it gives you that perspective. announcer: next, on american history tv, military historian paul springer talks about the use of cutting-edge technology. robotic weaponry and warfare such as drones and artificial intelligence have revolutionized makingy affairs, previous tactics obsolete. the new york historical society hosted this 90-minute event. >> it is a pleasure to introduce my colleague and friend paul fellowr, who is a senior and has a day job at the military into staff college in alabama and also taught at west point. he is the author of many books in and many coming out on cyber

war, military robotics, history of prisoners of war and a load of other topics. cnn, npr, fox, the history channel, the national geographic channel. he is really one of our most popular lecturers. have asked him to speak on revolutions and military affairs, which will give you a quick survey of military history from the 13th century up until today. sure youe hour, so i'm will enjoy it. please welcome paul springer. mr. springer: good morning. i would like to extend it a thank you. wonderful organizations i support and love working with. it is a great opportunity to speak with you today. i can review terrified for the weekend with

some military robotics information. i am an historian, by definition that means i have to backup way to far to tell you the beginning of the story. before i get rolling, do not worry about reading the small disclaimer at the bottom. these are my views, not the views of the air force or the department of defense or the u.s. government. they are solely mine unless you really like them. all right, so this is the only slide up i will throw at you with an enormous amount of text. i don't expect to read and and i'm not going to read it to you but my point of this like your, my fundamental argument, is that the world right now is in the revolution in military affairs. the mode of human conflict is altering and that alteration is going to change virtually every aspect of the way the human conflicts propagate.

it will change how we decide whether or not we decide to go to war. inwill change how we behave more. this is due to technological changes that are on the verge of upsetting human society. in the end, there will be some countries that adopt these changes. they take the new technology and learn how to utilize it in to some that do not. these will be the haves and have-nots of the future in conflict. there is any moment's advantage in being one of the first adopters. revolutionary change in conflict, it becomes possible to dominate your rivals in a short time. termriginator of the "revolutionary nuclear affairs is soviet and it gives me pain to give credit to a soviet.

but there are times when fundamental changes occur and they occur so rapidly they make everything that has gone before completely obsolete. it is my contention that is occurring right now. thate give you an example people are probably more familiar with. if you go back to the middle characterizedwhat were. tassels, modes, heavily armored knights. if you wanted to capture something belonging to an opponent, that would likely take siege.onths of unless you were lucky enough to find them at the gates open, the walls unmanned, the moat drained, and no preparations at made. appear we have three successful --zures in the 14th and sieges. undertakingsjor which required a lot of time.

this characterized war in that time. gunpowder became the norm in europe, the situation changed. it suddenly became possible to battered down the defenses of a high walled castle from a safe distance and the attacker had the advantage because the capital and its defenders could not leave its position while the andcker had more mobility to choose where and when to fight. suddenly, being inside the castle was a disadvantage because you became an obvious target. as a result, here are some successful seiges. -- and the seige duration is suddenly measured in days.

redesignssible to fortifications, to make them less vulnerable to gunfire and thus it became possible to defend a static position. this is what one of those fortifications looked like in the 1600s. as you can see, it is a.m. in enormous fortification full of geometric designs. wasidea behind this fort that it could not be approached on any side without the attackers coming under heavy fire from multiple anger -- angles from the defenders. the result was really long sieges. thathese were the sieges really succeeded. it became a major undertaking. and it shifted back to a static approach.

as you might imagine, those who had not changed the new situation of found themselves quickly overwhelmed. it became a impossible for an army that did not use gunpowder to withstand one that wielded firearms. siegecraft became an entirely impossible, you had to have some the castle.de sometimes armies were going to meet in the fields. in the 16th century, reloading a firearm could take two minutes. range of a firearm at was only about 50 meters. we couldexactly, it say, a paragon of physical fitness but even i could cross 50 meters in the under two

minutes. i could crawl 50 meters in under two minutes. which means if you are using firearms and to shoot and miss, there is a reasonable chance i could run across the field and hit it was something sharp or heavy. as a result, we get mixed formation. this comprises musketeers on the n on theand pikeme center. the musketeers open fire. mener they shoot, the pike come to the front while they reload. for made it impossible musketeers to overcome calvary men in minutes. it swept everything before it on me battlefield because it was better. than anything through that time using firearms in the field. it teaches us something. it teaches us sometimes it is

not the technology that matters, it is being the first one that figures out how to use it effectively. that is what is going on here. the spanish end up using it to become the dominant land power in europe. but nothing lasts forever. this is one of the rare times you will hear a historian talk to about swedish military dominance. it is not particularly what they are known for but it was the swedes who figured out how to counter the terse year. it was unwieldy because it was getting in the way. was hard to move around. you could have thousands of troops screaming to be heard. and maybe, the pikes that protect musketeers could for tech them without standing amongst them. the idea was called the brigade. and when the brigade swept onto the battlefield under gustavus

adolphus, it it drove them from the field. the 30-year war knowing it was one of enormous carnage but he had this new idea that for a brief time the swedes ward turn the tide of a that had effectively engulf the entire european continent. a bloody mess. as much as the 25 -- as much as 25% of the european population died, a much higher percentage than died in world war ii. this tells us these new forms of weaponry, even though they seem archaic today, could be extremely effective when used en masse. if we flashforward a few centuries, we reach world war i. once again, gunpowder is the time.nt weapon of the each individual wielding a

machine gun can fire 600 rounds are and they can sustain that rate of fire as long as they have bullets and they can fire relatively accurately for a distance up to two miles. i cannot cross two miles in under two minutes. there is no way i'm going to be able to do it with a couple thousand bullets flying at me. this caused warfare to once again become very static, very position-oriented. for all intents and purposes, to stagnate. but progress continued. world war i at the time was the bloodiest war in history. millions of people died. there was a significant movement around the world to say, we never going to do that again. point, leading nations attempted to ban the practice of warfare which did not last very long. united stateshe has never repealed the act where we swear we would never use

warfare against an opponent. there were other attempts to mitigate the aspect of warfare. a lot came out as the result of the gunpowder revolution. you had prominent thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries to said, there are limits to what you can do in warfare. note are things that are acceptable behavior. for example, you should not go out and poisoning your bullets before firing them at someone. you should not deliberately kill someone after you have captured them. you should not deliberately spread the disease amongst your enemies. yes, they are your enemies but when wars and, you have to go back to at least being able to coexist. unless your objective is the complete and utter annihilation of your opponent. which is flat wrong. you should not do that. annihilation is bad.

