tv Robert Latiff Future War CSPAN February 25, 2018 5:00pm-5:51pm EST
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christopher hitchens writes, and the difference between living and dying and just living is you're constantly aware you have an expiration date, for most of it's a possibility, something that lies ahead, but for dying people, it's -- they know that every single day is a gift, and normally ideally that's -- it would be great if we all lived like that but it would be stressful. . >> good morning. my name is nancy lieb and i am delighted to welcome you to the
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11th annual savannah book festival-presented by georgia power, david and nancy cintro, the sheehan family and mark and pat sun. many thanks to jack and mary romano, our sponsors, for this glorious venue, the trinity united methodist church. i want to extend thanks to our members and donors who have continued to make saturday's free festival event possible. 90% of revenues come from donors just like you. thank you. we are very excited to have savannah book festival app this year for your phone. please look in your program for information on downloading it. it well be helpful. i i have a couple of 0 housekeeping notes, immediately following the presentation,
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robert latiff will be signing festival purchased copies of his book just across the way in the square. if you're staying in this venue for in the next presentation, please move forward so u-ers can count available seats. please take a moment to turn off your cell phones. and we also ask that you do not use flash photography. during the question and answer portion, please raise your hand, and i will call on you and one of the ushers will bring a microphone to you. in interest of time and to be fair to all of the other aattendees to plies lift yourself to one question and please don't tell a story. robert latiff is with us today courtesy of few and fran thomas. dr. robert latiff is an adjunct faculty member at the university of notre dame, and he is the director of intelligence
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community programs at the time george mason's university school of engineering. he is a member of the air force studies board and the intelligence community studsboard of the national academies of sciences, engineering and medicine. please give a warm welcome to robert latiff. [applause] >> let me thank nancy and the savannah book festival for having me here. this is really an awesome event. first of all, i appreciate your interest in my work. also i don't know if any of you saw the savannah morning news, the -- andrea did a nice review of an interview she had with me.
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as a retired military person, which i'll get to i probably have done a thousand speeches, standing up in front of a group and talking bat book is a little bit like talking about your kids. it's harder. but this is a really important topic. now probably more so than it's ever been. i know if you read the news, you hear all this talk of war. actually saw an article yesterday or day before, in one of the publications, talking about drifting toward war. very much leak we did before world war i. so i think it's a frightening time, and probably a very timely time to talk about my book. i'll talk why i wrote it and how i came to write it, which i think is really a cool story. i always like to tell it.
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and then some of the themes that are in it. if it isn't immediately obvious to you, i grew up in rural southeastern kentucky. never did get rid of the accent. i was a product of the sputnik era. so i was all about science and technology and was interested in space and strengthly enough, nuclear weapons. and somehow or other i got into the university of notre dame. never figured that one out, but they let me in. it became immediately obvious to me that i had no means to pay for it. thus entered the army, rotc. i was going to serve my four years and get out and become a nobel prize-winning physicist. didn't work so i stayed 32 years in the military. six in the army, 24 years in
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the -- six years in the air force. trained for infantry to go to vietnam. i didn't go to vietnam. after my ph.d at notre dame, i went to germany, where i stood astride the gab facing 100 divisions of soviet infantry, who we were going to nuke when they came across the border. and to that i actually commanded an army tactical nuclear weapons unit that was going to hand out nukes to the firing battalions. switched to the air force, became very much involved in research, development, reconnaissance, space, and intelligence, nuclear weapons, all very, very high-tech stuff. my career was all about high-tech and weapons systems. so why did i write the book?
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well, as a young 26-year-old army captain, having to give nuclear weapons to people cautioned know think about my role in war. fast forward 20-so years i had the opportunity to be -- opportunity to be involved in release of nuclear weapons should that ever happen. and many, many other things. we went 0 into kuwait to tick saddam hussein out of kuwait, and you have thought, with that and the fall of communism, you would have thought we had won world war iii, the they we were acting. we sort of became bullies think strongest nation on earth, the only remaining super power, and we let everybody know it, and that kind of bothered me.
