 We have a polling question, I believe. Yes. Since it's a simple one, it's a yes or no. Grab your clickers. Will Congress authorize the war against ISIS in the next year? Yes or no? No. So interestingly, we asked a question somewhat similar about an AUMF last year's conference, and the response was a lot more positive as to the action of Congress. So we'll move forward on the panel. So this panel is called Living in the Era of Future of War, How Will Persistent Conflict Shape Our Society? We're joined by Rosa Brooks and Rob Johnson. Rosa is a senior Future of War fellow at New America. She's also a law professor at Georgetown. She writes about the changing nature of warfare. She has a very exciting book coming out later this year. She served as counselor to the Undersecretary of Defense for policy and as special coordinator for rule of law and humanitarian policy in the Pentagon from 2009 to 2011. Rob Johnson is the director at Oxford University of the Changing Character of War Program, which resonates very powerfully with our first speaker discussing the difference between the nature of warfare and the character of warfare. So we're very prescient in creating that project. He's a senior research fellow of Pembroke College, the associate of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford. His areas of focus in research and writing is war strategy, strategic thinking, and conflict in Southwest and Central Asia. He has done substantial work in Afghanistan, South Asia, and the Middle East. And he is a member of the advisory panel of the Defense Academy of the United Kingdom, and a lecturer for the Royal College of Defense Studies. So why don't we begin with a brief presentation about some of your ideas and thoughts about persistent conflict? Well, first of all, let me say what is a great honor to be speaking to such an august audience. And I'd say thanks to the organizers. And also thanks to the people of Washington. I hope that last you've now forgiven us for that in Broglieau in 1814 about burning down this wonderful place. I'd like to apologize on behalf of the crown for that disaster. What we're trying to do with the changing character of war program at University of Oxford is to challenge the thinking a little bit of some of our great government and military figures. And one of my great heroes is the British historian, E.H. Carr, who said, when you're trying to conceive of the future, the difficulty you have straight away is that you cannot escape the flux of history to which you yourself belong. And it's been very interesting to hear speakers talking about the difficulties of, you know, conceptualizing of the future. And one of the things that I've been able to do, courtesy of the program at Oxford, is to try to conceive of the future, not in terms of platforms and technologies, but instead to think of certain concepts and ideas that will be either persistent or that we're very familiar with or that are indeed transforming. One of them, for example, is the porosity or permeability of international borders. And by those, we also mean within society the permeability of our own private sphere. And that brings me to this important question that I've been asked to give about two and a half minutes' thought on. And that is really about our society, how we make a society used to the idea of potentially persistent conflict. And it begs the question straight away, what is it that makes a resilient society? And we might think of answers, we should have a clicker thing on this really. Is it that our society will be able to recover and function, which is a very functionary approach to the problem? Or is it actually something more intangible like faithfulness, a concept we often overlook? Now, as far as persistent conflict is concerned, it's a shame that actually that my colleague, who I know is over there in the corner, Dr. Annette Edler, who is my director of studies, she works on persistent conflict in both urban and rural spaces of South America. And I think she's better qualified than me to talk about this. But I think what we would expect to find would be episodic violence, which would resemble a law enforcement problem. Will it shape our society, that kind of problem? Well, I think it would all depend on our tolerance level. I was struck by watching your news programs, your news networks last night, that there were a number of murders even in this side or homicides, as you would say, in this side of the United States. And yet there was barely a flicker of interest from those who were sitting around me in the hotel lobby when this came onto the news screen. I guess because there's a level of tolerance there that would not perhaps exist in my own home county in Oxfordshire. And I wonder if what it takes, what threshold there has to be before a society or a government will respond to a particular threat or problem. One of the things that my friend Tony Atchut variates here at the moment, and one of the things that we've been talking about together is when there's a future major war, how will you know that you're in a future major war? Who will make the call that somehow the problems you face are now so persistent, so serious that you'll have to transform from a peacetime setting to a wartime setting? Now there is a risk, however, that we could over-securetise every problem that we face. That famous expression about, if every problem looks like a nail, you'll always use a hammer. And I think the assumptions we make