 Welcome and good morning or good afternoon wherever you might happen to be. Welcome to what science and technology owe the national defense. An event brought to you by Future Tents and Issues in Science and Technology. Future Tents is a partnership between Arizona State University, New America and Slate Magazine and Issues in Science and Technology is our cousin, it's a publication of the National Academy of Sciences, which is very much on point for the conversation we're going to have today. I'm thrilled to have with us Jamie Holmes, who is a Future Tents fellow and the author of, I have to do the plug here, 12 seconds of silence, how a team of inventors, tinkers and spies took down a Nazi super weapon and that is the inspirational, the inspiration that the trigger, I won't say the fuse for today's event. In addition to Jamie, I'm pleased to have with us, Margaret O'Mara, who is the Howard and Francis Keller endowed professor of history at the University of Washington, and the author of the code, Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. Hi Margaret. And my Arizona State University colleague, retired Lieutenant General Robert Schmiddle, who is the university advisor on cyber command, I'm sorry, on cyber capabilities and conflict studies at ASU, having been the former first deputy commander of United States Cyber Command. So welcome everyone, my name is Andres Martinez. I am the editorial director of Future Tents. I also am a professor at our Cronkite School of Journalism. And I'm very excited. I loved your book Jamie. And it's a great tale of how a number of very idiosyncratic quirky interesting scientists, tinkers, technologists came together during the war and then created what became the office of scientific research and development. And how they played an important part in this conflict. And one of the things that Jamie that your book mentions at the outset is that World War II was a conflict that was ultimately determined by weapons that were, you know, almost unfathomable or were not really, you know, in play at the outset of the conflict. And that's one of the things that makes World War II very distinctive. And oftentimes we immediately, our minds immediately go to the Manhattan Project and, you know, the advent of the atomic age as that being a decisive factor in the war, obviously. But I think what is really great about your book is that it tells the story of the scientists being deployed for all sorts of other, to meet other challenges and particularly the defensive challenge of, I mean, I didn't realize until I read your book that anti-aircraft guns in London during the Blitz were mostly there for show that it was morale because they weren't very effective. And the big challenge was how, you know, creating the first smart weapon that, you know, where you could try to bring down those bombers and ultimately the drones that the Germans were sending over the UK as a defensive measure. So I love talking to you, Jamie, about your book. And I think one of the things that was very intriguing about this in terms of what we at Future Tests and Issues in Science and Technology grapple with is this ecosystem that we have between, you know, military, the academy and industry, you know, the military industrial slash knowledge complex, whatever we want to call it. That is what provides a lot of innovation to American technology. It's what keeps us safe. And obviously there's a lot of friction there. So it's a great topic that, you know, this is sort of the origin story. You talk at the end of your book about how that of your research's Office of Scientific Research and Development was dissolved as planned in 1947, but the military industrial complex rose directly from its ashes. So I'm very excited to explore your book and then have this conversation with the three of you to have a conversation about how we got from there to today, how things have evolved. And I can't think of a more masterful conductor of that conversation than my colleague, General Schmidl, who has done everything from commanding F-18 squadrons to being on the board of the Defense Science, being a member of the Defense Science Board and just operating in this, in this bridging these three worlds and being engaging with this complex of how do we leverage technology and science for national defense. So I'm really thrilled to pass the baton to you, General Schmidl, to our audience members as you have questions. There's a Q&A functionality in the Zoom webinar. I'm going to keep an eye on those and then at a certain point in the conversation, we'll pivot to some of those. But for now, General, the conversation is all yours. Thank you. Thanks, Jamie. So if I could, let me echo what Jamie said or what Andreas said about Jamie's book. I thoroughly enjoyed it as well. So, Jamie, let's start off at the beginning. Talking about your book, can you give me, you mentioned very early on that your book is about how science moved to the core of military strategy. And I think that what is different about, about the story that you tell about World War II is there was a connection between the technology that was being developed and the implementation, the way that it was actually implemented and then the way that it affected military strategy, operational strategy. Can you talk a little bit about that, about how you came to that, to that realization from a lot of the, the, you know, the more tactical stories that you've told in there, but you've obviously got your eye on the bigger picture about how the, how science actually altered, changed, influenced in a very big way the strategy of the military. So thank you very much. I apologize as a jackhammer outside my apartment, so I'll be trying to mute that. Thank you to New America. And thank you so much to the National Academy of Sciences. And thank you for the question. I didn't begin imagining that I would devote so much of the book to this sort of political question, which you're addressing, as, as to, you know, so Vannevar Bush, who was one of the main historical figures in the book and then becomes very important later on and to our broader question. He's interested in recruiting scientists for the war effort and I thought I would tell a bit of his story and a bit of the story of this smart weapon. And what I really got drawn into was how he managed sort of the bureaucratic and political fights that he got into, particularly with Admiral Ernest King, commander of the Navy Fleet. And the question, you know, there's the technical obstacles of making new weapons and medicines. And then there's this very interesting larger story, which I felt the book would not be complete without, of how you put these weapons into the field. And that caused political problems. So on two occasions, prominently, Bush clashes with King on what role scientists should play in actually putting weapons into the field and even military strategy. There's a case in the Battle of the Atlantic where we've