 If it's a PDF, not a, there we go, okay, yeah. Okay, awesome, okay. Check one, two. Check one, two. So good morning, we're going to begin about six minutes, but for those of you that are sitting on the outside of the aisle particularly up here, if you could just move over to the center, that way people that come in late have a place to go. No one ever wants to sit up front, although there's lots of spaces, but so if you could just shift over, make sure that those coming in have room. As I said, we'll begin in about five minutes. Okay, good morning, we're going to begin in about a minute and also just to let you know, this is going to be a broadcasted live stream just like all the other ones. So we'll begin in about a minute or so. So good morning and welcome to the 28th military writer symposium. My name is Dr. Travis Morris and I have the honor and privilege of being the executive director for the symposium and also the director for the peace and more center. So for those in the room, welcome. Thank you so much for being here and for those that are joining us virtually, we also welcome you wherever you are attending from and we're glad that you are with us. So this is day two. Yesterday we had an absolute fantastic day and a heartfelt thanks to our esteemed guests that spoke in the panel last night, which many of you attended, but also sessions throughout the day and much thanks to also our moderators and students that participated yesterday. So why are we here? The symposium exists over the past 28 years to discuss security challenges that we face in the 21st century. The students in the room, like I said, many of you attended last night, but the difference between sometimes myself and some of the other faculty or staff or alumni in the room, you're going to be the ones that are going to be leading us through some of these challenges over the course of your career, whether it's in the military or in law enforcement, maybe in the political arena, working for an NGO. What we're talking about are these next two days or today and yesterday, this is your world. And some of the applications we're talking about are military in focus or security in focus, but AI is something that's already shaping our lives and it's something that's happening incredibly quick and when things happen rapidly, sometimes it takes detours down pathways that we don't know, we don't expect, or we underestimate. So that's why we've been doing this for 28 years, is we want to take some time just to pause, bring in people from around the globe that has spent some time thinking about these particular areas. And as you can see from the program, over the past two days, we're talking about artificial intelligence and the nexus between robotics, but last year, we looked at what was going on in the Arctic, before that, we looked at the weaponization of water and how water serves as a catalyst between conflict, sometimes violent extremist organizations and governments. And this year, we want to just pause and align the symposium with the president's vision looking at artificial intelligence and what that means for us in the future. So you can see on the screen that Dr. Lau Goldstein is going to be talking about incredibly important topic and I must say that we are thrilled that he's back with us. He was here for our Russian summit and we're glad that he's back. Also just want to say that when we're talking about artificial intelligence and robotics, we're having this conversation here in English in the United States. That's important, but it's also important to know that this isn't just an English-centric conversation. I've said yesterday in some of the sessions that these same conversations are being had in Chinese, in Arabic, in Russian, in Korean, in German. We're talking about a subject that is being discussed by some of the sharpest minds around the globe. I have no idea your familiarity with this topic. I have no idea if you've thought about the intersection of AI and robotics in your own life and what that means for the future. But if you're thinking about serving in the military in any branch, this is something that's part of your life that's already existing and moving ahead. I mentioned the international component because one of the things we do here at Norwich is one, we want to internationalize in every area. That includes cyber. But we also want to bring our students into every aspect of the events that we do and give them a voice. So before I introduce Dr. Laugh Goldstein, we'd like to have a student come forward. Yo Kamalwongse from Ghana, and he is gonna give us a short reflection both in his native language and then in English about his thoughts about technology, artificial intelligence and security. So York, why don't you come on front and the floor is yours, okay? Thank you very much for this opportunity. And my topic is technology in the dimension of warfare. So first I'm going to read in my native language and I'm going to move on to English. So here it is. So this is the definition of the language. The definition is that we can go forward and get back to this conversation. So I'm gonna start with a short reflection that we are very far away from where we are. This is what we do in the United States. We are very far that we can go forward. And so here is the definition of the language. The specific subject that we are going to talk about is the specific subject that is in our language. if you do not want to now I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm Now, one of my any N'fidu yuma abua apam no ma wajirak, nansu entimi yumu ne asetrenu am famu kuta. Eti yebira ni wose, n'fidu yuma honim de n'ema akonumu yekesi. Ese se akwancher foni asa a fompe ni fo, dihum in shishae, ni won akwain huru. N'faso hurawa da ekwanya wa faso ede mubre, n'awu ifi okwanya wa faso edi hun sem, n'awu bune se adetitura e mawudim kunim no mukumu. Seni ye wadane edi abakasemi no. Ni yehansu e ope shishae wa faso wa e fidu yuma woso okwanya wa faso ede yuma no. N'amu edi yuma wa akwain akwancher no eti po. Seni yehung wa abakasemi na yamono. Wa yung fidu yuma honim de fofo biara. Ene anmand anasee veikeos. Ochi na wuhumu asafo in shishae ahora ekwain imu. Se yehsa akwudie yea, ese siibu sae mosee. Okwanya na okwain beni ebil timi, de sehain fidu yuma ee ashee akwudie imu. Amai edi yungunim. So now I'm going to read it in English. Technology plays a vital role in the outcome of all. The use of superior technology over points has proved repeatedly in its ability to shape the combat dynamic. The use of rifles by the Europeans in the wars against both African and American natives. The use of atomic bomb in World War II. All of these are examples of how a war can be one sided when there's a presence of superior technology. Hishi has shown that armies that could integrate innovative technology into their warfare have had a significant advantage over their counterparts. However, technology is not the only determining factor for victory. War is complex and multidimensional and using one dimension to generalize the outcome is ill-informed. Technology is only informed or effective when supported by robust organizational structures and doctrine and when the threat is