 And thank you to New America and Arizona State University for this, should be a very interesting panel on social science and the future of war. A panel so diverse, we even invited a historian to join us. So that should be quite fun. I do want to declare that I believe this is a Princeton free panel. And I haven't checked the KUK State score, but I believe they should be going into halftime here shortly. So those that care about real academic rivalries, that's a particularly important one. We're going to do this a little bit differently than some of the other panels here. I'm going to have each of the panelists give just sort of some initial opening salvos, some initial thoughts on academic research, social science, and the future of war. And I think we'll just go down the column here. So Christian Davenport, University of Michigan, if you'd like to start. So it was a very interesting enterprise to try to think of exactly what it is that social science teaches about the future of war. But I think I'll start with initially the idea of expanding the conception of what it is that we're talking about. Much of the focus has been on war. But I think I immediately kind of jump to the more encompassing categorization, political violence, acknowledging the fact that there's just so many kind of like segmented or silo different forms of political violence that people are studying in isolation of one another. And war is, I think, this amazing vacuum of sorts that pulls in a lot of different forms, but we need to get to this more disaggregated understanding of it. And also try to think of exactly what's on the other end of that continuum, trying to get to the understanding of kind of positive peace, kind of going back to something that someone talked about earlier, thinking about what is on the opposite end of what it is we're trying to create, what it is that we're trying to kind of build, what is it we'd like the war to kind of basically help us establish and doing. But I think also we have this issue of kind of expanding domains as well. What we're finding in much of the social science literature is that we've had those people that studied interstate conflicts and now a group studying intrastate, but then it's kind of like now we're in this subnational disaggregated push, which is now international, national, subnational community, familial, individual, and then trying to figure out systematically exactly how all these fit together. And I think that's one of the things that different parts of the academic community would be able to put together. I use that phrase very loosely, because I don't know to what extent we are a community. So one of the difficulties I found in terms of trying to think of what social science had to offer was that presumed that we actually coordinated well amongst one another, which I don't think is necessarily the case. But they would not think we're joining many other groups in simultaneously trying to overcome those difficulties. We also have an issue of kind of expanding disciplines. It would be interesting. We have a historian, political science, sociology, psychology. I think we need to also get to this point of understanding the interdisciplinary nature that we're studying, and try to also work out exactly how those fit together. Again, I don't think academia is necessarily the best place to talk about exactly how that works out, because many places aren't working that out. Everyone has their kind of turf battles, or their particular methodology, or their particular source that they're pushing, or their particular theoretical orientation. But I think we need to overcome that. And lastly, I think it's kind of related to this. We can get this expansion of methods and try to think about exactly how distinct forms of collecting information actually could or could not fit together, and try to play those out, but also acknowledging that we're not really good enough at doing that. But we do have the different parts of the methods, but not necessarily how they all fit together with one another in kind of an integrated fashion. So I think of the things that we could get from social sciences that we kind of had the parts to piece together where that understanding would come from, but also were a little bit too fractious and haven't necessarily had that as the objective of something that we could do. Excellent. And with 10 seconds to spare, I threatened them with being brutal on the time keeping so that we could keep things moving. So, Petini Chrisia from MIT. Yeah, I'm going to kind of continue on from Chris's points. There has been a surge in social science on warfare in the years that America has been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we have indeed moved away from these macro level statements about war to more micro levels of analysis as Chris highlighted all the way down to kind of the individual. We've also tried to move away from just theorizing on onset, like why wars start or how they end, to try to also understand the dynamics. So basically now we're interested in why people join insurgencies or how do the exact violence, how do warring groups form alliances. And the fact that we've become increasingly interested in these type of questions that are more focused on dynamics has also meant that we've moved away from cross-country data sets where we were able to establish some kind of correlations that lower GDP per capita leads to higher likelihood of civil war or that ethnic fractionalization doesn't necessarily correlate well with conflict to trying to get at more causal arguments. So basically what we see now is people who are pursuing research designs within countries. So they go and study Afghanistan or Iraq, for example. And they try to