 Thank you very much Nick for that introduction and thanks to the Naval War College for the invitation to speak here today. I should start out by telling you that I did not intend to write a book, particularly not this book, but any book as a matter of fact. It happened rather serendipitously. I got a call from St. Martin's Press that asked me if I would be willing to write a book on what they called the Grey War that was going on between the United States and Russia. And I said, well thanks but no thanks. I don't think I would write the book that you're looking for. And they said, oh really? Well why not? And I said well you know the conventional wisdom in the United States right now is that the Russians are using this revolutionary new form of hybrid war based on what's called the Garasimov doctrine. Mixing long-standing tools of military conflict with some newfangled high technology information operations in new ways that are posing threats to American democracy, to the integrity of the NATO alliance, to the security of our allies. And I actually don't think that's an accurate picture of what's going on here. They said, oh really? Well what would you write? And I made the mistake of telling them. And I quickly found myself checkmated because they said great why don't you write that? And I had no recourse. So within another day I had a book contract and a literary agent and I was off to the races. So that's in a nutshell how I wound up talking to you here today. But I think it's fitting that the book came about in that way because the underlying theme of the book is how a variety of factors can come together and combine in ways that produce outcomes that are unintended and unexpected. And in the case of Russia in the United States today I would add quite dangerous. And the title of the book, The Russia Trap, has a subtitle that reads how our shadow war with Russia could spiral into nuclear catastrophe. Now most people when they encounter that subtitle are a little curious and I think the big question on most people's minds is how can you possibly be serious? Because the prospect of nuclear war between the United States and Russia, I think if we're honest with ourselves, seems quite anachronistic. This seems like it's straight out of the 1950s and 1960s with all the hallmarks of Dr. Strangelove. It evokes a period when school kids in this country were conducting air raid drills and the federal government was preparing for emergency operations in case the balloon went up and more than a few people were building backyard fallout shelters and stockpiling food. And we just don't think that way anymore. We're not afraid of the prospects of nuclear conflict with anyone really, but particularly not with Russia because we've been through that period in our history. The Cold War ended. The United States won. At least we certainly think that way. And we've turned the page and we're on to new challenges. For a long time it was the challenge of international terrorism and we're looking at emerging nuclear powers, regional conflicts that could spin out of control. And we haven't really paid a lot of attention to the prospect that great nuclear powers could actually go to war with each other and that that war might turn nuclear. Now, what I argue in the book is that we need to be thinking about this because it's a real danger. And the reason why we're not thinking about it, not concerned about this danger very much, is a set of assumptions that I think are quite questionable and need a lot more critical scrutiny than they have been given. And I want to just walk through with you very briefly what I think those key assumptions or beliefs are, why I think we need to think harder about them and then talk a little bit about what we do to mitigate the dangers of an escalatory spiral here that could get out of control before I open it up for questions and answers. So what are the assumptions that I think underpin our complacency? I think the first one is the most fundamental and that is the belief that wars overwhelmingly start by intention. What we really need to worry about is a World War II style planned attack, much like Hitler undertook when he decided that he really liked Poland a lot and wanted that territory. The Japanese when they decided that they were going to mount a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor or Al Qaeda in 2001 with that planned attack in New York and Washington. And the way you deal with planned attack of course is deterrence. You demonstrate to your adversary that the plan will not be successful where it will be a lot more costly than that adversary might suppose and it's not worth the risk. And they reconsider, they back down and they think about some other plan, some less costly, less risky, less formidable opponent. And I think that's not entirely an erroneous conception. Obviously lots of wars begin by intention, by design as a result of planned aggression, planned intent. And it is in fact accurate that the way you deal with that is through deterrence. That's an important element of our statecraft. It needs to be a part of how we deal with our adversaries. However, it's not the exclusive way that wars begin. And it's not the only way you deal with the prospects of war and instability. In fact, probably the greatest man made catastrophe in human history, World War One began not by plans or intentions, not by