war-defined and a working strategy established. We'll look at some historical examples to prove these points. Let us take a look at Germany in World War II. At the start of World War II, the Allies were miles ahead of Germany in terms of number and quality of tanks and air power. They were ahead of Germany technology-wise. However, in 1940, Germany won one of the most expensive victories in modern warfare. This victory was achieved by the revolutionary tactics that the generals of Hitler adopted. Most of the Allied forces had slow-moving infantry and no divisions. The Germans, however, created armored divisions before the war. They created organized tactical teams as combined armed teams with air support and tanks, which gave them speed and the ability to surprise the enemy with overwhelming force. The Allies, however, scattered their tanks for the support of infantry with no proper division into tank units or divisions. The inability of the Allies to effectively integrate their technology in their infantry proved to be their undoing. Even though, in the end, the grand strategy of the German people led them to their defeat. In the start, it was a very good plan. The Allies took a defensive stance and could not draft a strategy that would ensure they manifested their power of their technology at the start of the war. This is a classic example of how technology might not be effective when unsupported by strategy. In irregular or hybrid warfare, such as the Iraq war, technological superiority does not always guarantee victory if the Allies do not have a war-conceived strategy, including morale, sociological aspects against enemies. The strategic objectives of the war falter, when the grand strategy does not consider the economic situation the morale and the sociological states of the adversaries' population. In 2003, the United States and its Allies invaded Iraq in what is known as the Iraq war today. The main objective was to overthrow the Sadak Homssein government and liberate the people of Iraq. The combat phase of the war was unprecedented. The coalition advanced at a high speed with the help of their guided air systems. They had technology that drastically reduced their sensors to shoot a cycle, allowing them to take out targets swiftly and efficiently. Despite these successes, the post-conflict phases were disappointing. The assumptions integrated into the strategy of the coalition turned out to be inaccurate. They assumed the Iraqi people would rock on them as liberators and rubble their garments using their oil reserves. However, this was not the case. An insurgency occurred shortly after the occupation by the coalition and protracted the war, leading to the loss of thousands of lives. Technology has helped the coalition take over Iraq, but it could not account for the social dimension of warfare. There is no doubt that technology increases force on the battlefield exponentially. Strategists and military commanders need to involve them in their plans and strategies as much as possible. However, imperfects lie at a technical level, and when it is taken from the context of strategy and regarded as the main reason for victory in war, as shown in history, it is almost never a good idea. As shown in history, what is needed is to analyse the strategic advantages of technology and use it in the world's direction and purpose. After your central history, new technologies are being developed daily. Today, unmanned and received vehicles in China, tomorrow advanced space military systems. When we develop these weapons, we must ask ourselves what is the best way or method we can use them and how can we integrate it into our battle strategy to ensure victory? Thank you. Thank you very much, York. So it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Lyle Goldstein and for his bio, you can read that in the program, but I just want to highlight something that we're very proud of. You can see his affiliations. He's the Director of Asia Engagement Defense Priorities, visiting Professor Brown University, but this one we're very proud of, that he's a senior research fellow at Norwich University. So Dr. Goldstein, welcome back to Norwich. Thank you for being here. Well, thanks, everyone. It's a thrill to be back in Norwich. I've come to realise that Norwich is one of the foremost places to discuss strategy. So I'm glad to be here again, and this is a tremendous conference. I'm learning so much. I appreciate the remarks from our student from Ghana that I had a best friend in college who spent a year in Ghana and swore that these were the nicest people on earth, and so I'm taking that under advisement still and planning to get there. This may strike you as a bit of a strange topic. Maybe, you know, I know that Norwich has a very close tie with the U.S. Army, as it should, and I do appreciate the chance to discuss some kind of rather esoteric points in naval strategy, but I do think that these are worth thinking about very carefully. It's essential that, you know, people in the Army have some understanding of naval strategy, just as people in the Navy need to absolutely have some understanding of land combat. So I think this is well proven in the Ukraine war. I'll mention a few things about that conflict, but, you know, we can imagine that a lot of what's going on in Ukraine has powerfully impacted what's going on in the Black Sea and vice versa. So thank you for your attention to this topic today. Let me say that one of the some of the issues that are, you know, just to follow up on last night's conversation that strike me as very important. One is that while drones have absolutely proven themselves in the air, you know, we all know that unmanned aircraft, you know, quadcopters and the like are incredibly powerful tools. That's, we don't really know that that's the case for undersea vehicles. So the question is out there, and this effort at research is a start on trying to understand that issue to where this might be going. But let me start, say at the outset that, you know, we may have a question mark over this. I would also say just reflecting on what I heard yesterday that I think Sharon Weinberger raised the absolutely pivotal point that this technology is not really new, although it feels very new. But, you know, a lot of this, these technologies even were, you know, people started to work seriously on them during the Vietnam War. And I recalled a moment from travels in China when I was in Beijing at the newly modernized Chinese military museum in Beijing, and I urge you all to go there when you get a chance. It's quite enlightening. But in there you will see an American drone from the Vietnam era. And it's quite striking to see that, to understand that China got hold of this and has studied it thoroughly. And I think that may, when you begin to understand that China started this work, you know, decades and decades ago, we will not be so surprised by how far they're progressing. So let me make just a few more introductory remarks here if you'll permit. I was here for the Russia conference, which was fantastic in March. And I do read Russian, and I am very concerned about this. But Russia is an undersea power, absolutely. And that will