even though we are innovating these new net -- these new technological ideas and concepts, we are also saying there's something to just do not do. you do not invent weapons that .re designed to maim you accept the enemies surrender of they offer it in good faith. over time, it becomes the norm in european warfare that there are specific limits. these thinkers also considered, when is it respectable to go to war. they come to the conclusion there are times when war is an acceptable policy option. defendht to go to war to yourself, your citizenry, your territory. there are other circumstances in which warfare is also in acceptable alternative. the 20'se forward into century after world war ii, there was a significant movement once again to never allow a conflict like this to happen.

when the united nations charter was written, a key component was member states of the united nations shall not make war upon each other and if you violate that the expectation is that all of the other member states will come to the aid of the big. as you all know, it has not always worked out that way. body ofe is an enormous international law governing what war.an and cannot do in most is encapsulated in the geneva convention. there are four key components that will matter later in the lecture as to what are the ultimate limits of warfare in terms of who can and cannot anticipate. the geneva convention can make this clear. you must bear arms openly. you're not allowed to make war by hiding your weaponry, pulling it out, attacking the enemy, hiding it again. you must wear some form of

uniform or recognizable device. it may be the uniform of a country with a flag on it. it may be something as simple as hamas. headscarf, to and hesse b recognize more and distinct so i know you are representing yourself as a combatant. to you are expecting me follow the rules of war. you must be part of an organization of a hierarchical structure where the leadership is responsible for the behavior of these subordinates. there has to be a form of command and control. someone that is ultimately held responsible for the behavior of troops in the field. and, you must follow the laws of war. if you do not follow the laws of war you cannot claim their protection in any form of combat. why does this matter? the united states is currently with the islamic

state. with al qaeda. intoe fighting terrorism the concept. and the organization with which we are in conflict do not bear arms openly. do not wear a recognizable uniform. do not have a command structure where the leadership is responsible for the behavior of subordinates and they certainly do not although the laws of war. so there are outside of our traditional understanding of who combatant acceptable and who is protected by the laws of war and if the united states and its allies choose to extend additional privileges such as accepting surrender and restraining ourselves, that is our option. but we really effectively have to follow the rules of war even though we are facing an enemy who does not. be an incredibly frustrating situation as this cartoon illustrates. we have to follow the laws of war for one fundamental reason.

if we do not follow the laws of war then the laws of themselves become largely irrelevant and the enemy we are currently facing has its primary goal being the destruction of the existing world order. you can conceive of the islamic state and al qaeda as a global insurgency. its goal is not necessarily just to bring down individual governments, it's goal is to destroy the entire international system. down theing to hold system we have with the united nations where there are nations haves andonsidered have-nots. tool, ae the ultimate veto over the use of violence. the united states, britain,

france, and china. none of them are in the middle eastern region. so imagine if you will, if we were to redesign the permanent security council, choose new membership. would you put the same five countries in there? not on the basis of economics. not on the basis of population size and probably not on the basis of geography. nell imagine if the islamic state achieves everything and pushing for. caliphate that stretches from north africa all the way to the pacific ocean. would they have cause to claim membership in this most elite of fraternities? they might instead choose to pull down the system because they believe chaos and anarchy will more effectively serve their and goal. starting point. when it comes to 21st century conflict and military robotics,

the heart of what i want to discuss today i need to establish definitions. the media is a big fan of the term "drone." and drone has a specific meaning. it is a preprogrammed machine. it does whatever it is told to do. it does not think. it does not react. it does not choose from a host of options. it simply does what it is told. you preprogram a route, it flies the route. you tell it to strike a certain point, it strikes a certain point. it is not a thinking machine. a drone by definition is not being driven by some other intelligence. it flies off. you do not control it on its route. the ability to stop it, to abort its mission, but there's no intelligence hiding its actions. it has already been done. a robotic system incorporates

its ability to sense an environment and make decisions. you were probably familiar with a predatory. a predatory is being flown by a human operator but it has some functions it performs automatically. makes flying it a lot easier. it does not choose to kill. a human being chooses to fire a missile from a predatory. it does not choose where it will fly, a human being chooses where it will fly. but it does some things on its own. some of these other devices, this has become most well-known as an explosive ordinance robot. disposal it allows you to avoid putting humans and the worst of harm's way. it does not disarm bombs on its own. it gets close to the bomb and does what it's operator tells it

to do. incredibly useful to reduce as you'll tease. because at the end of the day, nobody cries every robot dies, does not die. it just gets rendered into small pieces. on the right, more terrifying. this is the larger, uglier cousin. it weighs about 200 pounds. it is remotely driven. it is not driving itself around and shooting off guns and causing chaos. there is in a operator driving it from a distance using a camera. .s you can see, it can be armed you can put rocket launchers, grenade launchers, machine guns on it. a lot ofot suffer from the problems that trigger in accuracy in humans when using weaponry. it does not have a pulse. it does not breathe. itinstantly calculate --

instantly calculates the wind. it does not feel bad if it is shooting at a house of children. it just does what it is told. there is a human operator telling it to do that, but there is a certain divorce there. the human is a little further away from the intimacy of killing. robot, for all intents and purposes, robots do not exist way the military means when it uses the term "robot." it makes decisions on what it is going to do on the environment and senses and right now there are no weapons that are true robots in the classical sense, wandering around causing headache for everyone. they do not exist yet that they are on the immediate horizon. i am going to show you some examples of how close we are getting and what we could do if

