>> 13 years ago on october 7th, 2001, less than a month after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. president bush announced u.s. military strikes in afghanistan. next, he talks about his memoir my share of the task. he recounts the major turning points which ended in 2010. it was hosted by the free library of philadelphia last year. >> thank you very much. thanks for coming out.

i think this is a wonderful opportunity for the gentleman sitting next to me, it is kind of a big deal. for anyone who pays attention to american foreign policy and military affairs. ever since the attacks on this country in 9-11, the united states has had to evolve to meet the challenge of this new enemy and more than anyone that i can think of, general mccrystal has beenab ab responsible for shapi that and adopting our primary method of defending the country, thank you for being here mr. mccrystal. >> thank you for a too kind introduction, i always thought

of you as a nonfiction writer, but you're going into fiction now. >> you were the commander in our special operations in iraq and afghanistan, there has been a rapid evolution, i'm familiar from writing "black hawk down" from the way things were in the '90s. can you give us an idea of the overall strategy that's involved, we'll get to specifics maybe, but also the tactics that you've developed. >> not me, a group of people did, thanks. >> at the end of the vietnam war as american has done at the end of other wars, the special operations units that are created get gutted or disbanded entirely, there's a bias to do away with them. in the late 1970s they were

really in pathetic shape and barely a shadow of what they had been. in 1980 the mission eagle hawk was launched for a rescue mission in tehran and it failed. it failed for many reasons, one was our special operations capability, while we still had people that were brave and strong and whatnot. they were not an integrated community capable of doing complex things, and so it failed. from the ashes of that, there was a report called the holloway commission and it recommended we take a look at our ability to do this and the structure to do it. i entered special operations a few years later and i was able, and i try to tell this in great detail in the book. when you start to build a

special operations capability as we were redoing in the 1980s, the first thing you do is find is stereotypical operators. that's important, you got to have that, but it is the easy part of creating the organization. what you have to do if you're going to do complex operations, you have to have a huge intelligence committee, you got to innovate that with invators and a culture, that culture has got to be very mature. that's the word i would use carefully, it is not a culture of stereotypical rambo kind of things, that's not how special operations succeed, that's how you lose. you have to build a culture that's evolved to

problem-solving. what happened is, i was in the rangers and then joined special operations command through the first gulf war. we did scud hunting, hunting for iraqi missiles and we were getting better and better at what we did. we all paid huge attention to what he wrote in "black hawk down", we went to school on that experience, aided on the operation that he had written on an operation that had gone very badly, but then essentially dealt with with the force on the ground. a lot of holes in what we could do came out. if everything went perfectly the which you planned it, but what do you do when things start to go badly, the way they usually

do. we went out in 2001, of course, some brilliant deep raids and in iraq with the initial invasion the same thing, working against a nation state. but where we found ourselves in late 2003 when i returned to special operations, you remember in the spring of '03, the evasion of iraq went well, deceptively well. then things started to go back in the late summer. we thought if we could potentially arrest saddam hussein that would stop the problems, we did, but what we had found was a cancer-like network by a man who had created

an al-qaeda type of organization. frustrated iraqi sunnis, they were a network, they were trying to run an insurgency using terrorist attacks. suddenly the force that had been honed to a fine edge for very precise but very episodic occasional operations was unprepared and unable to do the wider problem. it is like having a swat team for your police force for all of philadelphia, in reality if you can't cover the whole city, that one s.w.a.t. team can never be decisive. >> in somalia the task force range had been there for a month or two, and during that period

they had launched six missions, the space was intelligence gathering, planning and operation, sometimes very quickly once that intelligence came together and then launching a raid. describe what opt-tempo means and how that applied in iraq. >> mark has got it exactly right. there were a series of raids, you gather intel, you make a decision, you set yourself criteria to launch, when those criteria come, you launch. it is a pretty centralized, pretty deliberate process. when we got into iraq we were originally doing that. what we found was we were having an effect, but narrow effect and very slow effect. when we go for a target, we would pick up an individual, if we captured him and his phone, and documents, we would capture

