facebook.com/booktv. next on "after words," you'll hear from georgetown university professor rosa brooks discussing her book "holiday everything became war and the military became everything." in this book she examines the change in how america fights wars and the growing role of the u.s. military in ongoing conflicts. >> well, rosa, ate great to be here and discuss this book which is a long time in the making and a great resource for folks interested in civil military asias and issues we're facing with regard to the role of the military.

the title is have we in the united states become too dependent on our military so solve problem snooze i don't know if we have become too dependent but have become very dependent on the military to solve problems. one thing that blew my mind when i got the pentagon, and you have spent longer in that world but when i got there, like many americans issue assumed that the military prepares to fight war in the traditional sense of blowing stuff up and shooting at people, and obviously the pentagon does do that, but it was just amazing to me how much else people in the military now do, whether it's planning programs to prevent sexual violence in the congo, to programs to encourage microenterprise among afghan women or training judges or producing radio call-in shows. you name it, somebody at the

pentagon was doing it and it was half amazing and inspiring and have a little bit scary. >> host: well, you very much in the book talk about your experiences inside the pentagon. you go beyond that but let just pick up on how the heck tide you end up at the pentagon. a lawyer by training, your parents were activists in the '60s, and that was the last place they probably expected to find their tower. you are a writer. so talk about coming to the pentagon, what brought you there, and what led you to write a book about that experience. >> guest: you know, i never thought i would end up at the pentagon. never thought i would end up marrying an army officer. i did come from an antiwar family. some of my earliest memories -- i remember at age 4 in central park, sitting on the grass, sell braying the end of the vietnam war. my parents had taken me to the end of vietnam war celebration and protesting when i was ten the requirement that young men register for the draft. i think for me what ended up

happening, coming from a family that was very critical of the u.s. military and the way it had been used, was that i end up working of law school for various human rights organizations and ended up for a time at the state department and the human rights bureau, and i found myself in places such as kosovo and sierra leone during the civil war, and in kosovo, nato forces led by the u.s. had had used air power to stop an imminent ethnic cleansing campaign in sear ya leeopen, britt british military intervention helped bring to a close a really horrifically brutal civil war. so for the first anytime my life more or less i was both meeting lots of people who were in the military and seeing up close the fact that military power could be used for good, and it really shook up my own stereotypes, and left me much more aware that

it's a more complicated story. so i think for me that then led to an interest in the role of the military in post conflict reconstruction, led to a book that i tide previously on military efforts to build the rule of law in the wake of conflict, and how i ended up at the pentagon, quite frankly, was so agoer to work in obama administration i was doing what lots of people in washington were doing when he was elected, which is sending e-mails to everybody i knew saying i would like to sweep the floors, make the coffee. i would like to be part of this. and one of the people i e-mail was michelle flournoy who was nominated to be in the undersecretary for defense policy and the first person foolish enough to say, think we ick make something work at the pentagon. come work for me there. >> host: why don't you describe what your job was, what range of issues that led you to see while there, because it's a really

fascinating portfolio you have. >> guest: i went in without really a clear portfolio at all and i had worked obviously for human rights groups and on rule of lieu, humanitarian law and human rights issues. was also a writer. had been working -- writing a weekly column for "the los angeles times" for several years, and when initialer in now brought me in she said to me i don't quite know what you should do but why don't you start out by -- you can be my speech writer. i don't have a speech writer. and help me with congressional testimony, and we'll figure oust what else you should do as time goes by. and for me it was a terrific education because i hadn't particularly wanted to be writing speeches but one of the good things, and the bad thing about writing speeches and testimony for someone is that you have to learn a little bit about everything and you have to

go out and you have to talk to everybody, and you're constantly moving from issue to issue. for one week you're on afghanistan and helping to draft congressional testimony on afghanistan and you're meeting afghanistan experts. next thing it's piracy and it was a crash course in the issues and you know michelle was a fantastic boss and she was the kind of boss who say, that do you want to be doing? why? okay. tell me how you want me to help you do that. and over time, i said, i'd like to work on some of the rule of law and human rights issues in my background that i care about so i began to work on those issues as well, which was really satisfying. >> host: so, in that set of experiences while you were there, obviously i'm sure these idea thursday the book came throughout your history, as you talked about your time in