make causal arguments, for instance, about the effect of development aid on counterinsurgency outcomes or about how whether monetary incentives work in demobilizing combatants, for instance. So we see this kind of shift in research design, but we also see a shift in measurement strategies. So people still get to the ground. They realize that you absolutely need to talk to combatants. You need to talk to civilians. You need to get the perspectives of the insurgent and the counterinsurgent. And they've tried to be clever about it by creating survey instruments that involve experiments and other methods to make sure that people are not just telling you what they think you want to hear. But they've also been very creative about leveraging data without even getting on the ground at all. So for instance, they've looked at call data records to get information that is incredibly granular and very networked. They've looked at satellite imagery and some recent examples of work that I found exciting and maybe we can discuss is people who've looked at nightlight coverage in Syria as a measure of overtime deterioration of regime control or some work that I've been working on that looks at the effects of communications after drone strikes using call data records out of Yemen. I want to close with the fact that even though we have kind of tried to improve on the knowledge we're getting out of these places and we've been creative about measurement and research design, I feel that those have come at a cost of generality. So we feel very confident about these very specific questions we're able to answer. But we don't really know if this knowledge we are accumulating travels well. So we don't necessarily know whether the lessons out of Afghanistan apply to Iraq, to Syria, et cetera. And I think this is something we could discuss. Great question. Great questions for us to explore, I think, as we have this panel. And next up we have Will Moore from Arizona State University. Good afternoon. Thank you for turning out. Appreciate being a part of this. Back in the summer of 2014, The New York Times published an op-ed written by a political scientist arguing that political scientists can't forecast. Turns out that's a false statement that a lot of people don't know that. And the public discourse on this, and we see it in stock markets, you turn on ESPN, you see there's this false binary out there that it's like the old Miller-like commercial. Tastes great, less filling. Analytics, not analytics. And that's just silly. And what we need to do is stop thinking that way. Analytics are an important part of decision-makers portfolios. That's the message I want to leave you with it. Now, why am I telling you about this? Well, statistical forecasting systems of conflict events exist and are already used on a daily basis in the United States military. Many of you are probably familiar with IARPA's recent program in emulating a successful DARPA effort. It's the one that's under daily use in the Department of Defense. Some of you may be familiar with it. It's Integrated Crisis Early Warning System known by the acronym IQS. And you might be wondering, well, what does this do if you haven't heard of it? What kind of things can you forecast? And it's forecasting things such as armed attacks, bombings, protests, rebellions. How do these systems work? Just a quick thumbnail sketch. One does computerized textual analysis of news reports and other documents. They could be posted on websites or tweets or whatever. Dissident groups uses that information to forecast protests and violence by such groups under a bunch of different kinds of models. To offer an example, there's an IQS related project that predicted values of monthly, how many monthly armed attacks with groups like Boko Haram and Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula produce. Several other groups such as the FARC, Nigeria, Delta, Justice and Equality Movement in Sudan. And all of those are grading out at better than a .8 correlation. The point of these brief comments is that people who believe that political scientists are not producing useful forecasts are ignorant and out of touch. More importantly, decision makers increasingly understand that binary conversations about analytics or quants versus whatever are unhelpful. The question is not whether or not to use statistical forecasting models of conflict events. The question is how to usefully engage them as one part of your intelligence portfolio. Some of you may have noticed the ridiculous bling I've got on my finger. This is my 2013 national championship ring for Florida State football. I have it because Jimbo Fisher, the head coach at Florida State, understands this. He had no idea what the heck I was doing. He took me on in 2007 as a volunteer despite the fact that I had no experience beyond high school football. I wasn't doing anything fancy, just descriptive statistics, but I was taking a completely different approach. I didn't have any theory. It was straight-dated mining. And I was studying opponents' tendencies. And I can bore you with stories later if you're interested in knowing specifically what role did I play in getting this ring when we beat Auburn. But I wanna close with a provocative claim. Close with a provocative claim. A short provocative claim. There's not too much of an exaggeration to say that in 2016, security policymakers in Washington can be divided into two groups. Those who are learning how to make use of statistical forecasts as part of their information toolkit, and those who are gonna become roadkill. I look forward to your comments. General McMaster. Okay, so as the historian here, first of all, it's a great privilege to be here with all of you. I think I have