 Good afternoon. Daniel and Peter told me I was going to do a book talk in 10 minutes. And of course, I said, I can't possibly do a book talk in 10 minutes. The book is so long, it will take me hours. And they said, too bad you only have 10 minutes. And I thought, well, maybe I'll just read the chapter headings out loud to you. But they said, that was not a good idea either. So the book is called How Everything Became War and The Military Became Everything. It's out there somewhere if you're interested. And I'm going to try to just give you a little bit of a teaser of the book's main themes, which the people say, what is the book about? Well, the title pretty much tells the story. But let me start by telling an anecdote about when I worked at the Pentagon. I was working for Michelle Flournoy when she was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. This is towards the beginning of the Obama administration. And after a certain amount of time, I managed to convince my mother to come and have lunch with me at the Pentagon. And this was kind of a big deal because my mother died in the wall, lefty anti-war activists, and had never set foot in the Pentagon, except possibly to try to levitate it in the 1960s. So it was not getting her over there. It was sort of a big deal. So she comes, takes the metro from Alexandria where we live. And she comes through the visitor entrance. And we get her through security. We go up the escalators. And we're walking through the hallways. And we go past the CVS and the Market Basket and the Flourish Shop and the Chocolate Shop and the Bank Machine and the Barber Shop and so forth. And something my mom just stops in the middle of the corridor. And everybody is, of course, totally inconvenienced by this. And people are rushing around us, shoving us out of the way. And I said, what's the matter? And she looks around and she says, are you telling me that the heart of American military power is a shopping mall? I said, well, yeah, pretty much. Because over, Pentagon, as you know, is world's largest office building. I think it has, according to the Pentagon's website, 17.5 miles of corridors. 23,000 people work in the building, military and civilians. And over the years, not that surprisingly, when you have to go through layers of security to get anywhere, shops and restaurants have sprung up to cater to the needs of these 23,000 people. So the Pentagon has turned into the world's largest one-stop shopping outfit. We are now at a slightly surreal point where, at the Pentagon, you can buy a pair of running shoes or you can order a marine expeditionary unit to patrol in the Philippines. You can, if you have a headache or something, you can go buy some Tylenol at CVS or you can order special forces medics to go fight malaria in Chad. You can get a new cell phone if you lose yours or you are, if you're sufficiently high-ranking, you can order the NSA to monitor somebody else's cell phone. And you can buy a small chocolate sculpture of a fighter jet at the candy store. They're really cool. They taste good. Or you can order up a drone strike in Yemen or somewhere. So as my friend retired, Lieutenant General Dave Barno says, the Pentagon has become, the military has become sort of the world's largest one-stop shopping outfit. It's basically a super Walmart with everything under one roof. And what we've seen, I think, in the last 15-plus years, we've seen three successive presidential administrations who have been eager consumers of everything that the military has to offer. How did this happen? Should we care about it? Well, I think this phenomenon is both the product and the driver of some really seismic changes in how Americans and American policymakers think about war and the military, with consequent challenges both to our law and our values and to the military as an institution and our ideas of civil-military relations. Basically, we're caught in something of a vicious circle. As we have faced novel threats in the last 15 years, cyberspace, terrorism, et cetera, we have increasingly come to view each new threat through the lens of war. As we view more and more things through the lens of war, we view more and more tasks as the proper province of the military. As we do that, we also bring more and more things into the ambit of the law of war with its much greater tolerance than the law of war for secrecy, for the use of coercion, for reduced accountability mechanisms and checks and balances. As we ask the military to take on more tasks, we need to hire military budgets, which means that we have to make cuts or freeze elsewhere in the form of civilian institutions, which means that their capabilities are reduced, which means we turn to the military more and more and then the circle just continues, obviously. And I think we're seeing this very powerfully just in the last few weeks in the debates about the Trump administration's current budget proposals. You know the old cliche. If you're only tools, a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If your only functioning government institution is the military, then everything starts to look kind of like a war. And if everything looks like a war, then everything looks like a job for the military. Okay, so what? Who cares? What's at stake? If the boundaries around war and the military become blurry, it seems to me that almost everything is at stake. And here's why. I mean, to say something that on some level is so obvious that we almost forget it. We have in our society