all of those things, but one of our small forces around the country would do the operation, then it might take a day or two to send them back to our headquarters where we could effect the operation. it would be written in arabic and a computer. it would come back and 48 hours old, and then we didn't have translators to do it. when i went in this room, there was a stuff that hadn't even been read. counter-terrorism is all about intelligence. whoever knows the most wins. so we had this incredible inability to digest and operate. we devised a system called find,

fix, finish, explore and analyze. >> you find something, you fixed them, you finish, you analyze that, and you learn from it. basically a learning cycle, and we would do that. we would go through that process, but it would be painfully slow, because we were operating with different organizations, not all organic to mind and different agencies, intelligence agencies and whatnot. not all parts of the u.s. government work together seamlessly. so here we are, as this cycle and we have these things what we call blinks between the parts. one element would find a target, but by the time the information got to the people who were going to fix it, usually by a predator or something, time would have passed and accuracy of

information fidelity would have passed. it is unintelligible by the fifth person, we're trying to do things in that system. this is madness, it is not going to work. we started and went on a campaign to fix that process. bringing in different parts of the organization, building our intelligence capacity, giving ourselves a mindset that was different before. before, if each element did its part, they could take great pride. we succeeded and did what we were told. nobody is successful unless the whole process works. the definite for winning is the same for of us. that's quite a bit different than what we had. things got really bad starting in late march of 2004 in iraq. that's when the country basically melted down and we started operating as hard as we

could. to the operational tempo, how fast you can operate. we realized the size of the network, that we were going to have to hit it a lot. by august of 2004, we got up to 18 raids a month or about one every other night and we thought we were moving at warp speed. we thought this is the most amazing thing we have ever done. we are the most efficient special operations task force and we were, but we were still losing. so we had to speed up more. there had been this fixed on high value targeting, decapitation, we came to the conclusion that wasn't going to work. we started with if we got abu --

if the key person is taken out, would it make it worse? i worked at the pentagon, it really got better. communications, pass information, build car bombs, you got to take those people out. so we came out with a strategy. i used to tell those people, it is like rocky and apollo, we're going to hit them in the mid-section and we're going to hit them a lot. two years later, same month, same site, we were doing 300 raids a night. that's 10 a night. that's impressive. that means every raid guy on the force is going on at least one raid every night. every pilot is flying one or two raids every night.

these raid are not patrols, this is going in the door, somebody is getting shot. extraordinary, and to do that though, you can't use previous systems, one you've got to be able to bring in intelligence on an industrial scale. instead of the plastic bags of information on a target, we would start to exploit their computers, their phones, we would take biometric data, pumped back to west virginia to see if we ever had that person before or had dealings with them. we would move the documents back and send them back to multiple places in the u.s. and in theater and everybody would be analyzing at the same time and we would be trying to turn this to learn as quickly as we could. we could hit three targets a night from the initial intelligence. we would find out from what we got on the target about john

doe, we might hit that at midnight and another at 3:00 in the morning. the reason it was important to go fast is because terrorist networks repair themselves very quickly. if we were terrorists, as soon as mark is captured, pretty soon i'm going to hear about it, i change the connections that i have, cut-outs. you got to be quicker than they can repair themselves, both the hit targets and before they can develop new leader, over the time we started seeing the relative age of leaders go down and the relative effectiveness go down after that. pummel it as fast as you can so it can't breathe. over time it has a decisive effect on it, which we did, along with a number of other

factors. >> one of the things that's interesting to me about that change and increasing the tempo, the role that technology played. obviously we've seen the development of drones and the application of supercomputers, you moved intelligence analysts out into bilad and into your base there, can you talk about the role that technology played. >> yeah. there are several things of technology that changed the fight. one was obvious, it was predators, it wasn't drone strikes, it was drone surveillance. you put a surveillance that gives you full motion video, it means that anywhere in our force, to include the guys on the ground could watch a predator is watching in real-time video. the real effect of that is several, one is where it used to take 120 people to raid a target when only 20 were going inside,

it takes 100 to secure it outside. if you can do it from the air, you only send 20. now the other hundred can hit five other targets. we could hit six targets in the time we're hitting one. you can put drones over and you can watch people all of the time. if we decided to watch someone in this room all of the time, pretty soon we would know what you call pattern of life. where you go, who you hang out with and what you do and whether you're good or bad, so you can build this up, suddenly you're very precise. you start to know a lot. that's one technology that traumatically changed it. another was night vision. we had night vision on all of our force and helicopters, you could of course see in the dark, but in firefights, you were absolutely dominate, we put