kosovo. but what in that set of pentagon experiences krisalizeed for you've this dilemma you talk about in the book in terms of the -- at least the first half of the dilemma, how the military game everything. were there experiences that start tote crystallize for you've what the problem is? >> guest: yeah in some ways i suppose. one of the many portfolios i took on at the pentagon was looking at the defense department's strategic communication and information operations program. and that was an area, too, where who knew? the defense department was doing everything you could think of. from sponsoring peace concerts in africa, to producing soap operas and comic books and also doing some more stuff that's in the covert realm, designed to influence and i was both, again, impressed by this range of

projects and impressed by many of the people i met and yet also couldn't help but think, why is the pentagon doing some of this stuff? and that was the attitude of many of my colleagues from the statement depth at the time who had come over and would get quite angry and say why are you people doing this stu? you don't not what you're doing we should be doing it and it put up front and central the dilemma of, well, the pentagon is doing it because somebody feels the united states needs to be doing it, whether that right or wrong is another question, but somebody feels the united states needs to be doing it. the civilian agencies, state, usaid, have in many ways been defundedded for a period of many, many decades and have really lost a lot of their ability to put programs on that they might have had during the peak of the cold war, for instance, which means that the white house, and congress turn to the military because the military is big and has people who you can send anywhere in the

world on very short notice and they don't get to say, no, i don't feel like going to iraq. they just have to do it. that's not true of the civilian agencies so it turns into a versus circumstance'll the more we look around and say, it's a complex world, threats don't competely packaged. not just from foreign militaries. they're coming from cyber space and terrorism. they're comping in the future from bioengineered viruses or who knows. if we want to respond and if we want to be preventing conflict, then the united states has to be doing everything. we have to be addressing the root causes of terrorism. we have to be looking at political preprogression, economic development, have to be looking at the information domain and cyberspace. the more you do that you need somebody to do it, you ask the mill tier do. , the more the military does it, the less you need the civilian agencies, the more you have to fund the military and give them resources and the less the civilian agencies come do and it

backs a vicious cycle. >> host: that's very true and there have been efforts over time, secretary rice, secretary clinton, both two of the state secretaries who tried to grow capacity, strengthen the civilian role and rule in many areas. are those kinds of efforts doomed to failure? there is just an inequity that -- a gap that can't be closed or there is more we can be doing? >> guest: i have really milked feelings itch think like many good liberal is started out thinking the military shouldn't be doing this stuff. we need rebuild the capacity of the civilian sector, and it is quite shocking how little funding the state department, relative to the military. but over time i became -- anoint know whether you call this more pessimistic or more crazily optimistic. in the area years of the obama

administration, both president obama and then defense secretary robert gates and then secretary clinton made a lot of speeches saying we need to rebuild the civilian sector, restore more funding to the civilian sector, and gates said from the perspective of the secretary of defense the military can't do it job unless we have civilian partners who can do their job and we don't want to do all these crazy -- we want civilian dozen who do them el, and nothing really happened. nothing really changed at all. i think i eventually found myself shifting to a position where they would say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting something different to happen. that everything in washington was running around saying we need to rebill the civilian sector, and it never happened, and i started asking people, do you think this is like liely to happen in our political lifetimes? is there any political will in congress to change this? and everyone would say, not

really. and certain point it seems to me you got to stop running around and saying this ought to happen if it's not going to happen. world peace ought to happen but if it's not going to happen, what do we do? plan b becomes if we just happen to accept the political reality is congress is not going wake up one morning and say, hey, let's triple the budget, triple the foreign assistance budget. but if the military for the foreseeable future is going to continue to be asked to take on this very wide range of tasks, then let's make sure that the military is good at it. make sure that the skills and areas of expertise you need become resident within the military, which has pretty profound implications for everything from how we recruit to how we train, to how we manage military personnel. the military personnel system and so forth. >> host: are there places where you experienced that we have done that well, where the military has been given a task

and -- the training and the resources and the leadership have followed and then obviously also are there cases where you're more worried that they haven't followed? >> guest: i think we're doing better on things like cyber. i think because that's closer to traditional military competencies and electronic warfare, for instance. i think that when it comes to the governance and economic development spheres, the military is stale really floundering, in part that's because the civilians flounder, too. it's just had. not that the military is bad it's it bit bad at it because everybody is bad at it. but that being said, we obviously still recruit and train military personnel as if the world has not changed that much since 1955. and there are exemptions lots of people trying really hard to figure out how to deadapt, what

