Are Soldiers Obsolete? How Autonomy Will Define the Coming Conflict with China| Last Line of Defense

Hi, I'm Seth Jones, president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and welcome to the last line of defense. I am honored today to be joined by the former Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, uh, who is is with us to talk about, among other things, his new book, Lethal Autonomy. Well, >> Frank, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate you taking the time. >> Thanks, Seth. Good to be with you. >> All right, we're going to dig into uh lethal autonomy and the future of warfare. So, the title and subtitle of the book, whether we like it or not. Uh but would be first helpful just to take a step back and to get your view on what what why' you write this? Uh and and actually what was the process of writing this like cuz I think you you did it over a chunk of time. >> Sure. Um the first of all my life has been about the intersection of technology and and military operations and I started out as an army officer West Point grad. I served an active duty for 10 years. uh got into the research and development side of the business and ended up in the Pentagon first uh responsible for strategic defense programs for the strategic deterrent and then for tactical warfare programs for several years across all the services. Uh I then worked in industry on weapon systems as well. Uh came back in 2010 and uh worked as under secretary for acquisition uh throughout most of the um Obama years and then of course as secretary of the air force. So, I've got a really massive database in my head about conventional warfare uh and about the weapon systems and how they're employed. Uh during the uh latter couple of years of the Obama administration, Bob Work started an initiative called the third offset strategy >> and we are definitely going to get into that >> and and Bob announced it. I was with him when he did it did it very early on and I asked him afterwards, Bob, what is it? And he said, I don't know yet. We're going to try to figure it out. And so for the next several months, a number of us worked on that. uh myself, the director of DARPA, Arthy Perbacher, uh Steve Welby who was my assistant secretary for research and engineering, Jimmy Mcstraik from my acquisition office, uh and a few other people, the vice chairman of the joint chiefs, uh Sandy Winterfeld first and then Paul Silva, and we never really finished the job. And the first attempt to deal with the what became the book was a report that I wrote for DARPA uh during the first Trump administration. I went to the director and said,"I want to write something about the future of warfare, and I don't know if it's going to be 20 pages or 200, but I don't want the Chinese to read it." So, can you give me a classified location that I can I can work on this? And he did, and it became 300 pages. Uh, I worked on it over about a year to a year and a half. I would come in a few hours every week. Uh, and so a lot of thought over a period of time went into it as well as all that experience that I talked about. Uh and when I came into office, it was uh as Secretary of the Air Force. I gave it to a few senior people. Secretary of Defense for one. Uh my senior leaders in the in the Air Force and Space Force and a few others. Um it was never really a classified document. It it was really just something that I thought I wanted to have some degree of protection on. It [snorts] was declassified while I was in office. So that report is the genesis of the book. And what I did after I left this time is update it to be more current. A lot had happened. uh Ukraine conflict in particular. And so I was seeing people experimenting. I was seeing new ideas and new technologies certainly getting on the table. So after I left office a year and a half ago, I started updating it. And that's the book that you have before you now. It's an attempt to define what the future of warfare might look like if we move to very heavy reliance on uncrrewed platforms. And the world, I imagine, is one in which the current systems that we have almost across the board are obsolete. We're not there yet, but I think we're headed in that direction. And whoever wins that race is going to have a significant operational advantage for some period of time. >> Well, we will get into the details because it's a very interesting look at a what a world that is largely based on autonomous platforms across all the domains. I mean interesting as we get into it when we look at what your vision or view of what land the land domain may look like is largely autonomous platforms with a human role including dismounted infantry is very limited. But before we get there I wonder if we could provide some context for this. Uh you mentioned the offsets um both for the first and second offsets. the offset part of it was uh trying to offset advantages of the Soviet Union. Uh and we'll get into some more details a little bit later on those those specific periods including the third offset which you mentioned. >> But today the biggest threat which you highlight uh is uh the Chinese. I mean I think as I repeatedly heard from your staff in the Pentagon the emphasis on China, China and China. uh you write that China today is by far the greatest strategic threat to the United States and to the liberal democratic order established by the United States