sky, and it's about decision making process for a drone strike. and so when i saw joe book is remote warfare moral, it just seemed like the kind of topic that really needs to be discussed. and this would be a good place to to discuss it. joseph shapiro is lieutenant colonel in the us air force. he's got a ph.d. in philosophy from the university of oxford. his areas of expertise are everything from war theory military ethics especially the ethics of remote and autonomous weapons. he's a senior pilot with more than 1400 pilot and instructor pilot hours and many flown in of major u.s. combat humanitarian operations. he currently serves on the air force staff, so staffs, artificial intelligence, cross functional team.

but, you know, the more we see u.s. military involved in other parts of the world, the more we see the use of drones and other remote weapons. and so now a good time to discuss whether that is moral or. so please join me in welcoming joseph chapter. thank you, tony, for the kind introduction. thank you for being here. this is really a privilege. i would be lying if i told you that i expected someday to write a book and to be able to talk to folks like you about it. i never thought that was going to be the case. this is really exciting. and to do so at this historic place is something special for me. also i would be remiss if i didn't mention that president carter wrote a new york times op ed in 2012, in which made it very clear that he had qualms

about the quote unquote, drone program. and so i'm excited to bring some of those questions up and maybe hopefully to address some of the concerns that he expressed. so i think i'll start by talking about a period of during which i was writing this book. i think it was about 18. i walked into the family room where my kids were watching tv. they were watching paw patrol. i don't know if you're familiar whenever there a problem around adventure bay these pups save the day. and i saw that one of the human characters in the show was flying a remotely piloted aircraft using a camera onboard the aircraft to try find a lost hiker in the mountains. i could swear i heard this child in the show say the word drone. and i said to my kids, did they just say drone on a patrol? and my seven year old said to me somewhat condescendingly, yeah, dad, do you know what a drone even is? so let's start there. do we even know what a drone is? i think i do. i think in a position to talk

about drones, i know what they. but it's harder than it sounds. and one of the reasons that it's harder that it's than it sounds is because there are so many misperceptions around these airplanes. and so before we even can have a conversation about whether remote warfare is moral. we have to have a conversation about what we mean, some of these terms. what kind of warfare we referring to. so i'll give you just one example. i have nothing against the international committee of the red cross. they do excellent work. this is just literally the first one that came up when i googled. but this is an article from the icrc on autonomous weapons systems. and presumably it's going to tell us about the profound implications for the future of warfare. but the art department decided to give us a picture of an empty nine reaper, an empty nine reaper is not an autonomous weapon system. there's nothing autonomous about it. there's a human crew there, qualified. they're trained. they're certified. they're qualified to aircrew under the air force instructions that govern air crew qualifications. and there are some automatic of this airplane it can fly to

point it can hold an altitude. it even hold a specific bank angle, if you like. but that's no more autonomy than we have any modern airplane, including the airplane i flew went on to get here this morning. and so we kind of a problem because our our minds, we have these heuristics built because we see this image of the mq predator or its successor, the nine reaper, over and over and over again, associated with things like autonomy. i'm going to get to that a little bit more in a moment. but what i want to emphasize here is that the weapon systems that i have in mind, the predator and reaper, they're not autonomous and they're not by artificial intelligence. so what are the. well, the question remains difficult to answer. again, in 2018, i had a friend who assumed command of the newest united states air force empty nine reaper squadron. so i flew across ocean. i was living in the uk at the time. i flew across the ocean to be a part of that ceremony and the local headlines ran words like this drone squadron activated. and as you can see here, this is an actual picture of the

aircrew. they went from being a detachment to being a full fledged squadron. so they peeled off the patch, signifying the detachment put on the new patch, signifying the squadron. it was a great day and i was really glad to a part of it. two days later, you might not remember this date, but i certainly do. on december 21st, 2018, i back across the ocean. and as we approached gatwick airport in london, the pilot came over the mike and said on, fortunately, we're not going to be able to land at gatwick to drone activity on the airfield. he said, i've been flying for 18 years and i have never seen anything like this. so we thought we might be able to divert to heathrow. that would have been nice. that was actually closer to my house. but heathrow was full of all the airplanes that have already diverted to gatwick. so i got a free trip to manchester and a four hour train ride back home. but the next day these are the kinds of that i saw. gatwick drones, ground flights. so this word drone, we're asking it to do a lot of work. it everything from fully autonomous killer robots that don't exist. it covers the mq one predator and empty nine reaper that have been a mainstay of us air force

operations for the last 15 or 20 years. and then it covers 300 quadcopters that you can buy on amazon or anywhere quadcopters are sold. and the reason that matters to me is because unlike these air crew members who are trained and certified and have to meet longstanding standards for for air force, the person who bought that quadcopter ruined my day by having me have to divert, but also costing hundreds of millions pounds in the in the airline industry that. person had no certification they didn't need any special training. and as i said, it only cost them a few hundred bucks. so there's a huge difference to me between the kind of people that are involved in us air force operations and piloted aircraft and then the broad swath of people who might be behind one of these less expensive pieces, equipment. and so as we try to hone in on what it is, we're actually talking here, i want to away from autonomy, but i also want to recognize why we tend to think that these things are more autonomous than they are. so i don't think it's the right view, but it's an understandable view and part of the reason for