to bring up the old joke about, okay, that works in practice, but will it work in theory, right? So I think history makes very important contributions to our understanding the future of war, because if we don't understand how we got to today, it's very difficult to make a grounded projection into the near future, to understand the demands that'll be placed on humanity by armed conflict in the future. And so what I'd like to do is make a plug for understanding continuities. And General Milley talked about continuities in the nature of war as well as change. And I think social science has an immensely important role, really, in four key areas. The first is to help us understand not just war, but warriors. You know, in his great book that looked at conflict and battle over four centuries, the historian John Keegan said that what battles have in common is human. The struggle of men and, of course, women today trying to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation with the achievement of some aim over which others are trying to kill them. And so it's important for us to understand how we need to prepare soldiers. What are the requirements for warriors in the future? And I think this is an important topic to study. It's one of our army war fighting challenges. There's a snappy pamphlet in the back you can pick up, but it's one of our 21st order questions, the answers to which will help us prepare the future army. That question is how to develop resilient soldiers, adaptive leaders and cohesive teams who are capable of fighting and winning in environments of uncertainty and persistent danger. And so I think social science can certainly help us in that connection. The second key area I think they can help us really understand, and Christian and Will and Fatini already talked about this, understand the problem set within conflict and to understand our enemies better, to frame the problem sets, to understand not just the enemy, but the people among whom these conflicts are fought and Christian already mentioned that already. So I know that you're gonna talk about hybrid war and so forth later, it's becoming even more important, I think, to understand really the nature of your enemy, but then how you interact with that enemy in context, not just of geography, but in context of the populations and the cultural and political and social and economic and religious factors that affect your mission and the outcome. The third thing I think social science can help us do is engage people, because ultimately conflict is aimed at altering human behavior, and human behavior is fundamentally at the basis of violence. I mean, what does ISIS do? I mean, they pit communities against each other, they portray themselves as a patron and protector of one of those parties, and then use control of populations to accelerate that cycle of violence. So we have to be able to separate the enemy from sources of strength, and that's physically, but also psychologically and politically. And then the fourth thing is that social science can help us understand the problem of future war. Talking about really threats enemies and adversaries, understanding patterns and projecting forward, but as Zachary Shore has said in a great book about a sense of the other, it's really the pattern break that's really important. We talked a lot about Russia. Pattern break was like in 2008, I think. Also understanding our missions, technology, and its influence on war, but the interaction of technology and people, and then of course history and lessons learned. And then the question is, will anybody listen to social scientists about it? And I'm sometimes skeptical about it, because I think we try to turn future war into something that's alien to the nature of war. We tend to define future wars we would like it to be, fast, cheap, efficient, wage from offshore, standoff distances, and so we have to really guard against self-delusion. Excellent. We're gonna come to a couple of questions, and I've asked the panel to think about what their research and their time in the field suggests about the future of war, but I wanna ask a little bit more kind of geeky type question, which is both, Will's talked about kind of statistical forecasting, and I've done a lot of work on the text applications of that, the earlier work on IQs and whatnot. Fatini's talked about some of the work, call data in Yemen, and I know Chris has done some really incredible kind of archival and field collection work of data. And if we can kind of come up just a little bit in a world of big data applications, the Defense Department, other parts of the US government are very keen to sort of realize the power of all of this data, which we're told were just a mass wash in all the time. How does, what can social scientists tell us about how to judge that data? How to find the signal in all of that noise? And then how to make this last part, as Senator McMaster said, that translation, right? So not just being clever in the data discovery strategies, but also using that to really inform decision-making. Fatini, can I ask you to start? Yeah, absolutely. I think the really important thing when you're dealing with kind of massive tropes of data is to actually have a very solid knowledge of the context, so to kind of guide yourself as to where you would expect to find the signal in the noise, and also go in it with clear hypotheses of what you expect to find. So I appreciated the point of, there's incredible power in mining data, which is true, but if you have kind of 700 million calls and over 17 million callers, for instance, in one of the data sets that I'm working with, it's very hard to go just completely blind and looking for hotspots. So just to use an example, out