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fast forward again to 2003. that was the really crux of what bothered me, was the invasion of iraq. and it's public nudge i was very concerned about that. i'll get to that. so, i retired from the air force, went to work with the industry, and began immediately thinking about all this stuff, and called my friends at notre dame and said, i have in issues here. can we talk about it? they said, sure, develop a course for us, which i did. they say now that you delved a course for us, would you teach it? and so still today, eight years later, ten years later, i'm traveling back and forth to notre dame to teach young students about war and ethics and technology. i don't know if anybody watches notre dame football, but if you do, during the halftime they highlight a student and a
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faculty member, and my course was so popular that they highlighted me on national television, which was kind of cool. two minutes of fame. and that got the attention of "the new york times," and so sam freedman, a wonderful editor of the religion section at the "new york times," interviewed me. great article. and then that caught the attention of random house if you know anything about the publishing business, jonathan seagull, his authors have seven pulitzers to their credit. i'm probably going disappoint hip women if the one. john was a wonderful editor, did marvelous things, and was very nice to me and very patient. the themes of the book. there are several themes.
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number one, that war as we knew it, as i knew it greg up, is change -- knew it growing up, is changing. that's sort of obvious, war ask technology have always goning to. ethics is critical to soldiers. and there is a big chasm when the american military and the american people. you're saying to yourself, really? and not only that, our leaders, our political leaders, some of the subthemes, unfettered technology innovation, has some downsides. this coming from a life-long geek. we are often, as i said, vote or militaristic, hubris, arrogant about our technologies and i think arms control is hugely
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important. so, we're mesmerized by war, mesmerized by technology. steel, gun powder, submarines, stealth technology, nuclear weapons, the computer, the internet. it was not al gore who invented the internet. it was to defense advanced researches projects agency. so all these things are military encourages technology, and technology encourages the military. we're seduced by it. one of my favorite pictures is a picture of the apple store in new york city when a new iphone comes out, lines a mile long. you ask people why they're there? because there's a new iphone. just because. we're seduced by it. robert oppenheimer, the father over the atomic bomb, said we were just seduced by it. we worried about it after we did
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it. and marine general james mattis, who used to be one of my heroes, often said to his soldiers, you have to forget about technology. you have to be able to operate on your own. he's not saying that anymore. we have a largest defense budget in the world. larger than the next eight countries combined. and we are the largest proliferator of weapons in the world. twice as much as russia. so war is different. we all know that. terrorism, guerrilla warfare, cyber warfare, intrusion in our election systems. advanced technologies like cyber other things are more available to more people all over the world. people worry about sign were
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attacks on our electric grid. we saw what happened with sony, if anyone has read about the virus that -- somebody did. war is going to be closer to home, as we have seen, and others are going to have the same technologies we have. used to be that we were way, way ahead of people. now it's fairly obvious that countries like china are really boating us badly in -- beating us badly in some very high technology areas. so, the machines in some form watch for us. so i worked in an organization that built spy satellites. so they're going to be watching all the time. that's not only it. everything -- pretty much everything in the world now is instrumented and connected to the internet. just go on the internet and look at the data.
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machines are going to think for us. in the military and the intelligence business, machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to sort of give us the answers and it will be up to us to say, well, yes or no. they're going to fight for us. we even today see robots on the battlefield. fortunately the robots on the battlefield the drones are all controlled by humans now, but that's not always going to be the case. soldiers are going to be different, and i'll talk about that. war is going to be fast. it's going to be maybe subtle. we may not even know it's happening, or we may -- it may happen in the blink of an eye. and it's going be global. so, some of the technology. i've actually heard the military
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being described as a giant armed nervous system. everything is connected to everything else. things like information technology. we are now at a point where we can put literally billions of transition sores -- transittors on a tiny chip. the dod just asked for another $18 billion to put into things like artificial intelligence and machine learning. weapons will have decisionmake capability. they're defensive in nature. the patriot system, the aegis system, antimissile systems, but more and nor offensive weapons well sort of sneak up on the decisionmaking capable. right now the defense of defense says a human will always be in
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the loop -- or on the loop or at least watching the loop. but war will be so fast that humans willing become irrelevant, and we may actually slide into a case of decisions being made by machines and not even really know it. weapons will go to a target area, decide who to kill, and take action. they might seek permission first. they might not if there's no communication. these things are good. don't get me wrong. drones and all of these technologies, to make our soldiers better, are good. they keep the soldiers out of harm's way but need to come with a little bit of thinking. enhancements. i talk in the become about soldier enhancements. there's a yuck factor involved in this. exoskeletons to help zonings lift things more. pharmaceuticals.