we chose to. final definition, a cyborg. a cybernetic organism. that is, a human or any kind of critical but usually a human that has incorporated robotic elements into themselves, usually as a form of an enhancement. rush limbaugh is a cyborg. he has an implant in his ear that has restored hearing to him, without which he is completely deaf, which as i understand it is a problem for radio hosts. there are other cyborg's out there. you may be surprised some of the things we can do now with mind-controlled implants. artificial intelligence. the notion you could create a machine that would be capable of processing information in the same fashion as a human. certain extent, artificial intelligence is a red herring. there is not a compelling reason

to create something that is artificially intelligent. robots give us the advantage we can choose specialization. we can design them. there is not a particularly compelling to produce a humanoid robots with all the frailties and weaknesses of human beings. if i was designing the next human being, this is not the shape i would choose. i am a very picky guy, apparently. turing was a british cryptanalyst during world war ii. he posited the idea of the touring test. -- turing test. you can query a computer into human being through some mechanism where the sound would not tell you which was which. maybe you're using a keyboard to ask a question. you could determine whether or not you had created artificial intelligence by having a question asked and as they could

not determine which was which, you would have created artificial intelligence. microsoft a few weeks ago thought they would run an experiment. they created an artificial intelligence. they created a twitter account a computerit over to and hypothetically, they programmed this computer to act the way that microsoft takes a 15-year-old girl would act on a twitter account. within 24 hours, this thing was tweeting racist responses. it had been trained by the internet and all of the horrific things the internet could bring to life. microsoft quickly shut it down. no 15-year-old girl is quite that racist. at about a week later, they brought it back and it only took a few hours before it was announcing that hitler was right. there have been other companies.

maybe you are familiar with a machine called watson. it was designed to play jeopardy against human opponents. lotng jeopardy requires a more than an enormous knowledge of trivia because most questions are written in a way that reasoning.stract it requires you to think through in a way that previews to now, only humans could do. watson won the game against the that everrdy champion played. this came as a major shock. now, we had a machine that appeared to be capable of very quickly reasoning through very challenging questions. at, what do you do with machine like that? what is the practical use of something like watson? it turns out the thing is phenomenally helpful in the medical field. inson has been built by ibm turned over to some major medical centers and what we're machine canhat this

read virtually every medical research item that has ever been produced in every language. as a result, it is able to make conclusions that would never occur to a human doctor. toe itchesleft big and you taste in a burn the riverview mouth, you have liver cancer. that is a made-up example. but watson takes the strange symptoms, what some together, and then spits out what it thinks is the answer. it is looking and very obscure medical journals for the individual strange cases they get written up by doctors. in the deathsulted of a patient. they didn't knocked out see, it's a big toe, peanut butter roof of the mouth, clearly that was liver cancer. watson is doing that in a record amount of time and that offers an opportunity to revolutionize

medicine. that could be wonderful. we will see dark sides as well. when it comes to military robotics and artificial intelligence, there are some things that machines do infinitely better the end humans do. feel free to run a race with just a basic calculator and see if you are faster than it is in arithmetic. you cannot. it is hyper specialize. dois a far harder process to things like immediate calculations of ballistic tables and determinations of whether or not to engage what might be a threat. and, that is what this -- these devices is at the bottom. you might be familiar with the patriot system. it is an air defense system. you might not know it has a fully autonomous mode. he flipped the switch and it will fire on anything that comes into its engagement some that it perceives as a threat so hopefully you have predefined what it should consider a

threat. unfortunately, on a number of occasions, patriot missile batteries have opened up on those fighting on the same side of the united states and on at least two occasions it has fired on american aircraft despite the fact american aircraft were using a code that should've told it, do not shoot at me i am an american. so the system does not always work perfectly. when it comes to air defense, sometimes you have to accept the loss ability failure because it is too dangerous not to turn on the system. in the center, this is called a closed-end weapon system. radar-guided very powerful machine gun. it is used as the last line of defense on american naval vessels and has been used as years.r more than 30 as someone shoots a missile, this thing is the last chance to down beforeissile it hits our ship and potentially

sinks and ended might kill thousands of lives. you are willing to use it in the fully autonomous mode because it is your last chance to save a lot of lives and you are using it over into oceans of the possibility of collateral damage is relatively low. in this regard, autonomy is your best chance to actually save the sailors and so it is absolutely acceptable to use it in this mode. it is not as acceptable to use a thomas weapons and other circumstances were collateral damage is infinitely more likely . you are probably not willing to use this in the middle of new york city because you can only imagine what happens to every round and that does not hit deep missile and this can fire 6000 rounds a minute. that is an awful lot of projectiles flying through the air. when it comes to computerized warfare, we have seen fundamental innovations and changes. israel does not always get along

well with its neighbors. ofael does not like the idea any of its neighbors obtaining nuclear weapons. in 1981, the israelis got word the iraqis had built a nuclear reactor and were in the process -- andreaching uranium reaching uranium. israelis were not willing to accept that. they destroyed the reactor and for all intents and purposes, it ended the iraqi air program. would putthat israel an end to it anytime the iraqis nuclear program. it iraqi found out the syrians were building a program using pakistani expertise to get it rolling. they did not want to tolerate a nuclear program with a hostile neighbor but these syrians had

also purchased a first-rate air defense is system and the israelis were not confident there missiles could penetrate, retreat without paying enormous cost. so the israelis inserted a commando theme. they'vein the ground, managed to dig up a portion of the fiber optic network that controlled the or defense network and uploaded a virus. that virus caused the radars to be convinced there was nothing to see. that it was just a nice, placid night. the first hint these syrians had they were under attack was the missile hitting the program and wiping it out. this is what it enabled the israelis to do. fast forward a few years. virusy have heard of a

minimum thed at two resources of a nation in order it.otentially create it used an incredibly sophisticated system in order to effectively seek out a very specific type of machine and powers centrifuges. centrifuges that are used to separate uranium. somebody, and nobody has taken credit for it yet, but the leading candidates are the united states and israel. i am not revealing classified information, i have no clue was them. but they are the most likely because it was an iranian nuclear facility that had it. some he wandered around the parking lot of the facility and dropped a couple of thumb drives. flash drives. and somebody else came one and went, flash drives. i bet somebody will want the