about the future and about conflict are important. I have a real trouble at the moment getting funding for the CCW programme, for the changing character programme, because we have the word war in the title. People say war isn't anachronism, it's all armed conflict now. Well, we should be very careful about these semantic sanitising expressions. There is something very special and very profound about war. And one of the generals this morning summed it up for us by saying war does require the mobilisation of everyone, of every resource, of every sinew if you have any chance of winning it. And if you haven't got a chance of winning it, you shouldn't be in it. We are shaped by our historical experience. I think we do think about the way that our classical theorists have said to us when it comes to conflict, we should all, all the classical theorists say, we should all try to avoid protracted war. The only person who ever raised it to a virtue was Mao, and I'm not terribly fond of Mao Zedong personally. So, I suppose what we should remember when we think about our societies is that states have a responsibility. They have a responsibility to create the conditions for conflict resolution. We should never cease to endeavour for conflict resolution, even if we think we're in an era of persistent conflict. Because the consequences of a military, a military force being involved in a protracted and political conflict is the military will become politicised. And there is a risk that if we accept the idea of persistent conflict uncritically, we will also militarise our politics. And that can be the most dangerous outcome of them all. Thank you. Thanks Rob, it's terrific to be here and thanks very much to Daniel and to ASU for helping to make this possible for New America. I thought I would tell you a story since Rob is visiting us from Oxford about some things I learned many, many years ago when I was an anthropology student at Oxford. And here's the gist of it. Every human society throughout history, large and small, to the best of my knowledge, has worked very, very hard to draw clear and sharp distinctions between war and not war. You can call it peace if you want, or you can call it something else. And you know this. These are some examples I might give among the Navajo here in America. Navajo warriors, when they went off to war, would leave behind their village and as they left their village, they would literally assume a different dialect. They had different verb forms, different noun forms, which they would use for the duration of the conflict. Then when they returned from the conflict from the war, they, as they approached their own village, they would draw a line in the desert sand and they would step across that line and resume the ordinary language. The Makaoa, Papua Nugidi, would fast and be sexually abstinent for more than six months prior to going off to war. They would also have war paint and war sorcery. And the idea was that you needed to close off your body and fill it with war sorcery so you could go out and be the kind of brutal warrior you needed to be in order to win. But then when they returned from war, they had to once again refrain from sexual intercourse with their wives for another six months until the war sorcery had worn off them because if they didn't do that, the poisons, the toxins of war would leech into both their bodies, killing them both. So the idea, every human society's had rituals to mark off the difference between our warrior selves and our peacetime selves, our war mode and our peaceful mode. And we need those. Again, this is, I think, a familiar idea to all of you. We need these because the rules during wartime are very different. In wartime, you can kill people and you won't go to jail for murder, presuming you follow certain rules. You might even get a medal in peacetime if you kill somebody because you think they're your enemy. You will either be carted off to jail or to a psychiatric institution. So the rules of wartime and the rules of peacetime are utterly distinct. But right now, and I think you've been hearing this all day from all of the speakers, it's getting harder and harder for us to tell the difference between them for a variety of reasons, technological reasons, social reasons. It's gotten harder and harder to say, X belongs in the box we label war, Y belongs in the box we label peace. Globally diffuse terrorist threats, cyber threats, potentially in the future, bioengineered threats, do we put those in the war box or do we put those in the peace box? It seems to me on the one hand that we are absolutely at a moment where trying to jam everything into our old categories is only going to cause problems for us. It's going to lead to a failure of imagination in thinking about military planning and strategy. It's going to lead to a failure of imagination in thinking about national level strategy as well. We can't continue to apply categories that don't make sense, but I'm equally concerned about what happens when we lose our ability to distinguish in a meaningful way between what goes in that war box and what goes in that peace box because, frankly, the default in this society, as in most others, is to overlabel everything as belonging in the war box subject to war rules. And I think we're seeing that in our society in a variety of different ways. We see it in sort of a trickle down from war rules to peace time. We see it in changes in the nature of American policing, changes