would we need to do differently? but i got myself into a little bit of hot water because i wrote a tongue in cheek column for foreign policy magazine, arguing that we -- the military ought to start recruiting at aarp conferences. the american association of retired people and i was joking partly, but the more serious point is the u.s. military still recruits as if this is the 19th century and what we need are brawny young man and there's nothing young with brawny young men and some of our military personnel, as we singh, are out there crawling around in the dirt and carrying heavy packs and doing exactly what infantry men have done for centuries more or less, but we're in a world now where already 85% of military personnel are not in combat occupational specialties at all. they'rey support roles, even

those in combat roles may not ever be deployed into combat or if they are they may find themselves working on these governance projects, or economic development projects, and if you know for a fact that many of the service members are going to be asked to do everything from writing computer code to designing radio soap operas, why are we still focusing recruiting energies as if they're all going to be infan traymen you. still need but maybe we need to think different live about the kinds of skill sets we want to bring into the military. if we either need to bring them in or need to grow them when they're there. how do we mak sure that we have the military personnel system that lets us bring people in and out to get needed skills and that lets military personnel go out, work at google, work at a big company, work at a university, whatever, and come back in without harm to their careers. we have a very rigid system and

it's not serving us that well at a moment in time when we need much more flexibility and we need a really wide range of skills. >> right. so, the other major premise in your book is not just how the military game everything but how everything became war and a human rights lawyer, i have a feeling that the issue set that has been dearest to your heart over time, as much as it's impressive you learned so much on civil military relations, which is phenomenal. so, on that issue set i wonder if you can talk about coming in, in 2009, the bush administration -- it's a very complexion landscape in terms of issues about detention policy, issues about direct targeted attacks by the united states through different means, the war in iraq, the war in afghanistan.

there's so much going on. what were the issues that you think were most worrisome to you, that most made you want to join this obama team and get in there and make change? >> guest: as a bystander during the bush administration, i had, like many, many other people, watched in some horror as the u.s. response to the september 11th attacks became almost purely a military response, and more worrying -- not so much i think military force should not have been used. there's a role for military force in course terrorism but the -- course terrorism but the bush administration early on made a decision to view owl our responses to the 9/11 attacks through the legal framework of war. it was going to be considered an armed conflict for legal purposes, and the legal framework we have, both in terms

of international law and domestic u.s. law, the legal framework for war is different for the legal framework for not war, ordinary life and basically to put it in a nutshell, during peacetime, the state is not supposed to go around killing people. you only get to kill them if you have put them on trial, you have an elaborate judicial process you have to presented and so on and so forthin peacetime we have lots of safeguards for due process and to protect individual rights in peacetime we're very intolerant of government secrecy. we require lots and lots of checks and balances for anything the executive branch does that would infringe on individual rights in wartime it's the opposite in wartime, -- peacetime you kill somebody you'll be charged with murder in wartime if you're a combatant and you kill another combatant you might get a medal. you're supposed to do that. you've have something called combatant immunity.

you don't get prosecuted for killing the enemy because you're supposed to. opposite -- once you shift to the legal framework for waugh, we tolerate a lot more government zika decrees si, government -- once the bush administration made the decision to say, terrorism is in that box we call war, and the legal rules for war will apply to everything we do, you got things like u.s. plucking up people all over the world -- >> host: out of combat zone. >> guest: and bosnia, nigeria, as well as places such as afghanistan, saying, we think they're terrorists and sending them to in many cases to guantanamo saying anywhere not entitled to lawyers north entitle to due process and very early on you got lot of people, journalists and ngos and usual i officials saying, wait, wait, wait. how do we knee who these people are.

some of them probably aren't who think they are but if gore in the law of war box you don't have to do very much to find out. you can just say, hey, it's a war, mistakes happen, get over it. so we started kind of drifting into this world in which the a magic act of waving a wands and eight i'm going to call this war suddenly meant the u.s. government was doing in thursday in other universe would have been quite shocking, literally kidnapping people off the streets in countries around the world with which we are not at war and imprisoning them without any access to due process and to say, too bad, tough luck, not even acknowledging who we were keeping or why. that really shocked me as an american citizen. was shocked our government was doing that. and president obama really campaigned in 2007 and 2008 many ways on a platform of rolling back what he saw as those

