that transformed the personal computer from a novelty and much the same thing happened with the predator. at first, this new endurance uav was an important, just interesting and only to a few people at that. many were quite sure exactly what it could do for us. the predator offered phenomenal flying in to stay up as much as 40 hours shooting my video for infrared, but it was also slow in flimsy and vulnerable to life. and while still photographs

taken by sr 71 and u. twos and satellites were familiar tools of intelligence the 1990s, early 1990s, full motion video wasn't. when the predator made its debut in 1994, being flown by the army by the way, it is a platform for a video camera this imagery was sent back to a ground control station, a trailer at the time that went no further. by 2001, three years after the air force took charge, it was the first weapon in history whose operators could develop into a single individual on the other side of the planet from a position of ambush in total invulnerability. that transformation was largely accomplished by special air force unit, a unit i had never heard of before, even though i had written about the military for three decades. officially it is the 645th

aeronautical systems headquartered every patterson air force base in dayton, ohio. since it was established amenity 50s, it has been called bacardi. here is how i describe it and the book. created during cold war to help the air force cia and other agencies keep an eye on the soviet union and its allies, they big safari evolved to the fictional british service technology shop in the james bond movie. big safari didn't break his face or snazzy sports cars with machine guns, but like the below seven, big safari with fast with technicians whose mission was to get off quickly. big safari was more specialized. beginning with his first assignment in december night in

52, installing the largest aerial camera ever on a huge the 97 cargo plane, project code-named pie face, big safari's name was reconnaissance devices in a hurry and expressly to special missions. big safari's director in the air force took charge of the predator was phil graham's. that is him on the right the secretary peters and if clark. another retired colonel. i revealed the book of the grounds maneuvered on capitol hill tonight sure that big safari got to work its wonders on the predator. another unorthodox thinker who played a pivotal role in turning the predator into a world changing technology is someone whose photo i can show you. a techno- scientist of extraordinary intellect and ability who got interested in

the predator when it was still just a test knowledge of fun by the army. snake park called him the man with two brains. in the book by mutual agreement i call him fans and i describe in detail some of the major innovations come up with to the predator. they include figuring out to strand predator video back to the pentagon and other senators from anywhere in the world, mapping out a unique satellite fed up to the big safari crew could fly predator over afghanistan in the fall of 2000 from a ground control station in europe and creating a new communications architecture that made it possible in 2001 for cruz in the united states to fly armed predators on the other side of the globe for the first time ever. that's a little hard to see, but that's an air force diagram.

as i explain in the book, making not link to a uav on the other side of the earth is a symbol of subscribing to satellite tv. you can't shoot a signal to the satellite in geostationary orbit and bring it back down to a drum on the other side of the planet and you can't have a single from one satellite to another without the distant to signal travels in the process required along the way introducing enough latency, and not delayed signal to make it difficult for a crew to fly the train it remotely and impossible to accurately and its missiles. but they figured out how to rig a system that was latency to acceptable levels in the air force is still using essential architecture he divides today to fly but they now called remotely piloted aircraft that are a world away from bases here at home. and that brings me to buy this book also tells the cia story. because he came up a split

operations came up with that operation that they called it will miss the air force team and germany could secretly fly over afghanistan in the fall of 2000 to help the cia find osama bin laden. and that ad hoc unit of big safari operators in air force intelligence personnel indeed found themselves in line with the cia. less than a year later, he then invented what he called remote flight operations to give the cia the option of using an armed predator to kill osama bin laden without launching such a study from germans will. excitement about removing the ground controls a schneider germany was deemed essential. by the conventional wisdom has been the cia armed the predator into one account the air force decided it couldn't be left behind. i found the opposite was the case. the initiative to arm the predator was in fact become the air force general in late 2000,