after World War II. I don't think anybody meaningfully in either the Republican or the Democratic party that was looking at this world would say anything differently. What would be helpful though was is for you to talk a little bit about what the Chinese particularly the people's liberation army is doing. Uh they are building at mass and scale in all the domains of warfare. What concerns you most about what the PLA is doing to set this sort of stage for where we're headed? Uh I became alarmed I think that's the right word about what China was doing militarily when I came back into government in 2010 and started looking for the first time in several years at technical intelligence about their modernization program. China has been working for more than decades now to build the military which is designed to defeat American power projection. Uh it's also designed to seize Taiwan and conduct aggressive activities in the Western Pacific. But in particular, it's designed around the problem of US intervention. And they saw what we did in the first call for in 1991. They saw how we were able to project power and be decisive on a conventional battlefield against a reasonably modern Soviet-like equipped force. Um there was a at that time I was in the Pentagon then I was director of tactical warfare programs. Um there was kind of a global recognition of this revolution that we car set of capabilities we had. We've been kind of coasting on that ever since. We've fielded a number of other things. But what China observed was that we have certain vulnerabilities at least from their perspective. We depend on small numbers of very valuable assets. Uh in the case of the Navy aircraft carriers obviously in the case of the air force it's small numbers of air bases that we operate from and in space it's a small number of satellites. Uh the army is a little more distributed but even it has you know logistics nodes and so on that that are that are critical assets. China's come after all of those things. Uh it's filled a very large arsenal of of missiles. Uh there's a mix of crews ballistic and hypersonic now in very large numbers and they keep extending the range and the capability of those weapon systems. They're doing similar things in the air-to-air domain even. Uh they're also fielding an operational space force which is designed to support those weapons with targeting quality data and they're bringing applications of AI into the into the mix as well. And I've watched them extend their range, extend their capabilities over time. In some areas they're emulating us. They're building a few aircraft carriers for example, but [snorts] the thing that concerns me the most uh is that they have created a force designed to keep us out of the Western Pacific and they keep extending the range at which that force can can effectively do that. >> Uh you say uh in the book and I was in this area last week in u in Asia in the first island chain. You say that the United States is still the dominant military power until within about 1,000 miles of China and then things begin to change. So, can you talk about once you get sort of in that 1,000 mile range with certainly within the first and increasingly the second island chain, what then are the huge challenges that the US faces? You talked about PLA rocket force, missiles, ballistic crews, hypersonics, um, building now nuclearpowered submarines as well. Um, but what what would the US face in that kind of a of a fight? >> Um, I I covered some of that already. It's this large number of precision weapons, variety of technologies, uh, increasingly more hypersonic, uh, that can be brought to bear against our our assets. And you're not going to defend against these unless you have massive numbers of very perfect air defenses. And we don't have those. Uh nobody has those. That's very hard to do. Uh space sensors that can target uh aircraft carriers, for example. Um uh fixed bases, which are already targetable because we know where they are. They know where they are. Uh as well as small numbers of other assets that we're very dependent upon. So they they basically created a a force that can reach out to beyond a thousand miles. Now you know Guam is a little bit further than that. Uh we have a lot of capability at Guam. We have a lot of capability on a small number of bases in Japan. Uh same is true of the Philippines to some extent assuming that they would come in with us. Um and and so this is a problem that all the services have to wrestle with. There aren't easy solutions. Uh I had the opportunity when I was secretary of the Air Force uh to move the Air Force and Space Force forward. Uh I created a set of what I call operational imperatives designed to work that problem that I just described. >> [snorts] >> uh and we made a lot of progress. We started the uh collaborative combat aircraft for example which is implementing what's in the book. I had the opportunity for three and a half years to to implement the things that I wrote about in the book uh for the air force and space force at least and hope and try to convince other people to do similar things in other domains and other services and I think I made good progress but there's still a long long way to go. Well, I have to ask uh you know, it's the the the concerns about the Chinese and the modernization programs are not that new. Uh but there has been resistance. You talk a little bit