in the nature of immigration policy, changes in the rules in ordinary criminal courtroom rules, that as rules and practices and habits sort of designed for war, leech into greater and greater spheres in everyday life. Doesn't have to be that way, but the only way out of it, it seems to me, I think the standard way out of it taken by everyone from President Obama who says we cannot have a perpetual war to most human rights groups is to say, well, let's stick everything that was wrongly put in the war box and back into the peace box and just go back to normal. I don't think we can do that anymore. I think that the changes out there are real, but I do think that we have to face that and begin to get very, very imaginative, both about forms of resilience that are appropriate for the kinds of low level complex conflicts that may not involve physical force very much or only as part of them. We need to figure out how is a society to handle that, to address that, to respond to that strategically and otherwise, but we're also going to have to do a lot of rethinking of how we think about the military as an institution and how we think about our own laws and politics in relation to war. But I'll stop there for now, Daniel. So you've both pointed out the complexity of a war piece divide and also the value of continuing to utilize the term war. But do we need new concepts, new words, new labels in order to process this current situation and not fall victim to the failures of imagination? It's very interesting, isn't it? Because so many of the concepts we've used for war are still relevant. I mean, they have still got value and utility. And it's interesting that we've chosen to have a panel discuss the people, the public and our society, because so often studies about the future of war degenerate into discussions about platforms and what militaries do on one side and the state on the other. And civil-military relations is a subject quite often dominated by what the government's doing and what our forces do, and forgetting that people really matter and how this country had to learn that very hard way through the Vietnam War and the consequences of that war. We have got lots of tools which have, I say, lots of continuity, which are very valuable. I wouldn't want to throw those out or overlook them. But I think we do need to acknowledge a change of emphasis on some of them. Just to take one, you know, attacking nodes and systems is not new. I mean, the Roman armies in Europe would have understood the need to attack the nodes and systems of the barbarian Germans. No offense to anyone here who is German. You're not barbarians now, I should point out. But, far more civilized than us British. But they would recognize, for example, that the chieftains and leaders of the clans were the most important nodal points. That concept has now just got a slightly newer form in the sense that it's about electronic means and tools and signals communications. But those are still there. So I think we should be very careful and not think that all forms of conflict in the past were anachronistic, but we should just acknowledge that there's a change of emphasis required to update ourselves in where we are today. Yeah, I think, I mean, when I think I'm a law professor and I can get very, very boring on this subject, try not to, but our whole legal apparatus is essentially premised on the idea that we have one set of rules for wartime and another set of rules for peacetime that also maps, that is not only in terms of law of armed conflict for some of you legal wonk types versus human rights law, but also onto domestic rules as well, domestic laws as well, civil rights. When we're at national security matters and foreign affairs were at stake, courts, for instance, are much more deferential to executive power. So we have this whole system that is premised on our ability to tell the difference between war and not war, national security threat versus something else, criminal threat. And right now, we really don't know what to do with that. We're sort of shoveling more and more into the war box and using that set of legal tools to deal with it. I think everybody knows that that is beginning to have some really distorting effects on our system of democracy, on our commitment to rule of law, but nobody quite knows how to fix it, partly because no one is quite willing to say, gosh, maybe many of today's conflicts, not all, but many, won't and in the future won't fit neatly into one of these two boxes. We've got this binary system, the war box, the peace box. Maybe we need to think about what rules make sense in the middle of the continuum. Maybe we need to think of a structure in which things change as we move further along the continuum to a higher intensity of physical violence, for instance, or disruption. And that's a really hard conversation because we all tend to cling to the rules that we're used to, partly because we fear, to some extent rightly, that the minute you open anything up, you start losing whatever rights protections you've got. So there's a tendency to kind of go, oh, can't talk about that, can't admit that. But I think with law, as with military strategy and military tools, if we can't acknowledge what's happening in the ways in which our current legal framework, political framework, for recruiting, training, managing our military, is no longer well-equipped to face the realities that are out there, we're gonna have problems. We're gonna