not long after he took over the air combat command and from recent had nothing to do with the cia or osama bin laden. i explained his reasons and circumstances in the book, but here is what general dunford told me. all i wanted to do was to have the problem and sitting at the target. what can you post something on there that allows you to do something about it. to arm the predator with momentum against the air force team with osama bin laden in 2000. the acceleration was harshly due to the fact that by early 2000, the counterterrorism director of the national security council at the time in the cia official had come to the conclusion that the united states needed to kill

osama bin laden before he killed more americans that al qaeda had done in the 1998 means in kenya and tanzania and as they would do again by bombing the destroyer uss cole on october 122,000. the air force conducted its first fire missile shot from a predator at january 23rd, 2001 and in the spring and summer of that year, top cia peters rarely agreed to consider and i emphasize the words warily and consider coming using the new arms uid -- uid to kill osama bin laden. it is a did to using drone strikes. it was a great deal of money before 9/11 that the idea of an espionage and analysis airbags control and military weapon and operation that might be two headlines such as cia uses drone

to assassinate islamic militants. even though big safari in a small cadre of air force intelligence officers spent much of the early part of 2001 preparing for the mission, by the first week of september that year, most of the elements were in play. this side is difficult to see, especially from the back year. these are google earth photos that show the langley campus of the cia on september 12, 2001. the nsaid shows a double home is the air force predator command center. that small white rectangle next to it was the first of two ground control stations put there to fly the first predators over afghanistan. they were painted white to disguise them. my book describes in some detail some of the early operations

conducted by the air force unit at this railer park as some called it. i describe them as they were described to me by those who conduct did and could mandate. that includes the escape of the first kinds of wars in afghanistan, a taliban leader mohammed omar who assume they already know almost became the first high-value target ever killed by an armed predator. a book also includes but i believe to be the most accurate account today at the predators will in the death of al qaeda's third ranking leader and military commander at the time of 9/11, osama bin laden stressed and friend ahmed ocker. now i'd like to explain why i believe the predator gave birth to today's drone revolution. drones has been a wide variety

of configurations. in the 1990s, uav technology was improving and the military was using the year 19 with several types. they were still in niche technology. given advances in the underlying technology, lightweight composite materials, smaller and more sophisticated cameras, digital communications, gps i think is late evening time uavs would have become more than just a niche technology in any event. but as i said earlier, if necessity is the mother of invention, war is the mother of necessity and the wars of the late 20th century produced a predator in the predator made drones matter in ways they never have before. they physically armed predator 3034 which now hangs in the national air and space museum starting in january 2001 and tested starting with the static ground test, then firing missiles at targets named in the

desert and then firing them into a building the cia had construct a to find out which were designed to kill tanks would kill osama bin laden in afghanistan. the contractor apparently misread the clarifications and built a structure that bore little resemblance to the houses of afghanistan. so the testers nicknamed it taco bell and hung the sign. [laughter] they were in a hurry at this point, so to help measure the building, they had to spend the usual manic insult of ballistic killing. instead sec and the slide, the use plywood silhouettes and watermelon to simulate people. but while people at lower levels in the cia were getting prepared to send the armed predator after osama bin laden or richard clarke was having trouble getting leaders of the bush administration to focus on the threat he and others sought in

al qaeda. the national security council held its first meeting she disguised sending the armed predator after a summit in london on september 4th, 2001. while many preparations have been made to the ground control station was 30 at the campus. either the cia nor the military wanted to take responsibility, so they decided to wait. one week to the day later of course everything changed. in the day after that, three armed predators were on their way to a base in pakistan whether to take off and land permissions over afghanistan. predator dirty 34 come in very no markings at the time and controls to the trailer park at the cia launched the first predator strike in afghanistan on the first night of the war october 7, 2001, a strike i describe in some detail. three days later, president bush asked in a meeting, why can't we

