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An announcement detailing the dates, topics, and speakers of each lecture will be sent by me, both on email and posted on our website. Our next lecture will be on Tuesday, February 21st. We will feature an engaging discussion on the culture of inclusion with Naval War College Command Master Chief Farnin. For each lecture, speakers will provide remarks for about 45 minutes and then for the remaining 15 minutes or so, we'll answer questions from you. Okay. On with the main event, please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom, and we will address them at the conclusion of the presentation. With that, I'm very pleased to introduce our speaker, military professor, Lieutenant Colonel Jehara Matasek, who will speak today about U.S. Homeland Defense, where he will discuss the digital occupation of the American homeland. Lieutenant Colonel Matasek is a military professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the U.S. Naval War College and a fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a joint production of Princeton's Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point. From 2018 to 2022, he served as an associate professor in the Military and Strategic Studies Department, research director at the Strategy and Warfare Center, and senior fellow with the Homeland Defense Institute at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Besides having published over 80 articles and peer-reviewed journals, policy-relevant outlets, and edited volumes on warfare, strategy, and military affairs, he received a bronze star in 2022. I am pleased to pass the microphone over to Lieutenant Colonel Matasek. So, as you can see up here, I have a couple of pictures I wanted to make you aware of about how deep this research has actually gone. The first research trip as a part of elevating Homeland Defense Awareness in my duties with the Homeland Defense Institute at the Air Force Academy was actually visiting Ukraine in August of 2021. So, that happened to be us hanging out in downtown Kyiv when they celebrated their Independence Day on the 24th of August. And later that day, we went and checked out the memorial where over 10,000 Ukrainians had died since the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 by Russia. And why did we go there? We wanted to see what happens to a country when its homeland is invaded and what does Homeland Defense mean for our country under constant duress. That kind of kicked off a longer-term research project that I'm going to show you today. And I really look forward to you if you want to get to the details and weeds on certain countries, by all means, ask me. So, Homeland Defense, for a lot of people that don't realize, NORAD Northcom, this is kind of all the things you have to worry about. Now, the US has been very lucky for a very long time. We've had friendly neighbors such as Canada and Mexico next to us. And we have these two big things called moats that are called the oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic, which have traditionally made it difficult to attack the US homeland. Now, of course, World War II, things of that nature. As you think through that now, the Arctic's becoming more important. Issues from Central and South America are again impacting the US. But this whole presentation I'd initially built before what's happened over the last week, and namely, which was getting you to care about defending the American homeland. So, I wanted to give you this great meme joke. If you've ever seen Moneyball about what combatant commands are cared about the most, Yukon into Paycom, Centcom, and then there's basically Northcom. And what changed everything? The Chinese spy balloon. Now, you actually know and care about the American homeland and think, oh, wow, other countries can actually impact us and touch us in ways that we probably didn't think about up until a week or two ago. Now, of course, there's nothing new about this technology. Again, it goes back to World War II with the Japanese using their Fugu balloon bombs and trying to cause forest fires throughout the West Coast and Pacific Northwest. But again, this, the fact that people were already making Wikipedia pages about the Battle of Myrtle Beach and saying it's the first event in the Second Cold War again highlights how this is starting to be interpreted and being perceived by the American public. This also led to other interesting discussions from people saying, hey, what if the Chinese had maybe put an EMP device on that balloon? These are things that have already been discussed back in 2018 in a different report about ways you can attack the American homeland in ways that we are just not prepared or ready for. Well, of course, a year ago, and we know this is probably going to change this year probably because of what's now happened, you can see from the American point of view what people seem to care about most is cyber terrorism, things of that nature. And then you can kind of see Russia and China are a little bit lower on the list. This, of course, is going to change a lot this year. But what's important to think about is that there are traditional and non-traditional threats. And homelands around the world are being attacked and are under a lot more stress and duress, partly because technology and the diffusion of the ability of non-state actors and also states to attack without