war. live coverage on booktv on c-span2. >> good morning. my name is nancy leads. i'm delighted to welcome you to the 11th annual savanna book festival presented by georgia power, david and nancy cintron, that she and family, many thanks to jack and mary, the glorious venue, the trinity

united methodist church. and members and individual donors who have made and continue to make saturday's events possible. 90% of revenues come from donors just like you. and and it would be very helpful today. following this presentation, robert latiff will sign festival purchased across the way. and as it empties so ushers can count available seats. please take a moment to turn off your cell phone. and we ask you to not use flash

photography. during the question-and-answer portions. i will call on you and one of the ushers will bring a microphone to you. in the interest of time and to be fair to others, limit your self to one question and don't tell a story. robert latiff is with us courtesy of hugh and fran thomas. robert latiff is an adjunct faculty member of the university of notre dame, director of intelligence community programs at george mason university school of engineers, and therefore study board and intelligence community studies board in the national academy of sciences, engineering and medicine. please give a warm welcome to robert latiff.

[applause] >> i think the savanna book festival for having me here. this is an awesome event. first of all, appreciate your interest in my work. the savanna morning news, a really nice review, interview she had with. as a retired military person, i have done a speeches standing in front of a group talking about a book is like talking about your kids. this is a really important topic. probably more so than it has ever been, if you read the news

you hear this talk, i saw an article yesterday or the day before in one of the publications talking about drifting toward war, very much like we did for world war i. it is a frightening time and a very timely time to talk about my book. i will talk a little bit about why i wrote it, how i came to write it which is a really cool story i always like to tell. and some of the 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. i was all about science and technology, was interested in the space, and, strangely

enough, nuclear weapons. somehow or the other, i got into the university of notre dame, never figured that one out. they let me in and it was immediately obvious to me i had no names to pay for it. the center in the army, rotc, i was going to serve my four years to get out and become a nobel prize-winning physicist. that didn't work so i stayed 32 years in the military, 6 in the army, 24 in the air force, strained for infantry, to go to vietnam. and after my phd in notre dame, stood facing 100 divisions of soviet infantry. who we are going to nuke when we come across the border and

to that i commanded an army tactical nuclear weapons unit that was going to hand out nukes to the firing battalions, switch to the air force and became involved in research, development, reconnaissance, space, intelligence, nuclear weapons and all very high tech stuff. my career is all about high-tech. why did i write the book? as a young, 26-year-old army captain trying to give nuclear weapons to people caused me to about their role in war. fast-forward 20 or so years, had the opportunity, if you call it that, to be involved in reducing nuclear weapons should that ever happen.

and many other things. at the fall of the berlin wall, fall of communism, about that time, we went into kuwait, kicked saddam hussein out of kuwait. you would have thought with that and the fall of communism that we had won world war iii, the way we were acting. after that we were the strongest nation on earth, the only remaining superpower and let everybody know it and that bothered me. fast forward again, 2003. that was the crux of what bothered me, the invasion of iraq. it is public knowledge that i was very concerned about that. i will get to that. i retired from the air force, went to work with the industry,

began immediately thinking about all this stuff. called my friends at notre dame and said i have got some issues, can we talk about it? sure, you can develop a course for us, which i did. then now that you developed a course for is would you teach it? still today, ten years later, i am traveling back and forth to notre dame to teach our students about war and ethics and technology. i don't know if anybody watches notre dame football, but if you do through halftime they always highlight student and faculty member and my course was so popular they highlighted me on television which was kind of cool, two minutes, and that got the attention of the new york times. sam friedman, a wonderful editor of the religion section of the new york times, interviewed me. great article. and that caught the attention

of random house. if you know anything about the publishing business, jonathan siegel, his authors have 6 or 7 pulitzers to their credit, probably going to disappoint this one. john was a wonderful editor who did marvelous things, was very nice to me and patient. the teams of the book, several themes. number one, war as we knew it, as i knew it, is changing. war and technology have always gone together. it is critical to soldiers. there is a big chasm between

the american military and american people. you are saying really? not only that, our political leaders. some of the sub themes, there is unfettered technology innovation, has some downsides, this from a lifelong geek. we were often as i said militaristic, arrogant about our technologies and arms control is hugely important. we are mesmerized by war, we are mesmerized by technology. steel, gunpowder, stealth technology, nuclear weapons, the computer, the internet, it was not al gore who invented the internet, it was the defense advanced projects research agency.