about the alarm bells that you were raising to some degree falling on deaf ears. I mean, there has been work within the Pentagon on issues related to overmatch for a decade or so. What explains some of the resistance to to these alarm bells? >> I I wouldn't call it resistance as much as u near-term problems that we have to deal with. I mean, the the situation we have quite frankly is we have global deployments. Uh we have a lot of things that are we've inherited from prior uh situations both in Europe and the Middle East in particular as well as in the Pacific. Um I have seen multiple administrations going all the way back to Rumsfeld many years ago about the time 911 happened uh trying to shift more emphasis to the Pacific. We keep trying to shift our our priority to the Pacific and generally speaking something else keeps pulling us away. Mostly it's been the Middle East uh just as what's happening right now. Uh but more recently of course it's been Ukraine and what Russia's done in Ukraine. So with with there's always a limitation on resources. You have a number of combatant commanders competing for resources and and force structure. You have conflicts between the force we have right now that we have to sustain and keep ready and we have the force we're trying to buy come out of the factories and then the force we're trying to design for the future. So there's a lot of tension in all of that. Uh what I was focused on was the force for the future because I I think the force we have it's not obsolete yet but it's obsolescent. It's in the process of becoming obsolete. uh and we need to get to the future, figure out what that is, make smart decisions, and get there as quickly as we can. >> So, before we get to uh that future that you just talked about, I do want to touch on some of the lessons that you take from some of the previous periods. Uh first offset Eisenhower administration, second offset Carter administration, that sort of bleeds in and and even before, but that also bleeds into the 1980s to some degree. and then even the third offset period which you started off with. What what are what do you take to be some of the key lessons from those periods uh that are relevant as we start to think about the future? >> Uh one and maybe it's the first and most important one is that military advantage is is is not enduring. Uh you can you can create an advantage, others will see what you do, they'll emulate it or they'll think about ways to respond. So you buy some time. It's not forever. The first one was tactical nuclear weapons. We had massive Soviet uh armored mechanized forces we were facing in in Europe. They did not have nuclear weapons. We did. We fielded tens of thousands of tactical nuclear weapons. Ridiculous when you look back upon it now, but that was what we did. And then the Soviets got their own tactical nuclear weapons. Uh so we we we had to come up with something else. We were still looking at this and I served in Europe during the cold war in in an army or defense unit. Um so what we came up with uh first of all was airline battle came out of the 70s. uh which was doctrinally fine. Uh but tech technically what we did was something called follow on forces attack >> came out of a DARPA program called assault breaker. Uh it was the idea and it's interesting because the first offset was one weapon that can kill a great many things a nuclear weapon. The second offset was weapons that could kill one thing each with very high uh efficiency. So one shot one kill basically right artillery traditionally you fire a lot of rounds and you get you get some kills. We went to precision weapons. We went we introduced stealth. We [snorts] introduced uh networking of our forces more effectively so we could communicate each better and wide area surveillance systems. So that mix of follow on force attacks that suite of systems is essentially what we had matured in the in the 80s and took into the first golf and that's where we got that great advantage systems like Jars uh some of the precision weapons that were available at that time which were not nearly as sophisticated as what we have now. uh and that's what allowed us to be so efficient in dealing with Saddam Hussein's brother conventional harmony. >> And if I can just interject, it also appears based on some of the historical evidence that both with the first offset, so Eisenhower 1950s and with the second offset that the Soviets were deterred. Uh I mean there are declassified Soviet documents now arguing particularly by the early 1980s Okarkov for example noting that the US has advantages uh they they highlighted airline battle highlighted assault breaker noted the exercises we were running uh in uh in Europe as well. So I mean I think it it looks like it had a deterrent effect if the Soviets indeed did want to push forward. So >> I I think it did. I think we had a very solid deterrent in in Europe. We had the combination of significant deployed forces uh exercised uh with large-scale exercises show we could reinforce them very quickly with with more large forces. We had conventional forces backed up by tactical nuclear weapons and theater still in large numbers backed up by the strategic deterrent uh as well as some technical advantages that you decided. >> And then by the third offset period um I don't know if there's anything more you wanted to add. you covered it a little bit, >> but but Bob