the issues of attribution as much. So you can see the use of a biological or of a chemical weapon in England against a Russian dissident. Obviously, back in 2015, the Russians were hacking Ukrainian power grids. Iran has been supporting proxies to attack Saudi oil fields causing billions of dollars for the damage. Think about North Korea. They now have a chance that they actually do have the potential to attack the American homeland, even though they have the same GDP as Colorado Springs. And then finally, we all remember the OPM hack by the Chinese, compromising all of our data. Now, if you remember the last INS brief, Professor Breitman had actually alluded to sort of the problem with humanitarian responses and crisis management and weather events. Well, here's another thing that impacts the homeland and Northcom actually has to respond to and deal with, which is in 2022, we had $165 billion worth of climate weather related events. $165 billion worth of damage. That is the third most ever in American history. And if you look at the last 20 years, these events are happening more and more. Again, this is not being discussed enough or being appreciated for what impact this is going to have on our economy, especially as we move forward in the future. And these events continue to keep getting worse. Another thing as well, we think about COVID. After almost two years, over a million Americans are dead. We probably shouldn't have lost that many Americans. But guess what? The Chinese and the Russians have engaged in a lot of influence campaigns against the American homeland and other Western countries to also disinform and misinform and spread different ideas and polarizing concepts about COVID, the vaccines and so forth. Again, this is a lot of damage to be doing. So what's changing? What's happening? So believe it or not, as I see a decently young audience here, you probably remember smartphones didn't really exist before 2008. Well, believe it or not, between 2008 and 2014, I say 2014 is a really important changing point. That's when you basically had a 10-fold increase in smartphone sales, basically making peak purchase and use globally of cell phones. Can you guys think of some big events that happened in 2014? The rise of ISIS, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. These devices are changing the way we think about war, but also the way we perceive it, the way it's waged and other things like that. Other things do that I think should make you also worry about what we're doing or what we're not doing enough of. So for example, the Russians, it's been estimated, and I got this from a Lithuanian defense official, Russia spent about $4 billion, comparable value, on conducting sort of influence operations against Europe and the US. And then think about the Chinese, they employ at least a million people to do such activities against the US and Europe, whereas the US only has about 30,000 employees involved in sort of information operations. So we are at scale, we are nowhere near where we need to be when it comes to competing in the information age. And guess what? When you keep hearing the news in Congress about TikTok, it's now the most visited website app in the world now compared to Google. This is also highly problematic, but this is also why I'm saying everyone in this audience and around the world, you are now a combatant. Everything is being weaponized. Anytime you go on social media, and you choose to share or not share, comment or not comment on a topic or an issue or an idea, there is a pretty good chance there is a social media warrior being paid by Russia or China, Iran, that is trying to influence you into thinking a certain way about a certain topic or idea. But it's not as simple as that either. This term I've come to develop, it's socio-political information warfare. And what I think makes this very different is it's not so much about you trying to make America more communist, more fascist or make your country more authoritarian. It's about trying to polarize and create hyper-partisanship. This, I contend, is what is really making domestic politics in the U.S. and most democracies around the world so difficult for the contemporary era is the fact that many countries like China and Russia are involving themselves in politics through social media and creating sort of these fake debates and fake narratives and ideas and concepts. And if you think, okay, maybe this is overblown, thinking back to 2014 Ukraine, terms such as information Blitzkrieg were used because within a month of Russia occupying Crimea, map makers around the world were actually depicting Crimea now as a part of, as Russia, indicating that the digital reality that Russia wanted to construct became actual reality. And again, that's highly problematic. So other thing, when you think about this, even more broadly, when you think about clousfits and war, you think about the Trinity, at least, right? It's the people, the government, and the army. Well, I contend you, the blind spot on all of this was actually the fact, the thing that connects all three of those, which is civil society. Civil society is the community you live in, the churches you go to, the bowling clubs, the NGO, the book reading club. These are all these different kind of parts of civil society that are now being attacked by China and Russia. And there's actually a really important term to use to talk about