design. In fact, just the opposite. World War One was a surprise to all of the combatants. Nobody intended World War One to turn into this Europe-wide conflagration that it wound up being. It was the result of misperception, miscommunication, ineptitude, systemic factors that produced a logic of events, a path determinacy that none of the players understood as it was taking place. Nobody wanted, nobody expected. As a matter of fact, only a few years prior to the outbreak of war, a British parliamentarian Norman Angel wrote a book, which was a bestseller at the time, published in 1910, called The Great Illusion. The thesis of the book was Europe has become, through its modernization and development, so intermeshed through mutually beneficial trade, through communications, travel, mutual dependencies, that it had actually grown out of warfare, that war was becoming obsolete because it made no sense. It was in no one's interest in Europe for this to take place, and therefore, it was impossible. Society had moved on. Now, I think what this should point to, I think, is a gap in our thinking about the dangers that we might be facing right now, dealing not just with Russia, but other great powers in the world as well. China, of course, looms very large in this picture. We need to question that implicit assumption that the way we deal with the dangers in all these contingencies is deterrence by, as the Romans used to say, avoiding war by preparing for war. That's an explicit foundation of our national security strategy right now. It is explicitly articulated. It says, the way you deal with great power competition, these great power adversaries, is showing through the strength of the U.S. military and our alliances that they're going to be in for a fight that they can't win, and that deters them. It caused them to back down. But I think, as Robert Jervis at Columbia, long ago, pointed out, that deterrence model does not apply to all dangerous situations, to all warfare. There's also a spiral model that's out there, where deterrence is actually an inappropriate response for countries that feel that they are under existential threat. It's almost like a cornered rat syndrome, right? If your choice, as you perceive it, is fighting back or dying, that's an easy choice. And your adversaries can fight back in ways that can surprise you. So what I argue in the book is the situation, as I see it, between the United States and Russia right now, looks a lot closer to the World War I situation than it does to the World War II situation. In other words, I am skeptical of the notion that the Russians are, like Nazi Germany was in the 1930s, a power that is intent on expanding until it reaches some sort of determined resistance and will push outward as fast as it can, unless we fight back. I suspect, although that's, I think, the common view in the United States right now, the Russians don't see their position in nearly those same terms. I think their view of their own role right now is a lot closer to a country feeling that it is under attack, that NATO has been pushing steadily eastward, getting closer and closer to Russia's borders, posing more and more of a threat to Russian interests, and that Russia has long faced a threat of regime change, efforts by the United States in the West to foment instability, protests, opposition inside Russia in ways that are threatening to the integrity of the Russian government and its ability to maintain sovereign governance inside Russia. Now, here you get into a debate over offensive Russia versus defensive Russia, which has been going on for quite some time. What I argue in the book is that both of those schools of thought that Russia is essentially driven by offensive ambitions and that Russia is essentially driven by defensive concerns have strong elements of truth behind them. In fact, I think that Russia is driven by both impulses, that the notion that Russia feels under threat from the NATO Alliance, feels under threat from U.S. democratization programs, efforts to encourage opposition movements, liberalization from inside Russia are absolutely true. I think its views on this, its feelings of being threatened are genuine. However, that doesn't mean that Russia does not also have offensive ambitions. I think in fact it does, but I don't think they're largely territorial ambitions in the classic sense of wanting to invade and control neighbors. I think that Russia feels that it has to be a great power, that that's the natural role that it must play in the world. I think that feeling that Russia needs to be a great power has both offensive and defensive aspects to it, paradoxically. I think part of this is the belief that Russia is destined to play a role in the world as one of the world's great decision makers. It believes that if it is sitting at the board of directors, if you want to use that metaphor for the world's governance, that the decisions that that board of directors makes will be better, more effective, more likely to result in stability worldwide and in regions of the world that the Russians care most about. That's number one. Number two, I think the defensive aspect of this offensive ambition is the belief that Russia can't continue to exist in its present form unless it is a great power. Now part of that is the result of Russian history, a lot of invasions over time, the belief that its fundamental