these are military men asking the questions as well as civilians. during this time, we'll put together a number of different war planes. most of these war plans -- they are declassified now. most these war plans envision a soviet attack into iran, the middle east, going after the oil fields. they also based upon the idea nobody is up for a deliberate war at this time. remember the soviet union had biblical scale discussion as the offenses in the east and so they are trying to rebuild their country. almost everybody in the state department feels that if war comes, it's going to come about due to some misunderstanding or some kind of escalation of an event that was not intended to be an offensive threat. these are the war plans that were going to develop during this time. they reflect world war ii methodologies. they haven't yet come to grips

with the idea nuclear warfare is something completely different. they are using the models based upon the world war ii experiences, not upon this idea that 20 kilitons and 30 kilitons is more bang for your buck. many supporters say it's just another weapon so what's the big deal? what difference does it make if the source of ignition is conventional or fission? what difference does it make? the first one they put together is called pincture. it will target 20 areas with 50 bombs. the air force comes to the conclusion that what is a city? it's a collection of industry. well, if you have 20 kiliton bomb, if you drop it between the two of them you get a two for one. you get a bonus effect. that's the term they use, bonus

effect with your atomic weapons. in 1947 they'll come out with broiler that will drop 34 bombs on 24 cities, seven moscow, two leningrad, and they expect to have 100, 200 bombs in their supply line they can drop for later events. then p 1948 and they are going to drop 210 bombs on 70 urban areas and they are hoping to have a psychological effect on the soviet union. they are going to be doing these plans with forward bases in egypt and the uk. we have to deploy our bombers to these forward locations, then they will fly into the soviet union. the last plan they have off tackle which does include the guidance that came out from nsc 20/4, will bomb 70 cities with 147 bombs.

so you can see these war plans are based upon large amounts of weapons, large amounts of airplanes and competent air crews to deliver these things. now, when the half moon plan gets approved, it goes on during the time of the berlin airlift. things are starting to get tense between the united states and soviet union. at the same time, what happens is that the debate between the atomic energy commission and military over custody of weapons is going on. we are quilling about who should have these bombs while this threat or this event is going on. here is what truman says about it during the argument. you've got to understand this is a military weapon used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people and not for military uses. it has to be treated different from rifles and cannons.

if you are a nuclear planner, i know there's one in here, what kind of guidance do you have? nothing very defensive about what i should hit, how i should hit is, if you are a plaern, you're stuck with a vacuum. what is our end state? one thing we teach our majors up at command jones staff college what is your desired end state? once you figure that out, now you work backward to put together a plan. these end states are kind of nebulous. you're talking about nuclear concentration here. he said we needed an ample supply of bombs. these bombing campaigns are going to be a mixture of conventional and unconventional atomic bombs, a mixture of both. it isn't until april 2, 1947, that harry truman is first briefed on the atomic stock

pile. for two years, we have bombs and his quote is, we have enough to do the job. that's what he would tell people up until this time. he has no idea how many bombs he actually has in the nuclear stock pile at this time. as i said, the mach 3 bomb is the only bomb you have in the inventory until 1945. it is a pain in the rear to put this thing together. it is a hand made bomb. most people don't realize is the hiroshima and nagasaki weapons were science experiments put together by ph.d.s and physicists who understood the intricacies of nuclear physics. these bombs are made by hand. it takes about three days to put a fat man bomb together. because this is an implosion

device, there are various lenses they put in this with the explosives to push this implosion in. these lenses are hand cast and glued in place by hand. this is not a mass production of atomic weapons. it takes about three days to do this. by the way, bomt's good for about three days then the batteries will wear out. you've got to take the bomb all apart again and start over. so you have some technical difficulties trying to do this. and again, it weighs 10,000 pounds. the only plane that can fly it is a specially configured b-29. later on the b-50 will come out. it can carry it, but you have to be specially configured to hold this bomb. in 1947, we have components on hand for seven components on

hand for seven. number of bombs we actually have in the stock pile in 1947? when harry truman gets to that number, one of his aides reports he looked gray. you have pieces of bombs. you don't have any actual bombs. and by the way, the guys who designed these bombs, what the military referred to as the long hairs because they are civilians with long hair, most of them went back to academia. these guys have the knowledge. and they find these bits and pieces of bombs. they don't know which piece goes to which bomb. you literally have lost the corporate knowledge regarding how you put these bombs together. and they're trying to reconstruct some of the components and this is an actual event. they actually try to find the

tool and dye maker who made some of these pieces and asked, how did you figure they need to be this big or this large? one guy goes, i don't know. i used a coke bottle as my model for this component. this is really a haphazard kind of affair. what you have is bombs that don't have a shelf life, that are in pieces, that have to be assembled, have to be assembled by hands with men who understand the physics of putting these things together. so you have a logistics problem just putting bombs together. remember our war plans were dependent upon dozens, in some cases hundreds of bombs, and i ha have -- we have enough components that are being made

for one mk iii bomb every two months. owe cording to one los alamos scienti scientist -- we are losing peop people. to put it bluntly, we had louisly bombs. when the aec first gets established, they send some of the commissioners down to visit the air force base where the components were held by the atomic energy commission. one of them says, we just discovered this atomic defense that we had doesn't exist. we don't have a stock pile. it was assumed that we had a stock pile. we didn't have a pile and we didn't have a stock.

another one will say the same thing. we had a lot of nuclear capsules and cores, but we didn't have any weapons, we just had lots of pieces. so you have a problem, not only with the stock pile itself, but with the gentlemen who understand how to put these things together and design weapons because they all went home. the war time emergency evaporates with vj day. these guys go back to academia. what happens, these places lose their motivation, the talent leaves and it becomes very mundane existence there within the los alamos scientific community because of what happened. now, we're not done with the problems yet, folks. the story gets worse, okay? obviously, you make fissional components with reactors. the problem is this is rudimentary technology here. we are trying to figure this

stuff out. we like this idea using plutonium because it's relatively easier to make. you take slugs of u2-35 which we are making a lot of now. it's a better use of fissionable materials. you send these little slugs of u235 reactor. what comes out the other end is plutonium. 239. the problem is the reactor is getting hot and the tubes you send the pellets through is starting to warp. so the pellets can't get all the way through. so as a result, we have to shut down some of the reactors. so i already don't have enough bombs as it is. the fissionable material i'm making is also being reduced appreciably over time. plutonium production will stay at almost a standstill until 1945. as early as 1947, the joint