back. they picked it up and walked inside and plugged it into a computer to try to figure out who belong to to give it back. the moment they did that, they ed stucknet which then search for the centrifuges and made a tiny change and that tiny change caused the centrifuges to spin up and spend down. spin up and spin down. just enough action to cause the centrifuges to fail. they did not know they were the victim of a cyber attack. they thought maybe they worry in compton at building centrifuges. they thought maybe they did not have the know-how to create a nuclear program. it eroded their confidence and we can there believe in what they were doing. it was not until a couple years later when an antivirus firm located and pointed out the westence of the virus that

knew what caused it to fail. without committing a single act of war, somebody shut down the iranian nuclear program for about three years. time,ut the same somebody, and it may have been the same somebody, i do not know, started ss and 80 iranian nuclear scientist. that was more overt. thing,r viruses was one shooting people is more obvious. i do not know who was responsible, i just know there are an awful lot of people not excited about the idea of in iranian nuclear program. and here we have this possibility of enabling it to be shut down without doing the classic attack that would characterize it as an act of war. when it comes to military robotics, this is a longer thing than most people realize. military robotics are not new.

you can go back on most 100 years to have a very rudimentary system. flying torpedo. basically, an airplane packed full of explosives designed to have its engines shut off after a certain time of flight that will cause it to just dive on whatever is beneath it. this was innovated by charles kettering, it was not ready for world war i. it did not work well and it was not dependable said this was probably good. it was just as likely to come down on your own forces as it was on the enemy. on the verge of world war ii, the soviets came up with a driven tank.otely everything about it was normal but it had no humans inside of it. the humans that controlled it sat in a nether tank and couple miles away and controlled it via radio signals sent through line of sight. it did not work very well. it was clunky.

they had toority destroy themselves when the finnish people they were fighting against realize they could climb up on top, go down inside, pull out the radio control and say, hey, i've got a tank! ! brand-new tank just for me the germans created the goliath. a 200-pound wire driven miniature vehicle designed to be driven at underneath military enemy tanks and detonated. a landmine that moves around. you cut the wire, does not move it anymore. the vast majority of their goliaths wound up being stockpiled and never use. and finally the v-one flying bomb. the buzz bomb. these proved to be effective. much like the kettering bug, a jet attached to a bomb. you launch it and hope. you can target the city -- a

city the size of london and have a reasonable chance of hitting it. you cannot target a specific address and have any chance other than dumb luck of hitting it. but a city with lots of inhabitants, it can face a bombardment which they have no real response. one british tried to shoot them down, they discovered they were harder to shoot down. the is is way to take it down is to fly up next to it, but your wingtip under its wing tip and tip it over. that will cause it to crash. not the safest of activities. not the best idea for how to spend a sunday afternoon. moving forward into at least my lifetime, the pioneer. used for artillery-spotting. use it to fireto projectiles 20 or more miles. they could fly it over head,

looked down, and tell how to adjust fire. effective into easy to use. this is a target drone from the vietnam air. somebody came up with the idea you can put a television camera on it, flight of her hostile space, and now no longer have to use human pilots on reconnaissance missions. overwe start applying them china. china was intervening in the vietnam war, we wanted to see what they were up to and get advanced warning. the chinese started shooting them down and when they shut them down, they could not figure out why they could never capture a pilot. apparently, an american pilots were good at hiding. but there is no pilot. there are a lot of these things on display in chinese military museums that they point out as american fighter planes they shot down. researcher, insh my opinion, and incredibly creepy guy.

very smart. he had an idea, i will get a microchip implanted in my wrist and use the microchip to measure the electrical impulses of the human nervous system to figure out at what frequency and him are just the human body controls itself. after a long medical study, they decided they would let him do it to himself so he hadn't surgically implanted. he figured out which nerves in his wrist controlled which nerves in his hand. he maps it to an artificial hand, which is then able to mind.l with his he closes his hand into a fist, it closes. he opens, it opens. revolutionary. pioneering. a mind-controlled prosthetic. that is not creepy that is neat. creepy as when kevin's wife has a similar microchip implanted into her wrist and they are now able to control each other's

hands. able to control each other's hands with their own mind. two was only -- almost decades ago. you can imagine where this is going. getting close to the modern era. the reaper is almost the same size as the predator but much more powerful. it can carry up to 14 missiles instead of just two. this man has a cybernetic hand controlled by his mind. it has been implemented onto his arm. he is capable of picking up an egg with one hand, not the human hand, and cracking it. i cannot do that. i have perfectly that hands and make a mess. this guy has such good motor control in that has a four-speed system. which means he can close his eyes and tell you when he is touching something and how it feels like just how it goes back to his mind. the israelis built ireland on

with our missile system. a much more sophisticated missile system capable of tracking inbound missiles and choosing whether or not to shoot them down. it does not just an gauge everything that flies overhead, it calculates where that thing is going to come down. a populated area? or is it unpopulated, and watch -- in which case i should let it fly off and it will be safe. this has massively reduce the number of casualties israelis are facing from rockets out of gaza and the northern regions from southern lebanon. boston dynamics. this is build a robotic mule. gear. carry 300 pounds of it can move on for like a human. it can move up 30 degrees which is a high slope. it can walk on heights. it can be programmed to follow

an individual human being where ever it they go. is, american troops that are moving through urban areas tend to be loaded down with hundred pounds of gear. they would be incredibly useful of they could offload that to some kind of machine that could keep up with them. idea.s the and finally, the atlas robot. designed to be able to go into dangerous locations. the first time we saw this an operation that was sent into the are in japan to see whether there was a reactor leak under way. and just roared the robot. a much better alternative than destroying a human. the radiation levels were so high it would've killed anybody who went in to see what was going on. this machine is designed to go where humans go. it is one of the red cases where you actually want the machine to have roughly the same humanoid

in mind because it could move in the same vehicles. d.c. ram is the land version of that closed and weapon system. we put this into bases in iraq that were being shelled. of locating and engaging projectiles as small as 16 millimeters. it can head very small targets. defense, wetment of like to think of ourselves as environmentally friendly. when this projectiles come down, they are designed to do no collateral damage and not harm the environment. no depleted uranium being thrown around. it is nice, isn't it? it is because we care. where is this man going? here's quadriplegic. he is wearing a mind-controlled exoskeleton that allows him to walk and move. it is a slow system right now. he is not moving at human speed but it is a heck of a lot better

than the alternative. this individual is wearing a leg that is controlled by his mind. it allows them to move had regular walking speed. in both of these cases, the research was highly advanced thanks to all of the casualties we were taking from improvised explosive devices interact. there are an awful lot of american service personnel who have lost a limb and the dod has into advancedrt materials to give them a better way of life. the direction we are going with than having, rather a human being driving them, you would have them moving along the side or in place of that your human troops. nervousrts to make me because you can program those things to engage human targets without intervention. nobody in the loop saying, yes. shoot.