all these things encourage technology and technology encourages the military. we are seduced by it. one of my favorite pictures is in new york city when a new iphone comes out. there lines of mile-long, ask people why they are there, there is a new iphone, just because, we are seduced by it. robert oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb basically said we are seduced by it, we worried about it afterwards and marine general james mattis who used to be one of my heroes often said to his soldiers you have got to forget about technology, you have to operate on your own. not saying that anymore. we have the 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. war is different, we all know that, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, cyberwarfare, intrusion in our election systems, advanced technology is like cyber and other things, more available to more people all over the world. people worry about cyberattacks on our electric grid. we saw what happened with sony. virus somebody did, war is going to be closer to home as we have seen, others are going to have the same technologies we have. it used to be we were way ahead of people. now it is fairly obvious

countries like china are beating us badly in high technology areas. machines in some form will watch for us. i worked in an organization that builds by satellites. they will be watching all the time. that is not it. everything, pretty much everything in the world now is connected to the internet so all you have to do is go on the internet and look at the data. machines are going to for us in the military and the intelligence business machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to give us the answers and it will be up to us to say yes or no. they are going to fight for us. we even today see robots on the battlefield.

the robots and drones are controlled by humans now but that won't always be the case. soldiers are going to be different. i will talk a little bit about that. war is going to be vast, maybe subtle. we may not even know it is happening. it may happen in the blink of an eye. it is going to be global. so some of the technology. i actually heard the military 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 put billions of transistors on a tiny chip, advanced data mining, artificial intelligence, if you have seen the news the dod just asked for

another $15 billion to put into things like artificial intelligence. weapons will have decisionmaking capability, we already have weapons with decision-making capability, they are defensive in nature, the patriot system, antimissile systems but more and more, offenses weapons will sneak up on decisionmaking capability. the human will always be in the loop according to the part of the fence or on the loop or watching the loop. war will be so fast that humans will become irrelevant and we may slide into a case of decisions being made by machines and not really even know it was weapons will go to a target area and take action. they might seek permission

first and they might not because there is no communication. these things are good, don't get me wrong. drones and all these technologies to make our soldiers better are good. enhancements. there is a yuck factor involved in this. exoskeletons help soldiers lift things more. and airplane pilots drugs to keep them awake, talk about giving soldiers drugs to make more courageous, less fearful, feel less pain. we need to think about that and this whole area of neuroscience. this one is interesting. i talked to the advance

research project about some of the women we are doing. mostly for treatment of soldiers with traumatic brain injuries. good stuff, they are able to restore function to soldiers. but you know what? they also learned they can enhance normal soldiers, make soldiers learn faster, and treat -- they have gone to the point they can identify the structure of the brain and what some thoughts our. if you can read a thought, you can write a thought. this is very scary stuff. there is an increasing concern about biological enhancements, biology, synthetic biology. if anybody has read about crisper, probably won a nobel

prize. the worry, the director of national intelligence said crisper is a defense threat, and intelligence the rest. the worry is bad people create viruses that are not amenable to treatment so we worry about that. cyberwar, talk about power grids, dams, there was a case in which a man sitting in the back of an airplane was able to hack into the cockpit so hacking into airplanes and weapons is of huge concern and this is another area, the dod will be spending $12 billion next year on cyber. electromagnetic pulse weapons. anybody read the book one second after? and electromagnetic pulse, pretty bad. you can do it without a nuclear

bomb. that technology is out there, being developed. hypersonic weapons, weapons at 15 to 20 times the speed of sound, no defense against. technology is moving really really fast. if you look at technology adoption curves becoming more frequently, things getting into the public much faster. even i, phd in engineering, what do you expect of the american public? they look at this technology and go got it. the problem is the us is technologically pretty illiterate when it comes to the rest of the world. this is okay in civilian life. if we don't understand how netflix gave us the recommendation to the next movie it doesn't matter. but it does matter in the military. when we are going to kill people it matters a lot if we understand what is in our

weapons. we have to understand the consequences. i dedicated this book to a friend of mine, retired former navy, was in vietnam, exposed multiple times to agent orange and so we have to think before we employ these things what the consequences are. we knew what the long-term consequences were. with the against technology or what? technology is good. healthcare, everything we have done is wonderful, antibiotics. the problem with antibiotics we got used to demand now we are having a hard time trying to find ones that work because we overuse them. the food industry.