was looking at and I look, I was I've been a sponsor for and advocated for and uh tried to move military modernization forward throughout my whole career. Uh but Bob was looking for was a focused effort to go to the next generation of capability to go a leap forward from what we already had uh to the next generation. And he he centered on robotics. We came out of that group that he had working with the triumvirate of be able to operate at greater range uh autonomy as quantity of cost. We were those were the factors or the parameters we were going to address but we didn't get beyond that. We didn't define okay what are we actually going to do? what are we going to build and how are we going to and it's a combination of okay what's the technology what are the building blocks how do you put them into an operational concept how do you use them together and then what kind of force structure do you design to be able to make all that possible and I tried to address all three in the book >> all right so let's get to the concept of lethal autonomy can you talk a little bit about what that means and actually then uh before we get into some of the details in the specific domain pains. What are the challenges, legal, humanitarian, and others with this sort of world that you're painting? >> Well, let let me explain what it looks like. Um, our fighting platforms, uh, fighter planes, armored vehicles, even even surface combatants or submarines can be replaced by unmanned systems. uh and when you start to open your mind to that possibility uh some very interesting things become possible in terms of how you operate and use those systems together and how you organize forces and how you get forces to work effectively together. Uh standing in the way of all that are are a couple of things. One of them is cultural resistance. All of our operators uh have grown up and spent their entire lives mastering very sophisticated equipment that they know how to use operationally. uh and that and the idea that you can walk away from that and rely on uncrrewed things I think is very difficult for them to accept. Um but the the the the concerns about um uh terminator uh type things where killer robots that get loose on the battlefield, the concerns about laws of armed conflict, >> arms control or >> arms control etc. Right? there few years ago 100 very prominent people uh not military people wrote a letter saying we should ban autonomous weapons basically I don't think that's possible and I go into quite a bit of detail why I don't think that's possible uh but I do think we have to somehow uh find a way to implement the laws of armed conflict those already exist uh they're generally agreed to and generally uh not followed perfectly by any means uh but they provide a basis which to hold people accountable the problem is when you go to unmanned systems making engagement decisions automatically a autonomously who do you hold responsible and I think that's the thing we should address um and I think there are different ways to approach that but there are the people who designed and fielded and built these systems there are the people who controlling them operationally there are the people who decided it was okay to deploy them uh and put them out into an operational environment and then they're the people who actually operate them so I think we have to work our way through that I think that's doable at the end of the day human beings must be held accountable for what these machines do and you have to constrain them so that they don't do things that you don't want to do. I think actually that last part of it, how you design so that you don't have violations is relatively straightforward. It's essentially implementing rules of engagement. Uh and you want a situation where people can control that and adjust it as needed by the tactical situation or the operational situation. Uh the role for humans in the forces that I imagine and talk about is largely of executive control of battle management. uh the people will decide how much authority these systems have whether it's don't shoot no matter what which is one extreme or if something moves in that geographic area you go ahead and and kill it. Um and different operational situations will take you to different places there. Uh and the other thing I really want to make important point about is these systems should be better at making those decisions than humans are under enormous combat stress and in the heat of the moment. Um uh you will get mistakes. We've seen mistakes most recently in Iran, serious mistakes. >> Uh people are trying to do their best. I think we can get to where automated systems will actually perform much better than humans. And once you get there, you really out to let them the machines do it. >> All right. So, I wonder if we can get more specific on what this looks like or what this might look like in practice in the future. Uh I'm going in the land domain first. Uh the goal in land warfare, you note this, is likely will remain taking and holding ground. >> Yep. >> Uh so what is what does the operational concept look like and what are the kinds of platforms that you're talking about? What does land warfare look like in the the lethal autonomy uh future that you've laid out? what kind of what like if people can visualize what you're what you're talking about what are what are the key platforms building blocks and