developed airborne radar and Admiral King favors convoy tactics to protect the convoys to England. And Bush believes that the airborne radar has advanced significantly enough that we can hunt these German U-Votes from the air and has a fight with King about this. And then later lobbies Roosevelt to form a joint committee on new weapons in which the idea is that scientists are going to be advising joint chiefs, not just on what the weapons can do, but what are the potential strategic uses of new weapons. So throughout the story, and I'm sure throughout our discussion you have these interesting administrative bureaucratic clashes. I think that I saw, you know, we're talking about industry, academia, government, science, military, and it's really at the core of I suspect our discussion is going to be how do you organize these elements together for benefits and what are the, what are the outcomes of different types of organization and different lays on between these groups and how they have different cultures and these cultures run into each other and how do you solve the problems that arise from those conflicts. So if I could follow up on that for a minute, Jamie, so based on the analysis that you did and the case that you presented in your book, what would you recommend today? Let's just say that the future secretary of defense gave you a phone call said come into the office and tell me what should I do? How do, I mean without getting into the weeds, what are the big thematic things that you could recommend based on what you've seen? You mentioned King and Bush and what I took away from that was and having been lived through the innovation of bureaucracy piece when I was with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, there's, you just can't ever underestimate the power of entrenched bureaucratic thinking. So based on what would you tell future secretary of defense, how can I do this? How can I do, how can I make this organization more agile, more innovative? So I think to step back, I mean one of the themes that is certainly present from the onset of this organization in 1940 and becomes a key part of the debate as to what science and technology owes the national defense is to what is the role of basic research and what is the role of scientists in that basic research and to what degree do they have autonomy and discretion over choosing what they should do. I mean the way that the Office of Scientific Research and Development was set up was, we can go into it, but basically it's dispersed contracts to private and public universities. They're going to do the research at those laboratories or industrial laboratories, but it's going to be directed by military goals. So the military is going to say broadly, we want better armor and you figure out how to do it. And one of Bush's main emphasis was that in order to come up with radical new innovations, you need a lot of basic research. So we're going to go back to the beginning. Instead of saying how can we improve, let's say this tank armor, we're going to see are there other materials that we can use? We're going to ask fundamental questions and that's going to allow us to come up with radical new innovations. And Bush believed and scientists believed that there were enough breakthroughs, scientific breakthroughs in the 30s that hadn't been harnessed and that they felt the existing army and navy research laboratories were not going to be able to handle. So a heavy emphasis on basic research, independence, decentralization, and then after the war, the question becomes when the Office of Scientific Research Development sort of becomes the National Science Foundation, the question is to what degree are the scientists going to have autonomy in picking what research they're going to do? So to me, this is kind of the fundamental question. Like you can have leveraging existing technologies that are being developed independently and what does that pathway look like? And then you can have the model in World War II which is you're having scientists which are given directives and it's much more focused on control. So that's, I don't know, that's maybe a beginning of a discussion. Great. So the next question that I have, and Margaret, if you could, I'd like to respond to this. Today in the Department of Defense, we are spending, we the Department of Defense is spending far, far less on research and development for military applications than we were in the 1980s and early 1980s, late 1970s. More and more of the research and development which is now kind of that final line between basic research and applied research is being done by the commercial sector and more and more you hear conversations in DoD about leveraging commercial technology and what they're creating. So Margaret, in your book, when you talk about the development of Silicon Valley, one of the more interesting parts of all that and one that I was not as aware of is the extent to which the US government fueled the growth of Silicon Valley. And that was before people became, shall we say, some people became uneasy about the kinds of things that the government was asking them to do. So Margaret, if you could, how do we balance this commercial research and development, whether it's basic research or applied with the needs of the US Department of Defense and specifically examples from what you talked about in Silicon Valley and its growth, which is very much, although initially may be fueled by government expenditures. Clearly the examples that you give at the end with Apple and Jobs and others are more commercial applications that now the US military is trying to figure out how to modify potentially and use them. Can you give us your perspective on that? Yeah. Well, the process that Jamie writes about in his book during the war is quite literally, Bush was the father of Silicon Valley, or maybe not literally, but this whole structure, a Cold War afterlife becomes the model for the military industrial complex to come. And you're right, this entire, the beginning, why is the industry in the Santa Clara Valley of California, which was an agricultural valley up until then? It's because of the small electronics that was almost entirely defense related. And all of the investment that the US government and the Defense Department is making in electronics large and small, but particularly in the case of Northern California, this part of Northern California, small electronics. And where you see the genealogy from the wartime effort and what goes on a decade plus later in Silicon Valley is that the graduate advisee, the PhD advisee of Vannevar Bush from MIT is Fred Terman, who becomes the Dean of Engineering and Provost of Stanford, who really has a major role in reorganizing Stanford University's entire apparatus to build up physics, to build up its electronics laboratories and to create this incredible incubator and a place, a training ground for technologists. And there's a hidden history