chiefs of staff will say it appears atomic bombs fissionable materials cannot be metaphor years. go back to our war plans we had in place during this time. also, i'll show you another graphic here. here's the amount of energy put out by the hanford reactor in washington state. you can see here is the war time effort in 19456789 it drops off appreciably until 1949 when we start it up again. up top you can see the reactor. talked about people leaving the atomic enterprise. at the end of the war you have about 100,000 people total and it drops down to about 40,000,

just a few months late er later. we realize we have to train guys to put these bombs together because the long hairs all left. they are going to start putting together what they call the armed forces special weapons project. we are going to train the smartest young officers that we have on how to put these things together. so imagine this, you're at los alamos lab and you're a ph.d. and now you have this new hot-shot lieutenant come in who is supposed to learn how to put these weapons together. they don't like each other either. the lens designer for the implosion design will say, "these people are going to ask all kinds of stupid questions, be patient with them." so the tension that you see at

the armed forces special weapons project is also reflected again, as i talked about earlier, with regard to the leadership between atomic energy commission and the military. by march 11, 1949 -- excuse me, 1948, a meeting between the head of the military liaison committee and the head of the atomic energy commission lilienthal comes to a head when truman pulls both of them in a room and says, i know you two hate each other's guts, but i expect you two to cooperate. by 1949 it was estimated the armed forces special weapons project could easily assemble 200 mk iii and 40 mk iv bombs a day. this is assuming you have the fissionable materials and components to do that. again, this idea of corporate knowledge, about being able to

put bombs together many. you have a military test that look at bombs and their effect. it's largely military, not scientific. they are going to send armed forces special weapons project people to assist in putting these bombs together. okay. sounds like a great idea. the problem is when you do that, there is nobody left to put bombs together if the war opens up. there is nobody left. they are all out in the pacific. that's how few people you have to actually put the weapons together. actually, they're not going to explode one bomb. they have three. they are not going to explode the last one because of lack of fissionable materials. and to give you a quote -- what

you have here is a farcical arrangement. they need to be trained and familiar with them. they refuse to give up custody over these weapons. how can the military expect to conduct commissions on weapons they have no idea how to put together for a sustained bomber offensive? it isn't until december 1948, 1948, they will do the first exercise of transferring fissionable material from the atomic energy commission to the military, and ahead of the military liaison committee will say it's the best arrangement we can make under the present conditions. it's a highly complex environment. go back to what general spaatz said, quick, fast and short. you've got a problem, you can't

get your hand on the bombs themselves. here's the part i like. the ability to deliver the bombs, airplanes. i'm an airplane guy by trade. it's my thing. i like to count rivets and stuff like that. you have a problem with your ability to deliver the bomb. both in terms of air frames and in personnel themselves. just like the los alamos labs, everybody went back home, what did most of your servicemen do in 1945? they went home. war was over. go back and have 2.3 kids and buy a house, right? that's what they do. the problem is who's left in the air force? it ain't the cream of the crop. okay? according to air force general leon johnson won the medal of honor in 1943, he says, "we just fell apart. it was a riot really."

guys were wanting to go home. 1945/1946, they wanted to deploy five b-29s to europe as a defensive measure. couldn't do it. planes and air cruisers. five. that's it go. back to what you had in the pacific in 1944/1945. hundreds of thousands of airplanes. couldn't deploy five. november 1947, 15% of the u.s. air fleets is down for spare parts alone. in october 1948, curtis lamay takes over command as strategic air command. three months later in january, he orders an all-out practice raid at night over dayton, ohio. he gives his crews a prewar photograph of dayton, ohio. and briefs them to conduct this

raid at 30,000 feet and above which is how they plan to drop these atomic weapons at 30,000 feet. and that night not one aircraft hit the target as briefed. 2/3 of them missed the target by 7,000 feet. the pilots and crews did not want to go above altitude because it's cold. and oxygen systems don't work, and the radars didn't work. according to lamay, this is the darkest night in american aviation history. you also have a problem with the man power. remember, all the guys went home. usually during the war, the army air force has got the cream of the crop. they got the smarter guys. if you had a score of 100 or above, you could get technical training and be a pilot or navigator or even a mechanic. during the period after the war they drop that down to eight.

sometimes down to six because they are not getting the cream of crop. things are getting bad for the air force regarding personnel. remember, the b-29s and b-50s are the only planes that can drop these things. in 1945, america has 26 silver plate b-29s which are used to drop atomic ordinance. 26. that's all you've got. in 1947, 18. and the 18 we have are referred to as well-used. in may of 1947, there is going to be a simulated attack on new york city and they are going to call for 181 aircraft to bomb new york city. again, as an exercise. 80 aircraft are unable to sortie which constituted 44% of the sac

bomber fleet. unable to take off. in april 1949, the standard for air force bombing methodologies was the bomb should land somewhere within 3,000 feet of the intended target. okay? the averages are around 9,000 to 10,000 feet off target. the commander of sac, the gentleman you see on your far right, george kenney, macarthur's air guy during the second world war in the pacific. he's very competent. thing is, he kind of likes the limelight. he gets sent to the u.n. to potentially be in charge of this new u.n. world air force. get a fifth star and be in charge of arguably the most powerful air fleet in the world. we all know that doesn't happen.

however, he is put on the press wagon to be an advocate for a new independent air force. he spends most of his time somewhere else, not at sac headquarters. so he's not seeing to the day-to-day running of strategic air command. he leaves that to his deputy commander, major general mcmullen. mcmullen's nickname behind his back is "cement head." because cement head is requiring every pilot to be a navigator and bombedier. you are doing all these other things. he doesn't like what we refer to as nonrated people, not pilots. doesn't like them. but you have a lot of technical expertise in those who are not

pilots, maintainers, maintenance people, those kinds of things are not rate ed aviators. there is a huge crisis and a talent management problem. many of the air force leadership know there's a problem. as a matter of fact, in spring of 1948, the chief of staff of the air force is going to tack charles lindbergh who we know from "spirit of st. louis" and go, go supply with the crews and tell me what you see. if you go to the yale archives you can find his letter. standards are low, pilot proficiency is unsac. the men are overworked and morale. they sent another pilot to do the same thing and he comes back

with the same assessment. this is america's sunday punch. this is our front line. we have a problem with the bombs and air crews, as it is. and oh by the way, the b-29s and b-50s, well, they can't reach the target in some cases. so you know one of the solutions is? if it can't make it there and back -- i'm going to back up real quick. this is a map of hiroshima. this is where they think all the bombs should drop. that's pointing to 3,000 feet, that ring. the air force standard, 9,000 to 10,000 feet. if you were to drop little boy where the average sac cep is, would you miss a large part of the intended target. this is the average score during

this time. this is the problem you have with the range problem. you're on a one-way trip, pal. you're not coming back. i don't know about you, i don't want to get that as a mission packet. and keep in mind, i only have about 18 b-29s to do this mission, and if i send them on a one-way mission, i'm not getting that airplane back let alone a trained air crew, which is also in short supply. i'm going to expend that, too. it doesn't take a lot of math to figure this one out. i'm a historian and i can figure that math out because it's not really hard. in 1947, one bomb group had four qualified crew chiefs. the entire 15th air force had nine megs to service all of the radars they had in the entire wing.