impact how China goes about becoming an undersea power. So we better keep our eye on that here. I've got a little pointer here, but you can see this picture showed up on the Russian internet recently, a western drone off the coast of Crimea. Here's some discussion of the new American drone that they're taking seriously. Here's an article written by a Russian military strategist about the pipeline sabotage. So that will come up again in my remarks, but we haven't talked about that much, but that's maybe an interesting use of AI. But last time I was here, I was talking about Russia-China relations, and I'll be down at Naval Academy in a couple of weeks talking about that same topic. It's an absolutely crucial topic. What are the lessons that China is drawing from the Ukraine war? And here I just want to highlight that there are a lot of lessons that China is learning pertaining to ground combat. And I am putting a lot of this material together. I have a big pile on my desk, and I would love to come back to Norwich and share the results of some of that research if there's an opportunity for that. Now, China is already absolutely a drone superpower. They control, I think, something like 90% of the commercial market. Think about that, folks. So we shouldn't be too surprised when we see vehicles like this. This is a Chinese Navy drone, which is quite interesting. It's clearly not going off the deck of a ship. So what's it doing? I see a lot of ordinance. It looks like some kind of ground attack vehicle. Let's face it, this is likely to play a premier role in a Taiwan scenario, delivering some of that firepower to the beach. And, yes, China has amphibious combat on the brain, and none of you are surprised by that. This was just the other day. They were talking about some amphibious exercises. So we shouldn't be at all surprised that China is thinking very hard how to drone support amphibious operations. For example, blowing through obstacles. In fact, sorry, my scan is not very good here. But here's an unmanned vehicle, not an undersea vehicle, but what we call a USV, an unmanned surface vehicle. That would be primarily for the purpose of blowing through obstacles on a beach. And while I'm focusing on undersea vehicles, I do want to highlight that China's prowess on both UAVs and USVs, that is the unmanned surface vehicles, could be incredibly important. So I'm not, I don't want to downplay that at all. I'll come back to that. And here's just another bit of evidence here. This is just, I tweeted this out just the other day, an article on sea trials for a 100-ton catamaran USV that looks to be definitely more than a surveillance vehicle. This is a combat vehicle for sure. Now, why is China obsessed with naval unmanned systems? It's not too hard to figure this out, and I'll give some more detailed explanations later. But as a summary here, look at these nice capital ships here. This is just from the other day on Chinese military news, Type 075, you want to protect these things. You're going to go all out to protect these things. They're expensive. Here's a nice cruiser that I was mentioning yesterday in the panel, Type 055. But beyond that, China is very worried about our submarine force. And here's an article from their Navy magazine discussing, you know, you can see just how closely this is talking about the launch of a new US Navy nuclear submarine. This is probably, this is definitely up there on their chief concerns about the US military. So they're going to use drones to defeat these. That's what they're going to try to do. But also, I'm amazed how much attention you'll find on Chinese news about the sabotage of the Baltic pipeline. And maybe that's not surprising. China is building infrastructure all over the world. So they're very disturbed at the destruction of this kind of infrastructure. And one can imagine that drones will be a key part of protecting undersea infrastructure. China's effort in developing ocean technology is stunning in its scope. I think, I must say, I think it's at least as broad and deep as our own effort. And I'm, you know, I'm very well acquainted. Naval War College is next to the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. So I know how much brain power we put at it. I think China is trying to equal that. You know, you can see a lot of just what we'd expect here. But you'll see often the word in Chinese, Mubial means targeting. And you can bet that undersea targeting is very high up on their list. I'll walk through more methodically what I think they're sort of evolving doctrine for these undersea vehicles might be. But let's look at the discussion of Captain Ligia retired. I got to spend a day with this Chinese naval theorist in Beijing not too long ago, well before the pandemic. But he had some interesting ideas in this article that he put out. You can see, you know, he views this as a game-changer kind of capability, a focus on minds here. I think we better be attuned to that. That has been highlighted as a major vulnerability of the US Navy. And a big intelligence role. In fact, the words he used, or the editors anyway used in this title is shashoujian. That means like an assassin's mace weapon. In English we would say like a silver bullet kind of capability. We know that this has gotten high level attention. This is a 2018 picture from Hainan. That's a big thing in China when Xi Jinping comes to look over your technology. But I want to say, look, China does come from rather humble origins in this respect. And I would say, you know, prior to 1990 China probably had close to zero capability on this. Well, how did they go from zero to 60 so fast? It's a bit of a mystery. But this is partially explained by this photograph actually and some description I read in this interesting book on UVs. And the explanation, CR, what does CR stand for? I think is a good case we made it stands for China Russia. And actually this is a Russian vehicle that went out basically on a Chinese expedition. And basically China, from what I understand from this series of expeditions, the Chinese basically downloaded decades of Russian expertise on undersea vehicles. Now the good news is Russia was not as advanced as the U.S. on undersea vehicles. So that's a good news. The bad news is China did succeed in going from zero to 60, or at least zero to 55. And that explains a lot of how they have gotten so good in this area so fast. And indeed we're seeing some really cutting edge developments. Here you see this is a drone that works by using buoyancy. So it doesn't have any other kind of propulsion, but it is able to travel with almost unlimited range, which is extraordinary. But there are other extraordinary things about this. It's called a glider. We have them too. But gliders are, this one is from Tianjin University, not too far from Beijing. But these gliders, one of their features is because they have no propulsion other than buoyancy, well they go slowly, but they're also almost silent, which is, as you know, acoustics are everything in undersea warfare. So this actually becomes a potent system. And the fact that this particular glider has gone down to 8,000 meters is quite incredible. And actually means that this