that is because you look the shape of this airplane. this is the mta nine reaper on the left. nine was initially operational, capable in 27. so that was just six years after the predator was first armed with the hellfire missile, that first shot was on the opening day of the us war in afghanistan. so 2000, when we get the predator, 27, we get the reaper. and this is the reaper. and i want to point specifically at that nose in the front on any other airplane, what would you expect to see at that bulbous nose in the front? we would see canopy glass or windscreen, almost every airplane, almost every picture of every airplane that you have ever seen. if you look at that spot on the airplane, you're going to see canopy glass or windscreen and i think we've trained ourselves over and over and over and over. we've seen hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of different pictures, airplanes in the course of our lives and at the front, the airplane, canopy, glass or windscreen. and what that represents to us, i was just at the airport this morning. when you look through the canopy, what do you see? you see the pilot the person who you know is responsible for that

airplane and everything on board. and on this airplane, we don't have canopy glass and we don't have a windscreen. and i can't look through that glass and see the eyes. the person who's responsible for that airplane, i might trick myself into thinking, well, maybe there is no one responsible, but i'm here to assert to you that there is someone responsible. it's a qualified aircrew member that's been certified to be responsible, that airplane and everything on it. just humor me. there's two thought experiments that i'd like you to consider. the first, i don't know if you'll be familiar with this. as you might imagine by now, i watch lot of cartoons. the the disney pixar movie planes. every one of those planes has eyes. where are those eyes on those cartoon? they're always on the canopy glass, the windscreen. right. so even the animators at pixar know that as the ancient proverb says, in the case of airplanes, the are the windows to the soul, the eyes glass is literally the window through which i see human person, the soul that's responsible for that airplane. second thought experiment. just imagine we are now in the age of autonomous vehicles. there are not that many out

there on the roads. they're not in every city, but that they're in your city and you're standing at the crosswalk first. imagine just a regular automobile, good old fashioned car. it's got the windscreen. you look the glass, you see the person on the other side. when i'm at the crosswalk. and i'm trying to determine if that car going to stop for me. what do i do? i look through the windscreen and i make eye contact with the driver to see if they can see me. right. and we share a little bit of a moment if we don't make eye contact. i'm waiting till they come a complete stop before i cross right. and in fact, we can be thrown off on that. as i mentioned, i lived in the uk as much as it was difficult to learn to drive on the left hand side of the road. it was even more difficult to learn to look at the right, the correct side of the car because the car approaches the crosswalk. i'm constantly at my right side of the vehicle, which of course is the passenger seat. and it's pretty unnerving to see an empty passenger seat or even worse, to see a person's dog. but now imagine now that there's an autonomous vehicle, right? the autonomous has no need of canopy glass or windscreen. right. it senses the world around it by use of cameras and light and radar and some other things. and it positions itself in the

world through those means. it doesn't need the glass. so imagine that an autonomous vehicle has, a completely opaque windscreen, imagine that. it's this composite grey that we see on the reaper. and now imagine in the crosswalk when that vehicle approaches, the crosswalk, are you going to step out in front of the vehicle? maybe there's a person inside, maybe not. is that a technical system or is that a techno, social? is it just a piece of machinery? is there a human operator behind it? i think without realizing it? these are all the questions come up when people who haven't seen the of a predator or reaper cockpit see this image. so this is a lot of table setting. there's a lot of work to do to get to the ethical. but i think this is where we need to start these airplanes are not autonomous. they're flown by a certified and qualified air force aircrew aircrew. okay. so if if we can if we can dispatch with the idea that these systems might autonomous, then we can start to ask real substance, tough questions about how does this new technology or in my view, this techno social system. it's a system that consists both of a piece of technology and

human. cruise how does fit in with the long history of warfare? there are lots of ways we can ask this question. we could talk about moral justification for killing in war. we could talk about moral psychology and how that applies to war. here, i'm only going to focus on the warrior ethos, the warrior ethos in the western tradition. to us from homer, that's a statue of there on the left from the library of congress. and homer gives us two warrior achilles and hector. and of although we have these two warriors, it's achilles, that emerges in the tradition as the archetype of warrior, one wonders if that's because achilles one but we wonder whether achilles is the kind of person that we should want to emulate. is achilles the kind of person does he have, the kind of ethos that i would want? young lieutenants in the united states air force to emulate, for example, i think probably not. as you might remember, the iliad opens with achilles wrath or achilles rage, depending on the translation and his rage, his wrath, his personal sleights of