no, do not shoot. you can equip them with an audio detection system that picks up the sound of gunfire and automatically pivots to return fire. so if you have a problem with snipers in in a urban area you can deploy these and if the sniper takes a shot, you have the ability to immediately should on the sniper position. it reduces coalition casualty, but on the other hand it will not take long before the opponents start to chain children and front of sniper positions and this is the way they will intentionally take advantage of our ethics, our morality, and our superior technology. with aogy came out facial recognition system that can compare up to 30 million faces in a minute and do so at a high angle profile. about 20 years ago, the u.s. air force came up with a system designed to essentially fly over

a battlefield, look for targets, in fire without human intervention. i want you to take a moment to imagine what happens if you are the hitachi facial recognition fully economist loitering vehicle. it loiters over a city front to four hours looking for the individuals whose pictures you uploaded and then it starts firing missiles at them. missiles, itout of fires itself in a final projectile as a kamikaze system. these are the things that keep me up at night. where are we going? swarms. swarms are all the rage. you can a very complex behaviors out of the simple devices. a few years ago, they came out robotsry small ground with very simple programming.

move around and look around. stay away from other robots. report back. simple. they are capable of mapping a city the size of new york. every building, every street, with just 100 robots in two weeks. not a human being driving them. they are just wandering around mapping. this is assuming there are not being run over by cabbies or kicked by angry new yorkers. but the principle, if it was an empty city they could map it quickly. fire andtchblade is a forget weapon. this is where we are going in terms of shooting and not thinking about it anymore. one of the problems is, who was responsible if this thing makes a strike on a target that we would consider to be illegal. who do you blame? you cannot punish a robot in any way at least that it would

consider punishment. you cannot force a robot to feel bad about what it has done. in theory, you could punish the commander who released the weapon. you could punish whoever made the decision to ship it to the theater. you could punish whoever wrote software for it. but history would indicate that is not going to happen. even the perpetrator of them eli massacre, who was responsible for the death of about four hundred civilians, his punishment was four months of house arrest. so what are the chances we will hold somebody responsible? what are the chances we will write it off as an unfortunate situation? itm a pessimist so i think is the latter. i have a final case study from the news. you are probably familiar. on were all a lucky.

anwar al-alaqui. he is born in the united states, becomes radicalize, becomes the essential -- becomes essentially the spiritual leader. he is doing his best to inspire attacks against the west. he is being fairly successful. some of his known associates are the fort hood shooter. the underwear number. the man who tried to set off a bomb in times square. also associated with at least three of the 9/11 attackers. in day 15-year-boy who tried to detonate a bomb at a christmas tree lighting ceremony in portland, oregon. he spent a lot of time recruiting individuals for what

he saw as the quintessential fight against the united states. few years of life are spent in hiding. on the run. living in yemen. he knows he has been placed on the united states designated list.ed kill effectively the list maintained by the treasury department that is the kill or capture but the emphasis is on kill. as a u.s. citizen, he thinks he to have constitutional protection. that tea has effectively been judged and sentenced to execution without a criminal trial. his father sues in a federal court to get him taken off the list on the grounds that tea is an american citizen and has not done anything technically against the law.

it is a great area whether or not what he did technically violated u.s. law. something a court would probably decide. the case gets thrown out because his father does not have the legal standing to bring that law in theourt of united states. according to the courts, only anwar himself can file the lawsuit and to file the lawsuit he would have to come back to the united states to files said lawsuit. which is not willing to do. he is convinced if he ever tries to come back you will never seek the light of day again. so he has made his peace, he is living on the run. on a number of occasions, he is almost killed by american remotely-piloted aircraft. in one case, on may 5, 2011, the predator fired on a vehicle that we thought was curing him but he

had swept vehicles with operatives. but on october 14, and 2011, he and another american were killed a missile.or firing to a certain extent, i am not sad. i don't care that he is not part of this earth anymore but the precedent has me nervous. because in theory, article three of the u.s. constitution divides treason. -- defines treason. was he guilty of treason? i think he was. was he given a trial? no, he was not. in fact, and the executive branch made the decision they would execute him at the first chance regardless. it would have been harder to get permission to place a wiretap on his cell phone then it was to put him on the kill list.

he could is the wiretap would have required oversight. moving further into the constitution, the fifth amendment tells us you cannot be held to answer for a capital crime without an indictment of a grand jury and without opportunity for a trial. the sixth amendment says the trial needs to be speedy and public. you're allowed to confront the witnesses against you and you have the right to witnesses for canceled. none of these were true in the case of anwar. i understand. in wartime, there is a gray area and killing him probably saved american lives. but there is a kicker to the story and that is his teenage son. abdul had not seen his father in more than five years. he is living in yemen with his grandparents and he hears a rumor of where his father might

be. in so being a teenager, 16-years-old, he is impulsive. he decides he is going to run away from home and though to this town where he has heard his father is living and find his dad. is thatdoes not know his father had been killed two weeks before. hisas not even in the town father was in. so, he heads off. his grandparents runs off and he has left them a note saying he has gone to find his father and where is going. they called ahead to the town the kid is headed to where they have some relatives and say, look, he is looking for his father, could you pick him up at the bus station, hold onto them for a few days and we will come pick him up. with 04, etc.. spends a few days meeting cousins, wandering around the town in don the last day before he is supposed to board a bus and go back on, he is sitting in