kind of system, which may seem a little bit primitive, but it has, I understand from researchers at Woods Hole, one of the premier oceanographic institutions in the United States that this kind of technology has great potential for anti-submarine warfare. So in other words for tracking our submarines. And here you see some more evidence just how widely this is a different kind of glider. You can see China's expeditions, and this shows actually tracks of these gliders, but you can see they wielding whole fleets of gliders on some of these scientific expeditions. And I'll come back to the import of some of these gliders. But I also want to highlight, I noted your last year's symposium was about the Arctic, and I'm really sorry I missed that because I have a very deep interest in the Arctic. In fact, if all goes well, I'll be in China discussing Arctic policy about two months from now. But look at this, you have, this should look familiar. This is American territory, right? There's the Bering Strait. Here's Chinese operation of gliders right in that area. I wonder if we even knew about this. I credit my colleague from Naval War College, Ryan Martinson, who discovered this, but that's pretty amazing that they were operating research gliders right in the Bering Strait. But China has moved methodically on this technology, and like I said last night, where the US Navy has also deployed drones to find mines. It's exceedingly important that it's mine warfare. Just as mine warfare and ground combat is essential to understand and prepare diligently for the same with ocean combat. And indeed for China, especially as we talk about Taiwan scenarios, this is an incredibly important mission. So the fact that they're building up their capabilities here should be no surprise, and indeed there have been a number of new mine sweepers, mine hunters, and they will be wielding UUVs for sure. I can just click through a series of other UUVs. One of the amazing things about this topic, and this is one thing you'll find with China, that China is quite open. If you go on the websites of Chinese universities, you can learn about these systems. They're often bragging about their capabilities. Why? Well, it's partly because China is a commercial superpower, and a lot of this has major commercial applications. You can probably buy one of these if you wanted to. Maybe we should. But they have major ocean trade fairs where this stuff is marketed. But you can see that at least for the small size UUVs, this is becoming rather a very common place. Now when we get to somewhat larger UUVs, one you can notice it looks a heck of a lot like a torpedo. There's no, you know, ours do too often because that is kind of an optimized design. But also one can imagine that these deploy very easily out of torpedo tubes. And indeed, one of the major uses of UUVs is to operate together in tandem with submarines. For example, navigating through a minefield. You can imagine that's pretty important work. But it's not just, they don't just look like torpedoes, right? Look at this one. It looks pretty, in a way, this is, you know, it looks almost, give you a good laugh. But I think this is quite for real. We don't want to downplay the seriousness of this. This is a trend actually in Chinese weapons design, also in U.S. weapons design, to go toward bionic. That is to kind of copy from the natural world, from the animal kingdom. This shouldn't be surprising at all. But I mean, you know, I read this article very carefully. And if these capabilities have anything to do with reality, and I think they do, then we should be quite worried about this in terms of the speed parameters. And this article outlines how this will have small, medium, and large, each of them with differentiated functions. You can imagine the large one is sort of the, call it the headquarters unit that commands the smaller ones, some of which are surveillance and some of which are attack units. But we have begun to see some of these platforms, you know, these look more kind of research oriented. They could be also useful as targets to practice on, for sure. This one, very large, 10 meters or so. I don't even have the name of this vehicle. So some of these are harder to divine. You know, I discovered about a hundred discreet prototypes in my research on this subject. I don't pretend that's nearly the whole universe. I would say that's just the tip of the iceberg. And of course, a lot of China's work on this is secret. Here's another hint of coming attractions. This one is about 20 meters. It seems to have torpedo tubes. So it seems to be a combat UUV. The periscope is not telescoping. It's just sort of folding. But that's one of the virtues of this technology is that it's not, it's not, in effect, it's not rocket science, which makes it quite realizable. And there is good evidence now that China is on the cusp of wielding a force of robot submarines. Now, I would say we are also on the cusp of that. So, you know, that should make, scratch your head and see, think about where this rivalry is going. I do recommend this article, I think, is incredibly important. And my study suggests that the claims made in this article, chiefly by scientists at the Shenyang Institute of Automation, are very credible. And so if you're interested in this topic, please Google this from the South China Morning Post. There's quite a lot of good information in English, which is great. But let's talk in a little more detail how does China see using these things, you know, oceanography? Well, that should be plain. But here I would say that you've got to realize China has been at disadvantage in oceanography for a long time, right? We've been doing this for decades, our oceanographic ships going out, often from universities, you know, University of Washington, University of Rhode Island, University of New Hampshire, going out and collecting huge amounts of data in the world's oceans. China has not. So they're playing catch-up to some respect. That's true. ISR, everybody knows what that means. These characters are important, though. Xu Xia, Cheng Cheng. This means like the undersea Great Wall. And this is a true project that I think Xi Jinping has taken direct interest in. And we have good evidence, I'll show it in a second, to suggest that they are literally trying to build an undersea Great Wall, which would be a, you know, system of systems under the sea that would allow a very good detection of foreign submarines, you know, proximate to China. That's not an easy task. Those waters are very difficult. They're also, though, quite shallow, which, you know, does have some advantages in many ways. So will, you know, this to me is a massive project largely dependent on UVs, although not entirely. I mean, you can also have a buoy, for example. It doesn't move, but it also has incredibly important sensors and plays a vital role. You know, some of these other goals you can think are, you could surmise yourself are very important. You know, communications relay a, this is incredibly important too. Port security, China, I'll get into this more in a second. And I've talked about undersea warfare for sure. But also, it's not just kind of in a defensive