honor drive the plot in several instances. reason he's enraged at the beginning of the book is because his honor has been slighted. he expected a war prize and at the last minute was taken away. his honor was hurt. that's the thing that drives him to violence that that's the thing that motivates him. and i don't know that achilles is the kind of person that we would want to emulate as a as a kind of warrior ethos. we could look at hector on the other side. hector is much more human than achilles is a scholar, is more intelligent than i have pointed out. we get glimpses of hector with his family in a way we never get glimpses of achilles with family. we get glimpses of hector with his family. in one classic scene, he's still wearing his his uniform. he's wearing his armor, including his helmet, and he leans over the crib to see his baby. and the baby starts crying because the baby's scared of the armor. right. and hector thinks, how silly of me. and takes his helmet off. right. it's a very humanizing moment where we get to experience hector in the fullness of his personhood. that never happens with achilles. achilles is a warrior, and he's only a warrior. and i spend so much time on this only say that again and again and again. the scholarship on the warrior ethos traces the warrior ethos back to achilles.

and i want to challenge that a little bit for a couple of reasons. first, because when we think about the warrior, we tend to focus on the fact that both achilles and hector were to risk their lives. they were willing to pay a great sacrifice toward whatever their ends might have been. i would argue that they both have very different ends in mind and. so this warrior ethos grows up to this idea that. what it means to be a warrior is the willingness to risk one's life. the willingness to face risk in the face of an adversary, maybe even the actual imposition risk in front of the adversary. and so we think about in our modern time is the archetypal warrior. well, it's the person who's willing to to go out there and face the enemy gunfire at normandy or, you know, it's the person who's willing to raise the flag at jima, people who are willing to face great risk to themselves in battle. i think that's fair. i think that's right. think if we look at the history of warfare, we do see that. warriors are associated with this willingness, face risk, but i think there's something else operating there. first of all, we should distinguish between actually facing risk and the willingness to face risk. and i think this really matters.

speaking of normandy, a few years ago, my wife and i were able to tour the beaches at normandy and the american there. and we had walked through the 9000 headstones at normandy to, commemorate the us forces who were killed, not just in that battle. but throughout the war. and as we as we got back to the tour bus to go back to our next stop, i was in line with an older gentleman who had a world two veteran cap on and there were just not that many world war two veterans around anymore. and so i made a point to strike up a conversation and i had a fascinating conversation with a man named bill. and bill told me that on d-day his job as a 17 year old was to work the night shift at a baltimore newspaper and function of the night shift was to sit there, wait until the teletype machines, the stories that are on the wire. and his job was to determine whether the story sufficient enough to wake up the editors. and so he learned about in that room on the teletype machines. and surely that was newsworthy. he woke up the editors. and so he told me, thinks he's probably one of the first people

in the united states to learn about the invasion because he had that job on that day. and by the end of the he had gotten his mother's signature on his paperwork so he could enlist in the navy as a 17 year old. training takes a long time by time, he was trained up to go to the european theater, that war was over. we had achieved in europe. and so the redesign needed his ship for the pacific theater and the war ended soon thereafter. but he jokes with me that he got to the pacific just in time to earn his world war two veteran cap right now, this man, bill, didn't face combat risk. he was never actually at he never engaged the enemy, but he definitely displayed a willingness to face combat risk. right? he definitely through the steps that one must take in order to become eligible for combat risk. and i think that willingness really matters. and of the reasons that i think that is because of all of the rpa, the remotely piloted aircraft crews that i've talked to, i have never met a single person who has said, you know, i volunteered to join the military. we're an all volunteer force. so everyone who joined the

military volunteered. i volunteered to join the military. i raised my right hand. i swore an oath to support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies, foreign and domestic but then i volunteered to go to the predator or the reaper, because i really didn't want to face any combat risk. that seems unlikely to me. i have friends who volunteered to go to the predator reaper because were airsick or because they were tired of travel schedule and some other airframes or they wanted to produce more operational effects. they felt like they were stuck, not close enough to operation, but i've never met anyone. that said, i'm unwilling to face combat risk. therefore send me to the predator or reaper. so when we trace this line through the history of warfare, one of the things we should recognize is this distinction between actually facing and willingness to face risk. and i want to put the emphasis on the latter rather than on the former. but there's a second thing that we can we can mention here, and that is that all of the honor and glory that achilles is concerned with, it just might not sufficient to define what it is to be warrior. and i think as we read the

memoirs of of wars over time several wars, i focused on the last 100 years but i'm sure there are others we constantly we consistently this this remark that even though there are glorious things in they they are far to too minuscule to justify the of war. i've given you just a few quotes here but oliver wendell was served in world war correct and served in the civil war and he was on several occasions and actually the first time he was shot, he was in field hospital and he was convinced that he was going to die. and he wrote a letter to his mother, in fact, saying that he had resigned himself to death. of course, he and he went on to become the us supreme court justice. later in life he was giving a speech at harvard. it's one of the most famous speeches that he's given and. he says war when you're at it is horrible. and dull. it's only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. so he's willing to admit that there's something divine war, but only in retrospect, only when can review the lessons learned, not the in the midst of the blood and fighting.