have very big problems. Why don't we open it up to questions from the audience? Some mics, let's start here and then move back. I have a question for C-Power Magazine, a few others, and a former Marine, maybe officer. You talk about persistent war. If you look at Europe 13th through the 17th, 18th century, the constant, pretty much constant war, but they were fought by relatively small groups, professional officer corps, and then cadveries of peasants or whatever they would list into. Then you got into the 18th, 19th century, industrial-sized war, mass armies, and we got to take care of it on into the 20th century. The different feeling for whether war continues. Are we now in another era similar to what we had in that early European period, small, professional army, fighting distant wars that the rest of the public tunes out? These are a different feeling for whether war persists because we have such a few people involved in that. May I answer? Yes, sure, please. You're absolutely right. Quite right, the 19th, 20th century, characterized by increasing industrialization, bureaucratization, and professionalization of armed forces. So not surprisingly, war fought by an elite, but increasingly the depth of the battlefield extended into the human society and the industrial process drew populations into war. So what era are we in now? I guess some people are saying we're in information era. I think we're in a transition era between the information age and what you might call the synthetic age. We talked about robotics earlier to this morning. So I suspect that that will transform the arrangements of who the actors are that are in war. I think a lot of people would like to remain outside of armed conflicts if we ask them. The population of the United States would probably not want to go into a big war, but the problem that we all face is the information age is not giving us a choice. We are all confronted on a daily basis by a barrage of footage of war in different parts of the world, whether we like it or not. And that is affecting the way we react, even our own politics and our own social interactions. Probably with a small degree, if you live in Arizona, probably very profoundly, if you live in Finland right now and they're close to the Russian border. So I think the transformation effect will go on. That's the short answer. I think there's good news and bad news, right? Today's conflicts do not kill nearly as many people as conflicts of previous years. The bad news is that because it's harder and harder to put them in a box, they spread in more insidious and hard to see ways into civilian life. And we talk about the militarization of US foreign policy. I think you could equally talk about the civilianization of war and warfare. That cyber, what is that? What kind of threat is that? Bioengineered disease, what kind of threat is that? Even terrorism obviously straddles a lot of lines between crime and warfare. And so even as, in some ways, war grows more professionalized and militaries grow more professionalized and separate from the broader society at the same time, war itself is growing more civilianized in terms of its reach and its impact. And I don't think we know how to handle that yet. Question from the back, perhaps? Yeah, standing in the back. Is there a mic? Great, thanks. Hello, my name's Bill Liddens. I'm a Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel. We use the terms continual war and perpetual war often. I've heard it often today, but that's the effect. I would like to hear your opinion on the cause. Right. You know, is it that we've chosen an enemy that can never be defeated, terrorism? Is it that our reliance on drones and SOF? Is it the disconnectiveness between those who fight the war and those who send us to war? I'd like to hear your opinion. Well, I was very struck this morning when the general stood up and started describing the reasons why Russia might feel that it has a reason to be aggressive. And I wrote down in my notebook fear, honor, and interest, which is something a few cities taught me, of course, and taught all of us. The curious thing is that the drivers of conflicts are all familiar to us. And when we're talking about causation of war, we're often looking for the things that are new and exquisite and exotic, but actually too often they're rather base and rather predictable and rather human. And I don't think we should forget the human thing as a driver of war. I would add, and again, familiar story to everybody here, changing technologies, reduce the salience of borders, reduce the salience of states, enter competition from non-state actors, democratization of the means of conflict. More rapid diffusion of knowledge that it is destabilizing the centrality of the state in warfare and decentralizing the centrality of the military as the sole and only executive agent of various forms of warfare. There are commonalities between what is happening now and earlier eras of history. When you think about an actor like the British East India Company, what was it? Was it a company? Was it a government? Well, sort of all of the above. But the problem is not so much that we're facing something never before seen by humanity, true in some ways, not true in other ways, but rather that our tools for confronting it are still the tools of mid-20th century warfare in some significant ways. Thank you all so much. Thank you too, Rose and Trubb. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.