so you don't have the trained air crews that you need. we have a new airplane coming on the front, the b-36. we are going to fly over the polar routes. we are going to have this new radar that can drop bombs relatively accurately from 20,000 feet. that sounds pretty cool. problem is, the radar has about a 25% abort rate. the b-36 flies at about 319 miles per hour. what big technological aviation feat occurred during the second world war? jets. of course the russians will put out the new mig 15 which had very good speed, high altitude performance. is this vulnerable? this becomes a huge political football between the navy and the air force about where do you want to spend your tax and military dollars at a time when military expenditures are small. the air force and navy want to

run a test to see what the vulnerability is, but nobody can agree on the test parameters. because there is so much at stake. so they never do it. however, chuckati yeager says h flew an f-36 and had 50 hits on 50 passes on the b-36. go back to a world war i model. this is a slow airplane. i need fighter escort. they are going to need four fighter groups to do this. sac has one. that's all they have. in some of the evaluations of these war plans, they estimate that the atomic crews were going to lose about 17% of them when they go into the soviet union. 17%. so again, doesn't take a math

major to figure out after a long period of time you're running out of bombers and crews. also, we need to have good intelligence on where these targets are. the problem is, we don't. the soviet union is 63 times bigger than nazi germany. and during the second world war you had literally thousands of people putting together intelligence for bomber crews so they could hit these targets. the central interpretation unit had 1,500 officers, 12,000 signals groups and through thousands of recon missions a month to target nazi germany. you don't have anything like that subsequent to the war. where you do get your intel from is a project called winger. what happens is you have 1800 civilian and military personnel

interviewing german p.o.w.s who are in the soviet union or japanese, too, to say what did you see? write that down. that it's best we can do. i saw a factory in kiev. it was kind of over here. that's the best you got. there's no spies in the soviet union until 1949. there's no flyover because sovereign soviet air space. we can do some electronic intelligence listening for a little bit. and we can take pictures around the borders, but that's about it. we all know the size of the soviet union, so you don't even have good intel on the targets you want to hit in the first place. again, you didn't even have an instinct what you were trying to hit anyway. okay? also with the nuclear explosions we are having, the tests we are doing, we find out new things about nuclear fission and the explosions and effects it has.

guess who owns that? the atomic energy commission. guess who they don't share that with? strategic air command. the best thing the planners are are the strategic bombing survey results published in 1946 about hiroshima. you don't have good information about the target. you don't have good information about the effect of your weapons. it doesn't get any better. it gets worse. here is a map out of a briefing in 1950 about the state of intelligence. you can see of the 123 targets, half require prestrike recon. no idea what's there. we think we know what's there, but not quite sure. one of the problems you have during this time is sac has in september 1947, it has 55 recon aircraft. in september that year it has

24. it requires four recon wings and it has one. of course this recon has to have after we start the war. there is survivability issue with the recon crews sniffing around. when you go into the soviet union, they probably don't want you there. the threat assessment about soviet anti-aircraft is also a question mark. we don't know what they have. they estimated soviets have 1,600 fighters and 12,000 new mig 15s. these mig 15s, the jet you see up there in the upper left, can fly where your b-36 is flying at. by the end of 1949, russians will have 3,500 mig 15s. this is the same aircraft that

is going to give the b-29 crews in korea a hard time. as a matter of fact the air force has to stop daylight bombing in korea because the migs are so dangerous. now you want to conduct a strategic bombing offensive against the same migs. the soviet anti-aircraft casualties can shoot up to 50,000 feet. and they take a lot of resources from the germans and put those into the pbo strani, their air defense. we don't have a good idea about the radar capabilities, about their anti-aircraft capabilities. we do think, however, they can vector a fighter towards a bomber for about 70 miles and get within two or three miles of the bomber. if it's a b-36, you probably

couldn't see him because he's a big thing. last thing then i am on a short final, to use pilot lingo. if we don't fly the polar routes, we've got to put the aircraft in england or in egypt. that's our forward bases. the problem is in egypt, it's two strips and they're 6,000 feet long. that it's. it's a strip 6,000 feet long. there's no bomb dump, no maintenance spaces no hangars, there's no taxi or parking apron. and by the way, you've got to have a place to assemble the bombs, too. because you can't fly assembled bombs over the united states. it's kind of a bad thing. okay? and by the way, it's a 6,000 foot runway. that's pretty good. the problem is you need at least 10,000 to take off. when nola gay and boxcars took

off, both pilots will say they took every inch of that 10,000 foot runway to get airborne. everybody loves engineers because they build stuff. the problem is at this time, you don't have enough engineers. and by the way, take all your engineers and make this the priority because engineers have other things to do for the army and for the navy. this is assuming you get their priority. you have a significant problem with your runways themselves. in great britain, you can see here they are going to do the same thing. one of the problems you have that they are concerned about, there is no anti-aircraft defense. what if the russians strike? these bases don't have integrated air defense to protect the bombers while they're on the ground. and by the way, go back to the training teams to but these bombs together. i don't have enough of them

either. it talks about team. that's the armed forces special weapons team they are assigning to that particular location. depending what time of the year it is, they might not have those teams available. so with that, folks, i will conclude that there is a lack of coordination between the aec and military, a lack of bomb production, a lack of a clear goal, a lack of a specified war plan, lack of intelligence, lack of a competent bombing force and lack of assassination assets to conduct a bombing campaign. with that, questions. i love the little atomic bomb hat on her head. i saw that and said, i've got to put that in the brief somewhere. that's just awesome. they had a miss atomic bomb during the 1950s. you can find pictures of her. it's kind of strange. your questions, please. sir, you have to use the

microphone. >> i happen to be an atomic veteran. >> great. welcome. >> my question is because we were involved in the atmospheric testing 1962. >> yes, sir. >> between 1950 and 1962, what did you see happen organizationally that brought the aec and military together? >> good question. thank you. thank you for your service as atomic veteran, sir. what happens when lamay takes over in 1949, now you have somebody who is -- i'll use the term mediator, competent organizer, and understands what air crews need to do to do their mission, he is ruthless in his reorganization of sac. one of his subordinates will say when he takes over it was bloody, not killing people but sacking people. and what you have that's happening, not just within