excesses. some of his very first acts when he was sworn in were to issue a series of executive orders banning torture, saying that he was going to close guantanamo, and creating a review process to figure out how to close guantanamo, and i think for me, like many other people, i dame into the pentagon thinking, okay, he's going to fix this. >> host: right. in fact in 2009 i think it was relatively soon after you get there, you do take a trip down to guantanamo. can you talk about that experience. >> guest: well, it sort of -- it was very strange. guantanamo have you finance there? it's very beautiful, so it's a very strength juxtaposition of this barbed wire and armed guards with this incredible physical beauty. it's a tropical island. and it's quite jarring. i think what struck me most about guantanamo, other than the surreal qualities of resort by

the sea with barbed wire and seeing a terror gist master mind on the stairmaster, which you just kind of go, huh? what struck me most was that the problem by 2009, the problem with guantanamo wasn't guantanamo. it wasn't the conditions. by that time the physical conditions for detainees were substantially better than many stateside american prisons. the period in which there were allegations of mistreatment of detainees was over. but what was troubling about guantanamo was the sense that we had people at that point who had been detained by the united states for eight years, no charge for most of them no trial, increasingly our own government research suggesting that many of those people had been plucked up by mistake and shouldn't have been there in the

first place, and yet they were there with no foreseeable prospect of release. and that still shocks made built. it shocked me when president obama eventually sort of embraced the idea of indefinite detention because of future dane dangerous. >> host: one thing in your book you come back from this trip and you write in the book that you had tried to write about this issue inside your own chain of command and you said if we were convinced some detainees were dangerous there are alternatives to holing them indefinitely. we could release the subject to len e electronnage monitoring are in the end i conclude the risk of releasing detainees was outwayed by the multiple risks social it with adopting a prepreventive detention framework. and you talk about how you

sought to push that viewpoint inside the inner agency process, as we like to call it in washington, both inside the pentagon and more broadly, and in the end, after some time, you sort of decided i'm going to give up on this. i'm not making headway. >> guest: i got absolutely nowhere. >> host: so, can you talk about now with some hindsight, are there things somebody who wants to make change, who comes in with that idea with them and with the strength, the legal brown, and training that you had, and the experience of actually going down and being at guantanamo, that conveyed some amount of credibility? how can someone make change, you think, inside that system or is it incredibly hard. >> guest: its incredibly hard and i would be interested in hearing your own thoughts on this because you were also in a position inside the pentagon where you were struggling to push forward various reforms and

some succeeded and some of them got stuck. the u.s. government is a massive bureaucracy and there are good things and bad things. the good thing is it is in many ways a break on crazy -- a brake on crazy ideas because you have -- presidents come and go, political eye pointees come go but you have people who will be there for years and have a lot of experience and sometimes a lot of wisdom, and can put the brakes on craziness. on the other hand sometimes those same people put the brakes on good innovations. for all kind of of complicated reasons and i think on that particular issue, the issue of detainee policy, and what should happen at guantanamo, that it's hard to unwind the bury, acracy once you create and it in 2009 there had been eight years of setting up this elaborate president within the military to deal with detainees, and there were people whose careers were

deeply invested in that, and rolling it back turned out to be really, really hard, particularly when many of the people entrusted early on with saying, how do we change this process, were the same people who had helped implement the process. so i think it got bogged down and president obama ended up deciding that he had other priorities, healthcare reform and so on and the amount of political capital that he would have needed to put into this was just -- he wasn't willing to put it in. maybe that that we right decision given all the things he had to joel. he's got other fish to fry, too. but i think he ended up deciding, i'm just not going to fight this one. >> host: right. another area that you were very involved with the pentagon, subsequently, and in this same vein, of applying legal framework in this not war space was targeted attacks outside

combat seasons typically and most people think about drone attacks. talk a little bit, if you will, about -- you talk in the book about drones. how you find again the legal framework working, if it is and where it's troubling to you. >> guest: this goes back to the same set of reasons that we've gotten into a situation where the military is doing so many nontraditional things. that the world is complicated. we -- the threats, the security threat that the u.s. faces now don't competely packaged and, oh, it's russia or, it's china, or, oh, it's germany and you can tell they're coming because there are whole bunch of people wearing uniforms driving tanks. that increasingly we're facing these threats that cross borders, that may not have anything to do with the formal decisions made by states or their militaries. we have these loosely organized networks. we have cyberthreats and so