and we always have, human societies have always had different rules, different moral and legal rules for war and for warriors and for peace and for civilians. In wartime, we expect and want and indeed often require that warriors kill, that they use coercive force. We don't really care very much if there is censorship or surveillance or monitoring. We're willing to detain people. We're willing to suspend our usual rules about judicial review and checks and balances. And we do that because we think of war as a temporary state of affairs. And we say, well, war is kind of an emergency and when you have an emergency, you have to privilege the urgent needs of military objectives over rights and due process and so forth. But that's okay because wars end. They don't last forever. In peacetime, it's the opposite set of rules applies. You say you don't get to go out and kill people. You don't, if you wanna detain somebody, the state has to jump through a million different hoops and so forth. So we really have almost opposite sets of rules that govern war and peace. The problem, of course, is that we now live in an era in which it's gotten increasingly hard to draw a principal distinction between what counts legally, politically, institutionally as war and what counts as peace. Think of obviously, I mean, I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know, but when you think of whether it's globally diffused transnational terror networks made up of individuals rather than state actors when you're looking at cyber conflict and cyber attacks, you can't have any boundaries either in space or in time. You know, the battlefield ceases to be a geographic thing. It migrates from place to place. We no longer know what counts as a weapon. Civilian plane, a line of computer code, piece of propaganda on social media. We don't know who counts as a warrior, who's a combatant, who's a civilian. When we don't know what is a weapon and what is a war, it gets harder and harder to figure out, does that al-Qaeda or ISIS propagandist is that he's targetable under the law of war or is that a civilian or is he a civilian participating in directly in hostilities? What is a hostility? What does it mean to participate in? All of these really core concepts have gotten so blurry in the last 15 years that they've become harder and harder to apply. But the problem is, if we don't know what counts as a war or who counts as a warrior, then we don't know when to apply war rules which say it's okay for the state to use coercive force to kill people, detain people and so on without a lot of checks and balances or to apply peace rules that say no, it's not okay state. You gotta do the exact opposite. And when we lose the ability to decide what counts as war and who counts as a warrior in a principled or consistent way, we lose the ability to make the most vital decisions that any democracy has to make, which is to say which matters should appropriately be subject to judicial review and which should not. We always say you can't have a court in the battlefield, okay, but if you don't know what a battlefield is, how do you know when the court should be weighing in and when they shouldn't? We don't know when it's okay for the government to censor or monitor or surveil individuals with what set of rules. We don't know when it's okay to detain people without due process for how long, under what circumstances. We don't know ultimately who gets to live and who gets to die, right? And take something that I've written about and others at New America have written about expensively, targeted strikes usually referred to in shorthand as drone strikes. If we believe that the targets of all US strikes are combatants in armed conflicts or civilians participating directly in hostilities, if you wanna be a stickler, then a US drone strike in Yemen or Somalia or anywhere else is morally and legally identical to an American soldier on D-Day shooting at a German rushing towards him, identical. There's no difference whatsoever. On the other hand, if we think, hey, wait a second, these seem like really different situations and we're not so sure there's a war or we're not so sure that this person is a combatant in a war, then these strikes are extrajudicial executions, aka murders and we really wanna know the difference. The book, which I hope you will read or actually you don't have to read it, you just have to buy it. The book has really two strands and I won't talk much more about it because I'm virtually out of time and my 10 minutes is almost up. One of the strands of the book is an institutional story about the ways in which it places strain and complicates the role of the military and all of our ideas of civil military relations and civilian control of the military as we expand the tasks that we are assigning to the military. The other strand in the book has to do with the impact of this blurriness on law and our values. I won't, Peter and Daniel, are you here? Are we taking questions or are we just, they've all disappeared, they've all fled the building. Look at that, that's the way it works around here. They're gone. Do we, no, okay, no questions are permitted. That's all I have to say and I'm done. But in any case, much more to be said about the ways in which this is distorting, I think, are increasing inability to distinguish in a principled way between war and peace is distorting not only our laws and our politics, but beginning to place enormous strain on the military itself. Thank you very much.