ulysses grant certainly was a veteran of the civil war, but long before that he was a lieutenant in the mexican-american war, and he wrote his wife, julia. wherever there are battles, great, many must suffer. and for the sake of the little glory, i do not care to see it. so he's recognizing that there is some glory to be had, but it isn't worth fighting. and finally an unnamed french soldier in world war one writes, there will never be enough glory to cover all the blood and all mud. the french soldier right before that line, he calls the people, the generals and the policymakers who got the european powers into world war one. he calls them criminals. he talks about this this crime of war they've committed. and then he recognizes that there might be glory, but not enough to cover all the blood and all the mud. so achilles, motivated by honor and glory. i don't think that's enough. i don't think that gets us all the way there to what it means to be a warrior. certainly there's something about risk, something about the willingness to face risk. but i don't think that gets us all the way there either. i think the third thing, the thing that we're missing is that there also has to be a willingness to take human life on the other side of that.

and that goes under. under. remarked. under-researched. people don't talk about that as much. and i. one reason for that is that in the long history warfare, these two things almost always go together. willingness to face risk and willingness to take life. and in the predator and reaper world, we're asking people to separate those two ideas. we have predator and reaper crew members at this point, just reaper crew members of the united states air force who are willing to face risk because they they took the oath. they raised right hand. they're not actually going to face risk. but we are going to ask them to take human life. and i think that's a crucial element to understanding the warrior ethos in the way that we should. so if there's one holdout, if we can all agree that war is too muddy, too bloody to be justified, glory and honor, there must be something else that justifies war as a just war theorist. i have strong views about. i'll sidestep them here. let's just imagine that there are just causes to go to war. and it has nothing to do with. honor and glory. even so, there holdouts who think there is at least one

place that's still glorious in war. and those are the pilots, right? because flight has always been glorious. flight has always been this dream that we meant to achieve. we achieved it at kitty hawk in 1903, and then it became a fixture of warfare, starting in world war one. when i was an officer trainee at boston university. several years ago, i not only had to be familiar with john gillespie, mcgee's poem high flight, but my peers and i had to memorize it. he that i've slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter. silver wings. sun word. i have climbed and done 100 things you have not dreamed of. and so maybe flying airplanes and war is still glorious. that still has the honor that achilles was after. that's still still divine in oliver wendell holmes. his terms. but i hasten to add that john gillespie mcgee wasn't writing about wartime. he was tragically killed in a training accident before he ever got to war. he was writing about pilot training. he was writing about flying in a peaceful sky. and that. i agree is romantic. that is glorious.

there is a dream. in flying in a peaceful sky long. after john gillespie mcgee died, i flew the six texan two and the ti 38 sea talon in pilot training, and i lived gillespie's poetic dream. i did the things that he described in the poem and it was every bit the dream that he suggested. but i there's a there's a threshold that we have to cross as aircrew members when start talking about combat operations. and that's the time to put away the the poetry of the means and adopt the prose of combat ends. and so my view here is that there might it might be the case that when we put these cockpits on the ground, when we have air crew members, fly these airplanes from the ground rather than from the air, we are we are robbing them of some of that dream. but it's in the service of our our military service to the political community. and that's just a necessary condition success. we have to do what we have to in order to in order to achieve our ends and to say, no, no, we need to hold on to that dream. we shouldn't have remote because we should let these pilots fly

in their airplanes. that would be just like achilles saying that and honor are justifications for war. and so i just don't see it. i just don't see the argument working out. so i agree, gillespie on his dream, but i think there's something different about war. okay so if these weapon systems are not autonomous and and if we're convinced that glory and honor are not justifications for war, then we can finally start to hone in on the humanity behind these systems. they're not autonomous. they're not flown by computers. they're flown by people. so what is the human element that's at work in these weapon systems? there are several stories i could tell you, but i'll just mention a few. we could about moral psychology. we could talk about virtue. we could talk about moral justification. and in some of these stories, they're all interrelated. in researching for the book, i was allowed to go sit with crew members as they flew combat missions in the cockpit or sometimes called the ground station. and so i didn't know what was going to happen on those missions. i didn't know if they were going be exciting or boring to me to be frank about it. but it was a privilege to be

able to watch the crews do their work and so i was on headset listening to the crew and to everyone they were talking to on the radio. and in this one instance, the pilot was talking the jtc. that's a joint terminal attack. it's usually an air force airman, although not. and they obtained this joint qualification to be able to say cleared hot on the radio so this is the air power advocate that's embedded with the ground force that can translate ground speak army and marine corps speak into air force speak to translate the ground force commander's intent to the aircrew and the pilots. now talking to the to the jetpack and the pilot has found some disturbed earth in a field and she's not sure exactly it is and she describes it to the jetpack and the jetpack is convinced that it's in order to keep in mind the jetpack and his have been being fired at by mortars several days. so he is he is up to find mortar tubes and destroy them. and so this pilot and the sensor operator discussed the issue, discuss what they thought was under their crosshairs and said