concepts of operation that that we should expect might occur in land >> I'll first point I want to make is I'm I'm sure I didn't get all this exactly right I'm sure I got a lot of it exactly wrong but >> but you are talking about the future so I mean >> and we do have some pointers right at the time I originally wrote the report we had Nagon Carba and we had ISIS Uh now we have Ukraine, right? And we're seeing things in Ukraine like an entirely uncrrewed force, land vehicles and air vehicles doing an assault together successfully. We're we're we're seeing articles most recently about prisoners being taken by UAS's basically. Uh we've had that opportunity in the in the past even. So what what I imagine is a force that's built around a fighting vehicle which is uncrrewed. >> Yeah. It carries uh lethal UAS's which are reusable. In general, I tried to go to things which were survivable enough that it made sense to be able to bring them back, refuel them, rearm them, and use them again. A lot of what we're seeing in Ukraine is one way, first-person view things, which are essentially munitions. >> Yeah. >> So, the book is largely about trying to find ways to be efficient in the uses of the resources that you apply to to combat. So you want to get good exchange ratios and you want to reuse things uh to be get more use out of them more more repetitions if you will. So the the uh the UAS's uh several of which would be carried by one of these vehicles carry munitions and they go out and they do combination of surveillance and engagement. >> These are unmanned aircraft systems. >> These are unmanned aircraft systems carried by an unmanned ground vehicle. >> Right. >> Uh that ground vehicle has to be refueled and resupplied just as those those systems do. uh at uh at longer ranges you have you know longer range weapons equivalent to artillery and rocket systems right now that also can be uncrrewed. Where where humans come into the mix is command and control uh battle management and if you imagine a unit composed of the the ground vehicles carrying the unmanned air systems. Um there are some vehicles that are controlled by humans. They're designed to be much more survivable, more stealthy and they provide battle management function. So that might be at battalion level in a current force for example. Um it's an echelon or two above where people are are operating fighting platforms today. There there has to be some degree of self-defense. And by the way Seth I can go on and on. Uh the ground environment is the most complex environment we operate in. And it it's a very uh difficult problem to solve. >> I was involved in the army's future combat system for several years when they were trying to do it. >> Uh I was involved in other systems before that and since. So uh the picture I paint though is one in which while humans are still there and they have a number of rules to provide the the principal fighting role is carried out by these uncrrewed platforms this mix of ground systems and air systems. >> So to be clear you don't see at least in this in this future you don't see a major role for dismounted infantry. You don't see a major role. >> It is a fighting platform, if you will. >> Right. Or humans in a tank or in an infantry fighting vehicle. >> No. Um, that's really as far as I'm going with this, right? I do walk through each book, each se each chapter in the book has a a chapter that kind of lays out the concept, explains what the building blocks are, how you'd put them together, and then and how you'd use them operationally. And then there's another section of each chapter called complexities >> which walks through everything I could think of about that domain that needed to be addressed somehow. Uh and uh and by doing this over a year and a half at kind of a leisurely pace uh gave me a lot of opportunity to think and try to be as complete as possible about those things. Uh and when you look at counterinsurgency for example or you look at um special operations there are a whole range of things that ground forces do. There are a lot of things ground forces are asked to do besides combat against a major opponent, right? And you have to think about all of those when you're designing a force. I try I tried to do that. >> Yeah. And you do note in you do note in the book you you do see a role or or uh a role in some uh aspects for human special operations forces including for training, advising and assisting foreign forces. That may not go away. Mhm. >> Um I I wanted to touch on uh surface warfare in part because it's a I find it a really interesting domain and one where uh the Navy has probably not migrated as fast as some would have liked. But what is your future surface uh warfare? What's a what's the operational concept there? What's the future force look like? >> I don't think my Navy friends are going to like this very much. Um, but I had a very hard time figuring out what to do with surface combatants, unmanned or manned. Uh, the if you think about the history of naval warfare, surface warfare, it's about ships being able to sink each other from further further apart. We started ramming. Uh, then you go to short-range cannons. Then you go to long-range guns that go to the horizon at least. Then you go to aircraft carriers that send aircraft out to find the other guy's navy. Purpose of surface fleets has been to primarily to sink the other guy's surface