strategic air command itself, but in september of 1950, nsc 68 gets signed by harry truman, initiated beginning of the year but signed in september. and that puts more money into the military, national military establishment, the budget goes from 14.5 billion to 44 billion in one year. it's going to continue that way. then when the truman -- when the eisenhower administration comes on, you have nsc 162 or the new look. the air force budget will jump to 75% ballpark figure of the dod expenses. as the air force gains in capability and air crews, the aec will start to back off. and in the early 1950s, lamay will get the access to the

fissionable materials because he explained to congress why i need to have these things. this is not clearly articulated during this time. this is a new weapon. there's no precedent for it. but we're starting to come to terms with it. does that answer your question, sir? >> thank you. >> yes, sir. >> i don't know exactly where this comes from, but i understand there were some people that at the time you're talking about that wanted to threaten anyone who would dare explode one of these things outside of this country with the immediate attack with these bombs. it would be a bluff according to what you said but are you familiar with that at all? >> i have not seen that, sir. doesn't mean it doesn't exist, i have not heard that before. and given what we know about atomic energy and intricacies of this technology, i think it would be hard pressed for anyone outside of the u.s. to do this.

the russians don't explode theirs until august of '49 and of course they got a lot of their information from us -- [ inaudible ] >> i have not -- there is a move afoot subsequent to the war called the barush plan, they want to make nuclear technology free for everybody, everybody gets it, that way nobody will use it against each other. this is a nice plan. no. it gets shut down in 1946 i believe is when that goes away. we're holding on to this stuff. of course the americans don't want to give that and russians want it. but that goes away, sir and americans will hold onto it. as far as doing any kind of preemptive attack on anybody who has it, i have not come across anything towards that end. >> as a diplomatic tool.

i haven't seen anything towards that end. harry truman will rattle his saber with regard to korea, not because they have an atomic bomb but he wants to get this war over with but it's never -- it wasn't really a real threat but he rattles the saber a little bit. i haven't seen anything in my research that would suggest that. other questions? i've talked enough about one of my favorite topics and i appreciate your patience and letting me indulge myself. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. and the doctor will be out in the hallway with copies of his new book that came out last week -- >> in january. >> a few months behind. and i know he would be happy to chat with you more if you have additional questions. thanks for being us at the national archives. come back and see us again soon.

"washington journal" continues live from the democratic national convention in philadelphia. coming up wednesday morning, chris potter, staff writer for the "pittsburgh post gazette" will preview the dithird day of the convention. then katherin burdock will join anton moore. and martha kuhl will discuss hillary clinton and bernie sanders' records and platforms on labor issues with ryan boyer. watch c-span's "washington journal" live from the

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tv, military historian paul springer talks about the use of cutting-edge technology in the united states military. he argues that the advancement of robotic weaponry in warfare such as drones and artificial intelligence, have revolutionized military affairs, making previous tactics obsolete. the new york historical society hosted this 90-minute event. >> it's my ploesh to introduce my colleague and friend paul springer, senior fellow at foreign policy research institute, but also from his day job at the air command and staff college in alabama. he also taught at west point. he's the author of many books and many coming out on cyber war, military robotics, history of prisoners of war and a load of other topics. he's been on cnn, npr, fox, history channel, discovery channel, national geographic channel, and he's really one of

our most popular lecturers. today we asked him to speak on the revolutions in military affairs, which will give you a quick survey of military history from the 13th century all the way up to today. all in an hour. so i'm sure you will enjoy. please welcome, paul springer. good morning. i'd like to extend a thank you to dale and allen, the foreign policy research institute, both are wonderful organizations that i support and love working. with it's a great opportunity to come and speak to all of you today. so we'll see if i can leave you terrified for the rest of the weekend with some military robotics information for you here. but i'm a historian. by definition, that means i have to back up way too far to tell you the very beginning of the story. before i really get rolls, because i work for the air force, don't worry about reading

the small disclaimer at the bottom there, these are my views, not the views of the air force. these are not the views of the department of defense or views of the u.s. government. they are solely mine unless you really like them, which case everybody else can take credit, too. all right. this is the only slide i'm going to throw at you with an enormous amount of text. i don't expect you to read it. but the point to this entire lecture, if you walk away with nothing else, my fundamental argument is that the world right now is in the middle of what's called a revolution in military affairs. that means the mode of human conflict is fundamentally altering. and that fundamental alteration is going to change virtually every aspect of the ways that human conflicts are propagated. it's going to change how we decide whether or not to go to war, and it's going to change how we behave when we find ourselves in a war. and this is all due to technological changes that are really on the verge of upsetting all of human society.

in the end, there will be some countries that adopt to the changes, that take the new technology and learn how to utilize it and some that don't. these will be the haves and have-nots of the future when it comes to conflict. there is an enormous advantage to being one of the first adopters. if you have a revolutionary change in the way that conflict is occurring, it becomes possible to dominate your rivals in a very short period of time. the originator of the term revolution and military affairs was nick lay ogarkov. it slightly pains me to give credit to a soviet thinker, but he lad a really great idea. his idea was there are times when fundamental changes occur. and they occur so rapidly that they essentially make everything that has gone before completely obsolete. it is my contention that that is occurring right now before our very eyes. let me give you an example that

people are probably more familiar with. if you go back to the middle ages, this is what characterized war. castles and moats and heavily armored knights, and if you wanted to capture something belonging to an opponent, that was an undertaking that was likely to take you months of siege craft. unless you were somehow lucky enough to find them with the gates conveniently open, the walls unmanned, the moat drained and no preparations made. now up here we have three successful sieges in the 14th and 15th century, and as you can see each one of those was a major undertaking that really required all of the resources and all of the time of an entire campaign season. this is what characterized war in that time period. however, when gunpowder became the norm in europe, the situation fundamentally changed. it suddenly became possible to batter down the defenses of a

tall high-walled castle from a safe distance, and the attacker had the advantage because, after all, the castle and its defenders could not leave their position while the attackers had a certain degree of mobility, could choose where to fight, could choose when to fight, and suddenly being inside a castle was a disadvantage because you became an obvious target. as a result, here are some successful seiges, and you'll notice we're still in the 15th century, but the siege duration is suddenly measured in days rather than being a multi-month undertaking with no guarantee of success. but the situation didn't remain stable. gunpowder had certainly changed the approach to warfare, but it also was possible to redesign your fortifications, to make them less vulnerable to gunfire and thus it became possible to once again defend a static