this, schismogenesis. What is schismogenesis? It is this old anthropological term created by Gregory Batson, who worked for the OSS in the 1930s, 1940s, and used this idea and concept to divide and conquer many Japanese-occupied islands in the South Pacific during World War II. Again, this is about creating hyperpartisanship, dividing a society, and making them hate each other more as opposed to dealing with the real threat externally. This, I contend you, is the digital occupation of America. When you are online or do anything else like that, more than likely your data is either being stolen or sold to a foreign power who does not have your best interest in mind. And we know this because, again, after the insurrection events on January 6th a couple years ago, we know this is an issue because there were Chinese and Russian-backed bots and other actors participating and encouraging this insurrection against the US government. But we could even expand what we think about traditional and non-traditional threats. So for all these years we've been hearing about UFOs, there's indications that maybe these were actually just UAVs from China and Russia and other countries. You also have issues of China actually trying to physically occupy our country when they're buying up lots of land around American missile silos. Highly problematic. Then you also have ideas about what is real news, what is fake news, what kind of news can you have in American society when it comes to freedom of speech, things of that nature. Again, I can't tell you what to think, but you can decide what possibly causes people to think in a way that is probably un-American or at least these ideas that create friction points and hyper-partisanship in the US. Of course, you have your hypersonic weapons that everyone is very concerned about when it comes to NORAD Northcom. Of course, you have to think about what's AI going to do to information warfare and influence ops when you can introduce an AI chatbot and you can try to influence people down to the tactical level. Then you also think about last few months you've even heard down in North Carolina and the Pacific Northwest, people have been attacking the power grid, shooting at substations. I think about two years ago in Pennsylvania, a drone was used to attack also a power substation. Again, this is undermining the American homeland. I thought this was actually really interesting. Within five minutes of the Chinese balloon being shot down this past weekend, I got a recruiting email from a person from China representing themselves. A Chinese headhunter offered to contact me because I have a PhD to try and recruit me. Obviously, the person didn't do their homework as to who I was, but this is the new battle space problem, which is it's much more easier to reach out and touch people and target people. When I actually asked one of my old professors at Northwestern University, he's like, oh, I get these all the time and we get briefed all the time at Northwestern University about not getting yourself involved in this because it is a threat to national security. But the problem is, of course, all it takes is one person out of a thousand to respond, yes, I'd like to be paid more money and recognized by your headhunting company. All it takes is that one person of a thousand. So switching gears a little bit. So going back to where I was saying this has been a long-term project over the last two years, I've led the research teams from the Homeland Defense Institute to Ukraine, the Baltics, Sweden, and Finland, having done over 200 interviews with politicians, government officials, military personnel, civil society actors, things like that. And it was all about to gain a holistic understanding and assessment of these countries that are experiencing even more duress and threat from a foreign power. So like I said, getting to Ukraine, I don't want to go too much into history, but understanding the fact that the best term I ever actually like to describe what's going on with Ukraine and Russia is this is a 30-year divorce that just keeps getting worse and worse between these two countries. And this is also a great place to think about what the future of warfare might look like, hence it being a petri dish. So I'm going to give you sort of like pretty top-level, you just give you an idea of what it means going on these countries. But one thing I heard a lot when I was in Ukraine, this again, this is 2021, August. Putin is trying to recreate the Soviet Union 2.0. He knows he needs to have Belarus and Ukraine if he wants to restart the Russian Empire. But what I think is also less talked about in response to what homelands do when they're put under duress. It's also the power of civil society to actually respond. So we met lots of people from NGOs, activists that did a lot in those early years of 2014-2015 to rush things to the front lines to help out the volunteer fighters to basically push back the initial Russian advances. Wondering the quote that I got from a Ukrainian general was the quote of, in modern war, the rifle is not the main weapon. And when this came up, this became kind of a theme when we met some Ukrainian politicians and they start talking about that we're not trying to wage a war against Russia over language, food, culture, history, churches, and social media, but we're trying to carve out our own identity that is separate from Russia. Now, of course, the Russia