fleet, right? to control the seas. There are other missions, right? Uh there's escort missions, there's uh support of amphibious forces there and so on. But the problem you have is that if you have to move your your your surface combatants, including aircraft carriers, further and further away from the other guy in order to survive because they're lethal out to longer and longer ranges. You run out of water >> as you keep separating those fleets. When you can kill a surface combatant anywhere on the planet from land and you can target that surface combatant from space, you've got a big problem for naval forces. Uh, and I think that's where we are. You can build a hypersonic glide vehicle that can go just about anywhere. You can uh aircraft carriers are very big targets. Now, the Navy has worked forever to try to make uh service combatants and carrier strike groups more survivable. And there's a large suite of things that are there to do that. I don't think they're going to solve that problem. I think the Chinese the Chinese have built enormous numbers of anti-hship missiles of various types. They've got various delivery platforms. They've got sophisticated centers in space. Our surface navy has a big problem. >> So, if I could come back to uh one of the earlier conversations about the Chinese including the PLA rocket force. >> Yes. Uh, can you bring in the future you're talking about, can you bring man surface vessels within a thousand miles of the Chinese coastline within the first island chain? What is the risk of your submarines, your destroyers, your sorry, not your different category, your cruisers, your destroyers, your aircraft carriers? >> I think it's very high. Uh and at any given moment when the war starts, you know, the ships that are already there are very easy to target. There are a lot of ways to do that. Uh ships that are in port are very easy to target, can be attacked in port. So you've got you've got a problem at the initiation of hostilities period. Um and even as even once you go to um tactics and techniques and procedures to try to conceal the presence of the force, there's still you've still got something that's got very large signatures. uh you know the this is all unclassified. There's nothing classified in what I'm saying here. This has been observed for a very long time. You know publicly uh in some war games that the Marines have done. They basically just said the carriers can't get in. They got to give them out. So this problem's recognized. Um and I would like to think that there's some solution. During the Cold War, we had a similar problem, but we thought at that time that we could conceal a carrier strike group for some significant period of time. I don't think that's true anymore. I think that the oceans have been uh uh uh instrumented to a certain degree. One of the uh programs that's an unmanned system that came out of the early efforts of the defense innovation unit is a system called sail drone. It's an uncrrewed sailpowered you know small u unmanned service vessel and I asked somebody on my staff to come up with the cost of populating the western Pacific with a fleet of these things as sensors that could be used to target turfish ships. And for a billion dollars, you can put about a thousand of these out. The nominal cost a million dollars a piece. And you can you can essentially instrument the Pacific. Uh so you've got that kind of a sensor system out there, uh uncrrewed buoys, for example. You've got space-based systems, and then you've got other things. You've got their militia. So hiding surface ships is going to be really hard. And as the ranges extend, that thousand miles applies to attacking ships as well. Uh it's going to be very, very hard to defend them. It's it's a numbers game that at the end of the day, you're gonna have a really hard time winning. >> So, one follow-up question. >> By the way, so before I leave that, >> yeah, >> when you get to a vessel the size of a surface combatant, whether you have people on it or not, is not a huge driver of cost >> or performance. Right. You can you know, I make provisions say you you may have ships that are optionally unmanned where you can put a for possession purposes and for other reasons put a very small crew on, but most of the functions are automated. Navy's moved in this direction over time with their designs. In any event, [snorts] >> so uh h how do you think about um something like deterring or even if deterrence fails um conducting effective operations against a PLA invasion force of Taiwan? How do you think where where what are the elements of lethal autonomy that that become really important? I know that US uh Pacific Command and San Paparo including while you were in government have been thinking about this issue and even before he was the pickup commander as part of Hellscape. How do how do you bring in autonomous and other platforms in to deter or if deterrence fails fight in that kind of a situation? That was one of the things I was trying to do with the air force and the space force, right? Um the space force is essentially already an autonomous uncrrewed set of assets, but it has to be much more survivable than than our current assets and we're moving in that direction. We also have to have a counterpace set of capabilities uh because of what the Chinese are doing with their targeting systems and so on. The um uh so you have to engage in