position. this is what one of those fortifications looked like in the 1600s. as you can see, it's an enormous fortification full of geometric designs. the idea behind this particular fort was that it could not be approached on any side without attackers coming under heavy fire from multiple angles from the defenders. the result, we're back up to real long seiges, and these are the seiges that actually succeeded. the vast majority of siege attempts in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were doomed to failure. it became once again a major undertaking and warfare shifted back to a positional static approach. as you might imagine those who had not adopted gunpowder, who had not changed to meet the new situation found themselves quickly overwhelmed. it became impossible for an army that did not use gunpowder to

withstand one that wielded firearms. if siege craft became almost impossible, it guaranteed that you were going to have some battles fought away from static positions. some times you just could not build a fortification in a place that you wanted to defend long term, and sometimes armies were going to meet in the field. now, in the 16th century reloading a firearm could take approximately two minutes, and the effective range of a firearm was only about 50 meters. now, i am not exactly, shall we say, a paragon of physical fitness, but even i can cross 50 meters in under two minutes. i can crawl 50 meters in under two minutes which means if you're using firearms and you shoot and miss, there is a reasonable chance that i am going to run across the field and hit you with something really sharp or something really

heavy. as a result we get the mixed formations. this is the spanishtersio t.comprises musketeers on the outside and pikemen in the center. the musketeers open fire. after they shoot the pikemen come to the outside while they reload this. made tim possible for a cavalry charge to overwhelm a group of musketeers in a matter of a few seconds. it was very unwielding, moved very slow, and it swept everything before it on the battlefield because it was infinitely better than anything else someone else had come up with that-to-that time to use firearms in the field. and it teach us us something. it teaches us that sometimes it's not the technology that matters. it's become the first one that figures out how to utilize it effectively, and that's what's going on here. the spanish wind up using the tercio to become the dominant

land power in europe, but nothing lasts forever. now, this is one. rare times where you're going to hear a historian talk to you about swedish military dominance. it's not really what they are particularly known for, but it was the swedes that figured out how to actually counter the tercio. they realized it was very unwieldy being everybody was getting in each other's way. it was hard to move around. could you have thousand of troops all within the hearing of one person who is screaming to be heard over the sound of them moving around, and maybe the pikes could protect the musketeers without standing amongst the musketeers. the idea was called the brigade, and when the brigade swept on to the battle 2350e8ds of europe under gustus adolphus it drove the tercio from the field. adolphus entered the 30 years war knowing it was one of

enormous carnage but had a new idea that for a brief period allowed the swedes to turn the tide of a war that had effectively engulfed the entire european content, and this thing was a bloody mess. as much as 25% of the european population died in that war. a much higher percentage than died during world war ii, so this tells us the new forms of weaponry, even though they seem very archaic to us today, could be extremely effective when use en masse. if we fast forward a few centuries, we reach world war i. once again gunpowder is the dominant weapon of the era. the difference now, of course, each individual wielding a machine gun like this can fire 600 rounds per minute, and they can sustain that rate of fire as long as they have bullets, and they can fire relatively accurately for a distance of up to two miles. i cannot cross two miles in

under two minutes. there's no way i'm going to be able to do it with a couple thousand bullets flying at me, and this caused warfare to once again become very static and become very position-oriented and for all intents and purposes stagnate, but progress continues. now, world war i at the time was the bloodiest war in history. millions of people died, and there was a significant movement around the world to say, oh, well, we're never going to do that again. at one point leading nations attempted to ban the practice of warfare which did not last very long, though technically the united states has never actually repealed the kellogg/brianne pact where we swore we wouldn't use war. there were other ways to attempt to mitigate the effects of warfare that came out as a

result of the gunpowder revolution. you had very prominent thinkers in the 16th and 17th centuries that said there are limits to what you can do in warfare. there are things that are not acceptable behavior. for example, you shouldn't go out and poison your bullets before firing them at someone. you shouldn't deliberately kill someone after you have captured them. you shouldn't deliberately spread disease amongst your enemies. yes, they are your enemies, but when wars end, you have to go back to at least being able to co-exist unless your objective is the complete and utter annihilation of your opponent which these thinkers would also tell you flat wrong. you shouldn't do that. annihilation is bad. so even though we're innovating these new technological ideas, we're building the new concepts. at the same time we're saying that there's some things that you just don't do. y don't invent weapons that are

designed to make. you accept the enemy's surrender if they offer it in good faith, and over time it becomes the norm in european warfare that there of specific limits. these thinkers also consider when is it acceptable to go to war? and they come to the conclusion that there are times that warfare is an acceptable policy option. obviously you have the right to go war to defend yourself, to defend your citizenry, to defend your territory, but there are other circumstances in which warfare is also an acceptable alternative to these thinkers. now, as we move forward into the 20th century, after world war ii, there was a significant movement once again to never allow a conflict like that to happen, and when the united nations charter was written, a key component of the charter was that member states of the united nations shall not make war upon one another. if you violate that norm, the

expectation is that all. other member states will come to the aid of the victim. as you all know, it hasn't always worked out that way in practice, but there is an enormous body of international law governing what you can and cannot do in war. most of it is encapsulated in the geneva conventions. there are four key components that are going to matter a little bit later in the lecture as to what are the ultimate limits of warfare in terms of who can and cannot participate, and the geneva conventions make those clear. number one, you must bear arms openly. you're not allowed to make war by hiding your weaponry, pulling it out, attacking the enemy and hiding it again. two, 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 ascisming as the green head scarves common to hamas but it has to be something

recognizable and distinct so that i know you are representing yourself as a combatant, and you are expecting me to follow the rules of war. third, you must be part of an organization with a hierarchal structure where the leadership is responsible for the behavior of seaboard natz so there has to be some form of command and control, someone that can be ultimately held responsible for the behavior of troops in the field. and, fourth, you must follow the laws of war. if you don't follow the laws of wars, you cannot claim their protections in any form combat. now, why does this matter? well, the united states is currently engaged in a fight. we're fighting the islamic state. we're fighting al qaeda. we're fighting terrorism as a concept, and the organizations with which we are in conflict do not bear arms openly, do not wear recognizable uniform, do