laser aiming sights on our weapons, we had incredible dominance, so firefights our ratio is probably 1,000 to 1, in terms of people getting hit back. we don't have that many guys, so the ones mount up. every time you lose a person, it is a huge cost, because they are so well-trained and valuable. the other one that's less obvious is the ability to communicate. video teleconferences, not so much radio, but, for example, we would take all of our radio nets that was happening on the ground. we would pick them up, and we would put them into our classified computer network system, so every we had a technology that allowed you to

sit at your laptop. you could watch from above what's happening and you could listen to their radio nets from our side. down at the team level. now, do you say well, then i could micro manage, wi we didn'. but you could reach down and have a situational to help the force. if you're going to be effective against an enemy network, you have to be a better network than they are. it may be the people in your church, your community, it could be a combination of things, how you communicate with them, determines often the strength of how you share information. you know people for 50 years, you know them pretty well, you don't need to communicate as often. we started every day with a

90-minute teleconference. we had a conversation on updates, and operations, every day i'm on it with all of the people, so everybody hears the senior leader every day. so we created shared consciousness of the whole organization knowing what we think the situation is, what's happening, where it is going, the effect is, it decentralizes decision-making, if everybody knows what the corporate leadership is thinking, they know what we're trying to do and they just make them. we didn't ask them to come up for decisions. i didn't make tactical decisions, hit target x or y. i gave them an effect. here is what we got to do in this area, we got to defeat this nett

network. you figure out how to you do it. it was communication at the heart of it. >> one of the things you mentioned in your book. the emotional impact that this kind of videoconferencing had on say, an intelligence analyst, who is getting briefed on and acting out on the information provided. what kind of effect did that have? >> we talk about cultural differences, one of the things about special operators, you're brought up to have a tribal culture, it is very macho and intimidating, and intentionally so. so people who deal with them are often a little hesitant, but the operators don't have all of the expertise, you really have it in your intel people and whatnot. as we started to grow, we communicated so much. in one case, you would see an

operator communicating back with a young analyst back in the united states or somewhere, the operation had occurred because of what the analyst had done. the operator is going, hey, jim, great job, all part of the team now. another case you would go into our ford headquarters, we rotated analysts so everybody forward and back part of the time. i would see a big macho operator, everything in the command was plywood and a 22-year-old female analyst weighed 98 pounds and she's got her finger in his chest. when i do this, you got to do x and x and he's taking it. it became americatocracy.

>> you mentioned that early on there was the use of these enhanced interrogation methods. you evolved away from that, can you talk about that a little bit? >> sure. >> how many people here have ever run a prison or an interrogation facility? >> that's how many we had in my command. if you think about it, go back to 9-11, the first response is what do we do, we start capturing very serious terrorists, all right, we'll bring the specialist in, there weren't any. people go back to history books, but most of the manuals written in the military were designed in a conventional war between two armies where you capture private x of the soviet army and you're going to ask him questions, that's the way they were

designed. we're talking about some pretty hardened people. we had to learn our way through it. the nation had to come to grips about how we feel about it. it is still an ongoing discussion. but if you remember after 9-11, people jumping out of twin towers, holding hands to their death. >> i'll also remind you that in baghdad we were literally knee-deep in blood. it was unbelievable and the torture chambers we were finding, against that back drop, we had to take our interrogation techniques and figure it out. we were originally authorized to use enhanced techniques, you could limit a detainee to four hours of sleep a night. you could make them kneel down in stress positions, i don't agree with that, but that's the limit. there was no beaten people and

no waterboarding and anything i ever was involved in or so, in fact. >> but the nation had to come to grips with it. how we do this. a couple of things, first, we learned that the best way to deal to get information was long periods of conversation, very respectful, very persistent. the individual who led us to him, we had him for weeks, at one point we did movie night with him. we did two primary interrogators and they developed this close relationship. they finally said let's take a night off and have a movie. they brought in his favorite movie and they sat there together and watched a movie and it was the exorcist. but i mean, that's the way we did it. what you try to do, is you convince that person that they

want to communicate. sometimes because they are scared of being prosecuted within iraqi law. sometimes because they are worried about their family. there's any range of reasons, at the end of the day, you got to convince them that they want to give you information. the problem with torture, well, it is multiple levels of problem with torture, but first there's a sort of academic argument of whether it works or not and whether the informs is good or n don't know. what happens in torture, you hurt yourself. the torturer crosses a line and becomes something different. once you do that, i don't think you can come back easily.