security rests in this territorial expanse, the ability to put distance between itself and potential hostile invaders. Part of it is this belief that Russia can't keep intact as a federation, as a united entity, unless it is radiating power out, dominating its own neighborhood, not necessarily owning the territory contiguous to it, but certainly influential enough that it can ensure that this territory is not controlled by a potentially hostile outside power. So this combination of offensive and defensive motivations makes Russia a particularly difficult problem to deal with. I think it means that relying solely on deterrents as our mechanism for understanding what's going on and dealing with the challenges that Russia poses is not by itself enough. That has to be leavened with some other approaches as well, approaches that the spiral model would suggest. And the spiral model essentially says, look, you're going to have to talk with, and to some degree, accommodate adversaries that are driven in part at least by acute defensive perceived vulnerabilities. So from a response point of view, what I argue in the book is we're going to have to have more of a conscious effort to balance preparedness, military readiness, the pushback that is central to a deterrence approach with an outreach, accommodation, communication, and negotiation aspect of our policy that would be driven by that spiral model aspect to what's going on here. So first assumption that we need to be looking at this primarily as a deterrence model in order to avoid war, I think, is an assumption that demands greater scrutiny. The second assumption that I think we're dealing with that I think also we need to think harder about is that Russia's external behavior is driven by the internal nature of the Russian government. And the model that we have for Russia's internal government is largely authoritarian, very much controlled by Putin. Putin himself is central to our perceptions of the role that Russia plays in the world. If you look at US media commentary on Russia, it's very Putin-centric. It's driven by an image of Putin ruling by force with an iron fist and someone who's all controlling. And this was an assumption that you see underlying a lot of the commentary about Russia's role in the 2016 election interference issue. That no Russian actor, whether in government or out of government, would have or could have done anything in the United States affecting our election had Putin himself not personally been aware of it and authorized it, if not directed it in step-by-step detail. Now, this is a critical assumption that not only drives our understanding of what's going on in Russia, but also drives our response because it means our response is very Putin-centric. And the logic behind our economic sanctions, the punitive measures that we've taken to show Russia that it pays a price for this sort of transgression, have been Putin-centric. They're designed to penalize specific named individuals in and out of the Russian government who we believe are in Putin's inner circle. And the logic of this is when they feel pain, they will in turn tell Putin, guess what? We don't like this pain. We need to reconsider what we're doing, rethink the costs and benefits of our actions, and Putin will then say, okay, I got you. We're gonna have to chart a different course. Well, I think it's indisputable that this approach to sanctions hasn't produced the kinds of results that we have hoped. I think very few people would argue that the Russians have been chastened, have been reconsidering the cost and benefits of what they've done, and are charting a course that's more congenial to our interests. As a matter of fact, as best I can tell, the very widely held conventional wisdom is that Russia, if anything, poses an even greater threat today to our allies and friends in the world and to U.S. elections. We are hearing repeated assertions that the Russians are poised to intervene and attempt to affect the 2020 presidential election, which I can't imagine a more articulate or clear admission that what we're doing isn't having the kinds of effects that we want to see. So, why is that? Well, I would argue that this belief that Putin is driving everything and that Russia's external course of action is almost entirely a function of the character of its internal governance is something that we need to rethink. And what I would argue is that the belief that Putin is all-knowing and all-controlling behind every action inside Russia in and out of government is a caricature. Russia is a large place. It is actually difficult to govern. In many ways, more difficult to govern than the United States due to its size, its political culture, its history, and just how adept Russians have become over the centuries at what bureaucrats know as feigned compliance. And anyone that's worked in large bureaucratic organizations knows what I'm talking about. It's saying yes and doing something entirely different. And that, I think, is much more the norm than it is the exception inside Russia. Now, the other thing that goes on inside Russia is everybody has a mutual interest in depicting Russia for people inside the Russian state and people on the outside as being absolutely controlled by Putin. Why is that? Well, that's a way of impressing your adversaries overseas, deterring them from doing things that you might not want them to