not have a command structure where the leadership is held accountable of the behavior of subordinates, and they certainly do not follow the laws of war, so they are outside of our traditional understanding of who is an acceptable combatant 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 surrenders, such as restraining ourselves, that is our option, but we really eforgetively have to follow the rules of war, even though he ear facing an enemy that doesn't, and that can be an incredibly frustrating situation, as this cartoon illustrates. we have to follow the laws of war for one fundamental reason. if we don't follow the laws of war, then the laws of war themselves become largely irrelevant, and the enemy that we are currently facing has its primary goal 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 just to bring down individual governments. its goal is to destroy the entire international system. it's trying to pull down the system that we have with the united nations where there are nations that are considered haves and nations that are considered have-nots, and none of the halves resemble the organizations that are pushing to bring it down. consider the permanent members of the u.n. security council have the ultimate international relations tool, a veto over u.n. use of violence, and those nations, the united states, rush, britain, france and china. none of them are muslim. none of them are in the middle eastern region, so imagine, if you will, if we were to redesign the permanent security council, if we were to choose new membership. would you put the same five

countries in there? not on the basis of economics you wouldn't, not on the basis of population size. probably not on the basis of geography. now imagine the islamic state achieves everything that this claims to be pushing for. it creates a pan-islamic calaphate 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. or they might instead choose to simply pull down the system because they believe that chaos and anarchy will more effectively serve their end goals. so that's our starting point here. now, when it comes to 21st century conflict and military row boltics which is the heart of what i want to discuss for you today, i need to establish a few definitions for you first. media is the big fan. term drone, and drone has a specific meaning.

a drone is a pre-programmed machine. it does whatever it's told to do. it doesn't think. it doesn't react to its environment. it doesn't choose from a host of different options. it simply does what it's told. you pre-program a route. it flies the route. you tell it to strike a certain point. it strikes a certain point. it's not a thinking machine, and a drone by definition is not being driven by some other intelligence. you fire a cruise missile, it flies off. you don't control it on its route. you might have the ability to stop it, to abort its mission, but there's no intelligence guiding its actions. it's already been done. a robotic system, a robotic system incorporates some degree of the ability to sense an environment and make decisions on the basis of it. so, for example, you're probably familiar with a predator.

a predator is being flown by a human operator, but it has some functions that it performs automatically on its own which makes flying the system a lot easier. it does not choose to kill. a human being chooses to fire a missile from a predator. 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 here, this is called a pack bot. become most well as an explosive ordinance explosive robot. it allows you to not put humans in harm's way. it does not dissolve the bomb on its own. it gets close and then does whatever the operator tells it do do. at the end. day nobody cries if a robot die. after all, the robot doesn't die. it just gets rendered into smaller pieces. on the right, that is little

more terrifying. this is the pack bot's larger uglier cousin. it's called a tallon t.weighs about 200 pounds. it's remotely driven this. thing is not driving itself around and shooting off guns and causing chaos everywhere it goes. there's an operator driving it from a distance using a camera, but as you can see, this thing can be armed. you can put rocket launchers. can you put grenade launchers. you can put machine guns on it, and it doesn't suffer from a lot of the problems that trigger inaccuracy in humans while using weaponry. it doesn't have a pulse. it doesn't breathe. it instantly calculates the wind. it has a laser wind finder. it doesn't care what it's shooting at. doesn't feel bald if it's shooting at a house full of children. it just does what it's told. there's a human operator telling it to do that, but that means that there's a certain divorce

here. the hueman is a little further away from the intimacy of killing. a true robot, as you can see i've used a lot of pop culture references here, and the reason why is all intents and purposes is robots don't exist yet, in the in the way that the military means when it uses the term robot. a robot senses its environment and it makes decisions of what it's going to do on the basis of the environment it senses, and right now there are no weapons this are true robots in the classical sense, wandering around and caution headaches for everyone. they don't exist yet, but they are on the immediate horizon, and i'm going to show you some examples of how close we're getting and what we could do if we chose to when it comes to fielding this kind of device. final deficit, a cyborg. a cyber nettic organization. that is a human or any other critt

critter, usually a human, that's incorporated robotic elements into themselves. rush limbaugh, as you know it whether or not it a cyborg. he actually has an implant in his ear that has restored hearing to him without which he's completely deaf, which as i understand it is a problem for a radio host. there are other cyborgs out there, and we'll see a few of them a little further down the road. you may be surprised some of the things that we can do now with mind-controlled implants. artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence is the notion that you can create a machine that would be capable of process being information in the same fashion as a human. to a certain extent, artificial intelligence is a red herring. there's not a particularly compelling reason to create something that's artificially intelligent. robots give us the advantage that we can choose specializations. we can design them, there's not a particularly compelling reason to produce a humanoid robot with

all. frail tis and weaknesses of human beings. to be honest, if i was designing the next human being this is not the shape i would choose. if i was designing this human being, this isn't the shape i would choose either so i'm a very picky guy apparently. >> now allen turning was a british cryptic analyst during world war ii and posited the idea of what's called the terring test. if you could put a computer and a human being through some mechanism by using a keyboard to ask it questions, could you determine whether you had created artificial intelligence by having a human being question the machine and other humans and if they don't determine which was which you would have created artificial intelligence according to turring. microsoft a few weeks ago thought let's run a little experiment. they creed an artificial

intelligence and what they did is created a twitter account and turned it over to a computer, and hypothetically they programmed this computer to act the way that microsoft thinks a 15-year-old girl would act on a twitter account. within 24 hours this thing was tweeting racist responses. essential think had been trained by the internet in all. horrific things that the internet can bring to life and microsoft quickly shut it down, whoa okay. all right, all right. didn't know 15-year-old girls were quite that rates of. let's try again. about a week later they wrought it back out again. this time it took less than six hours before announcing hitler was right so microsoft shut do down. maybe they will rethink that a little bit. however, there have been other companies that have done bert. maybe you're familiar with the machine called watson. this was a computer that was designed to play jeopardy against human opponents and playing jeopardy requires a lot more than just enormous knowledge of trivia because most

of the questions are written in such a way they require abstract reasoning. they require to you think through in ways previous to now only humans could do. watson won the game against the best "jeopardy" champion that had ever played and this came as a major shock to us. now we had a machine that appeared to be capable of very quickly reasoning through very challenging questions. but what do you do with a machine like that. what's the practical use of something like watson? it turns out thing it phenomenally helpful in the medical field. watson has been built by ibm and copies of it turned over to some major medical centers, and what we're finding is this machine can read virtually every medical research item that has ever been produced in every language, and as a result it's able to make conclusions that would never occur to a human doctor.