that fight and you have to win it. Um, you also have to make our air bases in our air forces survivable in somehow. And so going to alternate bases that are uh you can you can move to and conceal where you are is part of that equation as well. The Navy service combatants is really problematic getting them in. Submarines have a better opportunity. Uh but the best place to defend Taiwan from for example is Taiwan. You can put a lot of uncrrewed capability on Taiwan or or or utilized from Taiwan. the uh Deputy Secretary Hicks had a program that she started called Replicator. Yeah. >> Which you mentioned a hellscape idea that was kind of centerpiece of that. Yeah. Replicator uh was classified and and there's not much I can I can't say anything about it really. Uh but it was an attempt to go in the direction you just described specifically oriented on uh making the Chinese problem much much harder. >> Uh last question. Uh I want to go to the way you sort of begin and end the book. Uh, you write, "I hate war. It is the most wasteful and cruel of human endeavors, but you have chosen to spend most of your career in uniform and as a civilian working in the development of weapon systems. I'm actually interested in um your thoughts on lethal autonomy and the way you've thought about the future of the force, how much that can also help strengthen deterrence and prevent especially the big fights to begin with." And I I'll go back to that conversation we had about the first and the second offsets which at the end of the day were actually quite helpful in deterring US versus Soviet uh uh war which would have been horrible casualties the economic impact of it. Um how how do you think about maybe there's a positive spin on it for peace? >> Well first of all I'm I I have an avocation of being a human rights lawyer. Uh I'm a humanitarian and I think that the destruction of war is is tragic. Uh and it's avoidable. We we as human beings, you know, we've only been civilized for about 6,000 years, give or take. And so we've learned how to not let violence be the way we solve differences at smaller scales. Uh we're not doing at the nation state level yet. We've tried. You know, the two horrific wars in the uh 20th century basically led to an attempt to do that which has been reasonably successful actually up until now. um the system of alliances that I talked about that you mentioned earlier is is part of that. So deterrence is the name of the game for me. I don't want to have a war. But we live in a world in which people are uh there are threats. There are threats to people that would like to have us live under a different form of government where we don't have the freedoms that we enjoy. And we have no choice but to defend ourselves. Uh and I think we need to defend ourselves so well that wars don't happen at least between great powers. We're also living in a world with nuclear weapons now. So the risk of escalation to the unthinkable uh is very real and I lived in that world for you know the first 20 years of my career with the Soviet [snorts] Union and I thought we'd escaped it when the cold war ended. But we're back in a situation now where there are three nuclear powers which significant arsenals uh and where tactical nuclear weapons are people are talking about using them. So we're still living in a place where humans are going to use violence. Uh I want the US to be dominant and that dominance is ebbing away. Um I believe in the values of our nation. I always have and everything I have done whatever I've been doing has been about protecting this nation and all the things that that we hold dear uh democracy the rule of law is where that starts and having a strong military that can protect our interests and also uh so which include those values uh very important to me and I don't want us to get behind when I wrote the original version of this I was worried about the Chinese seeing it and so much has happened in the last few years both what's happened in Russia and Ukraine Ukraine conflict and what I've seen China doing through the intelligence that I've seen uh they're figuring this stuff out and we got to move faster but we've got to move faster in the right direction. Emulating Ukraine is not the right answer. Uh we we're more resources than that. We've got more time than that. We can be smarter than that because we've got the luxury of being able to do so. And I'd like to see and if there's an single intended audience for this, it's probably our operational community to try to open their minds, open their eyes to the idea that you know that these are these changes are going to happen. Uh and we can either hang on to what we're know and are comfortable with or we can move forward and I think we need to move forward. >> Well, Secretary General, thank you so much. I actually found the book interesting both in the past and the present because it's very empirical, but also in I think opening people up to where the future and what what lies ahead and where the US uh really needs to go with its allies and partners. I will say though, your consistent comments about the threat that the Chinese pose, I think I is significant, is concerning, and is worrisome. And for me, sort of overhanging all of this is there will be a cost if we do not take some of the steps you're talking about. >> I agree. >> So, thanks for doing this. >> Thank you. Good to be with you, Seth. [music]