do, including messing around inside Russia itself, which they're worried about. Within the Russian elite, we've got a situation where the elite fears itself. Different elements of the elite fear each other. They don't trust each other. Very low social trust. And they have strong reasons historically to worry that one of the biggest threats they face are rivals inside that elite. So what do they need? They need a strong guy at the top who can protect them from each other, who can ensure that people don't get out of line, who can balance and create some sort of intra-elite equilibrium. They want somebody like Putin to play that role and they have a vested interest in making it appear to each other that this guy is tough and capable of cracking down on them. The other thing that the elite fears is the Russian people, the grassroots, who they simultaneously disrespect and disparage and condescend to, but also fear. Fear that there will be protests and revolts and social instability. And the elite wants someone sitting in the Kremlin who can protect them from the prospect of that bottom-up instability as well. But all of this points to a situation where the governance inside Russia is far messier, far more complex, much less orderly than it appears from the outside. And it also means that a lot of the things that Graham Allison pointed to in his classic study of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the bureaucratic politics model as a factor shaping policy and external behavior. And the organizational process model where you have behaviors that are inexplicable from the point of view of rational calculations of national interest, nonetheless occur in ways that can't be explained very easily using that unitary rational actor model. And I think we have too little of those bureaucratic process model examples and organizational process model analytics in the way we are thinking about Russia today and understanding the behaviors that we're trying to cope with. And I think those aspects were very much present in what happened in 2016 and what we saw in Russia's actions affecting our elections. Things that will result to some degree anyways of organizational processes. What Taylor Swift, the singer would say, you know, haters gonna hate, right? Well, when you create a bunch of internet trolls who were created not to interfere in U.S. elections, they were created to combat political instability and opposition inside Russia back in the early 2000s when the Russians were very fearful of a color revolution taking place inside Russia itself. And they decided they needed to take action. They created groups of people whose jobs were to fight against that. That's how this trolling activity began. And the logic of an organization whose purpose is to do that sort of thing is you seek new activities. What do bureaucratic organizations do? They try to expand. They want bigger budgets. They want more turf. We all have experienced this. Anyone in government or in the military knows how this works. There's mission creep. Well, where did they go next? They went to Ukraine. And they think this is working pretty well, right? How do they measure their success? Clicks, advertising buys, right? It's not an unprofitable business. You can sell advertising space doing this. They expand. They expand in the United States. What was the purpose? Well, the conventional wisdom in the United States is the purpose was they hate democracy, right? It's in the Russian DNA. This is at the very nature of Putinism. Putin hates democracy. He regards it as an ideological threat, a pragmatic threat to his own rule. And he must oppose it. Inside Russia in the immediate neighborhood in Ukraine and Georgia, which are obviously democracies, and in the United States, which is the the fount of all this democratic thinking, he must attack this and defeat it so that Putinism can thrive. One American diplomat said Putin wants to make the world safe for autocracy. That's our explanation for what's going on here. And it's not entirely wrong. There's some elements of truth here. Sure. Putin does not regard it as his goal in life to turn Russia into a democracy. But I would also say that the big threat that Putin worries about is not democracy per se. I don't think this is largely ideologically driven. I think Putin is essentially a pragmatist. What I think he's worried about is disorder, lack of governance, the inability of the Russian government to actually maintain order and function effectively inside Russia first and foremost. Secondly, disorder, lack of governance in regions that are important to Russian interest. The immediate post-Soviet space is the most important. The Middle East looms very large in this. And I think Putin, looking at what has happened from the 1990s to the current time, thinks of this as a narrative of growing disorder. U.S. evangelical democratization producing not better governance, not growing prosperity, but growing disorder. And I think he looks at Iraq, Libya, Syria, and even Ukraine as emblematic of the results of U.S. democratic interventionism. That the results are actually counterproductive. And I think not just Putin, but a lot of Russians see this in similar terms. Many Russians, in fact, think that what the United States has been doing is insincere, that our goal has not been better government, actual democratic prosperity, that we are essentially