there that is really important in understanding today's relationship. What is the relationship of industry that what we're dealing with right now and the relationship between the Pentagon and tech is just the latest phase in a long ongoing relationship that's taken many different forms and it's often been hard to see. I like to tell the story of Fairchild Semiconductor, which is the kind of the original startup. This is the original Silicon Semiconductor startup whose co-founders included the people who went on to look, to the founders of Intel, other semiconductor companies of Kleiner Perkins, which is a major venture capital firm in the Valley that has been behind just one blockbuster after another, generation after another. This company, which has kind of put up as a model of this is, this was the beginning of the Silicon Valley startup entrepreneurial story. Its book of business in the first years of existence was majority governmental and majority defense. And that's something that's not, because that's where the business was, you know, no one else is buying integrated circuits other than the government. And so the, you know, recognizing this interrelationship, I think, you know, and recognizing there are things that only government can and should do and sort of picking up on your last question to Jamie, kind of what comes next, you know, look the US built this extraordinary structure of scientific research and technological capacity within the government that worked hand in hand with industry, but also was kind of setting the agenda, not yet. And I think that what we need to understand is that industry is, you know, an important partner to different parts of the government. Not, it can't be the agenda setter. These are publicly traded for profit companies. They've got, you know, their, their, their priorities are necessarily different. So how can we reinvest and empower the, you know, this structure that's there rather than reinvent something entirely new, but to think about what sort of capacity can we build up within the government to be a real viable partner and an agenda setter that's working in partnership once again. That's great. That's a great overview. So let me ask the two of you a question here that your comments. Margaret, I think we're pointing towards. So if the, if the trend continues and the US government continues to rely more on commercial research and development and potentially on universities to do basic research. How do we deal with the issues of intellectual property as we, as we start to try to figure out what we can transition from the commercial sector into, into whether it's defense or other government work. I mean, we've had a numerous back and forths between some of the iPhone manufacturers, we say, and the FBI and others about privacy and about access. So as we, as the line, it appears to me, the line is much more blurred now than it might have been when Jamie was in the time Jamie was writing about, about the distinction between government or military applications and commercial applications. Now we didn't have proximity fuses, didn't have a big commercial application in the 1940s, although the use of that kind of RF energy to determine proximity to a target is something that is going to have some applicability later on down the road as we learn more and more about RF, et cetera, et cetera. So how, how do we, how do we potentially either transition what the commercial sector is creating or influence the creation of some of those capabilities that are clearly dual use. And I know that there's been some activity out in the Silicon Valley and this Silicon Valley defense working group that I'm associated with looking at dual use technology startups as potentially a wave of the future. Could either of the two of you give me some thoughts on where you think you see that particular trend going? Well, I'm not sure I would, I would talk about the, where it was going. I could talk about how difficult a problem it is. And certainly Vannevar Bush foresaw what your question as a central problem. They arranged it so that the patents would be owned by the government because they foresaw that you're going to have a lot of messy legal fights after the war, which other countries did in America didn't. Bush had a personal interest in patent law. So he saw this early on. And he also arranged so that there would be no profits based on any research done in industrial labs or the, or the university labs. And additionally, I mean, it was such a period of, of patriotic solidarity, you know, companies shared designs with each other. And scientists would just say like, sorry, we're going to share your design with your rival company. There's nothing you can do about it. So, you know, I can't imagine the kind of obstacles or the various obstacles that you're implying that if you didn't have those safeguards and protections in place. Yeah. And I mean, it's a really, it's a really central question. And, and the, you know, I think one of the ways to think about it though, too, is that what is, you know, what makes, what are the components of a tech ecosystem? You know, why, why has the United States, you know, been able to produce the technologies, both military and civilian commercial and governmental and academic since, you know, since the 1940s. It's not just a matter of the technology itself. It's also a matter of the, of the, the people and the, and, you know, one of the things I point out often about, you know, tech transfer, which is the sort of process through which the inventions that are conceived of and, and developed in university labs are, can be commercialized. And since the, since the war, since the early Cold War and from the, particularly from the 1980s forward after the Cold War, the Cold War was actually a big part of the approach for the most successful industries in the world. So, I think the first step of this act, the Cold War, as the whole act allowed commercialize these more ease of commercialization of, of research that was originally funded with government grants. There's been a lot of emphasis on this sort of spin-off activity. A lot of that's come from the biotech side, the biomedical side, less from the it side. And on the it side it's actually, you know, I mean, yes, there are these really important patents, really important IP, but there's also this, I think another dimension of this sort of question of what's the relationship between government or what's the relationship between the public sector and the private sector, the commercial sector, is thinking about who's building it and how those two sectors are working together. And I do, you know, I think one of the tricky things that makes it challenging is, you know, look, and we saw this very recently or in the last few years with the employee pushback that in these large tech companies to the big defense, the defense contracts that companies like Google and Amazon and Microsoft have been, that are