way. It could also be, you know, an adjunct to submarine warfare. Mine warfare don't neglect it. We constantly have neglected this at our peril. That is the U.S. Navy. I mean, let's face it, mine warfare is not sexy. I don't think in land warfare either. Who wants to be a sapper? It's incredibly important. And we've seen that in Ukraine, of course. And by the way, sea mines have also played a role in Ukraine. If you haven't realized it, there may be a good reason why Odessa has not yet been invaded. We can get into that in Q&A if you're interested. That's a very important aspect of the war there. And I talked about support for amphibious operations. I don't want to over-stress this nuclear delivery. You know, we don't have any concrete evidence that China is pursuing this, but Russia is pursuing it. I mentioned it last night. I'll show you a slide that shows you that China has an interest as well. Yeah, I mentioned the undersea gray wall. There's some evidence for that. And indeed, in fact, I think August Cole left, but I've used some of his colleagues' work, Peter Singer, here. Good work to show that this is in fact something that is very real. And here's some additional evidence for it. I've found evidence for three discrete tests. And I think, you know, of all the slides I'm showing, this may be, to my estimate, one of the most fascinating, because what are these things? Look at these things. You've got three different tests. And by the way, China has learned from us that you need to compete these tests. What are these? Well, you plugged in your cell phone last night, right? So did I. That's what these are. These are plug-in stations for UUVs. And if you're building an undersea gray wall, you better have a lot of those out there, okay? Because you want them on station and ready, constantly monitoring China's waters for adversary submarine. Or by the way, you know, in the, you know, even out to the, beyond the first island chain. So this, I think, is very critical benchmark in showing how China is advancing its effort in building that undersea gray wall. But they're going beyond just, you know, kind of simple detection technologies. Look at this, UUV. And I've read this article carefully. It shows that this is an operational program. Okay, this is a UUV that doesn't just go under the water. It starts above the water. It then goes under the water. It then comes back out and maybe attacks a radar. Think about that, folks. That's a whole different way of thinking about cross-domain combat. And we may, our guys may, you know, our people out there may face this. It's a concern. I did mention the nuclear issue. And I just wanted to highlight that this is not the only article I found where the Chinese are hotly discussing this. Again, we don't want to exaggerate the threat here. Obviously if Russia were to use this, Russia would be destroyed by our nuclear arsenal, which remains strong. But I bring it up, though, because this does have, this does have an important operational rationale. That is, if you're, all you think about all day is how to defeat American missile defenses, boy, this looks like a pretty useful system. And China is very worried about U.S. missile defenses. But, you know, even as we talk about these more complicated platforms, let's not neglect the simple. The most simplest use of these UUVs may be just patrolling like a fish outside of an American base and noting that a submarine just went by. You know, that could be a huge, a huge tactical and operational value. And I just want to highlight, before I close up here, that undersea combat is much more than just UUVs. This involves all these domains, and I am quite concerned that China putting a full-front effort at anti-submarine warfare that our submarines will be threatened by Chinese unmanned aerial vehicles as well. And that technology is definitely in development. There is a major commercial side to what China is doing. They are very interested in undersea mining. This is for real. This is not just a cover. By the way, they've been doing this near Hawaii, which is interesting. But I think they could be ahead of us in this area. That could be a concern, but they aim to wreak immense profits by mining the seabed. Okay, just in my last few minutes here, let me talk about a couple of scenarios that concern me. When we talk about the gray zone, a kind of non-combat or pre-combat area, drones could play a big role. You can snatch a drone, and I'll get into that in a minute. In fact, that's already happened. But you can also brandish drones in a crisis. Say, by the way, you didn't know we have drones off your ports. Let's show you. They could do that, and that could suddenly have to change our tactics. What if a Chinese drone shows up in the Atlantic, off of Norfolk suddenly? That would radically change how the U.S. Navy does business. It hasn't happened yet, but it might happen. We've talked a little bit about this one. I am concerned about that. Drones are getting ever more complex, and we're working on combat drones. They're working on combat drones. I think one of the speakers at the panel last night said, probably we'll stop right at the edge before we get these ready for as true combat platforms. I don't know, and I don't know that China will stop. We'll come back to that. When we consider China, we also have to think in terms of geo-economics. This is a geopolitical power. They're interested in strategy, of course. But as one of the good students last night who approached me said, look, China is really interested in making money. Well, there's a lot to that. And a lot of what I'm showing here today can be explained by that. China is a... They may not aim to conquer the world, but to simply buy the world. And a lot of this technology... And by the way, a huge boost to U.S. technology development in the undersea and just globally was the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf where you had dozens of drones working constantly to shut off that oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. So the commercial and military overlap here is simply huge. And that's true in the Chinese case as well. I am concerned that preemption... If we're talking about U.S.