he was killing thousands of iraqis, as well as many of our guys as well. you feel the press of time and you also see your comrades being killed, you see this extraordinary thing and you say i got to stop it, and the ends justify the means and you have to stop there. it doesn't, because you corrode the force. the worse thing that happened was abu grape. we believed they were an ab aberration and i believe they were. but to many people they were proof positive that america does that by policy. many because they had seen this, they said they had to join the jihad for that reason. they were amped on a vision of

something of net preconsumptions on the u.s. if you let torture become a policy, that's what happens. you mobilize your foe, and you increase them and mobilize them. any information that you get in my view is much less than the cost of getting it. >> i could ask you a thousand more questions, but i'll share the wealth. this is on television, so we have speakers, we have actually amplifiers, or whatever. so wait for them to come give them to you before you ask a question, okay? >> i'll start with my trend. trudy rubin. >> should i start standing up? >> get in the push-up position, trudy, that would be nice. >> you have said and written that you feel drones alone is an

insufficient policy. i wonder if you would talk about why you feel that, and also, given the weariness in the united states of the afghan conflict, and the ineptness and corruption of the afghan government, what do you think is the most effective think we could do and should do after 2014. >> first i think unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are really important. they are extraordinarily good for american defense. that said, if we issued a bunch of drones to the philadelphia police department and said go after the drug problem in philadelphia. they would be able to figure out some drug dealers, he this would be able to shoot some drug dealers with hellfire missiles, in fact, they would be right in

many cases, but if you think you would have solved the drug problem, you probably would not, in some cases you would make it worse, because many people would experience the explosion, even though they knew the person was a drug dealer, they would be offended by the fact that you would do that. put that in a sovereign country. and suddenly, you have a very effective tool that gets a perception of one, violation of sovereignty, two, there's a perception, even though the shot may only kill people who are absolutely guilty, the perception of everyone wandering away, is that there were civilians there, noncombatants, very quickly there's the impression that the united states uses power with a certain arrogance. american popularity among the

population of pakistan is not high. at one point it was below india, that's impossible. the people most upset about the drone strikes inside pakistan they were in other parts of the countries. so they are outraged about the theory of it. but it is important, because people act on their perception. i think we need to have that capability, we need to use it, but we need to be really mature about how we think about it. we need to really think through our process, because you create negative forces with even well-intentioned positive things, so it has got to be bald. >> the gentleman in the sweatshirt back here. >> what was the second part? >> given the weariness of the state -- [indiscernible]

>> the question is with the war weariness on part of the united and the situation on the ground in afghanistan, what should our policy be? >> the answer is, i can't tell how many troops ought to be there. what i do think is several fold. >> people say we shouldn't be in afghanistan, one that's pointless, we are there. two, we went for our reasons, not for afghans, we we went because it met our goal to get rid of al-qaeda. when we upended the taliban government and into free play, i think we had some kind of responsibility to set it right. if afghanistan were to be completely unstable, then i think that pakistan's stability would be very tenuous and they have challenges anyway, so i

think it is important. my view is, what we need to do is be consistent and persistent in the region. the reason people in afghanistan are so nervous, in 2004, they think we are going to leave and they have seen us leave before. in 1989 we turned from the region. it has become commonly accepted truth that we left in 1989 and they are starting to think we're just going to walk in 2014 and there will be nobody to rely on, they don't have other strategic allies. what they are looking for, in my deal is a long term partnership. i think it is the idea that you have an ally somewhere. their fear is they are very far away. >> i said what do you want in the future years, how many u.s. troops do you want here?