now, you know, very engaged in and employees saying that's, we don't wanna work with a Pentagon, that's not us, that's not what we do. And then you have people like me and Jamie saying, oh, but actually, you know, this is the history, this is intertwined. And I think recognizing that sort of being frank about, okay, why did the US spend all this money on advanced science and technology in the 50s and 60s? Why were scientists advising Eisenhower and other presidents? Because of the Cold War, it was war, it was geopolitical imperative, you know, that prompted the US to spend a lot of money on things. And that business of war had a lot of, you know, was the foundation for this extraordinary set of commercial technologies and technologies that have had wide application, you know, GPS, for example, you know, things that kind of come out of this Cold War defense complex, the space program was a Cold War program. You know, why were we shooting the moon? Because we didn't want the Soviets to get there first. So kind of, I think there's a, I think this question of, and Bob, you really get to the heart of it. One of the real sort of thorny questions is the question of, you know, backdoors and encryption and national security. And that's something that's been a live question for a really long time. You know, the US law enforcement and national security agencies want to be able to have a way in to see these American-made hardware and software products, you know, use those, not let bad actors use those in ways that can't be tracked. And I don't think that's gonna go away. Jamie's entirely right. If this were an easy problem to solve, it would have been solved already. Yeah, no kidding. So let me pick up on that just for a second. And two things that you just mentioned. One of them was this imperative that the business of war, of a Cold War, which one of the reasons why science had risen to such a level of visibility, if you will, among the senior politicals in the country. There are those that would suggest that today we are entering into another existential competition with China that is not solely military, but that is technical, is economic, et cetera, et cetera. And as we look at how the United States is postured to deal with that, it would seem to me that, again, picking up on something that Jamie mentioned in his book about the relationship between Bush and Admiral King, it's not just the scientific content that it's not just the science itself. And we see this now in all manner of things we're dealing with COVID related. The science is a part of it, but the execution of being able to execute inside of bureaucracies that have, in some cases, very tribal structures that finding a way to do that. And Bush did, he eventually went around King to Roosevelt, convinced Roosevelt. Roosevelt came down on top of him and said, no, we need to do this. Anybody on the outside looking in would have said, you're kidding me, right? I mean, you can detect these periscopes of these submarines and the conic tower. Why would I not use that? But there's an embedded way of doing that. So I guess what I would ask the two of you to respond to is the first question from the research that you've done separately in these books. What did you, conclusions did you come to about innovation in bureaucratic organizations? About how to move forward, in some cases, in a valley from nothing, and then having to deal with the companies as they created their own bureaucracies. And Jamie, in your book here about how they was literally trying to break those silos that he encountered in trying to get to be more innovative. If you could maybe give us some insight into that, as that might be useful as we think about the competition that we are having today with other countries that goes beyond just military means, if you will. Jamie? Sure. And then I want to ask you a question, Marvin. Yeah, I think, as your first question alluded to, it really is an organizational story and an organizational triumph. And you have these connections with people who aren't used to talking with each other. You've got the scientists and the military. And one of the funny stories that I tell in the book is that one of the characters who created the smart weapon, Merle II, he starts swearing a lot because he's trying to sort of blend in and then he stops swearing completely after the war, he had never. You have these groups with different professional cultural backgrounds and you need this strong liaison between the military and the scientists and that was facilitated in the book by this sort of brilliant Navy guy named Deke Parsons. And then you have to have the scientists and the industrial partners. And at one point in making this smart weapon, the head of the program sends someone to live with the industrial liaison and he lives at his apartment. So I think that they were very aware of how these human connections across these sort of different cultural backgrounds professionally were going to be the core of success. And when there was an analysis of why Germany was unable to build this smart weapon, it was for the very reasons that we're discussing as a report in 1945 where they say that the Germans had quote, too little liaison between laboratory and factory and between technician and military, practically no employment of pure scientists. They're not doing basic research, not enough basic research, dispersal of effort in too many directions, dissent, distrust and little sense that the country's war needs were primary. And another report concludes that apart from their aeronautics research, the Germans failed miserably in availing themselves of their scientific, we'll say a brain power. So I think it really is about these organizational connections between these different groups. Amy, did you want to ask Margaret a question before she- I did, sure, but I don't want to change the topic if you had a response to that question, Margaret. Well, I think you're exactly right. And I think when we look at where does innovation happen within bureaucratic organizations, which to be clear can be both public and private sector and academic, all sectors have bureaucracies. And one can argue that in the tech sector now dominated by five extremely large companies, which I think it's a constant struggle to keep their kind of innovative soul when you're within a very large company. But what's the real distinction? Where do we see these breakouts? It's leadership. And I think the example of Bush going all the way up to Franklin Roosevelt who's like, yep, this is what we're doing. And leadership can cut a lot of ways. It can be leadership for good or for bad. But I think a great example is that of the internet itself, which comes out of DARPA, the Defense Research Projects Agency. And is the product of a couple of people pushing through convincing their military bosses to allocate a million dollars to create this academic computer network that's connecting these folks who have