of Yemen, we have these three years' worth of call records the year before the Arab Spring, the year during and the year after, and we were very keen to try and use a coded data set of the protests and overlay call records over protest events to try and kind of get the anatomy of a revolution, try to understand how people mobilize in the context of collective action for protests. And we realized that have we not known the exact geographic locations of where to look, the times of events, the qualitative information of how demonstrations, which were violent, which were not, it would have been really difficult to try and identify patterns. I'm gonna leave it at this, but I also wanted to raise the ethical aspects of dealing with this type of data. And what's interesting is that even though social science has developed an array of rules, you have to go through human subjects committees for different type of experimental work or otherwise, we're really behind in terms of how to work with big data. So I've experienced, I mean, trying to think of how to even present this type of research. I've struggled with making sure that the data cannot be de-anonymized even though it's anonymous and figuring out what's the exact level of analysis to present it in. We'll quick thoughts then we'll go to Christian. Yeah, there's one way to try to answer that is, well, there's machine learning and there's theory as is the two ways that you try to split that out. And I think one of the problems that Washington has had is that a lot of the funding has gone to engineering firms and engineering firms are very good at selling a system and bringing no theory whatsoever to it. And that goes back to something that was said a minute ago which is, and this is our fault, social scientists are very bad at interacting with policy makers. And that's something that we need to improve and we can sit there and blame the policy makers but the reality is we're terrible at it. And there's also a training gap but it's about to start getting bridged. Social science is moving toward teamwork. We're gonna see my generation know but the people who are being trained today are gonna have to develop careers working in teams and working with teams with people with computer science degrees and all sorts of other things. And the computer scientists should never have to be responsible for the theory. Even if the theory is nothing more than identifying what's the set of variables I include in my machine learning algorithm. So we're not there yet. We've got to learn a whole bunch of new things. We've got to learn how to work in teams. We've got to learn how to work with computer scientists and we've got to learn how to communicate effectively developing, learning the languages that you all use and learning how to interface with you rather than trying to sit there and give my, here's my five minute speech on my research and expect that you guys are gonna be interested in following that. Chris, do you have thoughts on evaluating data? So one or not, I'm not a big data fan. I'm a better data fan and there's a big distinction between them. I think part of the problem is a lot of the stuff that we're receiving is kind of the noise. We get to a better understanding of exactly what's kind of being tapped when we're engaging in kind of triangulation but if all the money's being tossed in one particular direction towards a particular type of data collection then we'll think that we basically have, wow, we have like 5,000 respondents or 5 million or 800,000 or something thinking they were actually able to tap some phenomena but I don't think that's necessarily the case. So I'm methodologically eclectic to not trust any of them well enough to basically kind of rely upon anyone and thus I think we need to kind of push in this kind of like multi-faceted direction. The other thing about kind of like not talking to one another or not respecting or not hearing one another is clearly the two-way street, right? So I was at the University of Maryland for a long time and so I don't believe that politicians, scholars, NGOs or the military necessarily good at speaking to one another in part because it's an iterated conversation, right? So you need to get through, oh, that's what you mean by inference. Oh, that's what you mean by data and that takes time to kind of work through those and if you have this constant rotation of individuals then having to reestablish exactly how you speak to one another in the first place then that's going to be problematic. So the sustained interaction I think is necessary if you're doing that, but I think we all do it poorly. That certainly speaks to one of the great benefits that academic networks can provide and I think some that General McMaster has leveraged which is the way that these, whether it's collaboration amongst particular research partners or a lot of this is driven by interpersonal connections, right? And personality, whether that's for good, for good or ill. HR, can you speak just for a minute sort of how you've leveraged academic work and whether in your work in Iraq, Afghanistan or currently at ARCIC? Well, I mean, I think it's essential to have the connection to academia because these are complex problems and if we don't frame the problem properly, if we don't understand the problem, we'll engage in military activity and confuse that activity for progress toward achieving our objectives. And so I think a lot of this, a lot of our connection to academia can help us really understand the nature of the problem, ask some first order questions about what is driving the conflict and to recognize the limits of our own understanding by interacting with those who have real regional expertise who have expertise in