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right now we give air plane pie lates drugs keep them awake, there's drugs to make them more courageous, less fearful, feel less pain. we need to think about that. then the whole area of neuroscience. this one is really interesting. i was able to talk to the defense advance research projects agency about the work they're doing. mostly for treatment of soldiers with traumatic brain injuries. good stuff. they're able to restore function to soldiers but they've also learned that they can enhance normal soldiers. they can make soldiers learn faster. they can actually treat things -- they've got ton the point where they can actually identify the structure of the brain and what some thoughts are. think about that.
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if you can read a thought, you can write a thought. this is a very scary stuff. then there is an increasing concern about biological enhancement or biology and synthetic biology. anybody read about crisper? probably win a nobel prize. virus editing. the director of national intelligence says crisper is an intelligence threat. the worry is that bad people will create viruses that are unamenable to treatment. so we worry about that. cyber war, i've talk about power grids, dams. there's actually -- there was actually a case in which a man sitting in at the back of an airplane was able to hack into the cockpit. so hacking into airplanes and
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weapons is of huge concern, and this is another area, i think the dod is spend $12 billion next year on cyber. electromagnetic pulse weapons. read the book "one second after," an electromagnetic pulse, pretty bad and you can do it without a nuclear bomb. that technology is out there, being developed. hypersonic weapons, weapons that go 15 to 20 times the speed of sound. no defense against them. so, technology is moving really, really fast. if you look at technology adoption curves, they're coming more frequently and things are getting into the public much, much faster. even i, a ph.d in engineering, can't keep up. what do you expect of the normal american public. they basically look at all this technology and go, okay, got it.
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problem is that u.s. is technology include pretty ill literal when it come's to the rest of the world. this is okay in civilian life. get it. if we don't understand huh netflix givess the recommendation for our next movie, it doesn't matter. but it dot matter in the militariment when goring to kill people it matters a lot we understand what is in our weapons. we have to understand the consequences. i dedicated this back to a friend of mine, retired former navy, was in vietnam on the mekong delta, exposed multiple times to agent orange and died offing a orangele. so we have to think before we employ these things bet 0 consequences. knew what the long-term consequences were. so, man, is he against
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technology or what? technology is good. obviously. health care, everything that we have done, it's just wonderful things, like antibiotics, problem with antibiotics is, we got really used to them and now having a hard time trying to find ones that work because we overused them emthe food industry. wow. we had more food than we know what to do with, but a lot of drugs in our food. a.i. a.i. is the technology that is eating the government. everybody is interested in a.i. we need to understand, because we don't actually know how a.i. works, even the specialists don't really know. so, i moved on to -- in the -- i talk about technology. i thought that was really fun, and talked about technology again. that was really fun. i was actually teaching a course at george mason university to a bunch of master students, one of
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whom was a chaplain, an army chaplain, just came back from iraq. 16 of the soldiers in his houston were killed, and hundreds were wounded. and he talked to me about how difficult it was to treat the wounded souls of soldiers. believe it or not they're people, and when they go out and kill others, maybe even civilians, it bothers them a lot. and so he talked of how important it was for soldiers to understand what is correct and what is not correct in warfare. so i taught about just war theory and the laws of armed conflict and he was very interested in that. in that chapter i try to take those technologies, all those really cool technologies we talked about, and bounce them up against the laws of war. the laws of armed conflict, and say, are these things right?