motivated by cynical hegemonic drives that are meant to surround Russia and ultimately undermine the Russian government and break up the country. And this is unique to Putin. I think this is widespread belief and even Mikhail Gorbachev, who most Americans, I think, regard with respect, has said this quite explicitly on numerous occasions. You've stabbed us in the back. We reached out to you. We tried to create a common European home. We're the ones that brought down the Berlin Wall. We're the ones that disarmed. We thought that you would embrace this, work with us cooperatively as partners in creating a new world order in which Russia was a key player, a co-decision maker along with the West. And you stabbed us in the back. Look what you've done. And this was all intentional. So I think here again, this belief, what's driving Russian hostility toward us is essentially an ideological motive that flows from the nature of Putinism and the internal Russian regime is one that we're going to have to think about. And it's an important one to think about because it has, I think, very stark implications. If what we're dealing with is a country as former director of National Intelligence, Dame Clapper, has said, which as a result of its very genes, the Russian genes, is hardwired to undermine and subvert, then there's very little that we can do about that. You're not going to change the Russian genes, right? You can't change the nature of what Russia is, nor can we change the nature of what we are. The United States is not going to turn itself into a non-democracy in order to reach some sort of an accommodation with Russia. So the logic of that prism for understanding events leads you to non-compromise, non-communication, non-accommodation. You're not going to bargain over something like that. You're talking about the essence of what each country is. And that means one side's going to win or lose, right? You're not going to strike a bargain over the nature of what you are on either side. We're doomed to some sort of confrontation by the logic of that analysis. But if that's not true, if what we're dealing with is actually not quite so simple, if we're dealing with a country here where we've got drivers of Russian external behavior that, yes, partially are the result of the way it's governed internally, yes, but also partially a result of other things, geopolitical factors, the current balance of power in the world, the structure of the European security architecture, new technologies that are having important impacts on the way statecraft is practiced in the 21st century. And these things are all affecting what Russia is doing and what we are doing. And the behaviors of each country and the perceptions of each country in turn are providing feedback, amplifying or mitigating different behaviors in ways. That's a far more complex picture of what's going on. And it's also one in which we have more options than that simpler democracy versus autocracy dichotomy would lead you to believe. In other words, we have much greater agency in all of this than the conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. That's a good new story in part. It's also a bad news story in that it's a lot harder to deal with complex systems dynamics in which a wide range of factors are coming together and amplifying or mitigating each other and producing outcomes that you don't expect and are hard to anticipate. In other words, that World War I problem, which Henry Kissinger called a political doomsday machine in which was highly susceptible to instability provoked by small factors, small developments or events. That's a hard problem for statesmen to deal with. So yes, we have agency. There are things that we can do, but it's not an easy path to go down. It's one that requires a very high quality of statesmanship and analysis. Right now, we're not where we need to be in order to deal with this problem. The third factor I want to touch on, cyber technology. I argue in the book and I will submit to you today that this is a revolutionary factor that we don't yet understand nearly as well as we need to. And what we've got right now, I think, is a cyber domain that by itself is inherently a spiral model environment. In other words, it's highly prone to escalation within the cyber domain. And because what's going on in the cyber domain interacts with other elements in this complex system that is shaping dynamics bilaterally between the U.S. and Russia and multilaterally in our increasingly multipolar world. It's also highly likely that what goes on inside that cyber domain is likely to have spillover effects outside that cyber domain. Now, these are all controversial points. They're very much under debate right now among practitioners and experts and academic theorists in all of this. But where we are right now in our thinking on this is we're in a transition. We've been treating cyber, I think, to this point as a deterrence model environment where we can do things that will deter our adversaries from taking actions in the cyber domain that we don't want them to take by attempting to make their offensive actions more difficult by playing defense and by imposing costs. In some cases, through legal prosecutions when we can. In some cases, by economic sanctions or other means of punishment to make it clear that they can't undertake this sort of cyber aggression without paying