political science and social science who can help us understand the complex causality of these problems and then also the opportunities that exist for us to affect these problem sets but also the limitations. Before we get to the sort of my final question about for you on them, we'll move to the audience. I do wanna ask the panel for sort of their thoughts on how social science research has changed over the last 15 years, basically through this period of the war on terror. I started graduate school the day after 9-11. I lived three miles from Logan Airport. Fatini and I were classmates. I don't remember when exactly you got to Boston, Fatini. But it was still, you know, terrorism as a field of study was not a career advancing move for the most part, studying protest movements or contentious politics, which is really Christian and Will's background was still not certainly the emphasis in a lot of programs. I remember even being told in 2006 when I was studying counterinsurgency campaigns, my department chair said, insurgencies, really? Does anyone care about that? Not Harvard University's greatest day. A lot has changed in the 10 years since that conversation took place. My defection from academia not withstanding. What else has changed in the way we do social science research, both in the methods, but also in the topics that we see social science starting to focus on? I should note we're all political scientists with the exception of HR up here. So when we talk about social science, we're really not getting into these sociology or the cognitive sciences that have a lot to offer here, and I think probably might take us to the next step, but from the political science side, what's changed? Chris? Given the setup, I'm trying not to be overly pessimistic, but so I think some things have changed. So it's now, I remember, so I came out in 92 from grad school, and I remember there was like two jobs that talked about conflict and violence, and you were kind of going, okay, I had at least two jobs, which two years before that, there wasn't, that wasn't even there, and so now it's quite frequent. We're not at the stage yet where every department suggests that they need to have somebody that studies conflict and violence, and they know something about it, and then unfortunately it's trendy, right? So then a lot of people think we need a civil war person or we need someone that does terrorism, and every now and then maybe someone that does human rights violations, and so I think we now have more understanding that you'll see a few of those people, but there's very few programs, like if you're looking for a program like in an undergraduate or some other company, you'd be like, where can I go study conflict and violence? Which program should I go to? There's very few places that they have the people, there's like a working kind of group, there's some data that they're collecting and they're just punching out publications and training people. There's very few places that are doing that explicitly. You could have parts of that, you have some people, you have some workshops, you have some people doing some data, so most of us are doing publishing, but very few of those kind of piece together. But we now have the parts that exist to actually start piecing that together, but you start looking across programs, especially in like the more lead institutions, you'd be hard pressed to find more than one or two individuals that study anything that we're talking about in this room. So it's coming down the pike, I think, so that perspective I think we should be very optimistic about there's now more people that are studying it. Now, what they're studying, how they're studying it, I'll definitely quibble with some of that because I think some people are trying to be a little bit too trendy and think about exactly what is hot now as opposed to thinking more systematically about what is it that we actually need to know. So there's kind of like an organizational term, right? A lot of people want to study organizations, security voice institutions of different forms, but somehow we got started on this militia thing and so people are off studying militias and I'm like, talk about the sideshow versus the main event. And so it's kind of like, it's very interesting how these things kind of emerge, but I'm generally optimistic in the fact that I think that there's now a conversation, there's now people, there's now some training, but I'm clearly, I clearly would have thought more would have happened in terms of support for the training and the institutional buildings and so forth. I think in many respects, Europe is way ahead of us in terms of the training of the individuals and institutes and so forth. And so I think we kind of need to catch up. Interesting. Shift gears now and to have each of you just say briefly kind of what your research or your observations on the future of war are likely to look like. Are there trends that you see from your own research? Are there trends that you've observed through your field work or through your work with other students or other institutions that give you some insight into kind of our broader project here today and what the future of war. Will, can we start with you? I guess I'm actually gonna go back to a topic that was raised a little bit earlier in an earlier panel. And an observation that wasn't raised there is that I like to think about what it's like when you're in a democratic country rather than an autocratic country. And we have, especially in this country, a real tendency to think, oh, that's good things. There's always good things in democracies. And the question was about perpetual war and nobody wanted to bring up that we've done this before multiple times. We've