find more than one predator at a time? said that to have 50 of these things. in december of that year, bush gave a speech of the corps of cadets at the citadel in south carolina where he said this, before the war, the predator had skeptics because it did not fit the old way. now it is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles. now, as i said earlier, given the rapid dance and component technologies, it is fairly certain at some point translating would evolve anyway. but if the definition of a technological revolution is the same as the devolution of a scientific revolution come a breakthrough moment that disrupt internet offers unanticipated ideas, it seems to me the predator for global remote control was just such a moment and it was indeed a technological evolution. of course i can offer is

circumstantial evidence, but beyond president bush's statement at the citadel and the fact the cia has come to rely heavily on weapons that were once relent in two years, their space. s. 2001 began as the entire u.s. military owned a total of 82 unmanned aerial vehicles of three types. the predator, still in arms at that point and two small reconnaissance drones. a pentagon study issued in april 2001, 5 months before 9/11 estimated by 2010 the armed services might have as many as 290 in all, it's still only three times. when 2010 in fact arrive, they have nearly 8000 uavs in 14 different types and i think the number today is more like 10,000. today come in the air force is annually trained more remotely powered aircraft operators.

the army is flying its own predator through. the navy and air force are developing fighters that unmanned combat aerial field goals, as many as 80 nations are building their own military uavs and civilian use of code havarti outstripped the federal aviation administration's ability to regulate it. in short, i think aerospace smithsonian magazine got it right. the predator changed the world because it disrupted accepted thinking and offered unanticipated ideas and what followed was a drone revolution still unfolding. thank you for listening and again i think dhl and my friends for inviting me to tax you at the army navy club. it has been an honor and whatever time we have remaining, i will do my best to answer questions. thank you.

[applause] >> richard, thank you. that was great. there's quite a few questions if i may. let me thank with two to add two additional aspects to this debate. their legal implications from an ethical point of view, moral point of view, is this all fair to go after people who may not have committed any crime when anticipating that they will. how do you look at all this? what about the authorization of drone strikes. who can do this as the saddest that jury, et cetera, et cetera. he mentions that 80 countries 10 years down the road, a united

delta air flight of sensei. [laughter] >> well, there is a lot there. i think that your first question ,-com,-com ma there is a fairness question raised a lot with armed troops. the one question is, is it fair for our military personnel to stay in perfect safety and kill people on the other side of the world? and my feeling about that is if you accept the morality of war to start with, commanders have two primary obligations. the first is to win and the second is to protect the people as best they can. i think that fairness is a

concept that is very vital to sports, that doesn't really have a role in war. general is often will say we are not interested in traitor friday. so i say nothing at all. i just think it is a red herring to say that there is something unfair about using this weapon in military operations. in many ways it's a great wound to the military. now, the whole area of drone strikes raises a different set of issues. as you know, the military operates under title 10. the intelligence agencies operate under title 5010 presidential findings. i think for me as a citizen, one question i have is whether we

don't need better checks and balances on the executive range and more information about how people are put on the target list of what the standards of evidence. i would be personally more come it will if we had maybe the kind of situation we have with the fisa court for foreign intelligence survey the wiretap i believe the judge has to approve a warrant and someone has to review the evidence. the general principle i think it's valid like the executive branch to have some more check and balance in the house. they inform certain members of congress. i don't actually know whether they informed them before or after the targeted killing had taken place. my understanding first amendment of congress are not free to do anything with the information. and let's say also the targeted

killings are not just a question of you see drones. the principle is a neocon administration issued a public memo on the legal justification for the killing of a lackey, much of that one is redacted, but the justification was essentially that the government has the private authority right to kill people in certain circumstances. so anyway, the whole tangled area cannot memo didn't use the word drone. i doubt remember the exact phrase, but talks about targeted killing. the point is you can do it with a knife, too. we have to decide if this is what we want to do.