>> he says i'm not really worried about u.s. troops, i want u.s. business and i want you to be here making money, because if you're making money here, you'll have an interest in our stability. it will be good for you, and good for you. the fear in afghanistan is they are landlocked and they don't make anything we need. >> people say pakistan want us out of the region, i think they want us in the region and stay there. their fear is we're going to come in and pull out again and upend things and cause issues. >> i'm a vietnam veteran and i've been in the peace movement for probably the last 30 years, i was in iraq of december '04 and tried to get in the parking lot.

abu grave prison and they wouldn't let us in. i see our current military as dealing with the american people who pay their way, as dealing in two very distinct modes, one secrecy and one public relations. i see you as a master of one leg in each of those. you were the one star briefer for the press during the invasion. my question is given the vast amount of secrecy that is necessary for the culture that you are evolving, very brilliantly, i would concede, does it ever concern you, what impact this has on democracy and the citizenship that really doesn't know what the heck you're doing. to me, it is a very important

question, and i think it would rest in the sort of things you do and i just wonder if that concerns you at all. >> if i understand your question right, and many ways, i would argue i've been in the peace movement for a long time as well. if i understand your question, you're worried about the balance of necessary secrecy and wider secrecy, because there is a certain amount of necessary secrecy, if you have a son or daughter serving and essential information is given on their whereabouts or their plans, they become more vulnerable and that becomes a very real problem. there's a requirement for secrecy that's very, very real. i think it is balanced against, i think you're wider point which

is really are the american people informed about the policy thinking. i read the book "secrets" back in 2005 when it came out. he's the guy who copied the pentagon papers and propagated them out of there. his basic outrage came from after being part of the pentagon papers study, is what it was, he came to the conclusion that american policymakers weren't stupid, they had done analysis after analysis and they kept coming to the conclusion that what they needed to do in vietnam was x, but politically they weren't willing to do that, they were only willing to do y, so they were following policy y cynically, knowing that the probability of success was low. they were taking a politically expedient route over what policy

procedure actually said if you were going to proceed what you had to do. it is a very difficult question to ask. you ask yourself at what point what are the american people supposed to know and how much. trying to explain something as complex as afghanistan and not doing it in an organized enough manner. you know, if you go back to world war ii, someone could put up a map and you could show progress around the country, it would be hard to do that for afghanistan and iraq, it is so complex. even when you're there, you're constantly grappling with what truth is. i could write 15 stories and they could all convince you that afghanistan is in a disaster and they would all be true. i could write 15 stories that it

is a good thing and they could all be true. i didn't see a lot of effort to deceive the american people, i didn't see that. i didn't see people trying to get things wrong. i saw some bad decisions i disagreed with. i felt people wrestling with things with near term media pressure, we try to get through that day and then we go, we should have been thinking about last year, i saw that. but i didn't see let's deceive the american people. i didn't see a process for a true debate on issues. we got to go save the syrians, whether that's right or wrong, i don't think it was well-informed. most of what i heard, people are

dying, we got to go there. the response is, what side are you going to be on? i think you got to figure that out first. i'm not a conspiracy theorist, there aren't as many secrets as you think because most of them get leaked. they don't always get leaked completely accurately, but that's sort of my experience. >> this gentleman in the back here with your hand up straight with the beard. wait for microphone. >> general, when i was growing up, the big concern was nuclear weapons, nuclear war, mutual deterrence and all of that sort of thing. that faded away with the disillusion of the soviet union. we still about north korea and iran and this constant drum beat of what happens if iran success

seeds, or what happens if the north koreans have a weapon that can reach america. i'm just curious to know your perspective on where we stand in the nuclear arena in the world whether we have adequate defenses, should be worried about missiles from north korea, should be worried about israel attacking iran. >> i would be worried about it. i don't think the destruction of the world is anywhere close to where it was in the cold war. you had the ability with the miscalculation to have a war that would end civilization as we know it. i don't think that is as likely now, however, i think what you have is you have nuclear preliferation. the whole idea was based upon