these different government grants so their computers can communicate with one another. And then there is the beginning of 1969 of the ARPANET that becomes the internet that becomes everything. And that is the there we have leaders within a bureaucracy. And DARPA is a great example and continues to be, as you all know, and I'm sure many people in the line know, a really critical, critical funder of truly advanced research or blue sky research, the one that becomes even more important as time goes on as funding in other parts of the discretionary budget go down. The Pentagon's budget's pretty OK, even in the 80s and 90s as the rest of the US discretionary spending is more it's harder to hold on to the same levels of spending for the NSF and other research agencies. And that's leadership is a big deal. It's a big deal who's within those organizations, large and small, who are pushing and making something happen. So before, Jamie, before I jump to that question, so real quick, so one of the issues with the budget and the Pentagon, and unfortunately, I have a great deal of experience with that. As the amount of the percentage of growth every year in personnel costs far exceeds anything that we spend on science and technology. And when we budget in the Pentagon, we budget for inflation, a couple of percent a year. But at the end of the day, in really gross numbers, if the Pentagon doesn't get 10% a year of a budgetary increase, it's a net loss. And when the net loss comes about, unfortunately, one of the first things that people look at to start trimming money from is science and technology, is the S&T budget. And the money tends to go into programs. What are we building? Can I buy another ship? I don't care if it's manned or not. I don't care how big it is. The Navy's got to get to 355 one way or another. So we're buying ships. We're buying airplanes. We're buying tanks. Because that's kind of how, kind of what we know how to do. So that's not a positive thing by any means, but that is another reason for the increased focus on commercial science and technology and research and development work that's going on. With regard to DARPA, interestingly enough, I was on the phone last week with one of the PMs who is looking at a program managers who was looking at a program that would use advanced general AI in command and control systems. Oh, really fascinating. And so it's still in the very nascent stages, but it's something that I had experimented with 20 years ago inside the Marine Corps and scared the children so bad that we didn't go back to it because the agents that they were developing at the time in 99, 2000 were very, very nascent algorithmic agents. But it was not difficult in the command centers that I was setting up, which had 50, 60 people and a big science, or modeling and simulation. It wasn't difficult to see where this was gonna go, to see how quickly the agents were able to give my staff and myself options, whether they were planning options or looking at us to determine how we were making decisions, what the enemy was doing. It was really a very nascent stages. So those are just two quick observations on what you just said. And the technology, the budget piece requires constant management and leadership by somebody to protect that part of the budget. DARPA has been relatively successful at keeping its little slice of the pie, but it becomes more difficult as the budget comes down. So anyway, Jamie, you were gonna address a question to Margaret. Yeah, no, I just think one of the, sort of an interesting theme for us to discuss is to what degree there's strong support for these collaborations. In World War II, there was really no hesitancy. There was some regret of scientists who felt that they shouldn't have been involved in, let's say, the Manhattan Project or even the SmartFuse, but very little. And there's one person who worked on the Fuse, which she says in 1940. All of my colleagues had the same feeling. The America First idea had no support among the scientists, that is, the isolationist idea. And you could even argue very quite persuasively that the OSRD was initiated by scientists, that their duty to the national defense, they took upon themselves as a responsibility. And one of the interesting stories, and Margaret, maybe you could, maybe this would be something to talk about, is this idea of responsibility almost feels like it runs into the story that Silicon Valley likes to tell about itself. Silicon Valley has an idea that it's independent and that you've shown that actually it is quite dependent. And maybe there's something, there's interesting about these two stories and how they're conflicting now. I don't know. Yeah, I think it's really, I mean, we forget that in 1940 that isolationist sentiment encapsulated by the America, what was called the America First movement, was not some fringy thing. It was actually very deeply embedded, very mainstream, had been something that had been part of American politics for four decades or more. And that the scientists in kind of pushing that were going, being internationalists was to some degree going against the grain. And what's extraordinary is the, and again, I think leadership plays a difference here, the degree to which Roosevelt and others in the sort of leadership of the United States kind of pushed public sentiment in a different direction, in a rapid amount of time. I think this question of mission is really important, Jamie. I think you have, what I found so interesting in the kind of early generation, the Cold War generation, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, people of the 50s and 60s and into the 70s, people like, for example, Bob Noyce, co-founder of Intel is one example of that. People like Dave Packard, of Hewlett Packard, they were not gung-ho big government types. In fact, Packard was a lifelong Republican, very politically engaged, was also very much a small government Republican. He gave, was giving speeches at the Palo Alto Rotary Club in the 60s that were talking about how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were bringing socialism to the United States in the form of the Great Society. He had his political opinions, but when it came to the project, the Cold War project and the feeling like we need to, this is important for us to do for the country, for national security, for the national defense. They were, there was no ambiguity about their position. Like even these business leaders who were entrepreneurs, who were not fans of government bureaucracy in any way, were like, this is what we gotta do. And now the politics are more complicated. And also, it's not the Cold War anymore. I mean, going back to what Bob mentioned about China, we talk about the new Cold War with China. There are, once again, it is kind of a bipolar geopolitical conflict. It's an economic one. And it's one, I think on the tech side, is distinct from, say, remember back in