>> charlie stephens inside, rick, you up for it about other b. 22 osprey, the predator, what lessons would you offer for how the u.s. government can do a better job with this revolutionary technologies? >> i assume you need in the acquisition? why do we have situations like we have now would be as 35 that's been going on for years and years. i've thought about that a lot and i wish i had some good easy answer. i think i would eugenius affected because a lot of smart people working on this, you've been among the questions all the time. the interesting thing about the difference between the osprey as the predator is that you started out -- [inaudible]

it takes off like a helicopter and size like an airplane. in shorthand i call it the ugly duckling that turned into a salon because they had a very troubled development process but now is doing wonderful things for the marine corps and air force. but it took 25 years and $22,000,000,000.30 lives lost before they became the great aircraft that it is today. it started out as a joint project in which all four services were being involved in 10 different mission to list the requirements that went on and on and on, that the people designing and building it had to meet. at the predator was almost like build it and they will calm. there was actually a very simple list of required that, only three or four inchon bleaches memo in 1993.

and i think that obviously simplifies the process of great deal. i think raiding the requirements for military commitment is where the system gets bogged down a lot because there is a 10 station to ask for the impossible and i think the defense contractors have a great motive to say yet, we can do that easy, cheap. it turns out not to be that way. so i think one of the areas that should be focused on is the whole process of writing requirements in again about whether big safari, which developed the predator in many ways, one of many mottos is look for the 80% solution and that is not a bad motto. >> already. >> in building weapons. >> wolfgang chamber of church

international. since this is happening, we asked. every day target. the chinese act did not our computers here. nsa is not bad either. how can we make sure that these predators are not going to be controlled via hacker and in turn against another, including ourselves. >> well, it is a question that is on the blood people's minds. i would be lying if i said i knew the technical answer because i'm really not an engineer. i am a storyteller and i have told this story by interviewing people who are experts. i am told how other, by people who are experts on this, that at this point the military has encrypted the signals for all of the major uavs, the large ones

and that there is really no danger, little to no danger if anyone even able to hijack the control or reagan's secret data that they are transmitting. and now someone else told me that it still could be chance, the signals can be jammed. but as i say, that assert the arrest, but it's on the military has thought about. yes, sir. >> yes, i would like to drag you back to wolf in squash and we all love technology and is soon finds its way getting around the world. various people can want the same technology. i am wondering, how detectable is predator to the radon used and what is the possibility that if we could reach a point in

time for someone who is an adversary balance could actually use the same technology against civilian aircraft? >> there are countries out there trying. the chinese has a predator knock off coffee pterodactyl. if you seen the photograph photograph, it looks very similar. i think that the aircraft technology is not the secret. lots of countries may be altered duplicate aircraft like that. but software and communications architecture are very special and i think very few countries would be able to duplicate that. now also the predator while fairly hard to detect, tell the story in the book of how one captain scott swanson was piloting the predator over

afghanistan looking for osama bin laden, the taliban scrambled to make what came out and the other members of the crew and ground control station at the airbase for bobby than we've seen in the nutrient he aircraft to make it as small as possible. that jet fighter pilot failed to see the predator and flew right by because you know, aircrew says that roughly 82 miles an hour. and it's a pain in air superiority greg as it was when they sent it into action over afghanistan, it is pretty hard to see. but it's quite easy to shoot down. in fact, it's easier to shoot

down a predator then do it with a helicopter and a 12 gauge shotgun. [laughter] satellite inc. other countries may be able to duplicate aspects of the technology aircraft like this. i don't think that they are going to be successful in getting over our borders. we have the best air defenses i soon, i hope in the world. but anyway, we have substantial air defense is and i don't think we have to worry about people flying those kinds drones over a territory. especially the communication architecture, such as the diagram shows the signal has to go by fiber-optic cable from here into the atlantic ocean to europe where it joins the satellite terminal and goes up to the predator. i think it's a pretty expensive proposition .