had a cold war. Nobody wanted to think about the role that fear plays and the quite rational incentives that politicians have to play to fear because it mobilizes and gets people to the polls. George Bush, when he's sitting there after 9-11, had a choice to make. How the heck was that guy gonna get reelected? President. I mean, think about that. You know, he was dead on the water. What is your research saying, Will? What is your sort of, on the academic side, are we seeing in terms of the future of war? I'm gonna leave it there. Okay. Fatini. Like some of the challenges we're confronted with is trying to study things for which we just don't have empirical evidence. For example, cyber warfare. There's no empirics. So how do you even begin to study it? I know colleagues are trying to look at the legal frameworks or just come up with general theories, but if it's something is covert, how do you even go about studying it? Things have, I think we've become a lot more creative with drone strikes, for example, that are also covert, but being at New America, I mean, I think they were at the forefront coding the events and we're actually using their dataset now to try to look at the effects that drone strikes have on communications using the cell phone metadata. So people can try to be creative at getting at these things, but I think one of the main struggles we're gonna face is how do you study things for which you cannot do empirically based research. The other issue I think is combining technology with real shoe leather. So I appreciated Chris's comment about how you really need to be a multi-method in what you do. And I'm thinking about some recent research of colleagues who looked at satellite imagery out of Iraq and they were basically looking at areas that were controlled by the Islamic state and then taken over by the Iraqi army and they were looking at buildings and then looking at what buildings were, how many buildings were being destroyed as a measure of a kind of retaliation of the Iraqi army reprisals against locals who were allegedly supporting the Islamic state. And then when you talk to Iraqi army people or people of kind of the Hashtag Shabi militias, they basically tell you that they had to destroy these buildings because they were booby trapped. So in their, like their version of the story, they're protecting the population while what the researchers were interpreting just based on the satellite imagery is that it was, you know, because it was just in retaliation. And I'm not saying one or the other has the real ground truth, but all I'm trying to say is that you can't just do it with big data alone. You actually have to also have the ground story. Christian. There's an interesting finding. I think it's been around for a couple of decades, but if you think about it, it's kind of intriguing. So behavioral challenges from people that are going against governments tends to always lead to some government coercive or forceful response. But when you flip it and you're looking at government coercive violent activity, it has seemingly every effect on behavioral challenges. Sometimes it increases dissent. Sometimes it decreases it. Sometimes it has a delayed effect. What's intriguing is this has now been established relatively well, but we don't really understand what the imbalance means. So like if the government coercive activity, and you don't know exactly what the response to that government coercive activity is going to be, why would you engage in the government coercive activity? So we've paid very little attention to that particular question historically. Now there's some work on it. We're kind of like, well, okay, well, actually we're aggregating too much government activity. What we really need to do is kind of look at the selective or indiscriminate nature of it, or look at the violent or nonviolent nature of it, or maybe we're just lumping things together, right? So if you're looking at national level characteristics or national level trends, or subnational or neighborhood level, you're getting differences there, but we haven't really played enough with these kind of different levels of analysis, but that's kind of where we're going. Related to that, it's kind of this, I mentioned before this organizational churn, right? We're just kind of like, maybe it matters who is engaging in the coercive activity, which particular institution, which particular unit, which particular group of individuals, and that's relatively new that we're getting there. If you're looking at the kind of like government coercive activity directed towards challengers, my last book kind of showed that we've been looking at repression as kind of a cost and somewhat within these contexts, within some behavioral challenge in context, it's a benefit. It's like you are, you're now marked by this particular course of activity. Look, look who I am, and then your resiliency and your ability to try to overcome that is actually one of the things that is kind of propelling you to continue. And I think this kind of shows the kind of organizational and individual intersection that we kind of like need to push down on. The last point would be this issue of trying to figure out whether or not those particular findings are varying by the sources that we're consulting. So, the media sources have a particular interest in trying to convey a particular increase or decrease for what the behavioral challenges are doing. They have a vested interest in telling a particular story, or when you're doing interviews with challengers, do they have a vested interest in telling you that they fought back diligently besides the fact that behaviorally you couldn't really document that in any other way. But looking across the