we have more food than we know what to do with. a lot of drugs in our food. ai. ai is the technology eating the government. we need to understand because we don't actually know how ai works. even specialists don't know. i moved on, talk about technology, that was fun, talk about technology again, that was really fun. i was teaching the course at george mason university to a bunch of master students, one who was a chaplain, an army chaplain just come back from iraq, 16 soldiers in the unit were killed and hundreds were wounded. he talked to me about how difficult it was to treat the wounded souls of soldiers. they are people. when they go out and kill

others, maybe even civilians, it bothers them a lot. talked about how important it was for soldiers to understand what is correct and what is not correct in warfare. i talked about armed conflict and he was very interested in that. and that chapter i tried to take those cool technologies we were talking about and bounced them up against the laws of war, the laws of armed conflict and say are these things right? do they satisfy the proportionality and distinction and so on and so forth. that is just so much talk which is actually important, leadership is important. i talk about some of the things we in the united states did in

bombing civilian targets and massacres in vietnam and other places, then i talk about the good leadership. for instance robots. the example i use, there is this idea that humans and robots are going to fight together on the battlefield. i am sitting in a foxhole with my robot and somebody throws a grenade in. is my robot going to jump? am i going to jump on the grenade to save the robot? the courage and loyalty and camaraderie and all those things come into question when we talk about machines. enhancements, drugs, neuroscience. is that soldier operating with free will? can it make a moral decision? i don't know. we are trying to make machines more like people, trying to

make people more like machines. somewhere in the middle it is going to be a mess. my editor asked me besides you, who cares about this stuff? well, that sends me on a rant in chapter 4 and my answer was unfortunately almost nobody. a few writers like myself and others but not very many people. i go on to this discussion in chapter 4 about how arrogant we are about our technologies. after the fall of the wall we were everywhere. shock and are, remember that in 2003 invasion? that didn't work out very well. the media, by the way i love the media, don't talk about fake news. media gets it wrong. they focus on the wrong things

and don't focus on the important things. the internet is an awful place for people to do bad things. we are deliberately ignorant, we don't try to educate ourselves. there is a chasm. the public is just not involved. no knowledge of the military, people ask me did you ever kill anybody? no, not everybody in the military is a killer. out of sight out of mind. leaders actually use the military as a toy, their own it'll private -- back to this education thing, i read an article, remember when russia went into criteria -- crimea

and then ukraine? there was a survive by harvard professors. 2000 people, what do you think the united states should do. 60% said we should go in militarily. those same 60%, when asked if they knew who -- where ukraine was, they said no. they knew nothing about the military. i would like to use the phrase the big t. most people don't realize that the us spends 3 quarters of $1 trillion a year on the military. about $250 billion of that on new weapons. they don't realize the impact of all the deployments our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines face, the psychological scars of war. have no idea how the military gets missions and what the threats are. what they do know, what they

do, don't get me wrong, i appreciate it, they thank us for our service. we do halftime shows and believe me, that is wonderful but it isn't enough. we allow our politicians to employ our military. congressional research service basically pointed out in the 70 or so years since world war 2 we have deployed our military 60 times, over 60 times, almost once a year. a recent article in time magazine pointed out we have special operations forces, 143 countries. maybe all of those things are legitimate. i question whether they are or we just like to use our

military. so i say we kind of disrespect our military. i wrote an article, no one has published it, we disrespect our military. we have halftime shows and other things but i say a sign of disrespect is ignoring somebody and we are ignoring them. that has to change. there has to be a national conversation. i had a novelist friend in silicon valley who actually wrote what i thought was a pretty good description of my book. we ask our fighting men and women to go into battle ever more frequently trusting that the tools we hand them are somehow vetted as the right ones, their orders are honorable and their actions are sanctions by at least a majority of the citizenry they are sworn to defend. we are talking about the human

element of war and america is singularly lacking in intellectual curiosity and capacity, not just education but it's citizens will study, consider, debate and actively choose the purpose and nature of future conflicts when we put machines between us and our enemy. i think and who wrote the article quoted me in the last part, i like to end my discussions with what i think of as patriotism. anyone old enough to remember advice evenson, patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.