forth, and they don't look like what we normally think of as crime because sometimes these are threats that can cause death or destruction on a scale that historically is associated with the use of military force by states. but they don't look like war, either. and if you decide that you're going to -- the problem is, one way to put it would be to say we have a world in which there are threats along the whole continuum, from the traditional state on state armed conflict at one end of the continuum. at the other other end we have stuff that looks like individual crime. a guy drives a truck through a crowded nice. so we have threats that are along this continuum with a big area in between, traditional crime and war put we have a legal system that doesn't allow for in betweenness. a legal system that says pick one. either it's war, in the case you

get this set of rules, or it's not war in which case you get a totally different set of rules that are some ways diametrically the opposite. we decide -- we don't know how anymore to decide. does the terrorist -- what is an armed conflict? what's a war? what's a weapon? is that truck a weapon? used by the guy in nice who killed so many people? was an airplane a weapon? a box cut center well, they killed a lot of people. dot that make -- what is a combatant? ... with planning and supporting with any plot that will eventually hurt people? do have any special level?

we have no idea so we have an arbitrary decision to consider this person a convent where some guy who may be up to something that we don't like? if we decide they are combatants in an armed conflict, there is nothing new nothing different then getting off about two shoot you don't have to have a court sign-off. lawful wartime killings of the enemy combatants medical or legal problem. the united states kills them [inaudible] be the [inaudible] that is not willing to acknowledge.

that's kind of shocking. we really want to know the difference between war and not war but right now we have a framework that makes you choose in both the choices look like bad choices. that i think is the fairly profound dilemma that we are in and what we've been doing is sort of piling more and more into that were category because frankly it's convenient for the government, it's much more convenient to say i don't have to acknowledge this or give you the reason, just trust me, it's always easier for the executive branch to say that. >> one of the things that you write about that's related to that, if one thought during a period of time that's going to close a chapter, closes and we go back to war and peace dichotomy, that would be one thing but your argument is that this is not ending and in fact, the space of not war or the gap between war and peace which we had to come up with a good term for, it's it's enduring. can you talk a little bit about

that. where do you think we are going with that? do you see a way in which we can get back to the old way and if ever there was an old way or do you think we need to change how we think about war? >> i think we do need to change how we think about it. the neatness of these legal categories was always overstated.. even during the last big state on state conflict or world war ii, there were, on the margins, definitional problems. part of it is you have people who it ignore though war. i think what has happened in the seven decades since then, since the end of world war ii has been that we have gone from a situation in which there are lots of exceptions on the margins to a situation in which the situations are overwhelming the norm at this point. the norm for u.s. troops at the

moment to be involved in this murky space between traditional all-out state on state conflict and peace. i can't see that changing. it's a huge institutional challenge for the military because the fact that these new kinds of threats, these new types of threats are merging doesn't mean that the old threats go away. they are still there. you still do have to worry about traditional state uses of military force. at the same time you also have to worry about all of this other in between stuff. that's an enormous challenge in terms of thinking about how we prepare. how any institution or nation operates there. i do think the new stuff is not going to go away. it's only going to get murky. the a salience of borders isn't going to increase. all the technological changes are pushing in the opposite direction and we are going to have to figure out both operationally for the military and legally and morally and

politically how do we operate in a world, how to we preserve thei world that we care about, rule of law, respect for individual, life and liberty, how do we preserve those values in a world where the old legal framework doesn't give us satisfying solutions. how do we come up with new sets of rules. how do we come up with new ways to act in that in between's base? that's hard.trouble. i think if we don't do it, we will be in trouble. >> i'm thinking about the case for the u.s. government wanted to get apple, for example, example, to be able to crack into an iphone, of course i went back and forth and finally the government said don't worry we found our own solution. that's one example. how do you think the privateiv sector fits into this picture of

what was traditionally a government fear? >> it's going to have to fit in. if nothing else, other states including states that we view as adversaries such as russia are being pretty creative about exploiting that ill-defined space where you move between private and public actors and you don't always know who's doing what. sometimes you're usingt good propaganda and using proxies, it's all mixed together. n we are hampered by the fact that were not an authoritarian state. >> we don't want to become one and that's the challenge. the price that we pay for getting that is that if we become authoritarian then we all lose. and what was the point of all that.