so your left big toe inches and you taste peanut butter in the roof of your mouth. you have liver cancer. that's -- that's a made-up example, but watson takes these strange symptoms and puts them together and then spits out what it thinks is the most likely answer, and what it's doing is it's actually looking in very obscure medical journals for the individual strange cases that get written up by doctors than often resulted in the death of a patient. they did an autopsy and said, oh, itchy big toe and peanut butter in the top of their mouth, clearly that was liver cancer, it turns out. watson is doing that, and it's doing it in realtime. this offers the possibility to revolutionize our approach to medicine, and that's great. that could be a wonderful innovation. we're going to see some dark sides for us coming up in just a moment as well though. now, when it comes to military robotics and artificial intelligence, there are some things that machines do infinitely better than humans

do. feel free to run a race with a basic calculator and see whether you're faster than it is on arithmetic. it won't be. it's hyper specialized but it's a fairly simple process. it's a far harder process to do things like immediate calculations of ballistic tables and determinations of whether or not to engage what might be a threat, and that's what these devices are down here at the bottom. you may be familiar with the patriot missile system, an air defense system. you may not know it has a fully autonomous mode. you flint switch it will fire on anything in its engagement zone anything that perceives a threat so hopefully you've defined correctly what it perceives as a threat. on a number eachcations patriot missile batteries have opened up on coalition aircraft fighting on the same side as the united states, and on at least two occasions they have opened fire on american military aircraft despite the fact that those

american aircraft were actually using a transponder code that should have told it do not shoot at me. i'm an american. so the systems don't always work perfectly, but when it comes to something like air defense, sometimes you have to accept the possibility of failure because it's too dangerous not to turn on the system. in the center here this is called a close-in weapon system. it's effective a radar-guide very, very powerful machine gun. it is used as the last line of defense on american naval develops and has been used as such for more than 30 years. if somebody shoots a missile at one of our ships, this thing is the last chance to shoot that missile down before it hits our ship and potentially sinks it. it might kill thousands of lives if it strikes an aircraft care ier. you willing to use this in fully eytautonomous mode because it's your last chance to save thousands of lives and you're

using it over the ocean so the possibility of collateral damage is relatively low. in this regard, autonomy is your best chance to actually save the sailors, and so it's perfectly acceptable to use this in autonomous moved. it's not as acceptable to use autonomous weaponses in other circumstances where collateral damage is infinitely as likely. just as you're likely willing to use this out in the middle of the ocean, you're not likely to use it in the middle of new york city. this thing can fire 6,000 rounds a minute. that's an awful lost project isles flying through the air. now, when it comes to computerized warfare, we've seen some fundamental innovations and changes f.case you hadn't heard, israel doesn't always get along well with its neighbors. israel does not liability idea of any of its neighbors obtaining nuclear weapons. in 1981 the israelis got word that the iraqis had built a nuclear reactor and were in the

process of enriching europium towards the pursuit of nuclear weapons. the israelis refused to accept that and quietly worked out a deal with the saudis that let them flied over saudi air spores and destroyed the reactor. which for all intents and purposes ended the iraqi nuclear program. in 2007, the israelis got wind that the syrians had built a nuclear program. they were using north korean and pakistani expertise in order to get this thing up and rolling. they didn't want to tolerate a nuclear program with a hostile neighbor, but the syrians had also purchased a first-rate air defense system, and the its list were not confident that their aircraft could penetrate syrian airspace, attacked the heavily fortified location and retrail

the back to israel without paying an enormous cost. the had a commando team where women on the ground dug up a portion of the syrian fiber-optic network that controlled the sites that controlled the radar system and that virus caused the radar to be convinced there was nothing to see, a nice placid night. the first hint that the syrians had that they were under attack were the explosions striking the nuclear program and essentially wiping it out. this is what cyber had enabled the its list to do it. worked with their kinetic platforms to destroy a major threat, but if we fast forward just a few years you may have heard of stuxnet. stuxnet was a virus that required at the minimum the resources of a nation in order to potentially create it. it used an incredibly

sophisticated system in order to effectively seek out a very specific type of machine, and that ma sheench mothers 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'm not revealing any classified information. i don't have a clue whether they are the united states, but it was an iranian nuclear facility that had us so they are vows. somebody wandered around the parking lot and dropped a couple of thumb drives, dropped a couple of flash drives and someone else came along and said flash drive. i pet somebody wants that back and they picked it up and walked inside and flugd into a computer to try to figure out who it belonged to so they could give it back and the moment they did that they upload stuxnet devoid

from the rest system. stuxnet searched out the logic controllers for centrifuges and made a tine change in their programming, and that tiny change caused the centrifuges to spin up and spin down. spin up and spin down, and it induced just enough of a vibration to cause the centrifuges to start to fail. the iranians weren't sure what was going on. they didn't know they were the victim of a cyber attack. they thought maybe this indicated they were incompetent as building centrifuges or maybe it meant they didn't have the know-how and it started to erode their confidence and weaken their belief in the confidence what have they were doing. it wasn't until a couple years later when a small belarussian anti-virus form located and point out existence of stuxnet that we even now what caused the iranian centrifuges to nail and without using a single warplane and without committing a single act of war somebody shut down the iranian nuclear program for

about three years. at about the same time, somebody, and it may have been the same somebody, i don't know started assassinating iranian nuclear scientists. that that was a little bit more overt. computer virus is one thing and shooting people a little more obvious what you're up to. again, i don't know who was responsible for that. i just know there's an awful lot of people who are not excited about the idea of an iranian nuclear program, and here we have this technology enabling the possibility of shutting it down without anything to do the classic classic things that would be characterized by car. then comes military robotics. they are not new. can you go back almost 100 years to have a very rudimentary system called the kettering bug, also known as a flying attorney doe, an airplane packed full of explosives that's designed to have its engine shut off after a

certain period of flight which will cause it to just dive on whatever target is beneath it. this was innovated by charles kettering. it was never actually field in time for world war i which is probably a good thing. it didn't work very well. it wasn't very dependable. just as likely to come down on your own forces as it was the enemy, but if we move forward a little bit, getting on the verge of world war two, the soviets came up with what they called the teletank this. was a remotely driven tank. everything about the tank was normal except it had no human beings inside of it. the human beings that controlled it sat in another tank a couple miles away and controlled it via radio signalses that they sent through line of sight. it didn't work very well. it was rather clunky. the vast majority of their teletanks. they had to destroy themselves when the finnish, people that they were fighting against, realized they could climb on the top of the teletank, begin side and pull out the radio controls and say, hey, i got a new tank,

brand new tank just for me, so the soviets wind up destroying some of their own stuff. the germans, they are going to create the goliath. a 200-pound wire driven little miniature tract vehicle designed to be driven underneath enemy tanks and detonated. think of it like a land mine that moves around. the vast majority of their goliaths wound up being stockpiled and never used and finally the v-1 flying bomb, the buzz bombs. these things proved to be fairly effective. much like the kettering bug, what you have is an airplane engine, in this case a jet, attached to a bomb. you launch it, and you hope. you can target a city the size of london and have a reasonable chance of hitting that city. can you not target a specific address and have any chance other than dumb luck of hitting it, but a city the size of