the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc built an entirely separate computer system. Like computer software and hardware behind the Iron Curtain was entirely different and separate from that built in the United States and other parts of the so-called free world. Now you have, here I am, here's my iPhone assembled in Shenzhen. Here's, we have these 5G, all of these technologies are totally interrelated, supply chains that are totally unrelated. And I think that is another thing that makes this question of who's side are you on and America first or the world first? Or kind of, it is not an easy, it makes it a more complicated first, I think for scientists and technologists and all of us to figure out, what's the right stance to have? But it also seems to me that it muddies the waters on this issue of the moral trepidation that some folks have about supporting the department or not. And Jamie, at the very end of your book, you bring out an interesting anecdote there where you talk about, there's a conversation between two folks about the fuse and the scientist, and I can't remember the exact names or details, Christmas I think was his name, talking about how the, he was not, he was having second thoughts about the development of the fuse, et cetera, et cetera. And as you, if I recall, as you finished the book, he's in a conversation with a survivor of the battle of the bulls with army who saw the world very, very differently and saw what that fuse did to literally save American lives and help in that battle. But I think as Margaret points out, that binary distinction is not something that we are fortunate enough for whatever reason to have today, that it's much messier and it's much more intertwined and we see that particularly in the roles of artificial intelligence. It's one of the, it's kind of one of these most talked about, least understood things inside government. And we constantly confuse in the conversation different types of AI, what they could or couldn't, and, but everybody is trying to find this, trying to find the answer to well, how do we morally deal with this? And we've, the conversations we've had with regards to all of this technology and even in the valley that Margaret, the things you mentioned, people in certain companies say, well, we don't wanna work for the government. We think that's morally wrong. And, you know, and Jamie with the examples that you gave in there, you know, even in the bomb didn't really become the big public moral issue until after we had dropped it. So I don't know. I mean, as we, you all have some thoughts on how is there something that, for example, is there something that science can do to inform this conversation in a way that might be useful as opposed to metaphysicians that might wanna inform the conversation? Yeah, I think it's a great question. It becomes clear if you look at the kinds of weapons that they were developing and thinking about developing, it's not really the choice of like, would we like to do this? That's not the question. This is probably happening somewhere else. So we better be ready for it. In that context, it's sort of, I mean, there's an amazing quote which I didn't put in the book in which one of Bush's researchers quits on moral grounds and Bush writes him this remarkable letter in which he says, I think your position is untenable. If you could get the Axis scientists to quit too, you would have a strong position. But really what you're suggesting is that we let other countries scientists contribute to the national defense and our scientists will do nothing and they'll run over us and my son is at war and I'll leave my son unprotected. And he says, you may be able to join Gandhi in such a point of view, but I am not. So that's sort of my takeaways is that this isn't a moral position on cooperation. It can't be a statement on the world as you wish it to be. That's a great point and I think it's a, I think that one of the things that's an imperative for this conversation, this is happening. And so our scientists and technologists going to engage in it. And look, there are a lot of things in the past tense, the military industrial complex did not, there were a lot of reasons, a lot of people turned away from it. It did not, there were many, many, many mistakes and many tragedies. And so how can we think about a new sort of next generation partnership across different sectors? And I think government broadly defined not just national security, but all parts of government that are thinking about a broader public good and also bringing scientists voices, the science community and the technology community is much more diverse than it was in the 1940s and 50s. And so how can those voices, those experts and that expertise be taken seriously and weigh in on the great challenges before us that are multiple and demand scientific expertise and organization. Hello again. I just wanted to chime in with some of our audience questions. This has been such a great conversation. And this theme that you all were fleshing out right now about the attitude of the scientists, the technologists outside of government in terms of their, what they owe the national security and the government. That's been a theme of several of the questions that we've gotten. And one of the things that I was thinking about as you were talking too to keep in mind is that with globalization, things have shifted to the point where it's not entirely clear what the nationality and identity is of these corporations. And when World War II comes and the CEO of General Motors, I never know if I'm supposed to pronounce it Knudson or just Knudson, but he famously goes and works for the administration for a dollar a year or whatever. And there's no, there's the nationality of General Motors is not in question. And so, but fast forward to today. I mean, on top of all the sort of moral qualms that you might have with polarization, with less of a sense of urgency and just the different politics, you also have corporations in the technology field that yes, may be doing some work for the government, but the majority of their employees are not American, are not gonna be American. The vast, a majority of their revenues are coming from overseas. The CEO of a lot of these Fortune 500 companies, him or herself, might not be American anymore. So that relationship is also, I'm not sure that a lot of these corporations necessarily want to route themselves around the flag, even though they clearly make profits from government contracts. But when it's in the limelight, that's just kind of an interesting additional wrinkle of how the world has changed. And I just throw that out there and you can react or not. But let me touch, we have one viewer is asking, again, on this theme, how do you think we can rebound from the war fatigue and the political polarization that has led millennials, many of whom work for the Google's, Facebook's, et cetera, lead them so they can potentially recreate a culture