a coffee shop with six other teenagers when a hellfire missile strikes and hit some all. it strikes with such force and power that the family is not able to distinguish the remains and they bury all seven of them in a common grave. as you might imagine, the family protests this action and asks, why did you kill our children? the federal response was, this man was a 21-year-old al qaeda operative act of lee planning operations against the united states. said, no.he family he was not. he was 16-years-old. born in denver. not an al qaeda operative. look at his facebook profile. kid is not in any way, shape, or form radicalize. you killed him because of who has father was. the government came back and said, well, actually we did not

kill him. we killed the guy next to him and he happened to be sitting next to the wrong person because we were aiming at a bomb maker him.egypt sitting next to if you sit next to bad people, sometimes bad things happen. the problem is, the cia had that atb maker under surveillance the same time and he was in egypt, not yemen. government has not commented on this case and i do not think they will. there is nothing good you can say about this incident. a lott is indicative of of our decision-making in the 21st century. military robotics have made us feel like we can wage war with impunity. that we can face it -- we can have a war without the possibility of facing consequences on our own. useas eroded when we

conflict resolution. it fightot mean we can wars with impunity and the reason why is the enemy does not just sit there and take the punishment raining down from robots in the sky. they cannot shoot down the robots and if they could a would not be very satisfying. instead, they look at other targets. but those targets don't tend to be uniformed personnel who have adopted an accepted the risk is part of service. rather, the organizations being targeted are aiming for civilians. embassy personnel, tourists who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. back by placing bombs on civilian airliners. leaving car bombs in crowded areas. they do not just absorb the punishment and are not going to follow the rules. so my argument is not that we

should give up military robotics. that is not going to happen. but we do need to think about where it is we're trying to go and what it is we're trying to produce. we choose the wrong scenario. think you for your kind attention. [applause] mr. springer: i believe if you want to ask questions, their microphones on the side so they can record you and know we said forever. >> how much is the cyber war responsible for the destruction of isis and al qaeda. those terrorist groups that retreated a great deal. : it is a call whether they metastasized or retreated. al qaeda has a lot more branches now than it did in 2000 one.

that may be because its sanctuaries had been destroyed. it is difficult for it to group together large amounts anywhere. but those organizations have also received the allegiance of a lot of very terrifying groups. do not realize the deadliest terror organization is boko haram based in nigeria. it has warned its allegiance to the islamic state. al-shabaab has worn its allegiance to al qaeda and is now being swayed toward the islamic state. it is a judgment call whether this has eroded their abilities or hindered their opportunity to engage in operations or not. a lot of what we are doing is manned aircraft because we are launching so many of them and they can carry so many munitions. while it has that been pushed back, in terms of the number of casualties, it is

still an incredibly dangerous organization. i'm not sure this is eroding their power at all. >> do you think the russians were in violation of the roles of four in ukraine with the troops they sent in hand basically were not in russian uniforms? yes.pringer: the so-called russian volunteers, these patriotic russians? i would call it was a violation of war. in anere openly engaged invasion of sovereign territory. that is something the russians have done recently, for example in the case of georgia in 2008. the russians said, there is an ethnic majority of russians, we to protectonsibility them from the evil overlord georgian government. in georgia, they use the same argument. they said these people are

russian and the ukrainian government is mistreating them so we have a right to invade. according to the u.s. charter, they do not have the right to invade but they do have a veto. if the u.n. wanted to pass some kind of a security council resolution to condemn or send forces, the russians could veto it. they have the legal right and they do not have to explain the veto and there is no mechanism to override the veto. so is it legal to go out of territoryer sovereign to engage? no, it is not. does it mean the organization will do anything about it? i doubt it. the can is trying to intervene that close to russia, that far from our bases while we are engaged in some and other conflicts is a really difficult proposition and without american leadership, the rest of the world is not going to do it.

>> i was wondering when artificial intelligence is integrated with robots and goes to war, what is a realistic ?ontingency plan to kill them what may go out like in the movies and kill? mr. springer: i don't know. hide in a basement. surrender. in theory, you can program robots to have a kill switch to down. in theory, you could use an be toomagnetic pulse may fry there is electronics. but you can shield against those, too. if you design killer robots and make them powerful enough to engage in war, shutting them down if you made a programming error could be a bloody proposition. the last thing i want to see is a fight between humans and robots, even if it is our robots into humans we do not lie, that

is a bad idea. here's a tidbit, the united states army right now is kept at 480,000 robots -- humans. there is no limit to how many robots you cannot. you can build one million, 2 million and send them in combat. a lot of americans would say, as long as no american troops died, it is no big deal. we never value summary else's life as much as we do our own. so the award of, we could fight a war and not lose any of our own citizenry could prove irresistible to some people unless you educate them on the ramifications. answers have any good other than to try to stop people from building them in the first place. >> a lot of what i know about robots in the military comes from the film "eye in the sky." how much of that is realistic is not about the

ability to cordon off and area -- how much of that would be realistic? mr. springer: it has been a long time since i have even come into passing with it, but you can program and entire area to be completely off limits. we am done it before, we do it right now. we have areas considered for lack of better terms, kill boxes, and others that are completely off limits. whether it is humans or robotics. if you want to cordon off an area, you could. they do not care to be particularly accurate when they are depicting robots of war because the reality is far more exciting in some ways in some ways and far more terrifying and deeply depending on how you think about it. i would not depend on hollywood to get it right.