a price. This approach hasn't worked. I think we all agree what we're seeing in the cyber domain is increasingly bold, increasingly aggressive, and increasingly dangerous activities by our adversaries, including quite significantly the Russians on this. And so we're trying something new. The new strategy goes by a lot of different names. Persistent engagement, I think, is probably the most common. Defending forward is another way that it's being characterized. General Nakasone, who had a cyber command, has said it's essentially using offense to play defense. It's taking the fight to our adversaries, going into the Russian systems, forcing them to contend with our own offensive activities against them so that they've got to worry about their own vulnerabilities more than they have to date. It's by taking down to the degree that we can their botnets, the means that they use to mount attacks on the United States, forcing them to rebuild, recreate, build new structures that they can use against us. And the idea here is that this will result in what theorists call an agreed competition, that the Russians will recognize that we're in this fight, that we're taking the battle to them, and that the result of this agreed competition will be two things, which are both explicitly articulated in the US cyber strategy as goals. One is stability, strategic cyber stability, that we will recognize mutually where the red lines are drawn on each side, and that as we fight it out day to day in the digital domain, it will gradually become clear what's in bounds and what's out of bounds. The second goal, again explicitly articulated, is US superiority. Now, I think there are some problems with us that we need to be thinking about, and these problems have some very direct implications for the prospects for an escalatory spiral with the Russians that we don't think is likely. One is I'm not at all confident that the fruit of day to day cyber war fighting will be mutual recognition of where the red lines are drawn before those red lines are crossed. In other words, we may only know retrospectively where that red line was after we've gone past it. Now, that may not have huge implications or it may, but we're rolling the dice here that the crossing of that red line won't have significant implications. And I would argue that we're already seeing escalation taking place within the cyber domain. What's that escalation? I think moving from a deterrence posture, from essentially a defensive posture, into explicitly articulated offensive operations, into this taking the fight to the Russians posture is already an escalation. And I think the Russians have exactly the same incentive that we do to do this to us. Why? It's because of two factors. One is in the cyber domain, the offense has an enormous advantage over the defense. There's not much you can do to prevent a sophisticated cyber adversary from penetrating your system if he wants to. We're getting better at attributing these attacks. We're getting better at detecting them more quickly after they're launched. But very, very rarely can you stop this sort of thing before the intrusion occurs. It's number one. So that means that defensive focus strategies are not likely to be very effective. So what do you do? You go on offense. You do what you can do. The second thing is the intentions of an intruder are by the nature of cyber operations inherently ambiguous. Once I've detected somebody in my system that shouldn't be there, the next question I have is what is his goal? Why is he there? And again, I can't know that. The mere presence of someone in a network is not enough to tell me what he's doing there. He could be going in there to gather data, right, to steal information, to look for vulnerabilities, to map the network, to prepare for a future attack. Or he could be there to corrupt the data, to disrupt the operations of the system, to damage that system's ability to do the things that it's intended to do. And I can't know that just by knowing that that intruder is in the system. As a matter of fact, the intentions are not going to be clear until sometime well after the fact of whatever that intruder has done. So what do I do about that? Well, I've got to gather information on what the other side is up to. And the best way to do that is to get into his system. In other words, the logic of cyber technology and cyber operations actually incentivizes more penetration into the other side's network and a minimum for the purposes of cyber espionage to figure out what he's up to. But then what does the other side do when he knows I'm in his system? He has exactly the same dilemma. What is he here for? What are his intentions? And because both sides are so vulnerable to this sort of thing, they're also incentivized to take hostages, to seek out critical infrastructure that they can hold at risk in order to disincentivize my bad activities inside their system. And because these vulnerabilities are so dynamic, because these zero day opportunities pop in and out of existence as they're detected, exploited, patched, and repaired as malware goes out of date and loses its effectiveness, you've got to do this constantly. It's not like the logic of the Cold War when the knowledge that each side had nuclear arsenals that could mount secure second strike retaliation on the other side had a restraining effect, a stabilizing