i don't think many countries can do that. so i think the greater threat actually to us in america from unmanned aircraft is from small unmanned aircraft, even down to the size and some nefarious group wanted to take on them for some sort of explosives on that. but that would just be a terror weapon. that would be a weapon of any military significance. i rambled a bit, but i hope they answered the question. >> thank you. [inaudible] may follow up on that last point than look into the future again on the civilian uses of the technology. could you, but you might expect it to look like with the haitian organizations involved? what would that look like and how it changed the environment in which all of the aircraft

operate? >> well, thinkers gentlemen at the aviation named jim williams who would love it if i could get an answer to that question because that is something the faa is struggling with. you know, one of the big issues, one of the problems, one of the technical hurdles for people and the unmanned aircraft industry in safety. the piloted aircraft has to be able to see and avoid other aircraft. so there's lots of companies, the defense department are working on technologies to provide a uav, and unmanned aircraft to avoid other aircraft are protected and avoid other aircraft. how heavy and how expensive that technology has to be and without it i think there are definite

limit to what you're going to be able to do with this type knowledge he because you can't just love this guys with aircraft that may run into other aircraft or fall from the sky and hurt people or cause damage to buildings or whatever. so safety is a major concern in a major hurdle. we are not there yet. you know, having what does this story and in the tells the story of how he came up with this remote split operations to evolve a major problem that arose in the planned operation, i am very hesitant to predict the future because i know a month before he did that anyone would have predicted that you could control the uav on the other side of the globe from the united states. in fact, all of the other

experts were saying this can't be done. we have to shut down the operation. but i am reminded also of the fact that when i wrote the book about the osprey in 1830s, deterring that inspired the aircraft, dream of creating the aircraft that could do everything a bird could do in the dream of flying cars. we are still waiting for flying cars and i don't know how air traffic control would work if all of us had the ability to suddenly decide i'm sick of this traffic can. i'm going to fly over to the grocery store. there's some problem that may make it insoluble. i hope that helps. yes, sir. >> thank you had robert

danziger. this is a most specific follow-up on a previous question. as you know, a drone would reverse engineer it and is one that is crafted and able to duplicate not just the frame or -- [inaudible] >> you're asking me whether they were able to quiet >> well, i don't know, but i doubt it. and now, it was interesting to me when they held their news conference and show conference and showed this is the rt 170 cents of all, which has been known to report the beast of kandahar because they were just get glimpses of it from time to time. when that was put on display in iran ,-com,-com ma they didn't show the landing gear.

they had a flag or something draped across the front. and i've talked to people who know more about these things than i do say let's suggest a band that only aircraft came in for a pretty hard landing. it is unlikely that it was intact. it looked like a strange beast when they showed it at their news conference. that i don't know the answer to that question. i mean, that is a classified -- that was a classified aircraft before the rainy and scott it. but i've also been told and i think it makes more sense to me than any nl's bet the case of the rainy and taken over in bringing it in visits last link allows us at all and went down

and probably had a hard landing. i have answered every question. >> any additional questions or comments? >> one more. >> richard orlowski. rick, you have written your previous book about to be 22. were they prepared touristic program. this is as you say revolution, a tremendous story, but more incremental. there's very few opportunities to observe the revolution as it happens in the aerospace for air defense industry. is anything in the future on the horizon that could approximate something of this magnitude in aerospace and defense in terms of emergent knowledge he's a requirement?

>> wow, i can count on you richard to pose 10 answerable question. i think if i knew the answer to that i wouldn't tell you because i would be working on a book about it. [laughter] >> richard, thank you very much. [applause] thank you very much in thank you all for being here. for those who have not received the book with his signature, please i think we have some copies left. thank you for joining us. [inaudible conversations]

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>> almost that entire time that wee known each other. it started out as a screenplay project at nyu and discovered this story and wrote this amazing screenplay about it, and it actually got made into a short film as one of the awards for the contest she won which you can view on my youtube page because i think it's amazing and what an amazing movie this book is going to be. she didn't give up on the story and knew that she had found an amazing story, and it's one of the, like, longest periods of time i've ever known any of my friends to work on a project x the culmination so amazing, and