has portrayed that as you're being Russophobic, but to the Ukrainians, this is the development of a national identity. And I'd like to describe those almost as like a hyper state formation. Also, since we happened to also be in Ukraine in August of 2021, what happened that month? The fall of Afghanistan. So of the 40 plus people we met while in Kiev and also with Dessa, it came up constantly, don't abandon us like you abandon Afghanistan. Now, luckily, two years forward, we have not. I got this quote actually from a Ukrainian soldier that I met two years ago, but is still alive and fighting the front lines. And it was some to the effect that, you know, we're getting so much American equipment and NATO equipment, but we're not fighting your way. We're fighting the Cossack way. And that's a cultural reference to Ukrainian heritage and culture about fighting a very different way that is distinct from Russia. And finally, I think it's really important to emphasize the importance of strategic communication. Also, referred to in NATO terms as stratcom. If you haven't heard this term, what it basically is is a combination of public affairs and information operations. If you haven't been paying much attention to Ukraine since the invasion, they've done a lot to make sure that they've created at least the narrative of perception that they are defeating Russia and all they need is military aid to keep the fight up and stay independent, switching gears a little bit to the Baltics. So we visited the Baltics two months after visiting Ukraine. And they were also equally worried about the war breaking out in Europe as well. But other things that are important about this is, for those of you who don't know much about the Baltics, they have, when we meet these people, they have lots of historical and cultural shame about not having fought more during World War II against Soviet and Nazi occupation. But since 1981, they've become vibrant democracies. By 2004, they joined NATO. 2005, you've never heard of this thing called the Baltic Media Alliance. This is Russia establishing a media corporation in London to continue transmitting and creating Russian speaking media for the Baltics since 2005. And that's again about trying to control or at least overtly project Russian points of view onto the people living in the Baltics. And then of course, since 2014, 2015, NATO in the US especially has deployed a lot of the forces to Eastern Europe. So this is current as of June 22, almost 100,000 American troops are deployed to Europe in general with 40,000 troops under NATO command. So this is all about deterrence and what may come in the future. So another interesting joke that came up a lot when we visited Estonia is it's called Estonia. And why Estonia? Estonia has digitized everything. Since 2007, when Russian hackers basically shut down most of their country by turning off the internet for them, they have decided that not only are they going to digitize everything, but they're going to be really effective at it and make it super secure and basically get everyone away from even having ID cards and going towards digital ID cards. This is something that I think we may have to consider over the next 10, 20 years as the Chinese and Russians develop even better ways of influencing the US and attacking the way we live with the Baltics. Again, I don't want to get too much of the weeds on this as well either, but I can tell you broadly speaking, it was really interesting to hear this perspective that World War II did not end in 1945 for the Americans or Western Europe. In 1994 when Soviet forces finally left their country. I think that's an important way of looking at these people that live in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They view Russia very differently, but of course they did try to be reconcilable with Moscow, but they said obviously when we met these officials, they said 2014 was the turning point. People tried to ignore what happened in 2008 with the Russians invasion of Georgia, but it was basically viewed as that wake-up call. Now, when I say not all Baltics are alike, I mean this in the sense that they all have their own vulnerabilities, but also the way they think about security and defense. So I'll give you an example. Estonia after independence 1991, they never got rid of their draft. So they've had conscription the last 30 years. Lithuania got rid of it in 2007, but brought it back in 2015 because of what happened in Ukraine. And then Latvia, they got rid of theirs in 2009 and have been unable to bring back a conscription because over a third of their population is basically ethnically Russian. That's viewed as a liability. Other liabilities people don't really give much a consideration to as well is Russian rail gauge. So countries like Finland and the Baltics, they still have old Russian Empire railroads, not the same rail gauge that you have the most in Western Europe. What does that mean? In a future crisis or conflict, as we're seeing in Ukraine and Russia right now, how important railroads are to moving massive amounts of artillery, troops and supplies. This is going to be a hindrance in a future scenario because there is no Western European rail line connecting the Baltics to Western and Central Europe. And finally, when we were in, when we were driving from Latvia to Lithuania, we got pulled over by the border police. And as I first I'm in Europe being in the