no, it just doesn't look like a mortar to the much more likely scenario is that it's a shovel because this is a field and it's disturbed earth. so it looks like someone was doing some shoveling. they finished the task and they put down the shovel. and so the jetpack wanted this pilot drop a bomb on the mortar team. and the pilot said, no, and we can do that under us military doctrine, because under us military, the pilot follows an power chain of command up to the combined forces air commander and the land force follows a chain of command up through the land forces component. and so when the when the army or the marine corps joint correction, ground force commander asks us for a weapon as the united states air force for a weapon, it's not a direct order. they're not in a position to provide with direct orders. so it's really more like both people need to consent. the pilot has to to release the weapon and the ground force commander to ask for the weapon. in this case, the pilot was uncomfortable it and said, no, thank you. now, i would argue that that is human judgment operating in the cockpit, that would not have happened if this was an autonomous computer driven system. the data could have just said,

go and the system would have gone. but because we, a human in the seat, the human can execute human judgment. i that's important. even though that story that i just described is never going to make the news. you'll never read it in the newspaper. you'll never see a headline. and there are a thousand such stories like that where air crew members are using their human judgment. and you might disagree in in this case, you might side with the data and you might with the pilot. but the point is that there is a human judgment at work and these decisions. and i think crucial and fits in with the long history of of air power, the video that you're seeing on the left here. this is predator video from the of 2002 on a hill called tucker, ga. afghanistan in 2001. as i mentioned, the us invaded afghanistan on october sixth, a pilot named scott swanson, the first hellfire missile off of a predator. that was on the opening night of the campaign. but it wasn't close air support. he wasn't supporting troops in contact. he was trying to destroy a high value target. actually, he was to destroy a vehicle in the convoy that

belonged to a high value target in the hopes that that would draw the high value target out. five months later, there's a predator providing overwatch for on this mountain, on this tucker gar hilltop, and this predator, unlike the previous, is not armed. the hellfire is new to the predator. they had to expedite the testing process to get the hellfire on the predator. so not the tail numbers have a hellfire missile. so this is stuck just watching. it can't do anything. it doesn't have a missile. well, the this was a special force ingress. it was a seal. and they're their their air power advocate was, an air force airman named john chapman. they took heavy. the enemy was far more dug in than they had expected. it did not go well. chapman was injured and he fell, lost consciousness, and his teammates assumed that he was dead. they quickly exfil they quickly exfiltrated the mountain top. and because they thought chapman was dead, they the risk of going to get his body was too high. so they left him and then he woke up and then he fought on by himself. another hour.

and at the time he was awarded the air force cross is one of the highest ranking medals. one can be awarded posthumously. he was killed after that that our, in fact, according to some accounts, was killed because he had he had taken several bunkers from the enemy. he had driven the enemy out of several bunkers. he took up one of those bunkers as a fighting position. and he have been able to stay there and fight on longer. but according to some accounts, when the army sent a quick reaction force to support this effort, he came out of the bunker to, draw enemy fire so that they wouldn't be able to shoot down the with the army folks that were inbound. so he was awarded the air force cross several years ago, then secretary of the air force deborah lee james read an article, airman magazine, that said that an air force airman had not been awarded the congressional of honor since vietnam. and so she that page out of the magazine and handed it to an aide and said, go look into this. how come an air force airman hasn't been awarded the medal of honor since the vietnam? and so they looked over several sets of records to try to find medals that might be able to be to be promoted to the of honor. and chapman's was one. so he he has now been awarded the congressional medal of

honor, one of the most important pieces of evidence. that decision was this video from predator at the time. that's why it's been declassified and why you can find it on the internet. but imagine imagine that the pilot of this airplane who if i have the historical pieces right, is also scott swanson, the pilot who fired that first missile. right on the opening day of the war. he's got an armed predator and he fired a missile. now he's watching a fellow airman fight for his life and there's nothing he can do about it. try to imagine that feeling. the next airplane. once he got out, he ran out of gas and to go back to the base, he was replaced by a different pilot and that pilot was flying an armed predator. so when that army quick reaction, quick reaction force got to the hill. another jay tech, gabe brown was able to call in the first ever close air support strike from a hellfire missile and they were able to defend the friendly forces in that strike. here's why i tell you the story. when we think about the ethics of remote, we're often we're often to terms with the headlines, with the strikes that have gone badly and will be the first to admit that several

strikes have gone badly. and i'm not saying that those strikes were morally justified. that's not the argument. the argument is for every one of those strikes that you might see in the news, there are countless times that the predator or reaper crew did, the right thing produced the mission objectives, what they were asked to produce and did so with extremely low civilian harm. and imagine if scott swanson had a missile on his airplane that day, right? the story would have been very different. and john chapman might have made it home. right. so when we think about the ethics of warfare, we can't just think about the strikes that have gone badly. we have to think about all the things that would have been different had we not had these airplanes. there are. people i have met them who believe the world would be a better place had it never for remotely piloted aircraft. a big question. i don't know the answer to that question, but i know if we're going to take that question seriously, then we have to think not only about the strikes have gone bad, but also all the work that the crews have done to produce justified military aims with very low civilian harm.