i think the war, peace line in the public and private line in the civilian and military lineli are all lines that we drew, god didn't hand them down and say only people with this uniform can do this and this and this only counts as a war and only the public sector can do these and private sector can do thosen these are categories that we create to achieve certain circumstances and to build the world that we want to live on. we can change them. if blurring the line between public and private, we worry about that, we worry about that because we worry about corruption and accountability and so forth. there. there is no inherent reason that you can't create different mechanisms fort si ensuring accountability and reducing corruption if you have a more blended set of operations.

i think the limit is our own imagination and we get very stuck by what the law says and so i have to put everything into this box or that box and we get tied up in knots but this is an invitation to us to have a very different kind of conversation, one that doesn't start with the law and political institutions as they are but one that starts with what do we want to be able to do and what kind of legal and political framework would we and need to create to do that while at the same time protecting rights and the rule of law. >> for the legal community i would think it also requires a shift in the type of skill setso

we have a growing core cohort te who can kind of connect the dots between these different worlds but, some of this is really hard, reinventing international institutions, that's really hard. some pieces of this are pretty easy and i think we let the fact that when there are hard problems they prevent us from dealing with the easy problems.u fixing international law and institutions, hard. making u.s. target strikes and drone strikes more transparent and accountable, i think that is pretty easy. >> what are the key things? >> i would like to see greater due process whether it's a quasi-do process or independent commission, the assumption that you don't have judicial process when it comes to wartime use of

force is premised on the ideanv that it's all like the invasion of normandy and you can imagine a court setting up on the beach and people dying all around. it's not feasible. when it comes to target strikes, in most cases the u.s. has been tracking someone and building a case against them. for weeks and months and even years sometimes, it becomes becomes feasible when the process is that long to add in additional layers of process that are outside the executive branch. do you have issues of protecting methods.me as that one strikes me as pretty easy. there are half a dozen easy ways that don't address every last85% problem of every last case but kind of get you 85% of the of the way to addressing the mostha common objections that president obama could sign an executive order and make it happen

tomorrow if he wanted to. >> unfortunately, i find it a little bit baffling. he's made numerous speeches to clearing his commitment to increasing transparency and accountability, he has taken a few baby steps including most recently s recently some declaration of a certain number of civilianha casualties but he has done muchh less than any other speeches suggested he would, and, and at this point unless he has an 11 power, this is part of my legacy change of heart, i don't think we will see much progress. >> another area in the same is authorization for military force. we've had an ongoing debate inside the congress about b whether there ought to be a new authorization and he gets back to these constitutional basis is for what were doing in the world and whatever we call it. what is your thought on how that debate has progressed and where it needs to go?

>> that's another one where the problem is not that the issue is too complicated, the issue is really lack of political will, the 2001 authorization one authorization to use military force was passed just a few days after the september 11 attacks and essentially congress gave the president the authority toeo use force against people andha organizations that had planned or abetted the september 11 attacks for the purpose of s presenting such attacks against the united states in the future. in some ways it was actually fairly restrictive. the bush administration had asked congress to pass a very different authorization, one that just says the president can use force against whoever he wants to to respond to this andr congress had kind of said no, we want something that is narrow, we want to restrict it to use of force to go after those who are responsible for this to prevent the same thing from happening against the united states in the future.ve over time, over the past 15

years, that seemingly relatively narrow authorization has been used most obviously and directly and appropriately to justify the use of force in afghanistan. it was then against the taliban and other actors in other states against members of somalia's al-shabaab organization, against members of isis, in syria, libya, iraq, groups that didn't even exist at the time of 9/11 that had nothing to do with that that don't seem to be plotting similar attacks against the united states, repudiated by al qaeda and they may be bad people who maybe we need to use military force against, but we've kind of shoehorned all the stuff into this one paragraph authorization to use force in a way that has stretched it so unbelievably and i don't think

there's anybody at this point in either party who won't acknowledge that including president obama who even, as he relies on it says he thinks it's overly broad and that it should be changed but were in one of those situations where you've got everybody saying it's overbroad and it should be change but nobody, including the president willing to say yes were going to stop relying on it because we think we have stretched bounds of where we can take this and if he stops relying on it, it would put congress on the spot and they would have to come up with something else, but it's a game of chicken and he doesn't want to be the one to say i'm stopping, no more airstrikes on anybody until you guys get your act together and since he doesn't want to do that, frankly i think that would call their bluff, nothing is likely to change. >> it's interesting that in both halves, everything, this backdrop, the context ofti sclerosis or dysfunction or lack of ability to make real