-China rivalry, we're talking about two nuclear powers going to war. I mean, I don't want to be too extreme, but in the darkest scenario, we have Chinese drones off of King's Bay or off of Puget Sound, where some of our nuclear armed submarines are... Is this the future we want? We may be hurling toward this future. And then we may have to radically change how we do business. And this enhanced bastion scenario I've been thinking about is a more defensive use of drones here. And we can imagine that China, as it builds its undersea great wall and so forth, that really is kind of thinking in terms of these rings of geostrategic power and that most of this is... And there is a geographic component to drones that I don't think we've really discussed enough. But for transparent oceans, more cheap sensors out in the ocean are going to make the oceans more transparent. This could be a major problem for the U.S. Navy because we rely so heavily on our submarine strength. That really is the, I would say, the sharpest spear in the U.S. Navy's toolbox. So this is quite a dark future if the incredible value and advantage we possess in nuclear submarines starts to go away because they can now be more easily revealed. And finally, this leapfrog scenario, you can guess what that is, but there is evidence that I've revealed where Chinese strategists say, hey, China does not have the same prowess in submarines, right? I've been doing it the way we have for 100 years, but can China leapfrog over that capability with unmanned systems? I mentioned that gray-zone scenario. This did occur in January 2016. Sorry, December 2016, you had this incident where they took one of our... It was a glider. They did give it back, so that's encouraging. But I don't doubt for a minute that Beijing had looked at its... This is right after the phone call between Tsai Ing-wen and candidate-elect Trump, and this is what they elected to do. That's very interesting that they decided to employ a drone snatch in that way. So it's something we might want to talk about how drones can play and that can be part of the crisis there, but it's not the only crisis, right? There was another crisis where Iran shot down one of our drones. Well, just a few parting shots here. I think this picture is quite interesting, but this has become very fashionable in China to hold these competitions where students gather at a pool and start playing around. We do a lot of this, too. They learned it from us. But yes, a new generation of Chinese strategists and engineers started doing this. And also wanted to just highlight this article in Deng Da Hai Jun, which I think really points at something very disturbing here, that they may use drones to get at the very deep ocean. Most military operations... Oh, there's my timer saying I better wind up. So most military operations take place in the... not in the really deep depths of the ocean, but China is kind of saying they're advantaged by going deep, which is quite interesting. And really, if you read some of these quotes, quite unnerving here, you see... talking about deep-sea robot squadrons and this ability to achieve surprise and to use the hydrographic terrain of the ocean floor. I mean, this could get really problematic. This is a kind of whole new approach to the thing about naval warfare. So, you know, we better keep this in mind, folks, and this is something that AI... a way that AI can transform naval warfare. You know, here was the graphic, actually, that was part of that article. And of course, this seems like a complete stretch, but actually China has... In fact, Xi Jinping has put his own imprint on a project to build an undersea base, they called it, it's something like crazy, like 8,000 meters or something, if you can imagine that. So this is... you know, this should not be dismissed. And just the final thought is, I just published this article in Nike, Asia about this drone competition. I do think there are some avenues for... still for cooperation, for considering crisis management arms control. So I think that has to be the agenda. You know, we need smart people like you folks to help chart some of this out unless we caught in that robot war that we have been talking about a lot. But thank you so much for your time and attention and happy to take some questions. And you see my contact info, I am tweeting almost every day on this kind of stuff, and not just on China, but also on Russia. And if you email me, I will try my best to answer questions and like stay in touch with you. I hope to see you again at Norway. Thank you. Let's give a round of applause. So Dr. Goldstein, thank you for your very illuminating, I must say, I assume it's for you a presentation. Now it's time for Q&A. I can open us up with a question if someone doesn't have one that's pressing right now. But if you do have a question you can come down on this side and come down this side. And I expect that there should be quite a few questions from the audience. But I'll start us off. So one of the slides that you had looked at the cooperation between China and Russia. And I would argue right now that when we're looking at the war in Ukraine and Russia, this eclipses a lot of our attention. And we're focused on sort of the kinetic exchange between Russia and Ukrainian forces and our proxy equipment that's being sent there. A concern would be the relationship between China and Russia. Particularly in this area. And this is not something that unless you go digging for it it's covered in the media. It's something that's almost absolute blacked out. It's not something that's discussed, but your presentation illuminates something that we should be thinking about. But also knowing that you're fluent in what's going on with Russia. Would you be able to speak about any information that you found about China and Russian cooperation to this day? And do you think that what's going on Ukraine even pushes more cooperation, more emphasis on China and Russia going further in research, maybe collaboration or training and testing in this particular area? Yeah, thanks so much. As you know Russia-China relations are something that I spend a lot of time on. I'm writing a book on the subject and indeed the military aspect of it which I've written about in Norwich's very fine journal is absolutely essential. And yeah, I mean the quick answer is yes, yes, yes and it's not there's a lot of things that go on between Russia-China that we have no window into. I mean for example if you looked you could find online an enormous amount of space cooperation which you know gets mentioned very occasionally but these Russia-China are planning to go to the moon together folks. I mean it's a moonshot, right? That's not a small thing at all and China will repuge gains from the experience of Russia's space program by doing that kind of very intensive work. Well I would argue that you are seeing almost something close to that elaborate on the undersea side. That is China knows very well that Russia has had its issues undersea, right? I mean just already even in 2019 Russia had a pretty serious submarine accident at Los Charrick up in the Barrens so I mean it's they know that Russia is not your how to put it your model undersea power on the other hand they also know that Russia has done some extraordinary things including inventing what's a key platform for our navy today which is the SSBN the nuclear armed submarine which you know this is a submarine that can destroy countries. That was a Russian idea originally so we copied it and we did it better than they did but it was their idea. So this kind of you know I call it design engineering prowess that Russia has if we marry that with a lot of strengths that China has particularly in kind of China is very good at big programs and kind of the manufacturing side and kind of tweaking systems to get them right. Russia is not good at that so when you put these together I mean just to give you another example where this could be a major breakthrough technology for China. They look at our F-35B maybe you're familiar that's a very innovative fighter aircraft vertical takeoff right maybe you've seen them coming off the decks well does China want that? Sure, sure