sources, I think, is also something that's emerging from this particular paradox. Hey, Chair, we're gonna come back to you. I wanna take just a couple of questions from the audience here, here quickly. And I'm gonna use what I learned last year as the Jake Tapper rules. And we're gonna go, girl boy, girl boy, in asking these questions. So, we'll start off that way. Man, here in the front. We're trying to keep the conference here on time so if we can keep those questions punching into the point, that'd be appreciated. Maria Smith, I'm with the Department of State for our one non-political scientist, or if you guys have any opinions on this. When I was doing my master's degree actually at University of Michigan, I was going through a Russian studies program and I was one of the few sort of national security-focused people doing that program. And what I really observed was that in terms of the historians, military history, or anything along those lines was regarded as pretty archaic. It wasn't interesting to them. In terms of the anthropologists, it was not just uninteresting to them to look at security challenges, but they actually reported colleagues being essentially blacklisted for wanting to work with the US military or do anything along those lines. Do you think that still holds true? Was there just too big an ideological and interest divide in those fields for these people to contribute to the work we do? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think that there shouldn't be a divide about this. I kind of attempted to paraphrase Raymond Bradbury when he was asked about Fahrenheit 451, they said, are you trying to predict the future in this book? And he said, hell no, I'm trying to prevent it. So I think what we need to do is to study war, to study future war as a way to prevent it, right? And it's our understanding of war and our understanding of warriors that makes wars if they do occur less inhumane, right? And so I think if we have a flawed conception about future war, for example, that reduces war to a big targeting exercise, we don't understand the human, the culture, the political drivers of conflict or the same drivers that Thucydides identified, right? Fear, honor, and interest, we're only gonna treat the symptoms. We're gonna prolong the war and this is not in keeping with just war theory, right? So to go into a war without having a way to get to that adjust end is unethical as well as stupid to do that. So we have to think clearly about the problem of war and warfare and we need the academy to help us do that. Christian, you wanted to respond. Immediately when you were asking your question, I was hearing it in a different way and the way that I was hearing it was do I lose out of my ability to speak to rebels and those that kind of challenge political authorities if I go for a Minerva grant? Hell yeah, I mean, but it is also, I mean, so I did research in- Minerva grant being a DOD program funding social science research in universities, yes. I mean, I did some stuff on Rwanda, Northern Ireland and I was clearly benefited by being an African American because of their perceptions of what that meant. I was getting to meet all types of challenging individuals because of the presumption of exactly, well clearly if anyone's against the United States, you must have some gripes. We'll run with you and so did I use that, yes. But then if anyone was looking at kind of like who had funded my research, they might have had some problems and I'm asked a couple of interesting questions at some point about that. So we've been thinking of collaboration as all benefit. There's this cost part two with regards to how that's gonna hinder your ability to read certain types of audiences which is going to be a major issue. I'm not sitting this far away from Mr. Macastor because I've just realized that actually, but clearly there's these kind of issues where these dyadic kind of partnerships are gonna have these unintended consequences that we haven't necessarily thought through but I know that people are in the academy thinking about this. This does come up quite frequently where you're getting your money from and out in the field, you don't wanna have that conversation with exactly where did you get your money from but it's clearly a problem. I think it's good for there to be a healthy tension between the communities. You don't want all these groups seeing these questions from the same perspective. You can't then challenge those perspectives but the question is how to avoid that hostility, right? And the sort of stereotyping that occurs in lots of different directions, amongst these, that's right, that too. Gentlemen in the back. Chick Feldman or Namo. What I'm curious about, how is the communication between an operational commander who thinks he needs some analysis and are you able or would you want to, help redefine his problem or figure out a research project to get to what he or she is looking for? I've relied very heavily on academics from multiple disciplines to help in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example. When we went into Northern Iraq in 2000 and 2005 and sadly it's kind of like it looks right now. Al-Qaeda had largely taken over, Al-Qaeda and Iraq had largely taken over the northern part of the country. I called West Point and I asked my friend in the history department if he knew anybody who could help and he sent a major Dan Bernard who had done his dissertation at the University of Chicago on the 1919, 1920 revolt against the British in Nineveh Province. I've relied on Colonel Joel Rayburn who's here today as well for that kind of deep cultural understanding, really to be able to go in asking the right questions and understand the