political progress inside washington really fits and they are both with regard to not being able to get authorization for civilian departments to c undertake missions and also the defense budget and authorizatios bill becomes a vehicle for everything and in the sense of not being able to come to consensus in the national security realm around the rules that will guide us going forward, even when there seems to be consensus. ob something should change, obviously that goes beyond where you try to look but again is this a chapter that ends or do you have a chapter that goes to the future that looks a lot different, do you think a change in that context, cannot take us to a different place? >> i would really like to see the u.s. create some sort of universal national service

program. i think that's the only thing that over time might us break the partisan gridlock in dysfunction and mutual mistrust that has surfaced so much in this election season and has characterized relations for the last eight years. >> what would that look like? >> so there's this myth that we have about world war ii which has some truth in it which is that the draft, mass mobilization for the draft brought together, when you're a hollywood producer you always get this little platoon and it's got the battalion guy from brooklyn and the jewish guy from new york and the farm boy from iowa and the scandinavian immigrant from north dakota, by

the end of it were all just americans and we all love each other. there's some truth to that. it did find america together again with the commonsense identity and i think for the next couple decades it fueled bipartisanship in american politics and policy. i don't think it's realistic and nobody wants have a military draft and we don't need one in terms of the number of military service at this point, but we have so many problems in this country ranging from infrastructure to problems in our public school not to mention of the lack of foreign assistance that i would love to see a program that was mandatorn for 18 months or so and you have to do it between the ages of 18 and 24 and you could choose

whether you wanted to subject the national needs and going to the peace corps kind of work or the visa work or prepare bridges and teach kids or be in the army and it brought everybody in a mix them up geographically and ethnically and mix them up in terms of class like the drafted for young americans. it would be really powerful and people would say no no that would be too expensive but i don't think that's right. it would be expensive up front but it would be a massive investment in infrastructure of reform and building the kind ofw skills that we want. we want to have nurses and teachers et cetera. i think that's the only thing that i can think of that would really shake things up and giveu us a chance of getting past the

partisanship that has been so detrimental and so destructive on so many different issues. >> some of the strongest proponents for national service has been former military,. >> here's the most amazing thing about the american military. it has all kinds of problems but it's this institution that is capable of marshaling so much human talent so quickly andoo really quite amazingly effectively all things considered. there's another story i mentioned in the book, major in afgha general told me at one point he was talking about being in afghanistan and realizing a certain point that it would be impossible to have an enduring peace with the taliban and the matter how many people you killed if the afghans could not reform their economy. he wanted to get some civilian expertise and consult with

afghan leaders on agriculturalfo reform projects and i'mor oversimplifying his story but he am i called up the department of agriculture in washington and said hi, i'm an army general in afghanistan coming untran, can you you please send some agricultural experts out here and they say will have two ofal them in their really busy and they don't want to go to afghanistan.e the army goes with the big collective head scratch and then they say the army reserve has a national guard with farmers and people who work for agriculture companies. let's find them and bring them here. a year later we have hundreds and hundreds of american reservists and national guard's who had some agricultural background. were they quite the right people? no. some of them were probably saying i have a garden and that doesn't mean i can help the

afghans on agricultural production but what an amazing ability for a country to do that. if we can take that energy and talent, that talent andtr diversity that we have in thisde country and put it to work for the whole country, that would be so wonderful. >> you've had your book out now for at least a few weeks. >> i thought it was two weeks. >> it's already been written up in the wall street journal and the new york times and other publications, what has surprised you the most and delighted you the most about the reception? tt >> what made me happy us other than every writer wants to get attention in the reviews and it's sad and depressing when you write your book and nobody reads it, but i think what has mimi happiest is for the most part, with a few exceptions, for the most part the response has been very non- ideological. i don't see it as an ideological part of this book.