that prioritizes working with the government on technology. I don't know, who would like to take that? So one of the existential threat to the United States in 1941 or 42 was far more obvious than it is today. I mean, it just was. You didn't have to, I think, convince people, especially after watching the way the Japanese were rolling in the Pacific and the way Hitler was taking over Europe, that there was a problem. And I think that the America First Movement that Margaret mentioned before was, once the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, you see a great decline in the amount of support for that and the country begins to shift. Today, one of the challenges is that the threat is not so obvious, I would suggest. And the other part of it is that the threat is also most obvious in channels that are very classified and sensitive. And so you have another challenge here, which is trying to incentivize the electorate and the industrial base to do work for the government when you are asking in some cases them just to press the I believe button and not thoroughly indoctrinate them into what the threat is. Now, there's a great thing in Jamie's book here where he points out where one of the folks that's out there, I think it was Van Allen that's trying to get the Navy to use this fuse technology tells this admiral in very classified sensitive detail exactly how it works. And he makes a decision on the spot to do that because he feels that if he doesn't, he's not gonna have the support of this admiral and he's not gonna be able to implement the fuse. And we see that that successfully works, right? So that I think is part of it. The other piece of it is that we, the Googles and Microsofts and Amazons, and again, I'm looking at this from a 100,000 feet here, in many cases behave as if they were nation states. And yet we deal with them as if they were wholly owned subsidiaries of the United States and that they ought to do this for us because their headquarters is in Washington state or in California, when in fact, as you mentioned, many of their employees are not in many cases, the employees feel more loyalty to that company than they do to any particular country. And so this is trying to unravel this Gordian knot is gonna be very difficult, but I think it starts with an understanding that there is a threat and the threat is here and here's what it's doing. And I'll leave you just with one last thing, it's become more evident in the last couple of years exactly the extent to which the Chinese had been stealing intellectual property and infiltrating the US defense industry and other parts of the United States that had been publicly known prior to that. And you see that once that gets out there that there begins to be more of an understanding that, okay, so these economies are intertwined, everything's intertwined, but we still have a problem here that we can no longer ignore. And to think that because they're intertwined means that there's not gonna be a conflict has been disproven many times over. And if I'm not mistaken, 1910, 1911, best selling book in Europe was called The End of War. And it was based on the premise that the countries at the time were so intertwined economically, they'd never go to Oregon, right? Three years later, we're still in hundreds of thousands of each other in the Psalm. So, just kind of my perspective on that. I wanna also turn to a question from Jeffrey Alexander who asks, this is interesting. Historically, a huge impact of defense on US science was DOD funding of graduate student research training. That funding has declined in recent years. Has this affected how national defense contributes to US innovation capacity? And is anyone worried about that decline? I'm worried. I mean, one of the things that makes, so there are two things that made the, helped make the American research complex broadly defined the juggernaut that it has been. Like why is the US, why is the US overwhelming leader in the tech space? One is investment in higher education, public investment at the federal and at the state level, making higher education, world-class higher education, affordable and accessible. Going to University of California for $50 a semester. And also making opening doors to the best and the brightest from around the world to come here to study and to, in many cases, stay on and start companies. And those, the Americans do not have a monopoly on technological talent. The reason that the US has been such a powerhouse has because of immigration policy, foreign educational exchange, and investment in higher ed. And those things have been disinvested in and a chill has, you know, international, coming here to study if you're an international student has become not only more difficult, but there have been a lot of reasons that you might be like, I think I'm gonna stay in Bangalore. Why would I come here? And that is a, you know, that's an own goal on the US. Those are things are, those are, I mean, I looking at this historically, those are foundational to not only kind of making, you know, creating opportunities for individuals to reach their full potential and have, you know, do the things they do. The founding generation of the Valley, these guys who come there in the 50s and 60s, they didn't come from money. They didn't, you know, they ended up in Northern California, partially because they didn't, you know, didn't have a father who was a partner or a bank or a law firm, you know, they didn't, they didn't, they were just smart engineers. And these incredible opportunities came their way, courtesy in large part because of public funding. I, first of all, I really appreciate the soccer reference. I'm really glad you brought up. That certainly is, is part of the, part of the story here. Here's a fun question, an anonymous attendee. We have an anonymous people on this, on this webinar, a lot of dodgy people. So it's asking, there's a commonly held belief that while the brightest scientific and technical minds of previous generations were working on projects like Section T that had critical history defining importance, today they are largely working on commercial apps and offer forms of more frivolous tech drawn by huge salaries that government can't match and perhaps dissuaded from working for the government because of the larger tech backlash. Is there any truth to this belief? And if so, what can we do to change that? Well, I don't know if the, what I would suggest is that if you look at the amount of spending, money that we're spending on S&T and research and development that the government spends on, as opposed to where we were 25 years ago and the percentage of that that's being done by the commercial sector now, that would be a starting place to try to understand why there's much more of an attraction to do that. They, in this day and age, in the government, especially in some of the agencies that do things that have direct applicability into the commercial