so what comes next? i think i've made the case the human crew is central to, these airplanes and i can imagine i've heard people say to me when i say these airplanes are not autonomous and, they're not driven by artificial intelligence. sometimes i get the response. yeah, not yet. but soon they could be. that's true. soon they could be. and in that that composite bulbous, maybe instead of a satellite dish antenna, maybe we have some supercomputer brains. someday but what i wouldn't want to do is that when that day comes, when artificial or autonomy is sophisticated, that it can autonomously control a reaper. or wouldn't it also be able to autonomously control other stuff too? i have there a picture artist's conception of what a loyal wingman might look like in the us air force's approach to loyal wingman. that would be a traditional f 35 fighter pilot controlling, a swarm of, say, four, ten or 12 autonomous, loyal wingman. if the age of artificial

intelligence is upon us, if we're going to have autonomous weapons systems, sure, it could look like reaper, but it could also look like the loyal wingman. but for that matter, it could also look like a traditionally piloted f 35. we can have an artificial intelligence system and put it on that airplane to support the pilot and the pilots. so what i don't want to do is imagine this throughline that goes from predator to reaper to the age of artificial intelligence. i don't think that's what it's going to look like. i think we need to learn the lessons we can learn from remote warfare, from predator and reaper. and then i think we need to have a separate discussion about autonomy in artificial intelligence. i don't think they're as closely related as some people do. so everything i've said up to this point seems a little bit retrospective. and that's true. it is retrospective. i am looking backwards at two decades of remote warfare, but i don't want to leave you with the impression there's nothing here for us, for the future and the reason that i say that is because the emphasis, the ethics discussion on which i've very little i meant is on the distance, right?

the reason that we can separate in the warrior ethos, reason we can separate the willingness to face risk and the willingness to take life is because of the distances involved. the reason have to ask questions about whether these crews their job. seriously, i didn't say much on that but that's one of the arguments that have a playstation mentality or the reason people have that concern because of the distance we've had, we've learned a lot about the psychology of remote warfare. i haven't said on that either, but i could add to is grounded in the distance. the initial assumption that these crews would be would be psychologically unaffected by their work was grounded in fact that they're at such great distances. how could they be so emotionally invested? and so all of these questions about distance, those aren't questions that go away at the end of the predator and reaper era. those are questions that are going to come. and i think they're going to come up more frequently. let me just give you a few examples. if what we're worried about in the ethics of remote warfare is the 7000 miles, which is the distance from nevada to afghanistan if that's the kind of distance that we're worried about, then think about

something like cyber warfare operations or a cyber warfare operator might operate from the united states and produce effects in cyberspace that have physical effects on the other side of the. or think about hypersonic flying at five times the speed of sound continents and over oceans that, too, is going to involve thousands of miles worth of distance. or imagine, as i said, artificial and autonomy. we know we might imagine that if 35 pilot with a human pilot board staying outside of the enemy's threat ring and sending some of those wingmen forward to a place that's more dangerous even that pilot will be at a greater distance than will the autonomous level wingman. so these questions about remoteness don't go away. i think they they actually get more important. and so my hope is that will be able to look at the lessons learned from from 20 years of remote warfare, ask hard questions about what elements of this really are ethically significant, and then try to apply some of those lessons to the next 20 years. thank you all for here tonight. and do we have any questions to to mention about being 7000

miles away from afghans does that mean that there's one drone operation? so great? the question was, is there just one operations center these these airplanes? because i had mentioned the state of nevada. so i have mentioned at the top, but just in case there's any doubt the views expressed are my own and don't necessarily represent the department of defense, though i am an active duty air force officer, so there are lots open source information about various places that the air force, these airplanes out of. i'm not in a position here to list them all. there are several. yes, sir. you talked and about distance being issue, but it involves more than just the predators. what about the person? no relationship. between the and the potential victim, because it's thing if you are flying a fighter jet that sends a missile some

distance or punching a button sends a missile, but it's another. you've been watching the family that you're going to perhaps attack. that's right. so the question was about the distance relationships and how that applies to the aircrew that might be on one side of the world and the person under the crosshairs on the other side of the world. and that's one of the things that we had to learn the hard way. a community that people do get invested in the work and that can at a at an emotional psychological. so not only is it case that they're witnessing what's happening on the screen. so it's it's not like you know the the remote warfare of the 1990s if you will was cruise missiles. but when the surface warfare officer launches a cruise missile from a ship, they're not actually seeing the impact. they're not seeing the missile explode. and so on the one hand, it's true that we're these crews are watching the video. right. so that's one way that it's a little more intimate. but we have that in traditional fighter planes. also, the tv screen will be smaller and the image might be a little grainier. but we share that in common with