they would have you watch a crime show and say, keep the villain on the line for 30 seconds or we can trace them. trace takes less than one second. that is why 9-1-1 knows exactly where you are when you call. but it is a hollywood device that works well so it has become kind of a hollywood trope. but there are so many robots now, people think it is cute and cuddly and the star wars movie has the one that rolls around and he is a lot of fun and not scary. unless you put some sea-four on him in which casey is a rolling. that might seem far-fetched except american troops did that with a robot that looked like it was built out of an erector set. it weighs about eight pounds. they put a mine on in and send it forward and said, well, if any of these guys come out of the shadows we're just going to

did -- detonate this rolling land mine. people are capable of horrific innovations. in that case, they did not use a but i would not rely on hollywood to give you the best take. ofwe have heard stories orrators in the military under military control that have a uniform on and also heard stories about cia and intelligent officers to push the kill buttons. is quite innk that the laws of war. title 10,er: we have the code that governs all military operations. title x employee, i am. title 50 governs the intelligence services. the 1970's, president gerald ford issued what has been referred to as the assassination ban. members of the

intelligence agencies are not allowed to kill people and in particular are not allowed to assassinate people. why? and failed a bunch of times to kill fidel castro. it is like watching a wile e. coyote cartoon. we actuallygars, tried to do that. somebody laced a suit with the so when he put in on it would kill him. so no more assassination, let's not do that. but then president clinton created an exception for leaders terroristn organizations. president clinton said, the band means you cannot kill foreign heads of state and it is ok for intelligent officers --

intelligence officers to target al qaeda or other organizations that we have said are terrorists and so we are going to put you on this list and give you fair warning. so things like predator, things like reapers, the vast majority of strikes by those aircraft, particularly outside of afghanistan and iraq have not uniformeded out by air force personnel. some have been carried out by been carried out by contractors working for the cia. it creates a cut-out. it divorces you further in further away from the rolls and makes it easier. the intelligence agencies are better at hiding what they are doing, who is responsible for the decision to kill, to strike, etc.. it becomes harder to untangle who is responsible if you make it a mistake. area.a great you could conceive of those individuals as mercenaries which

have fallen completely out of law. in international you could also conceive of them as agents of the united states government, in which case they would theoretically be protected. i don't think there is a good answer. >> two things that are stopping the expansion of robotics is the budget. predator costs billions of dollars and there are only so many people that can create them. you do not think that is going to stop it from becoming a dominant form of warfare. i would like to know why. mr. springer: first of all, the united states is always willing to spend more money than blood. that is our thing. in world war ii, the germans would say, you cannot fight against the americans because they fight 10 times as much

artillery as they need. and it is because united states was willing to sacrifice firepower for human power and this is an extension of that. you're right, the predator costs thet of money there must of -- most of the cost is the sensor ball. the stuff you strap onto it. out, and american infantry person is also incredibly expensive. not only just to pay them a salary, he's been more than a quarter million dollars training them to do their basic job and then another court of a outfitting them with staff and become anyd they kind of a casualty, you might spend millions of dollars on the medical care. millions of dollars on their medical benefits for veterans. in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, you can mass-produce the machines and stock while them. you can just have them sitting around until you want to engage in a conflict which is harder to do than with human beings.

you have to create the force. there's also the attraction, if you are a civilian decision-makers music, i want you to go do ask, there is a possibility a human will say, no. it is unethical, illegal, immoral. robots do not talk that. they do what they are told and i can make them very attractive if reallyt to be a controlling leader. right now, as you know, thanks to the constitution, the military is subordinate to civilian control and that can cause frustration. sometimes the military feels they are not being listened to. they are the experts but these civilians want to tell them how to do things. but there have not been any instances in american history where the military flat out refused to do well was asked of them in terms of military missions. times one been plenty nonmilitary missions where they have said, no, that is not our thing, we cannot do that.

robots do not talk back. while there might be an initial large investment, they cost almost nothing to operate. you have to replace munitions, give them a battery charge, and that is it. what we're saying is these things are becoming more and more attractive. so if you go to the north korean-south korean border, they have started to build and deploy century robots. one of the attractive sides of this is you do not have cap personnel patrolling. you can of a robot that has senses and can see and infrared spectrum, uv spectrum, and so on. one of the other attractive aspect is, the century robots do necessarily use force. you are willing to risk a robot. you can arm a robot with a taser or teargas and that might allow you to save lives on both sides. that is not necessarily what those sentries are armed with, a

hostile border that's been it weren't for 60 years. are $20 trillion in debt. we seem to be comfortable with wrecking that up. we just passed a $602 billion defense legit. compared to that, we're talking about a few billion dollars being spent on robots right now. so right now i think they're going to wind up becoming the more of option. wouldt in your view constitute an act of war in cyberspace and where would the issue of sovereignty come in? mr. springer: good question. i am going to stall. [laughter] mr. springer: it generally, the threshold for an act of war is in the recipient eyes. if canada launches a border coarse, about of

90% of them live near the border so they will attack. [laughter] a hunterger: if the wanders near the border and is trying to shoot a deer but she is my cousin, that is not an act of war it is an accident. but if the government wants to pick fight, they could say it was. of defensecretary robert gates said and went limp and set up ecowas that the u.s. reserves the right to reciprocate for any kind of cyber attack. if you do anything in cyber that we can plausibly call an active war, if we think it is to our advantage we will call it an act of war. for me, an act of war either needs to cause casualties or significant property damage and needs to be done by that purpose.

it cannot the accidental. not, oh my gosh oh is trying to lesbian nausea and accidentally shut down a power grid and some people died in car accidents. i would not classify it that same way. it turns out, it depends on who we thought launched that attack and we might very well classify it as an act of war so we would have the opportunity for recalibration -- retaliation if they deserved that. if i pull out a gun and shoot alan luxembourg, you would know i did it because i was right in front of them. phone, forll out my all you know i was texting my wife. so there is a gray area of what is and is not an act of war and it is hard to decipher and right now we do not have an answer.

conflict,ry kind of it is the aggrieved nation that tends to make its on whether ones to go to war or not. in 2007, when russia released war against estonia, estonia is the most wired country on earth. is a cashless society. every transaction is done electronically and the russians shut down their whole internet for the whole country for three weeks over a tiny political issue, essentially the estonians offended russia by trying to move a statue of a page russian soldier away from the city center into a garden and the russians got angry. was that an act of war to shut down the entire estonian economy? to shut down the estonian power grid? to shut down the estonian banking industry?