side, the folks that come there and stay there do it for the mission, it's not the money. I mean, they could make three or four times that amount of money if they decided to go do this commercially, but they do it because they feel like they're making a difference to the country and to the mission of national security. That, whether you can rely on a segment of the population to always feel that way without any for other incentives is probably naive. And so, we have to find a way to do that. When I was on active duty, I was suggesting that we would give young enlisted net operators bonuses like we give pilots. Look, we're giving pilots bonuses and there's a skill set that's probably declining in its relevance and yet the skill set that's increasing in its relevance, we don't incentivize them at all. So, these kids get out after six years and they got Googles beating them to the door and offered them three times that amount of money and stable home life and no deployments and so it's difficult. I mean, there's just some real blocking and tackling kind of things. First, you know, related that we need to address. It's not hard, it just takes political will. Yeah, and I would just add, this was one of the central questions about organizing science after the war for defense. I mean, in 1941, you already had 52% of the top chemists in the country working for OSRD. You had nearly 80% of the physicists and one of the questions after the war was these were scientists who had put aside their research interests. So, they weren't, you know, in many cases, in some cases, they were sort of out of touch with their field by the end of the war. They were working on other projects. So, you're right, it was a great answer. I mean, all of these incentive problems that you have, like, do I get to publish? What kind of rewards do I have? Can we get 20% of their time? These are all important questions. So, we still have quite a few questions but mindful of the time, I think we're almost ready to wrap up. I do want to turn back to Jamie. This question that I just read references section T, a couple of others did. And this conversation has been so meaty and started off really honing in on the sort of the big structural thematic questions that I feel like maybe we should end, Jamie, with giving you an opportunity to bring at, you know, show the spotlight onto the proximity fuse and tease out a little bit the, just the narrative here so that people, if they haven't already read your book, go brush out and buy. Just tell us a little bit about, you know, we've referenced the proximity fuse, but what was it, what really happened? Thanks, Andreas, I appreciate it. Yeah, so I tell the broader story of science, mobilizing science to the war, but a lot of the book focuses on this small band of inventors, experimental physicists, and then later became sort of a motley group of, you know, like radio amateurs and even like oil men from Texas and anybody who knew anything about radios. But it's about creating what was called the world's first smart weapon, which was a better way to shoot down airplanes. At the beginning of the war in the early weeks of the Blitz, the ratio of downsh of shells that it took down to shoot one airplane was 20,000 to one. This was measured in something called RPB rounds per bird. So we were really bad at shooting down airplanes at the start of the war. And an American physicist said, at the start of the war, it would be a sheer stroke of luck to hit anything. So the Navy realizes that their battleships are vulnerable and says, you know, the problem was we had these shells, these are explosive shells, and you shoot them at an airplane and they have shrapnel and they're supposed to explode in the flight path. But you had to put the timer on the shells to 1 40th of a second. It had to explode at a 1 40th of a second window. It's going 2000 feet a second and it's rotating over 250 times a second. So even if you were a foot off in your aim, if you're a second off in a timing device, you're 2000 feet away from the aircraft. So everyone knew like the idea was easy. Well, what if we could put some kind of electronic sensor inside of a shell? It could sense automatically that an airplane was near and blow up in proximity to the aircraft. The problem was the electronics of the day were very, very sensitive. The transistor didn't exist yet. Instead of the transistor, they had these little things called vacuum tubes, these little glass devices. They could, you can see for scale, there's a pen. And they had to withstand these extraordinary pressures inside an anti-aircraft gun 20,000 times the force of gravity. For reference, a space shuttle that launches three times the force of gravity. So really it was this engineering puzzle of how do we get these very delicate electronics to withstand these extreme forces. And it's this story of how they did it and they had little support at the beginning and they sort of didn't know what they were doing and they buy the wrong blasting powder and then eventually they get good Navy liaison and they succeed. But it's really just a story of cooperation and overcoming a scientific puzzles under great pressure and organization. Awesome, thank you. It's really a fun read and this has been a really fun conversation. Margaret, General, Jamie, thank you so much. I wish we could, I wish we had another hour but maybe we can do it again sometime. So it's a theme that is timeless and yet you tell it through this great story of the wartime needs. And Margaret, I really also enjoyed your book as well on the birth of Silicon Valley. I first heard you in conversation with Kara Swisher which is how you came up on my radar. And I was like, how haven't I read this book? It's fantastic. And now out in paperback. There you go. And it animates so much of what we like to think about and are engaged with the future tense. And obviously it's very central to the inquiries of our colleagues at issues. Also I should plug this Friday at noon, future tense is having an event unpacking the TikTok WeChat drama, quagmire, whatever we wanna refer to as. And we're posing the question of whether it is a win for national security or a loss for free speech. We have some great speakers in that. So noon Eastern, nine Pacific Friday. You can follow us at future tense now. And if you want more information and wanna register for that event Friday, you can go to the New America website, newamerica.org and click on events. Then next Wednesday at our sort of normal rhythm of a point of time of Wednesdays and noon, we are having another free speech project event looking at the Balkanization of the internet and how we might have gone from having one internet to various internets. And that's gonna star our slate colleague Josh Keating and New America's president and CEO, Anne-Marie Slaughter and others. So thank you so much for coming today and please continue to follow us. And thanks to you three for a great conversation.