the traditional fighter and bomber crews. what really it different is the loiter time. so fact that these air crew can stay on station for eight, ten, 12, 21 hours really provide a lot of insight sometimes about how just how human the person under the crosshairs is. so different people react differently to that. but we certainly have learned that some members have had a hard time with some of those issues. i didn't get into it much here tonight, but but the the remotely piloted aircraft community, if will, is several different commands. but that community recognized. probably almost 15 years ago that this was to be a psychological, emotional challenge. and so at creech air base, for instance, they established a human performance team and at various times they've had slightly different professional cadre of professionals. but at the time i visited and interviewed folks, it was a physiologist, a psychologist, a chaplain. and so the idea is that with their powers combined, they should be able to provide support to the in the kind of emotional spiritual,

psychological space. and even when they first established that team, they decided it really wasn't effective because those members didn't have the same classification readings, the crews. and so the crews didn't feel comfortable telling them what had happened on the mission because they didn't know if they were allowed to because of the classification constraints. so now that human performance team is read into all the same classifications as the crews, so they can just walk in the work centers, they can walk up and meet people and build that way. and the the stories that i got from them, from the members of human performance team when i interview them, is that it's really come a long way that they really have deep going to get support from the human performance team. so we've come a long way, but we had to learn the hard way. you you also mentioned that there can be differences of opinions, a request to going ahead with a strike that happen often. i don't have any data to to but it's it's certainly unheard of. one story that i think captures this the best is a friend of mine named, dan, had been

following a high value target for several weeks and. so he's only an eight hour shift. there's a 24 hour cycle. so there are other crew, other crews that are supporting that same target. but every day he comes in and for roughly 8 hours, he follows his high value target. and every day this high value target leaves his house, puts a kid on the back of the motorbike. there's a football, you know, soccer pitch the home. and so there's a bunch of kids playing soccer. and so he goes and gets one of those kids, puts him on the back of the motorbike and goes a mile to the north to the homemade factory, because that's what he's responsible for in the terrorist organization. and so it became pretty clear that he's using those children as a human shield to to do the drive to the north. and so, my friend dan is watching this play out. and then one day after three weeks of this, he shows up and starts to get the intelligence briefing and says the ground force commander to take the shot today. and so starts asking questions of the relevant echelons today. why does it have to be today? why not yesterday? why not tomorrow? and he never a satisfactory answer to that question. and he knew that if he's asked,

take the shot and if there's a kid on the back of the motorbike, he's morally responsible for that. so he decided that he wasn't willing to take that shot. and by the way, they did the ground force team did consult with with legal. so it wasn't a question of whether it was illegal. the determination was made that that the proportionality calculus would have been satisfied. so although it would have been tragic, it would have been a justifiable civilian casualty because the military value of the target was so significant. i'm to discuss that, if you like. but the point that it wouldn't have been a war crime, it wouldn't have been illegal. it's just that dan didn't feel comfortable with it. so the point of this whole story is that dan has the authority to say to the ground force commander, i'm not doing it. doesn't feel. but then because these cockpits are on the ground, the squadron commander walked into dan's cockpit and said, dan, are going to be all that. you're going to be able to take the shot today. and what strikes me about the story is that the squadron commander could have said, dan, take the shot. well, now we in uniform code of military justice, territory because now that is his commander in his chain of command him a lawful order. but the commander do that because when we put these

cockpits, the ground, we built in some flexibility and the commander recognized that. so he said, dan, you going to be able to take the shot? and dan, if they could give you a reason why it has to be today, i could do it. but in the absence that reason, it feels arbitrary and i'm not comfortable with it. and so the commander said, all right, i don't have anybody else to fly the line today. so stick with it, i understand you're not going to take the shot tomorrow. i'm going to get somebody else on this line. and so that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target come out of the house and the next day, squadron commander found another pilot who was fully briefed it wasn't a secret. he knew. he knew what he was getting himself into. and he said he was willing to do that. and that day, for the first time in three weeks, the high value target did come out, did get on the motorbike, but didn't put a kid on the back of the bike. and so the timing, the complacency worked out to where that pilot was able to take a clean shot against the high value target. but i tell that story here because emphasizes the fact that that air chain of command, that's that's that's not in negotiation. those are orders when it comes to the air power supporting land component, that becomes more of a peer to peer relationship.