EU, where they were checking our IDs because they thought we were refugees. Apparently, the cops were explained to us, oh, we saw a bunch of guys in a bus and we thought, those are probably people from Belarus or Russia. So it turned out, and this is the importance, again, of being in these countries, we met some Lithuanian M.O.D. stratcom officials and they actually documented in detail the way Russia was advertising in African countries, at Middle Asian countries, to convince them to hop on Russian funded airplanes, to fly up to Belarus and get put on buses and sent down to the border in Lithuania and Latvia. This is the weaponization of refugees. And this was happening as early as 2021. And I also wanted to point out that China is also causing issues as well. So if you didn't hear in July of 2021, Lithuania pulled out of a big Central European EU trade deal with the Chinese. One Lithuanian M.O.D. official said, we averaged about four cyber attacks from the Chinese a month before this. And after that, it went from four to 100 a month. So China has been very unhappy with the Lithuanians. And when I asked them why you did this, they pointedly, like Blake said, we have anti-communist DNA. We cannot accept what China is doing and we know what they're doing in terms of stealing intellectual property and things like that. And finally, we visited Sweden and Finland back in September of this past year in 2022. Important thing about this is Sweden, after a little war with Napoleon in 1812, had been neutral for just over 200 plus years. And of course, you have Finland was forced to be neutral during the Cold War. But this is all probably going to change, hopefully, if they do get to join NATO. Now, what's the importance of that? Well, lots of common terms that were thrown around of that is that Norway, Sweden, Finland, all in it being a NATO, you will essentially have a NATO island between the Arctic and the Baltic Sea. And Baltic Sea now becomes a NATO lake. It was also interesting to meeting a lot of the Swedes and Finns. Historically and culturally, they actually have sort of embedded Russophobia because they've had so many experiences of being occupied by Russian troops. So when we were there back in September, when we would ask their intelligence officials, are the Russians fighting the way you thought they would? And they're like, yeah, they are not very good. And they do lots of mean back things as we've obviously seen documented a lot. And one final thing I think is important as well. And maybe this will dictate or at least this will inform what looks like the future of the geopolitics of the region. There are three islands of Norway, Sweden and Finland. When I say they are frozen in geopolitics, these are old, old treaties with the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union about these three islands not being allowed to be militarized. So these are very weird neutral islands of these three countries that cannot have any military forces. You can't even have military overflights of them. Again, these are weird, you know, islands stuck in like ancient history to me. A couple of things that, again, I can spend all day talking about this, but just realize that Sweden and Finland take the idea of homeland defense so seriously that they have models and terms and concepts developed around it. And their whole government and society and military and private sector, Sweden and Finland, they function around that identity and that idea. Now, what does that mean to you? It means that we went to these meetings where you had kernels and generals and CEOs of various companies, trade unions, meeting in one room and talking about how they're going to deal with, you know, future supply chain issues and other issues associated with the Russian and Ukraine war. Now, it was interesting that they actually let us go to these meetings when we would ask them about China. And this takes them to that bottom point. Sweden and Finland have very mixed emotions, especially even like the national defense officials, about the US, what they perceive as the US pulling them into a conflict. And the reason why they have justifiable feelings about this is because in 2019, NATO announced its own pivot to Asia to counter China. So I also wanted to point out that Sweden and Finland also have two institutes dedicated to trying to counter disinformation and misinformation. The US actually tried doing this back in April, as the DGB, the Disinformation Governance Board, which fell under the Department of Homeland Security. And between April and August, it was relentlessly attacked by certain parts of American society. And by August, DHS actually had to dissolve this agency, which was all about countering disinformation. So again, you can check this out online. There's lots of crazy stories about it. But this is a problem for the US, right? The fact that we create an agency to deal with something and it only lasts a few months. So a couple of things when we think about less is learned. I like to break this up into thinking about there can be formal defense. So formal government organizations like NORAD, NORTHCOM, DHS, National Guard, all these sort of ideas and concepts to how you deal with traditional and non-traditional threats. But I think equally important and undervalued is informal homeland defense. So thinking about how do you develop resilience in your population, civil society, how do you