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do they satisfy the proportionality and the distinction and the discrimination of combatants and so on and so forth? everybody -- you might say, well, that's just so much talk but it's actually important. leadership is important. i talk about some of the things that, yes, we the united states did in bombing civilian targets and massacres in program and other places. then i talk about the good leadership. for instance, robots. the example i use, is a robot -- there's this idea that humans and robots are going to fight together on the bat battlefield. well, i'm sitting in a foxhole with my robot, and somebody throws a grenade in, is my robot going to jump on the grenade? am i going to jump on the grenade to save the robot?
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courage and loyalty and camaraderie and all those things, come into question when we are talking about machines. enhancements. drugs. neuroscience. is that soldier operating with free will? can it make a moral decision? i don't know. learning the idea what it means to be human. we're trying to make machines act more like people and make people act more like machines. somewhere in the middle it's going to be a mess. so my editor asked me, john asked me, besides you, who cares about this stuff? well, that sent me on a rant in chapter four, and my answer was, unfortunately, almost nobody. a few writers, like myself and others, but not very many people. so i go into this discussion in
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chapter four about how arrogant we are about our technologies. like i said, after the fall of the wall, we were everywhere. shock and awe. remember shock and awe in the 2003 invasion? that didn't work very well for us. the media. by the way, i love the media. don't talk about fake news, but i think the media gets it wrong. focus on the wrong things and don't focus on the important things. the internet is an awful place. it's good but it's an awful place for people to do bad things. i think we're deliberately ignorant. we don't try to educate your ourselves. and there's a chasm. the public is not involved. no knowledge of the military. people ask me, did you ever kill anybody? no. not everybody in the military is
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a killer. out of sight, out of mind. leaders actually use the military sort of as a toy. their own little private -- kind of back to this education thing. very interesting. i read an article that -- remember when the russia went into the crimea and then certainly after that into the ukraine? there was a survey bay couple of harvard professors, 2,000 people, that do you think united states should do? 60% of them said, we ought to go in there militarily. and those same 60%, when they asked them if the knew where ukraine was, they said, no. so, they know nothing the military. i like to use the phrase "the big t." most people don't realize that the u.s. spends now
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three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year own military. 250 billion of that on new weapons. they don't realize the impact of all the deployments that our soldiers soldiers and sailor and airmen and marines face or the psychological scars of war. have no idea about how the military gets its missions and what the threats are. what they do know or what they do and don't get me wrong, i appreciate it -- the thank us for our service. we do halftime shows and believe me, that is wonderful, but it just isn't enough. i said we allow our politicians to deploy our military. congressional research service basically pointed out that in the 7 or 0 so years since world war ii we deployed our military over 60 time us. almost once a year.
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and recent article in "time" magazine pointed out we have special operations forces in 143 countries. now, maybe all of those things are legitimate. i question whether or not they are or whether we just like to use our military. so, i say that we kind of disrespect our military. i actually wrote an article -- we disrespect our military, say what? we have halftime shows and all these other things. i say a sign of disrespect is ignoring somebody, and we're ignoring it. that has to change. there has to be a national conversation. i had a novelist friend in sill son valley, ann bridges, who
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wrote what thought was pretty good description of my book. she reviewed my book. she says we ask our fighting men and women to go goo battle ever more frequently, straight tools we hand them are vetted that's right ones, that their order honorable and their actions are sanctioned by at least a majority of the citizenry they're sworn to defend. we're talking about the human element of war. and america is singularly lacking into an intellectual curiosity and captain, not just in education, but in a citizen's will to study, consider, debate, and actively choose what the purpose and nature of future conflicts should be when we put machines and between us and our enemy. so, i think ann, who wrote the article, quoted me in the last
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part of the book. i like to sort of end my discussion with what i think of as patriotism. anybody here who is old enough to remember adlai stephenson, said patriot tim is not a sort outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime, and so i say, in a little bit more forward fashion, that rara pate from won't do it. we actually have to sit down and think and have a debate because, this technology is coming at us fast and going to present issues for the soldier and that's the one that worries me, and for our decisionmakers. our decisionmakers really don't have the capacity to understand the a lot of this stuff, and we actually have to have a national