you could call it enacted for. damaging. tiny estonia, population 3 million, do you really want to pick a fight with your russian neighbor and what are you going to do in response. worker retaliation would of depression's are too good at cyber and they knew it would come. so what did the estonians do? the apologize and put the statue back and waited for to be over. was an inactive an act of war? yes, probably. did nato define it as an active war? they probably thought so, but they said no. they didn't want to get involved. they father experienced effects of remote-controlled glider arms in italy at salerno and he was a casualty. hadad said if the germans

continued with that offensive, they would've pushed into the sea and change the outcome of the war. why didn't we work on something also during the second world war? content with using infantrymen? my father was in the infantry in salerno. on that?t we work we worked on the atomic bomb? we pick and choose which technology to pursue and one of the technologies we work pursuing that cost almost as much as the atomic bomb was the be-29 that was going to deliver it. so many of our top scientists and engineers were going into that. were going into the system that allowed the art artillery to explode when a got near a target. directr phenomenally defense system but we were terrified the enemy might get a

hold of it. we got a hold of some of their glide bombs and started to reverse engineer them but the problem was these were jet engines and the germans were so ahead of us in terms of jet engines that even as you try to reverse engineer and bring out your copies, the enemy had a significant head start. they had done all of the experiments for how do you actually controlled jet engines and produce them and effectively. so we did take the technology and tried to produce our own copy from the captured and we captured as many german engineers and scientists as we can about them to united states and put them into our high technology programs, so in alabama, for example, we built an enormous weapons programs built entirely around german rocket science. westernrendered to the allies rather to surrender to

the soviets coming in. we were far enough behind we did not prioritize it because we're -- we wereards prioritizing other things we thought would win the war. so we had to put up with the enemy having an advantage and that is the danger when you face technology -- a technologically advanced enemy. >> you mentioned individual robots. i would love you to comment about how hardened we are at a micro level in terms of individual predator drones and , which ise that wonderful and protects us completely against people like isis doing something electronically and kind of on a macro-strategic level, how many things are computer driven offense hardened against a more robust electronic

enemy, say a russia or china? hardening is possible but expensive which means we don't typically do it, particularly if we are facing an enemy that does not have the capacity to do anything. the islamic army does not have this capability so we have not had to harden against him. when it comes to a, the life expensive -- the life expectancy if you want to flight against ap or you could measure in seconds. shooting one is not difficult. it cruises at about 100 miles an hour and its radar cross-section is obvious. we use it with impunity right now because the enemy cannot do anything about it. hardening against it electromagnetic energy is in the space program because paes is a harsh environment and satellites in particular have had to be hardened against things.

the sun emits all kinds of damaging radiation so we have had to learn how to protect these components long-term. so we know how to do it, but it is expensive. it weighs down whatever you are trying to harden so if you want to have a lord time of 24 hours with a footage or you cannot harden it with electronics right now. one of the things we face and fear is when you remotely control something, that means something else could, at least in very common take control. a few years ago, a sentinel was aning over ran and landed on iranian highway. and the iranian said, we took over your aircraft. no, they did not. basically broadcast a gps signal at a stronger wattage than the one that normally broadcast from satellites. they overwhelm the gps receiver and convince them it was somewhere else.

oversaid, you are right the air filled and in thought it should land. it is not taking over but it was a clever way to bring it down. to be incapable of reverse engineering the thing but it does not mean the chinese and russians are incapable should they choose to sell components to them. so every time you build these remote-controlled items, you run the risk that others can control them. that is what pushes towards autonomy. if the machine runs itself, it is not as susceptible to outside control, unfortunately that means your own control. when it comes to things like emt, setting off a pulse is not as easy. the erratically it could be done, hollywood makes it seem simple. you just not giving her's out

the electronics of an entire city. it is not like that. jamming it is more of a problem than some kind of a pulse to knock out the whole thing. : final question. we, the good guys, are using will not bad guys, it be pretty when the tables are turned which is not long enough. do you know if any diplomatic initiative or thoughts about andng chemical nuclear logical? mr. springer: we have a number of treaties that cover things like biological weapons convention, when you say, there are horrible things you should not use. we selectively said, these are really bad. regimes, for example the syrian regime recently accused of using a chemical

weapon. sarin gas. there are people that will violate the rules. in theory, there is a nuclear nonproliferation airy that means no other nations are going to start and to develop nuclear weapons program. in practice, that is not true. that haveories do it chosen to develop their own system and there are signatories who have chosen to ignore the provisions. there is a social movement to ban autonomous weapons. significantt been a push and the international legal arena yet. there are a lot of individual scholars and theorists saying, you know, we could save trouble if ibm these horrible things before you use them. unfortunately, that does not seem to be the way humans work. the chemical weapons paneling came about after world war i when we saw how horrible chemical weapons were and how indecisive they were. they did not win the war, they just made it worse for

everybody. and in some way, that is how i see autonomous weapons quite. you are not going to win the war unless you are facing and upon you could of been without them. it will make the war worse. let's say had pathetically, we get in a war with ap or competitor who is also using robotics. let's just say our robots destroy theirs. you think they are going to surrender now? human history says, no they will not. no, they will keep fighting. talkingarly if we're about a war of conquest rather than a limited right. in that case, your robots are going to have to deploy against their human troops and they are probably going to be very effective at killing them. but humans will fight a lot longer than hindsight would indicate is a practical idea, particularly in wars of national survival. and what i say because i am a pessimist, is that if you build enough of these machines you are

going to feel almost a compulsion to use them before summit he advantage over you and you are going to wind up using these and you may create one of the worst human atrocities in history without actually changing the nature of the state interaction in the world today. so, on that happy note -- [applause] >> on behalf of the new york historical society and the foreign policy research center, i want to thank paul springer for sharing with us remarks that offer clarity and judicious miss in approaching a very complex technical issue we face as a country and in the world. i think all of you for joining us. there are a lot of things going on here at the society. come back often. thank you very much. [applause]

announcer: interested an history tv? visit our website. you can see our upcoming schedule or watch a recent program. -- road to re-house the white house rewind and is notten say that 50 the new 30, it is the new 50 and it looks good. it's ok. people ought to own their age. we shouldn't be talking about being over 50 as decline. aarp ceo talks, about the health and financial challenges older americans face and what aarp