the fact that your opponent was a rational actor who has something to lose. i think what everybody is scared about with north korea, erratic leadership, although they have been a rational actor to date of a sort, they haven't bomb anybody, but there's the concern. the thing about iran that worries people so much, they have been very irresponsible, using surrogates in the region. so there's the sense that they don't have to destroy the world, all they have to do is get a few weapons out and because of where they are and what they can do, they can do, you know, irreparable damage to a small country. it has lowered the threshold,

they don't have to do as much. if they did any of that, it would be painful for the people involved. even worse than that is the next step, once you get beyond a nation state. the one good thing about a nation state. you got a geographic place to go after if they act with nuclear weapons. if it gets to a terrorist organization, they don't have one. they have nothing to hold at risk. so suddenly, they can use it with complete irresponsibility, and there you are. now, again, they won't destroy the world, but they don't have. i think we should be very, very worried about. i think nuclear and biological weapons are a real threat. i think cyber weapons are coming into that same area. the barrier for entry into cyber attack is pretty low. you don't have to have a lot of

stuff. we need to be become more resilient and hardened. >> the gentleman in the suite. keep your hand up. there you go. >> thank you. general, you note our great capability in electronic warfare, et cetera, what happened in benghazi? >> yeah, i got a very classified briefing on it, and i can't share that stuff. what i'll tell you is, we really don't know. there was a brave ambassador out in a consulate with only seven americans total and local forces guarding it. what i saw of the attack, it looks like a very disorganized group of people. who walked in. there was not an attack.

they walked in an open gate, and they didn't even know the ambassador was there. they started a fire in a building and he happened to be in safe room and was killed by smoke inhalation. so i think at least that part of it appears to not have been a very organized thing. it strikes me of an emerging good idea. there's a later attack that involved weapons. i've seen a lot of well-orchestrated attacks and that didn't appear to me to be one. if we can't put our diplomats in

harm's way you can be in parts of the world. we've got to celebrate people like ambassador stephens who died bravely. some will be armed, we'll learn the relationships, we'll have a real interface with the world. so that's why i think all of the finger pointing has the danger of creating this fortress mentality wherever we are. >> this gentleman in the corner over here. >> good afternoon, general. thank you to you and mrs. mccrystal for the joining forces initiative. i'm a marine sergeant in the reserves and i'm working for the navy. good afternoon. do you think, sir, that we're at the risk of the same mistake that we saw after vietnam in losing the expertise with this

potential sequester, and the possibility of losing special operations funding and the hard one expertise of our special operators? >> yeah, we are. >> first the defense budget is already coming down and it needs to come down a lot. the defense budget got huge, and based upon the nation's finances and all, we got to bring it down. but i think that process is already underway. when people talk about defense, we need to spend 3 or 4% of gdp for defense. i think that's a dumb approach. you need to spend as much foreign defense as you need to defend yourself, no more. the sequestering was completely different. it was so unpalatable that sane people would never let it happen. >> we confused the last part.

what happens is now, if you sequester in 2013 and you don't make it until early spring. they only have the rest of the fiscal year to execute that. you don't have the ability, it is like me coming to you and saying next month you have to spend 20% or less. or 15% less of your income, in reality, you know that only 15% of your income is what you spend on food and that sort of stuff. everything else is rent or whatever. suddenly you got your house but you don't eat. that's kind of what happens in sequestering, you have to take it out of those areas. we stop sailing ships and flying planes and we stop doing a lot of things we need to do. you have to contract it consistently and carefully.

it has to come down intelligently. and simplified. >> thanks. >> this woman right here. third row. yes. >> general, you certainly make war sound very exciting, and i'm a long-term peace activist, so it is not easy to say that. my concern is the drones, and the drones as mark boyden is quoted as saying are a terrifying tool. the ability to target far off individual and places is a terrifying tool. how can you condone the use of drones somewhat indiscrimina indiscriminately. decisions about drones seem to be made unilaterally and i think

that's kind of inconsistent with our democracy. >> they are very fair questions. first off, i don't think they are indiscriminately fired. i know the process and it is very, very carefully done, and you know, i used to ask the question, people would say, well, you can do this, but you can't do this. and if you're going to go kill somebody, at the end of the day, in a legal sense, it doesn't matter. if you parachute in american special forces and you kill somebody as opposed to using a drone, sometimes that creates more. there's a cultural part that you're hitting on that i think is really, really important. if you are a nation or a part and particularly a parrior nation, that culture. and somebody has technology that allows them to stand off and shoot at you with impunity. they don't respect you as a warrior. >> they don't think this guy