does and I understand they already have a Yak-141 which was the Russia's vertical takeoff jet and indeed F-35 itself F-35B borrows actually from that aircraft that original Soviet era aircraft. So I don't think it's outlandish at all to expect that we will see China put forward probably several prototypes of vertical takeoff aircraft and those will have deep deep Russian origins as a lot of Chinese equipment does so I mean I'm very concerned about this and the last thing I'll say here is China look China I think has used a reasonable amount of restraint in reacting to the Ukraine crisis that is although they have rhetorically supported Russia they we have not seen legions of Chinese tanks we haven't seen these airborne division in Donbas I don't expect to see any of that and I don't want to see any of that but it's not crazy to think that that could be in the in the cards. If things get much worse between the US and China then China could throw its lot deeper in with Russia I think there's a lot going on behind closed doors a lot we don't know about but let's hope that it doesn't come to that level that would be a kind of that sort of back to the 1950s kind of very tight relationship but I'm concerned about it. Hi, so my name is Isabel I'm majoring computer science and my question is how will these underwater vehicles affect regular people and ecosystems because we've seen how drone strikes although targeted have a lot of collateral damage in the civilian area Well, it's a fantastic question and I'm so glad to see students that are really attuned to environmental issues because I do think that's a chief it should be really foremost in all of our minds and I would urge you to look at a recent New York Times article that talks a lot about this undersea mining and what might be some of the environmental consequences when I said China I mean China has a huge economy I would argue it's in my view it is larger than the US economy really but that comes with it a lot of environmental issues let's say and we're well aware our speaker from Ghana might be able to tell us that in Africa for example there's been environmental problems with Chinese activities so I think one of the most important things there was actually another big article about Chinese activities in terms of fishing across the globe's oceans they're not in other countries waters they're in international waters so it's all legal and it's unregulated but yet the environmental consequences are very considerable so I guess the biggest thing I would say with regard to unmanned undersea vehicles is I think they have played somewhat of a positive role right I mean think of the BP spill in 2010 that was an environmental disaster we have to give these little robots credit for they were absolutely critical in shutting off that spill so we should all be as Americans quite thankful for the role they've been playing they also play a huge role in oceanography and understanding the oceans and some of the damage the oceans is critical to and UUVs are playing a very important role there too but I I think you're probably right that maybe this is a great issue for a student paper but let's also think about the consequences whether UUVs have been found in fishing nets but if we're using the oceans much more intensively putting down undersea networks for example you know that's going to create environmental problems but I think the biggest issue by far and I won't even mention a nuclear armed nuclear powered UUV which is what Russia is doing should disturb all of us I mean and this is a doomsday weapon that is created to develop a tsunami like impact which you think of what a tsunami hitting the eastern seaboard of the United States that's what Russia has in mind it goes without saying that should be condemned by all people environmentalists also but the thing I worry most about is this undersea mining and we better keep a real watch on that because that could have a major impact it also holds great promise for electric vehicles and so forth lithium and so forth but we need to watch that really carefully great question thank you so we have time for one more question but this is what we're going to do we're going to ask everybody no you can stay there stay there we're going to ask everyone that's lined up here and over there to ask your question and you can choose which question you'd like to answer just so that we can hear all the questions that people have so go ahead what's your name you're leaving we wanted to hear your question so go ahead Alex and then we'll just hand the mic up and then you can choose which question you'd like to answer but I think it's important just the audience here what question is it we have before you as a somewhat reluctant optimist can I ask you about the issue of detente how can we avoid these doomsday scenarios best how can we invest energy and time into avoiding this seemingly inevitable global superpower conflict what can we do right now to this escalation so you were saying the Chinese are developing this technology out of sight and sometimes the unintended consequence of an arms race is discovery in other areas if they are going to deep sea places that we've not looked at before do you think that any science or marine biology studies that the Chinese might be producing could tell us if they are in unexplored areas of the ocean and give us a view into sort of what they're developing so I was wondering about how you talked about how like Russia and China share technology and how China has been able to progress really quickly with UVVs I was wondering how as an America how we should defend our technology from espionage from other adversaries and how we should conduct researching in the future good morning I wanted to ask you about what you would think the development of arms control regime to prevent a escalatory arms race between China and the US for example would look like in the future decade or multi decade sphere so that's a nice flavor of questions for you so your choice yeah boy all excellent questions so I hope I'll discuss with the questioners afterward because I would like to answer them all but let me focus on the first and last one if you don't mind on the arms control I think it's I mean just one simple it seems to me this is a completely basic proposal but has not been to my knowledge has never been seriously discussed but I mean as we're like I said the most worrisome scenario is that both sides will develop zones that now hunt down are the most important part of our nuclear deterrent which is I'll say with a little pride that the Navy part of it don't believe those Air Force guys the Navy naval part of our nuclear deterrent is you know the most robust the most secure and we need to maintain that and because that supports strategic stability you know we could talk for a long time about why that's the case but to me we if we have these drones patrolling outside like I said outside of Puget Sound out off of Kings Bay in Georgia we're in a whole new ballgame suddenly those submarines become much more vulnerable we don't want to go there so of course we you know we're not going to trust the other side we have to do our due diligence and that's