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>> thank you. do you have any information about what's going on in our embassy in cuba? >> i've gotten that question several times, and the short answer is i have no information at all. i guess people were getting sick, and they thought it might be some kind of sonic -- i guess technically that's possible. low frequency waves can vibrate your internal organs, so it is conceivable. but the short answer is no, i have no information on it. >> now the military leaders and
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the government are if not chronologically challenged, certainly technologicallyrn challenged. how, how are you going to be able to make them understand? because many of them that are familiar with technology are not in the military.e how will you make the leadership understand they can use that the technology to the best example -- to the best advantage for this country? the argument is always the military fights the last battles. how are we going to train the military decision-makers to fight the battle of the future? >> i don't actually think it is the military decision-makers who are the issue. the military doesn't, generally speaking, the military doesn't really want to go to war. by and large, most senior military leaders have a pretty good idea about the technologies. it's the civilian leadership that's troublesome, and the only
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way i know of to make the civilian leadership lesson is for the public to demand it. if the public demands it, then they will listen because they want to get reelected. it is a tough problem trying to explain to a political scientist how christopher works is sort of a fools errand. but trying to explain to them with some of the implications of that are, it may be something that we could do. again, the public has to demand it and that's the simplest answer i can give you. >> first of all, thank you for writing what sounds like a wonderful book, and i look forward to reading it. aren't you describing a w failue oflo the people?
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the republicans accused democrats of, quote, losing to china when it fell to the communist and 48. nixon spent 40 years in vietnam in a war he knew he couldn't win. today we are in afghanistan. there's nobody in this trade who can explain our exit strategy or what the victory will amount to in afghanistan, and our politicians are terrified to tell us the truth because they know it would be unsatisfactory. i guess one way of asking the question is this aa lost cause, but where do you think we can do when the leaders are terrified of their own people and for good reason. >> if i said it was a lost cause, maybe i should have said it's a difficult cause. part of the problem and the biggest problem is that the war has come frequently, and it has come at no cost. we fought the vietnam war on the
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credit card, and every conflict we've been in, there've been no additional taxes. i'm not silly enough to think we would ever go back to the draft, but itt hasn't affected the american people. after 9/11, which was an awful situation for the president declared a national emergency and then told the american people to just go about their business. they didn't say go shopping, that is the apocryphal story that they said go about t your business area i think that's wrong. the only people who work at by 9/11 and beyond the family is obviously a, where the military. and they got sent over and over. i have signed orders keeping people from the military well beyond where they should have stayed. many of them went multiple times. i have no doubt some of them have been killed or wounded.
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but if it doesn't affect people, they are not going to care. i don't know if that answers your question but we have to way to make it affected the american people. and then maybe we won't do that so often. we will do it when it really needs to be done. you talk about the ethics of the war with all this going on in the exponential technology and how ethicscs differs globally. can there really be an ethics of war? >> that's a wonderful question. literally for millennia, especially for centuries, people
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have debated this topic, and most, at least advanced countries were civilized countries can actually do follow some sort of law. otherwise the war would be nothing but a jury, which it was back in the time of the greek. if i can be so bored, groups like isis and al qaeda, they don't care anything about ethics. but thatyt shouldn't be what's important to us. we talked a big game about rights, we'veri gone to war over human rights. so if we are going to talk about human rights, we have to demonstrate some aspect of human rights. we have civilized nations around the world signed up to things like the geneva conventionss and
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hague and other international humanitarian law. so yes, i think there truly is a place for ethics and warfare. i don't know if that answers yourth question or not, but we should do what is correct and not what other people do. >> do you believe that the all volunteer military is the most effective way to staff our military organizations? >> that's a question i get a lot. obviously i grew up in a time of the draft. i don't think we have any other option but an all volunteer military, because i think it is the most effective way.