i see it as an argument that don't feet fit neatly in democrat or republican and i feel really gratified that by and large that's been the reception that i've gotten. i've gotten really positive feedback from people who were on the other side of the protocol that i am and i've gotten positive feedback from military audiences and people in the intelligence community as well as people at the state o department or people who don't work for the government at all. that feels really nice to feel doesn't se like they don't see these as partisan issues but issues that we all need to care about urgently. >> about inside your own community. he talked about across the aisle do you feel like there are folks were interested in issues with regard to security that you are writing in your work be on the

itself, the timing is right for that to take that next step and moved to developing some kind of framework that makes. >> the germ of what became this book was an article i wrote and published in 2004. there have been some fundamental ways that i've been saying the same thing for a dozen years now everyone thought i was crazy early when i said the lines of war and peace are getting blurry in breaking down. now i don't get that anymore. now most of the time with most audiences i get yes, that that is happening, that's true, you're right. i feel like we've just been spinning in circles about what to do about it and i hope the book becomes a small part of keeping that discussion now the

discussion has gone to yes, we need to change that and i hope that will keep happening. >> the anniversary of 9/11 is coming up, where do you see that next chapter going? do you think we have a continuing war on terra ahead of us in which many of these same issues arise? are there issues that are not yet dash you were the canary 12 years ago, can you forecast ahead and give us guidance on what we should be thinking aboun now? >> i think what has become more apparent in the last few yearsip which is a real warning for everybody including that everyone who has been in denial with those issues has been the other bad actors, adversaries are adopting the argument and

legal framework that the united states is made to do bad things that we don't like. to give one example on issues of sovereignty, i remember vladimir putin commenting some years ago in response to some u.s. unilateral actions that he didn't like, he said this is a two-handed stick in the other side will come back and hit you in the face. it did in ukraine and all kinds of ways.n this many others have been saying hey, wait a minute, when we say things in the united states like we can detain this personha indefinitely because we have information that we don't have to share with anybody else that shows they're planning something against us, but trust us we will make any mistakes. when we say we can send the drone or special operations team

to kill a person in a foreign person with which we are not at war and we don't even have to acknowledge that we did it much less tell you why or show you the evidence and allow you to evaluate it because trust us, where good and where the good guys. other people here that and that everybody is a good guy and other people say hey united states, if you get to say it's a secret, its national security, trust us, we get to say it to them were going to do a whole lot of things that you are going to hate under those rubrics. i think that many of us said for years, watch out these precedents will come back to bite us in and last few years they are coming back to bite us. i think if nothing else, one of of two things will now happen. either we will end up in a much worse world and using force

without having any buy-in with the un security council and the precedents we have set on detaining people or killing people based on secret classified evidence that were not going to reveal to anybody and were not going to reveal that we killed them, either that becomes the norm and lots of international actors do the same thing and that's a really scary world where everybody's acting or it serves as a wake-up call for us and we say well, you're right, right, we want to be the country that we have long been, we want to be the country that sets the right international exampl norms and we will make the world better. we are going to be in this in between war and peace plan with threats that are not going to look like uniform personnel. how do we collectively come up with some kind of international rules and institutions that will recognize those threats are real

but don't slow out the window in order to respond. let's figure this out. kno let's it will be hard but let's figure it out.'s i don't know which path we will go down but i sure hope it's the latter path. >> you are writing this book at a time when we are about to transition and people will be coming to you and say should i go into government and probably her example and take my great principles in my background and try to make change. what do you tell people? what are the great things about going to work in the government and trying to make change and one of the hard part? >> you learn how the sausage factory operates and if you care about making change whether you think to yourself i want to

spend the rest of my career in government or whether you want to go and be a journalist or anp academic work of the private sector, you have have to know how it works. you have to know enough -- nobody ever really knows how works, it's much too complex for most of us. even i left after 26 months, i felt i was finally beginning to understand some things about how it works. i know some people who retire after 40 years and they still feel that way. it was fascinating a knife met wonderful people and i left with a better understanding of how change can happen and why it't doesn't always happen and i think that has been really useful to me and how i talk to people and in how i write and so forth.and say, it would be really useful to me again if i ever went back in to a different administration in a different place. when people come to me and say should i go do this, i usually say absolutely. that doesn't mean you shouldny stay forever but if you care about any public policy issue whether it's on the foreign-policy national security

side or the national security side, if you care about being an advocate and an activist and reformer, you will learn so much that is valuable and youry credibility will be forever higher if you go and learn a little bit more about how it works and how it doesn't work. i think it's a great thing to do. the one danger is people can gem off-base very easily. you can go in saying going to be part of the solution and end up being part of the problem. but that's always true for everybody. >> it's a fascinating read and your experiences from the pentagon give great storytelling and people can read more those stories in here.e. hopefully you will be back again with another book telling us how to solve these problems. thank you so much. :

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