london with millions of inhabitants suddenly faces a bombardment for which they initially have no response. when the british try to shoot down these particular ate else, they discover they are a lot harder to shoot down and found out the's west way to take down a v-1 is flying up next to it and put your wing tip over it and if you do that that it l cause it to crash. not the safest of activities, not the best idea for how to spend a sunday afternoon. okay. moving forward into at least my lifetime. the pioneer, this thing was usually used for artillery spotting in the 1980s, in particular the knave liked to use it since they fire project isles 20 or more miles into the distance. they can fly this overhead, look down and tell them how to adjust their fire. pretty effective and pretty easy to use. that is target drone from the vietnam era. somebody came up with the brilliant idea that you could put a television camera on it,

fly it over hostile space and now no longer have to use human pilots on reconnaissance missions. then we started flying these things over china. since china was intervening in the vietnam war, we wanted to see what they were up to and get a little advance warning. the chinese start shooting them down and as they shoot them down they run out to the wreckage and canned figure out why they can never capture a pilot. apparently american pilots are really good at hike and seefnlgt it's because there are no pilots because there's an awful lot of these things on display in chinese military museums that they point to as american fighter aircraft that they shot down h.this is kevin warwick. kevin warwick is a british researcher, and in my opinion an incredibly creep guy. very smart. so kevin comes up this idea. he says you know what i'm going to do. i'm going to a get a microchip implanted in my wrist, and i'm going to use that microchip to measure electrical impulses. human nervous system to figure out at what frequency and at

what amperage, how does the human body actually control itself, and after a long, long long medical study, they decided, okay. well, we can let him do it to himself. has it surgically implanted and figures out whichner informs his wrist control which muscles in his hand and he then maps it to an a artificial hand which he is then able to control with his mind. he closes his hand into a fist t.closes into a fist. he opens it up, it opens up. revolutionary. pioneering, a mind-controlled prosthetic 16 years ago. that's not creep. that's kind of neat. keepy is when kevin's wife has a similar chip implanted inside her wrist and now they are table control each other's hands. able to control each other owes's hands with their own minds and that was almost two decades ago, so you can only imagine where this is going. getting close to the modern era here.

the reaper is a much larger -- almost the same size as a predator but a much more motherful version of the pred tomorrow. instead of carrying 2 miles it can care up to 14 this. man roos higher as a cyber nettic hand which is controlled by his mind. it has since been implanted on to his arm. he is capable of picking up anying with one happened, not his human head and cracking it. i can't do that. have perfectly two good hands. he can close his eyes and tell you when he's touching something and what it feels like all through the signals going back to his mind. the israelis took our patriot missile system and built iron dome, a much larger and more sophisticated system that's capable of tracking incoming projectiles and rockets and missiles and choose twlornt shut them down. it doesn't just engage everything that flies overhead.

instead, it calculates where is that thing going to come down. is it a populated area in which case i should intercept, store an unpopulated area in which case i should let it fly off into the middle of nowhere. let it strike where it's going to be perfectly safe. this has massively reduced the number of casualties that the israelis are being fired out of gaza and the northern regions from lebanon. this guy is from boston dynamics and this company has care eeld it can walk on ice. it can follow basically -- basically can be followed to program a human being, and it will follow them wherever they go. the idea is american troops that are moving through urban area tend to be loaded down with up to 100 pounds of gear.

it would incredibly useful if they could offload that to some form of a machine that they assume could keep up them. that's the idea and finally the atlas robot. the atlas robot is designed to be able to go into dangerous locations. the first time we actually saw this thing in operation it was sent into the fukushima reactor in japan to see whether there was a reactor leak under way. that wound up destroilgt robot, but that's a much bert alternative than destroying a human. the radiation levels were so high that it would have killed anybody that it went inside there to see what was going on. this machine is actually designed to be able to go where humans go. it's one. rare cases where actually want the machine to have roughly the same humanoid design so that it can use theoretically the same types of vehicles and could move in the same areas. in case you're wondering, the c-ram, the land version of the closed-in weapon system. we put this into bases in our iraq that were being shelled by

artillery and mortar fire. it's capable of low capital gains tax and engaging projectiles as small as 60 kilometers. can hit very small targets. the d.o.d. likes to think of ourselves as environmentally friendly and we've made biodegradable projochen hecht ils for it so when the proje projectiles come down they are designed not to do collateral damage or harm the environment no. more depleted environment. where are we sghg this mind is quadriplegic swu wearing an exo skeleton that allows him to walk and move. it's a fairly slow system right now. he's not moving at normal human speeds but it's a heck of a lot better than the alternative. this individual is wearing a leg that is controlled by his mind and allows him to move at regular walking speed. in both of those cases the research was highly advanced

thanks to all of the casualties we were taking frommism visd explosive devices in iraq. there are an awful lot of american service person they will have lost a limb and the d.o.d. has put a lot of effort into advancing research and giving him a better quality of life. you've seen the tallon swords and you've seen their variants and the direction we're going with those things is full autonomy. rather than having a human being dedicated to driving them, would you inside having them move along aside or in place of your human troops, and that starts to make me a little nervous because you can program those things to engage human targets without human intervention. nobody in the loop is say, yes, shoot, or no, don't shoot. you can many equip them with an audio detection system that picks up the sound of gunfire and pivots to return fire so if

you have problems with snipers in the area you can deone of these and if the sniper takes a shout have the ability to shoot back immediately on the sniper's position. on the one hand this is a good thing reducing coalition casualties. on the other hand, it won't be long before our opponents start change children in front of sniper pogtsz, and this is a way that they are going to potentially take advantage of our ethics, our morality and our superior technology. a few years ago hitachi came out with a facial recognition system, and that came are a can compare up to 30 million faces in a minute and it did so. at a highage-of-of profile. >> about to years to go, we came up with the low cast system designed to gli over the battle field and i want you to talk a

moment what happens when you pair the hitachi system with the all autonomous loitering vehicle. you fire it it loirts over a city for up to four hours look for the individuals you've uploaded and then starts firing missiles at them. when it runs out of missiles it crashes itself as a final projectile in a kamikaze system. these are the things that are starting to keep me awake at night. where are we going? swarmts. swarms are all the rage. you can have very complex behavior out of very simple devices. darpa, the defense advance research projects agency a year yews ago came out with what's called the centebots, very small ground robots with very simple programming. number one, move around and look around. number two, stay away from other robots, number three report back what you see. simple programming, and they are capable of mapping a city the