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no, i don't. but i don't have any other answers beyond, perhaps, having some sort of national service. the problem with the all volunteer military is that if you look at the data, increasingly it's coming from a narrower and narrower slice of the american public. it doesn't represent the entire demographic, and that's worrisome to me. and again, had nothing to do with the all volunteer -- the fact that it is all volunteer, politicians have a tendency to just use it it to -- i don't wat to use the term mercenary, but use it more as a tool to impose their will on others, and that's not quite right for me. but the short answer to your question is no, i don't think it
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most effective way. but a sort of draft, which will never happen again, i don't know what fixed it. >> this is pretty much purely technical, but as an air force guy, do you envision the combat and i'm talking dog fighting rather than visual range missiles between the manned aircraft? >> possibly in the future. unmanned aircraft certainly don't have the limitations that the manned aircraft do, human systems to try to keep the pilot alive. so i guess my question at some point would be what is the point. the short answer is possibly, yes because the technology because unmanned aircraft is getting so much better.
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i actually had a student ask the ones well, why don't we just have the war between machines. my answer to that was what would be the point. at some point, humans are goingn to die, or land is going to be taken. just having machines kill one another doesn't seem to be useful. >> the gentle man in the center. >> following up on your question before. why did you say no to a draft? it seems that's the best way to get the public vested into what the politicians areo doing if everybody's son and daughters might be affected. >> well, don't mistake my answer r'ghfor now, as i said i grew un the time of the draft and it wasn't without its problems.
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a lot of people don't draft deferments and it fell heavily upon a smaller subset. but by and large, everybody served. i just don't think it is possible in our current political environment. if 9/11 wasn't an opportunity, i'm not sure what will be. i do believe everyone should serve. and i talk in the book about okay, if you're not going to serve in the military, at least served in the government. if you are a citizen of the united states, they're -- wrote about the social contract. you have responsibility. i would like to see the draft, but it's never goingwo to happe. one of the things admiral mueller said we should do is is
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deliver the active duty, the number of active-duty soldiers to a veryow low number and fillt up with reserves. then the next time we go to the war, the reserves would be the ones to go. that would impact families and families might actually say no. so i didn't exactly say no to the draft, i'm just a realist and don't think it will happen. >> over here in the blue shirt. this is just a broad question on the military budget additional 80 billion or whatever it was in three quarters of a trillion a year. it seems if we can't win with that or half o have that, can te
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military spend its budget wisely and efficiently or is it just this behemoth that keeps coming? >> i was with you until you said wisely and efficiently. they can certainly spend it. [laughter] i was in that business for years. i bought weapons. i thinkht we could. honestly, i don't think we need three quarters of a trillion dollars. that's to be fair, much of that coast operations ordergoes to oo maintenance, goes to gas, spare parts, health. but over 200 billion of that goeit goesinto the weapons busi. and i honestly think that we don't get one system out onto the field until we start to think about the next one, and it's generally the other guy is creating something we have to respond to.
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in my opinion, it's too big. maybe if we look at it very closely we would find that it is exactly where it needs to be. but my issue is the american people don't seem to care much about it. ask any typical person on the street what they think. you will never get the right answer. and i think that is sad because it is their money. a politician says we need it and they say okay. we need to go to war. okay. nobody ever tells us how sending troops to ukraine's -- and we have troops in ukraine by the way -- how that is going to make us safer. i guess you could say we are helping to protect nato and somehow or another is going to
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make us safer. that is a long rambling answer. did i answer it? [inaudible] [laughter] i have one question that will leave us off on a somewhat positive note. you say that the military is developing enhancements for perhaps soldiers. he he that there may be a way to some of that technology in our schools to help our students today? >> well, there's two answers to the question. first, thosede type of technologies that the military developed very often almost always get into the civilian world. we are developed by civilian companies. and so, yes they will make it
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into the civilian world. whether they should help students becomes a very sticky and if the question. the idea of putting green enhancements in thi is sort of e having students take ritalin which everybody knows which students take the -- ritalin. what about the people whoho cant afford these very logical in plants? -- neurological implants. those will make their way into civilian life is just how will they be controlled. i don't know. you wanted to end on a positive note. [laughter] i will tell you the positive note. our soldiers, sailors, airmen and dreams are the best in the world. they are great young people and
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