this kind of warfare sounds more personal. i think that's right. one of the things that i think it took a long time to recognize is that if you look at the the development of technical i'm sorry for those that couldn't hear the question was this feels more personal. this kind of war feels more personal. so if you look at the technological developments in the 1990s, especially in the united states air force the the tasks were to try to find and destroy and that was true in the first gulf war and it was true in in kosovo. and it was true throughout the 1990s. in fact, the air and stated mission was to do time targeting and single digit minutes. so find a target and put a bomber within minutes or less. but all of the target sets were machines. now certainly if you blow up, you know, let's say an iraqi tank in 1991, certainly you're going kill the people inside. that's that's going to happen. but that was never the intent. we weren't we weren't trying to kill those people. we were trying to destroy the tank. and what happened september 11th is that we transition to a force that was in the business of

targeting people. and and i think it took us a long i think we reeled from that transition for a long time. and so now we were i would like to think we're we're coming out of the post-9-11 wars, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency. there are lots of people in the dod who are talking about future conflicts. and it almost feels like a reversion to that 99 just discussion about how do i destroy the adversaries machine? and so i don't know if we ever if we ever got to a point where, we really understood all the nuances of that shift. but but we did learn to do it effectively. and as i said, to deal with some of the psychological, emotional implications of that. and do you see things like drones becoming more prevalent as a weapon warfare? so the question is whether i see these airplanes becoming more prevalent in warfare, it's really hard to and people in the united states force have very different opinions on that. it's i think this is just my opinion. it's a question of what one chooses to emphasize. so if you look, the recent national defense strategy, that emphasis is on you know great

power competition, near-peer threats the pacing threat is china that's what that document says. and so when people think about that kind of conflict, we're very much in the we're looking forward not back, it's going to be a contested environment, meaning, you know, unlike iraq and afghanistan, they'll have the ability to shoot down our airplanes. and so we might need airplanes are more sophisticated than the predator and reaper there's another line of argument that says even if we need to think about those things terrorism isn't going away, that that operational concern ended. so we still need airplanes like this. so what i think we'll see is increasing automation, not all in one go. we're not going to get to loyal wingman and i had up there overnight but i think you'll start to see processes on board airplanes become more and more automated to the degree that maybe potentially eventually we're able to take a person out of it then and then it's a drone, but it's different from what i've been talking about here because now it's it's an autonomous airplane opposed to a remotely piloted one. for me, i have one last question. what is your answer? the title of your book?

yeah, it's i was hoping you wouldn't. the question is, what is the answer to the. i think that these are weapons. and so i think that whether the use of a weapon is justified or not depends on what you do with it. and so i think it is incumbent upon us as as the united states of america to impose on ourselves on how we decide to use force. and as a just war theorist, i think that last resort is a crucial of what they call you, said bell in the of the decision to go to war and. one of the main one of the main arguments, the most significant arguments against remote warfare is that it creates a moral hazard? it provides an incentive for decision makers to resort, to force. it's cheap and easy, and i don't even mean monetarily cheap, although these are cheaper than, you know, f-16s and f-35s, but it's politically inexpensive because the chances of having casualties on our side are much lower. and so we create a political incentive to resort to force, even when maybe we shouldn't resort to force. and i think the solution to that isn't getting rid of these weapons systems. i think it's imposing self-discipline on our on our foreign policy.

but that's just my opinion. yes, sir. so from kind of a historical perspective, you know, sixties cold minutemen, sailors, crews, bunker in american sailor, we get it. you know, in order they got 90 seconds, they go through the procedure, they push the button, obviously more distant than the experience of. the drones now. but at the other end i've seen some stuff related to like boston dynamics with their robots being basically warriors again, to the question do you see a limit of where you know a robot. one guy controlling 20 of them running through forest or back at a desk. i mean, yeah, it is you know, it's escalation. yeah, that's a great question. so the gist of the question was remote warfare has been around

for a long time going back to the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the post-nuclear era. and so that seems like it's been around a time. but then we have these contemporary developments like the the boston dynamics robot dog and, you know, robot, other robots and everything and so we're putting ourselves on a trend line that we're going to have a single operator for several, maybe several dozen of these systems. and so that was the gist of the question. so i am concerned. so one of the reasons that i take view that i do is because the humans are so involved, intimately involved in all the decisions that go into the use of force. these weapon systems. and as we start to kind of aggregate those systems where, you know, maybe you'll have for eight or ten or 12 systems under one human control, there's no way that that human is going to be as intimately invested in each of those scenarios or each of those operations. and so i do have a concern about that, actually. i worked with i worked with some researchers on a project, and we were looking at how humans react to the kinds of moral dilemmas that can come up in remote

warfare. and we just had an offline discussion. i was surprised to find that there proposed solution just as an idea. what if we intentionally pixelate the image before the strike right so we now have high definition cameras which is far better than what you saw in that video. but what if the time of the strike we pixelate the image so that the human operators aren't face to face with the human toll that causing? and my view on that, i don't think that's the right move. don't think that's the right direction. right. i think we should should do whatever we need to do to build emotional resiliency in the crews so that can deal with that that trauma, that stress. but i don't want to move to place where we're where we're constantly abstracting from. the human cost war, because the more we consider war to be costless, right, the more the more fail to appreciate the costs of war. the more eager we'll be to start wars. and i want to put us in that position. and there are questions questions. but joe, thank you very much is you have given us, i think, a

lot to think about and. think about it in terms of of context going back in history and we appreciate you being join me in thanking joe chhabra. thank you very much. thank you all very much. and if you'll join

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