in a forward fashion, patriotism is not going to do it anymore. we have to sit down and have a debate because this technology is coming. it is coming at us fast and it is going to present issues for the soldier. that is the one that worries me. and for our decisionmaker's. our decisionmaker's don't have the capacity to understand this stuff. we have to have a national debate about that. we ask a lot of our military and i hope this book, i hope it sells bazillion copies, i hope a lot of people will read this and enter into that debate because i think it is so important especially now. with that there is a chapter on

what i think some of the things are that we could do. it is not the greatest chapter but this is a tough, tough problem. i am anxious to get some of your questions. >> if you have questions please raise your hand, and the ashes will bring the microphone forward. >> do you have any information what is going on in our embassy in cuba? >> i have gotten that several times, the short answer is i have no information at all.

people were getting sick and thought it might be some sonic -- technically, that is possible. low-frequency sonic waves can vibrate your internal organs so it is conceivable. the short answer is i have no information on it. >> leaders and the military in government, if not chronologically challenged, technologically challenged, how, how are you going to make them understand because many of those familiar with technology are not in the military, how will you make the leadership understand how they can use technology to the best advantage for this country? the argument is always the

military fight the last war's battles, how are we going to train military decisionmaker's to fight the battle of the future? >> i don't think it is the military decisionmakers who are the issue. the military doesn't generally speaking doesn't want to go to war. by and large most of the senior military leaders have a pretty good idea about the technology. it is the civilian leadership that is troublesome. the civilian leadership, the only way to make them listen is for the public to demand it. the public demands it, they will listen. they want to be reelected. it is a tough problem trying to explain to a political scientist how crisper work is a full's errand but trying to

explain to them what the implications of it are may be something we could do. the public has to demand it. that is the only circumstance i can give you. >> thank you for writing what sounds like a wonderful book and i look forward to reading it. already really describing the failure of the people? the republicans accused the democrats of, quote, losing china when it fell to the communists in 1948, nixon spent four years in vietnam in a war he knew he couldn't win. today we are in afghanistan. there is nobody in this country who can explain our exit strategy or what victory will amount to in afghanistan, yet

our politicians are terrified to tell us the truth because they know it would be unsatisfactory. one way of asking the question is is this a lost cause? leaders are terrified of their own people and for good reason. >> if i said it was a lost cause, i should have said a difficult cause. part of the problem, the biggest part of the problem is more has come frequently and it has come at no cost. we thought the vietnam war on a credit card. every conflict we have been in there have been no additional taxes. i'm not silly enough to think we could go back to a draft but it hasn't affected the american people. after 9/11 which was an awful situation, the president declared a national emergency and told the american people to go about their business. he didn't say go shopping, that is an apocryphal story, but go

about your business. that is wrong. the only people affected by 9/11, beyond the families obviously, where the military. they got sent over and over. i signed orders keeping people in the military well beyond where they should have stayed. many of them went multiple times. i have no doubt some of them were killed and wounded. 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 figure out a way to make it effective. maybe we won't do it so often. we will do it when it really needs to be done, i hope.

>> you talk about the ethics of war, with all that is going, exponential technology, how ethics differs globally, can there really be an ethics of war? >> wonderful question. for literally millennia, especially for centuries, people have debated this topic. most, at least, advanced countries, civilized countries to follow -- otherwise war would be nothing but butchery which it was, by the way, back in the time of the greeks. so yes, i think -- i think the basis of your question if i can be so bold, groups like isis and al qaeda don't care

anything about ethics. that shouldn't be what is important to us. we talk a big game about human rights. we have gone to war over human rights. if we are going to talk about human rights we have to demonstrate some aspect of human rights. civilized nations around the world signed up for things like the geneva convention and other international humanitarian laws. i think truly is a place for ethics. i don't know if that answers your question, we should do what we think is correct, not what other people do. >> upfront?