effect, where both sides realized we are mutual hostage and we need to be very careful about escalation because it would be mutually suicidal. This, in many ways, produced what John Gattis called the long peace during the Cold War. The logic that we're in right now with the cyber technology is fundamentally different. Instead of producing mutual restraint, I think the dynamics within the cyber world produce mutual escalation, continuing to seek vulnerabilities, exploit them, hold things at risk because of the changing nature of this environment and our inability to play effective defense. Now, if this were to stay within the cyber world, it would be a very dangerous thing because our societies are so wired, so online that they're highly vulnerable to the kinds of disruptions that cyber attackers are capable of inflicting. But I would argue that we're in an even more dangerous situation than that because of the interconnections between the cyber domain and other parts of this complex system within which the United States and Russia are operating today. And the one that I think is most dangerous is something that James Acton at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington has been sounding alarms about, and that's what he calls nuclear entanglement. It's the change that has occurred in our command and control structures that govern the nuclear world and conventional long range strike capabilities, where conventional long range strike is not only now capable of doing things that it once required nuclear weapons to do, but the command and control for some of our conventional forces is intermixed with command and control from the nuclear domain. Now, the implications of that intermixing can be quite serious when you ask, how does that cyber world interact there? And the scenario that Acton highlights and one that I think is concerning and one that requires I think a lot more discussion than it has had to date is what happens if there's a regional crisis of some kind? And the Russians think we're preparing for long range conventional strikes that might affect either Russia directly or a Russian proxy or friend in some way. And they want to figure out, well, what are we going to do? Who are we going to strike? Do we have targets in mind that matter to the Russians? What's their best way of figuring out what our intentions are? Cyber espionage. I want to get at that targeting data. I want to figure out what preparations are going underway. I want to be inside that command and control system. Well, let's say they're successful. And the intelligence community figures it out. And they say to the US president, well, that's a bad news, sir. We've got Russians in our command and control system. And, oh, by the way, that command and control system also controls our ability to launch minute missiles. And I can't tell you what the Russian intentions are. I don't know whether they're trying to gather data or whether they're trying to create a situation where if you push that button, those nuclear missiles might not launch. Well, that's something we could probably sort out maybe with enough time, with enough established channels of communication with the Russians and with enough relationship and trust between senior US and Russian officials that we could have a rational discussion and deliberation about what's going on and how we handle it. In a crisis situation where there's channels of communication are essentially almost non-existent, where the trust between the United States and Russia at all levels in and out of government is almost zero, where you have US officials saying that I know when the Russians are lying because I see their lips moving. And you don't have a lot of time here, because guess what? The amount of warning time you have for a launch in which to make a decision in the regional crisis situation where you're in essentially emergency mode, this is not conducive to calm communication delivery. So is that a likely scenario? No. Is it impossible or unimaginable? Absolutely not. In fact, it's all too imaginable. And I think that this kind of situation is something we need to be thinking about. We need to be talking about, well, what do we do? How do we manage that sort of thing? And that essentially is the point of the book. It's to say, we've got a more complex picture and a more dangerous picture that is confronting us here than we have here to for realized. We need to recognize the dangers and the dynamics of what it is that we're facing. And we need to be thinking about a new approach here that can mitigate these dangers, manage this new competition that we're in. Not build a friendship with Russia, we're not going to be friends not anytime soon. But we are going to be competitors. And it is very much in our vital national interest, I believe, to make sure that the competition that we're in is as safe as it can be is one that doesn't spiral out of control unintentionally, that doesn't produce the kind of disastrous outcome that happened in World War One. So that's going to require some some fundamental thinking, some creativity, and I think some moral and political courage, which is an all too short supply right now in Washington. So I think I've already spoken a little too long. So I will wrap it up at this point and take some questions and answers, some of which I hope we'll get at this question of what is it that we should do?