use the power of NGOs, activists, highly motivated individuals that want to do the right thing in a crisis or to deal with a threat or a future problem? And finally, if you accept that America's strength is diversity, freedom of speech, also realize this is also seen as an asymmetric opportunity for adversaries to exploit. So you think about social cohesion and transparency and corruption, these three things will be and are already being targeted by the Chinese and Russians. They want Americans to think that there are two types or three types or more types of Americans and that there's a right kind of American or a bad kind of American. This is the targeting of social cohesion, which is really dangerous. And transparency and corruption. Unfortunately, America isn't doing very well when it comes to transparency and corruption. A recent index came out and ranked the US 24th in the world when it comes to corruption right behind the powerhouse country of Seychelles. So action needs to be taken, right? Lots of problems, but also require lots of solutions. A couple of ideas I've been briefing and working with Norad and North come on is the idea of developing these US national defense courses for the private sector. You may be thinking, what's that? Well, guess what, in Finland, they have this. They're called national defense courses where they pick 50 people each year to attend national security courses mainly from the private sector so that they buy into the idea of homeland defense and defense of the country and thinking about supply chain issues, things that may be leveraged by adversaries. These are little baby subs that the US can do to get the buy-in from tech companies and moguls and things like that and other elites to realize there are things that are good to debate and there are things that are maybe more polarizing and help adversaries in information warfare. Ukraine, believe it or not, also has this thing called a department of digital development and digital resilience. What does that mean? The US is not doing enough to protect our data. The chief of staff of the Air Force, General Brown, actually equated the idea of data being zeros and ones being just as important, if not more important than bullets and bombs. We do not protect our data enough in this country and unfortunately it's sold off to adversaries and other people that mean us harm. Protecting targeted citizens. It's not uncommon for Russia or China to send agents to go off and intimidate people in democracies or to at least intimidate them online and make their life miserable. This again is a thing that we do not properly defend against and it does require the use of other agents like the FBI. Getting back to the idea of fostering a sense of US national security, other things that would also work again is when you think about national security, you have to have the private sector there and you have to get them to buy in that protecting the data, protecting infrastructure, being a part of certain projects, promote US national interest and that at some point you cannot take neutrality as an option anymore. I think I already kind of covered the importance of Arctic security with the introduction hopefully of Sweden and Finland because they will be a critical component for the future of Arctic security and hypersonic weapons. Red teaming, believe it or not, down to the tactical unit level, the ability to understand what an adversary might do to you is not done enough. I'll give you an example. I was a part of this other project at the U.S. Army War College about power projection. We called it the Forts the Ports scenario and we described a way in which an adversary would do whatever they could to prevent say a base like Fort Carson in Colorado trying to deploy a brigade of tanks and armor another infantry from Fort Carson to a port in Texas and it was all about things that you could do as an adversary to prevent such power projection by messing with electrical lines along the way, preventing the trains from operating properly, to preventing employees from even showing up to work, these little things you could do to target certain parts and yet not look suspicious. Again, this is a problem we have not thought about in the next crisis. We have taken for granted the idea that we can actually get troops to a seaport or to an airport to be taken to a crisis zone because I promise you the next adversary in the next conflict against the U.S. they will not let us easily power project, they just won't. I can't say enough about STRATCOM and the importance it is either in a government agency or military agency and again this is a pretty well accepted way of dealing with information and encountering disinformation and there is actually a NATO Center of Excellence dedicated to strategic communication that's based in Latvia. And finally, you probably have heard over the last year, so lots of discussion about banning TikTok and similar platforms. I would contend to you, yes, in the short term doing that would be the right thing to do. The problem is over 100 million Americans have TikTok and use it at the third of the country and that there will be a future TikTok. It doesn't matter what is it called. The question is can we create laws that prevent adversaries from collecting our data or if four companies do work in the U.S., they have to be willing to submit to American data privacy laws which, by the way, are not good enough still because the other alternative is the U.S. buying TikTok from this Chinese company, which if you weren't aware of this as well, this is why we are so concerned about China. They passed the law in 2017 requiring any Chinese company or citizen to turn over any data that the Chinese government says contributes to their national security. So I guess I could say, Mike, Clarion called everyone in this audience physically and online is the next time you see that meme you think is really funny, think about it. Is it divisive? Does it contribute to partisanship? Because if so, it's probably not worth sharing. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Lt. Colonel Mattisak for that excellent lecture. We do have one question on Zoom and for all those that are on Zoom, please submit your questions now if you have any. For those in the audience today, do any of you have any questions for our speaker? And if you could use the microphone, that would be awesome. Thank you. Good evening, sir. Left and left are with you. I want to know your opinion about the threat from within. So I think characterizing the digital occupation as an act of adversaries alone isn't a fair way of assessing it, particularly when there is evidence of data misappropriation by Western firms like Cambridge Analytica and also the algorithms that are being used by these popular social media applications which hook the viewer into certain kind of things that they would prefer to see. So even, I think they are equally responsible for digital polarization. How do you see this threat from within contributing to this? Oh, I mean, it's going to get a lot worse, especially with the addition of AI and as these algorithms get better. And if certain companies are being used as shell company by Beijing or Moscow, they're going to look at any sort of application you use as a way to weaponize it and make you a combatant in sort of this future war of words and perceptions and ideas. I mean, a lot of this is also just, and this is I think the most difficult part of this is the reason why you maybe have not thought about this as much or wondered why there hasn't been much more of a robust response is there isn't really ever going to be a Pearl Harbor like event that wakes up the sleeping giant of America to this issue of this problem because it's all about a slow drip to influence you into thinking or perceiving reality in a certain way to the benefit of Beijing, Moscow or any other adversary. So this again goes back to we need to have better data privacy laws and much better understanding and oversight over companies that do have American data and access to everything that we have because we are emitting just gigabytes of data every day, every single person. And this can all be used to develop sort of what's called an avatar, but sort of a model of you as a human. And if a foreign government wanted to target you, they would use all the information bite up on you to try and maybe influence you in a certain way to act or behave or believe a certain thing in a certain way over time. But again, this is very much a slow drip. It takes time. But with the addition of AI quantum computing, the time to be able to do this will probably be shortened a lot. And I think this is what makes it more dangerous, the fact that, you know, in a day, broadly speaking, this is all about propaganda, right? But the thing was in the, you know, industrial agent before propaganda, it required, you know, a, it was a higher risk activity, which is having to put humans up against other humans trying to convince them to think and do certain ideas and believe a certain thing. Now you can just do it anonymously, cheaply, fastly at scale with lots of intensity. In fact, Russia wants to do it so much they even farmed out a lot of their troll factory operations to a couple of West African countries just because it's just even cheaper to do it there as well. And just export in, you know, this sort of sociopolitical information warfare against, against the West. Yes, go ahead. Captain Ivan off Bulgaria Navy. I have two questions first. Thank you for your lecture. It was really interesting and practical, let's say so. Do we have any perspective of how's Russian, Russian acts on the Balkans in the, in relation to the research that you've done in Ukraine and Baltic states? First question. And I completely agree with you that the hyper partisanship is a massive problem. In your perspective, in a society which is pretty much divided in accordance with, let's say, some activities, what is the way back? I mean, how it can be, I mean, yeah, I know that is, if you can use the answer to this question, I mean, it's a one million dollar question, but I want to hear your perspective about that. Thanks so much. Yeah. So your first question to the Balkans. So, yes, I do not know about a specific Russian activities or the pivot to the Balkans, but I do at least, or I am at least aware of the fact that since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian disinformation against the US has gone down and also against Europe has gone down like 99%. They have pivoted almost all of their social media warriors to the Ukraine war and creating narratives about the Ukraine war that is very pro-Russia. To that end, they seem to have mainly operated in that sphere outside of the West. And by that I mean, it sounds like when you measure perceptions of the Russian