came up and took his best chance and he got me. >> they don't really respect the technology. they respect it in one sense, but think how you would feel if you knew there were drones up above you and at any minute they could shoot. it is a little bit, you would resent this omnipresent omni-lethal entity that can just reach in. it really creates a lot of resentment on people. the other thing i worry about even more is the threshold. go back to 1998. president clinton launched tomahawk missiles into the sudan and afghanistan. they hit targets. if you had asked any of us the

next morning whether america was at war, we would have said no, we fired some tomahawk missiles, but we're not at war. if you asked people near those missiles, they would have a different view. it can lower the willingness to use force and not think of it as war, yet you build up enemies and people who think they are at war with you. when did al-qaeda go to war with the united states and the average answer is 9-11. al-qaeda declared war in the united states in 1996. most of us didn't get the memo, but they attacked east africa. i mean, they were at war with us. and there's always a danger when one side is at warnd the other isn't at war, in both ways. so the danger of all of this technology is that.

anytime you can sit down in relative safety and do something to somebody else, you don't necessarily feel now. if your son or daughter was going into the target area and you were going to spend a sleepless night worrying about them. you would have a different view of that mission, you would be at least more connected to it. but technology has the danger of lowering threshold and it can become politically easier to operate it without putting forces at risk, so that lowers it again. >> this gentleman in the front. >> two quick question, thank you for your service. and leadership, one, do you support oppose chuck hagel as secretary of defense, and two -- except for you and general

petraeus. >> i just finished his book. it is painful to read about generals being criticized, because a lot of it is corrected. we had shortcomings of not being strategically enough minded. you get focused on your job and not thinking the tstrategic problem. we don't fire enough generals, that may or may not be a good criticism. it is certainly worth paying attention to. it is a useful thing to throw out there. >> what was the first one? >> chuck hagel. >> if chuck hagel will take the job right now, god bless him. whoever is going to be secretary of defense, they are going to go through a constricted budget and

implementing things like female in combat, implementing is going to be hard. it is going to be a very difficult four years. i think he's got great background to bring to it. his time in vietnam is useful, but the most important thing is if he and president obama are a good team, that's what matters. i don't much worry about his policy positions one way or another. because he's not go going to be a policy maker. but the fact that they feel that they can be a good team, to me that's the important thing. unless the president nominates somebody who is just, in my mind, unqualified or something, i tend to think a leader should get who they want.

>> thank you we have to stop now. >> a lot of soldiers have been away from their years for three to five years, and they are getting letters home saying the farm is falling to pieces. it wasn't desertion of soldiers not wanting to go to battle. but their families really needing them back home. what lee imposed was a fairly

strict orders. several occurrence of this happening. in fact, the morale was so low. les miserables came out and they said that's us. >> next on american history tv, for 17 years the unabomber killed three people and injuring 23 others, a panel of former fbi agents and coauthors of the book

un bomber talk about the events. it is about an hour. . >> good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, my name is craig floyd. i want to welcome all of you here today to the museum's witness to history, investigating the unabomber. generally sponsored by our friends from target who join us in the front row, as well as the

museum our host. i want to thank all of you for coming. today is a glorious day outside and the fact that you would want to spend an hour or two with us, that's extra special. i think you're in for a fascinating discussion here in just a moment. i also want to thank our friends from c-span who tend to cover many of these witness to history events. for those of you who may not be familiar with the national law officers memorial fund. we were formed in 1984 by a former new york city police officer and legend. establishing the national law

enforcement officers' memorial. it sets a couple of blocks from here in the judiciary square. on the walls of that memorial are the names of 20,267 federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement professionals who have given their lives in the line of duty. our latest initiative is to establish a national law enforcement museum, we have been working on this now since 2000. we have been working on it ever since and that museum will open in a few years from now. right across the street from the national memorial. but in many ways, our museum already exists, we have collected more than 17,000 artifacts. fascinating artifacts of american law enforcement his