>> do you believe the all volunteer military is the most effective way to staff military organizations? >> that is the question i get a lot. obviously i grew up in a time of draft. i don't think we have any other option but at all volunteer military. do i think it is the most effective way? know. 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 if you look at the data coming increasingly it is coming from a narrower and narrower slice of the american public.

it doesn't represent the entire demographic and that is worrisome to me. again, has nothing to do with the volunteer but the fact that it is all volunteer politicians have a tendency to use it, i don't want to use the term mercenary but use it more as a tool to impose their will on others and that is not quite right. short answer to your question is it is not the most effective way but short of a draft which will never happen again i don't know. >> how many aisles back there? >> this is purely technical. as an air force guy, you envision air combat, dogfighting, beyond unmanned aircraft.

>> possibly in the future unmanned aircraft don't have the limitations and aircraft to, human assistances to try to keep the pilot alive. my question at some point would be what is the point? the short answer is possibly yes, technology for unmanned aircraft is getting so much better. i had students ask me once why don't we just have war between machines? my answer to that is what would be the point? at some point humans are going to die oreland is going to be taken. having machines kill one another doesn't seem to be useful. >> the gentleman in the center.

>> following up on the question before, why did you say no to a draft? that is the best way to get the public tested into what politicians are doing, if everybody's son and daughter's might be affected. >> don't mistake my answer is a no. i grew up in the time of the draft and it was not without its problems. as we know, you can have draft deferment for bone spurs and a lot of people got draft deferments and it fell heavily upon a smaller subset. by and large everybody served. i don't think it is possible in the current political environment. if 9/11 wasn't an opportunity, i am not sure what would be. i do believe everyone should

serve. i talk in the book about if you are not going to serve in the military at least serve in the government. if you are a citizen of the united states, russo wrote about the social contract, you have a responsibility. i would like to see the draft, never going to happen. admiral mullen, former chairman, he said what we should do is lower the number of active duty soldiers to a very low number and fill it up with reserves, the reserves would be the ones to go. that would impact families and families might say no. i didn't exactly say no to the draft, i am a realist. don't think it will happen.

>> in the blue shirt. >> this is really just a broad question on the military budget, additional $80 billion or whatever it was, 3 quarters of $1 trillion a year, if we can't win with that, perhaps that. can the military spend its budget wisely and efficiently or is it just this behemoth that keeps growing? >> i was with you until they said wisely and efficiently. >> that is quickly. >> i was in the business for years. i bought weapons.

i think we could -- honestly i don't think we need three quarters of $1 trillion. to be fair, much of that goes to operations, maintenance, spare parts, pay. over $200 billion go into the weapons business. i honestly think we don't get one system out onto the field until we start thinking about the next one and the other guys creating something we have to respond to. in my opinion it is too big. maybe if we looked at it very closely we would find 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. i that is sad because it is

their money but a politician says we needed and they say okay, we need to go to war. nobody ever tells us how sending troops to the ukraine, how that makes us safe. you could say we are protecting nato and nato is with us. that is a long rambling answer. and did i answer it? >> i have one question that

leaves us on a positive note. the military is developing neurological enhancements for soldiers, a way to use some of that technology in our schools to help our students today. >> first those types of technologies the military develops very often, almost always getting to the civilian world are developed by civilian companies and make it into the civilian world and whether they help to develop a sticky ethical question. the offer of putting brain enhancements in, having students take ritalin. everybody knows what students take ritalin. whether or not we should be enhancing people, what about

the people who can't afford neurological implants. how does that affect society? you are probably on to something. those technologies will make their way into civilian life. how will they be controlled. you want to end on a positive note. our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are the best in the world, great, young people and they deserve everything they can get. [applause] >> join me again, as you exit this venue, our wonderful volunteers, accepting donations to the savannah book festival. it is because of your generosity we were able to take this festival free, please help us to continue keeping it free,

thank you. [inaudible conversations]