Ukraine war, it sounds like outside of like North America and Western Europe, most of the world actually either is neutral or more pro-Russian, which leads me to believe that likely in the Balkans, they have invested some time and resources into trying to create the narrative they want in the Balkans. And I know there's been some issues between Serbia and Bosnia as well. To your second point, the million dollar question of how do we recover from this? I think we can, but again, this takes political willpower. And it also, you know, it isn't like there isn't a template or an approach or a way to actually do this. It just takes time and it takes political willpower. And by that I mean, in Sweden and Finland, they take critical thinking and digital literacy very seriously and public schooling education. That's kind of that first initial step of trying to develop digital resilience to an adversary. Now the problem of course is, you know, in America, because we do value, you know, we value free speech and liberty so much, you know, who gets to decide who's the bad guy and who's the good guy, right? That makes it more difficult in the U.S. And so honestly, I, you know, I do actually hope that the Chinese spy balloon is sort of our Pearl Harbor-like incident in the sense that it does wake up the sleeping giant of America to realize there is a bigger threat not inside the U.S. between what political party you're a part of. The greater threat is authoritarianism in China and Russia. Any other questions? Go ahead. Good afternoon, sir. This is Commander Furit from Bangladesh. So just linking to the previous question, as my takeaway is that the targeting civil population using non-traditional security means and dividing the civil society is a major security concern for the homeland security as a whole. So I perceive that the generating the public awareness can be a critical factor in combating such threat. I think it is equally applicable for the countries around the world, not only for the U.S. So my question is that what should be the government approach or the general approach to generate the public awareness which will eventually contribute to this type of threat? Thanks. Thanks. I think it starts with transparency. It means that U.S. government and military officials have to be much more transparent. It also means as average citizens in this room and online holding your elected leaders accountable when they engage in behaviors that you perceive as a hyperpartisan or at least destructive to sort of internal American social cohesion and identity. And I think, you know, and we could have a whole political science lecture on what it means to have identity and have an inclusive identity of being an American versus an exclusive identity where you describe what it is and what it takes to be an American and to more of the data and the digital issue. Again, this takes us back to the U.S. has been a wild, wild west of data and internet technologies and capabilities since the 1990s, whereas Russia and China, they have sought to control the internet and data much, much more because they saw sort of this wild west approach as a threat to their control over their domestic populations. So, can we strike the right balance moving forward because our data is used as a weapon? We are being digitally occupied by foreign social media warriors that wish to drive partisanship and cause a divisiveness, like using that term, schismogenesis. And can we find the right middle ground of protecting our data but allowing us to, you know, still be a part of the global internet system but realizing that this will always be a potential asymmetry that Russia and China will exploit? So, I did have a couple of questions on Zoom. I think you can assume that autocratic countries like Russia and China have by default the upper hand in hybrid warfare. How is that important for their domestic media and how do we approach, you know, that challenge because they control their own internal media? Again, that's the difficulty of having the First Amendment is we have some organizations that call themselves a news organization and yet we have very few laws restricting your ability to call yourself a news organization. Again, there are other models out there. Canada has more laws on their books saying how you can, like, these are the, you know, the standards you have to meet to be able to call yourself a news organization to be in Canada. Again, how does the US find the right balance? Again, that is up to voters to elect their leaders to decide what laws they think are best to prevent foreign adversaries from doing this. But again, it's this really awful circular logic of, you know, how do you get the average American to basically accept the fact that, hey, we've already decided in the court of law that you cannot be in a credit movie theater and yell fire, right? Because people get hurt. You're held accountable, responsible, and liable for that. But I would argue the moral and ethical equivalent is happening online every minute, causing people to get hurt, die, do bad things, and that individual has never held accountable for it. Any other questions from our audience? All right. Well, that is all the questions that we have for you tonight. Thank you so much for a very engaging lecture. We really appreciate it and appreciate the time you spent with us and the 100 or so Zoom attendees as well. So thank you very much. Thank you.