political, tribal, ethnic, religious dynamics within a particular area. And then also just to understand complex problem sets. The privilege of commanding a task force in Afghanistan was a counter-corruption and organized crime task force called Shafafiyat. And so I brought in many area experts but also social scientists, law enforcement experts to understand really the political foundations of that problem and then to work with Afghans on a way ahead. So the academy's been very accessible to me and I think what's important is to just have those lines of communication open so that when you do come up against complex problems you can bring the right people together. And again, it's important to get people to listen, right? I mean, we talked about Iraq and there was more planning that happened but a plan wasn't developed, it was informed by some of the experts like David Pierce, who's now our ambassador to Greece who did the Iraq study. So the key is that we on the operational side, whether it's diplomats or soldiers have to listen I think that's a bigger obstacle than access to the academy. Christian and then we'll wrap up. Actually kind of related to your question, I was kind of thinking about and immediately kind of referenced the network dynamics. I mean, he made a call to West Point and I'm just kind of thinking of how we're tapping like who's academia, right? Who's social science? Getting back to a point I was making before because I think part of what's difficult about kind of accessing the academy is much of the modeling we have is archaic. So we're waiting for someone that has that clearly established book that's been published which is probably two years late, right? From inception to writing and distribution. What we really want is like the state of the artwork being done which in all likelihood, good luck finding it because it's like SSRN or it's peace science or it's happening in someone's classroom at that moment and we haven't figured out a way to actually get to the state of the art technologies and people that are working on stuff that could directly speak to the issues that are needed in many respects and being able to access that in some kind of easily rectifiable manner where someone's prompting what kind of questions they'd like and that is going out on some secured site where everybody could clean into it and kind of identify, well I could do that probably easily or I'd love to actually get engaged in that type of thing. But the model that we have set up to do it now waiting for the article, waiting for the book, having some reputation or looking to the same institutions to kind of provide that kind of knowledge when they're not doing the best work. That's the thing that I think we kind of need to break down and figure out exactly how to get our heads around it, kind of tap the network that actually exists. And I think New America and ASU are trying to be one force of bridging that gap. There are other literally bridging the gap efforts between policy communities and academia. But I think that this is certainly part of the challenge. HR, we didn't get to you earlier on the thoughts on the future of war. You can see the clock ticking down in front of us there. I'll let you have the concluding thoughts here. Well I think the key thing is to make your ground of projection into the future. And one way to do that is to understand our most recent conflicts as a starting point. You know the old saying, hey the military's usually ready to fight the last war. That's actually incorrect. I mean the military's that have problems are those that study the past and the recent and ongoing experience is only superficially. So I think what we've learned is quite a bit. We've learned that war is not a big targeting exercise. That war is essentially political. And that the consolidation of military gains politically is an integral part of war. It has to be an integral part of campaign planning. And so I think as we look to the future we have to develop capabilities across our joint force but across our government that allows us to achieve outcomes consistent with a vital interest that brought us into conflict to begin with. And so I think that when we look toward the future we have to look at geopolitical trends which are not going in a good direction. I think that the work that Jakub Griegel and Wes Mitchell have done on this in a new book called The Unquiet Frontier is very good. And this looks at really geopolitics is back, right? The end, I think the invasion of Ukraine punctuated the end of the post Cold War period. We're in a different period now where we have weak states that surround revisionist powers. So I think that the chance of great power conflict is higher now than has been in the last 70 years. And we also have I think a grave threat from non-state actors. What all these conflicts have in common though is they're about the control of territory, people and resources. So what we need to cope with that is a balanced joint force capability. I think the trend in war that has given us our advantages from standoff range, it's bottomed out because of a new technological counter measures and so forth. We ought to pay attention to what's going on in South China Sea. We ought to pay attention to the fact that Russia has established air supremacy over Ukraine from the ground. So I think the character of warfare is changing. But I think as we look at the geopolitical dynamics and the threats, I think that the danger is high and rising of conflict. Which means we've got to be ready because as George Washington said, the most effectual way of preventing war is to be prepared for it. I think that's an excellent segue into our next panel. If you would thank the panelists here for me today.