up to a lot of your students to make sure but we also have to it seems to me we could come into an agreement with both Russia and China that we are not going to make those very destabilizing deployments and finally the question about Deton it seems to me is very fundamental and hopefully people are keeping this mind I wrote a 2015 book advocating for explaining how a U.S. China Deton would look like but I must say I think it starts with a decent amount of you see this word up here restraint that's something defense priorities is dedicated to realism and restraint but I think that word needs to be kind of up foremost in our vocabulary as we think about strategy with China I mean the truth is the United States is in an incredibly strong position right I mean you know robust society and economy allies all over the world nobody you know is talking seriously about a you know Chinese invasion of the United States or something like that so let's keep that in mind we're an incredibly strong and secure country and we can afford to act with restraint and as I put it in my book in 2015 we can take some risks for peace the natural instinct of great powers is to compete in a massive way and to you know this naturally can become destabilizing but thoughtful people enlightened strategists will realize that we have to take some measures to act with restraint we want to see some Chinese restraint but I think we can in that way we can move forward and reach that detente which is absolutely critical and by the way I will know I don't think it's been said at the forum but this is the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis read that history folks and reflect on John Kennedy's restraint which prevented the probably the most dangerous moment in world history from destroying us all excellent let's give him a round of applause thank you and also you'll notice the program we have a gap between now and the next session and Dr. Holstein will be around so if you do have questions or you would just like to speak with him or discuss matters further he'll be around and would welcome your engagement thank you very much been a great audience okay good morning everybody we're going to begin your seats so good morning and welcome to the 28th Military Rider Symposium in Northfield Vermont we are thrilled that you are here and for those of you that are joining us online wherever you are in the globe welcome and we're very glad that you're able to join us my name is Dr. Travis Morris and I have the honor and privilege of being the director for the Peace and War Center and also the executive director for the Military Rider Symposium we've had an amazing day and a half we've looked at the intersection between artificial intelligence and robotics and we had an amazing panel last night my guess is many of you were there and were exposed to just how important and critical the subject is and one of the takeaways that we hope all students faculty and staff leave for these two days is that when we're talking about the intersection between AI and robotics that it does apply to you it certainly applies to all of us most importantly for the students that are in the room those are going to be carrying the mantle of making decisions in areas involving security of defense and policy you are our future and this is why we're having the Military Rider Symposium theme focused on this critical important subject so over the past 28 years the Military Rider Symposium is focused on issues and topics that are national and global concern from security to cultural issues also to science and to psychology we're given this charge to focus on these events because we want our entire campus community whether you're an engineer, criminal justice whether you're biology you're a studies and warm peace major of political science or history or nursing that there are some subjects that transcend disciplines we pick subjects and themes that are important to all all citizens and as I just said esteemed guests and colleagues over the past day and a half have really advanced our understanding on these topics and we are very grateful another unique aspect of the Military Rider Symposium is something called the Kobe Award for a quick google search we've been awarding this award for the past 28 years and if you were to type that into google and you're to look at some of the authors that have won this over the years they have raised to national recognition the award is given to an author who's published a first time book on security, military issues, intelligence it goes the book goes underneath a very scrutinizing review process ultimately makes it to the Kobe Selection Committee and of all the books that are published over the fiscal year on military subjects one book is selected each year we bring them to Norwich and our charge is to amplify their career highlight their work connect them with other authors that are well published and well recognized in the field and just to help them succeed as best as possible and we are thrilled this year that Wesley Morgan the 2022 Kobe Award recipient is with us today you can see the title of his book on the screen and we just suggest that while you're here his book is for sale in the bookstore you can buy a copy and I'm sure he would be glad to sign it or you could buy two or three copies and he'd be glad to sign those too so this event the military writer symposium and the Kobe Award is in direct partnership with the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago has supported this award and the symposium many years and it's because of their generosity financially and also just their support that we're able to continue the symposium but also have this award each and every year so today we have a special lineup and the way in which we're going to talk about the hardest place will be a combination of our faculty Dr. Nick Roberts and a student who will provide sort of a mixture of commentary between some readings and the book but without further ado it's my pleasure to turn it over to one of Norwich's most dynamic faculty members Dr. Nick Roberts the floor is yours Thank you to Travis Morris and everyone for being here especially those who helped plan the event Megan Liptak and Yang Moku and our guests from the foundation Mr. Morgan I have a very simple job here today which is really just to facilitate space for Ms. Farhad to engage with Mr. Morgan so to do that what we'll do today is after a few brief remarks by me very brief we'll turn the floor over to Mr. Morgan who will read a selected passage as a platform for Drukshan to engage in with her commentary in response to her and then opening the floor to everyone in the audience for a group discussion session so before that let me introduce Mr. Morgan Mr. Morgan has won the 2022 William E. Colby Award for his book The Hardest Place Morgan has covered the US military in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2007 when he began embedding with combat units as a 19 year old freelancer from 2017 to 2020 he covered the Pentagon for Politico and his reporting has appeared in the Washington Post The New York Times, The Atlantic and other outlets he's a native of Boston and a graduate of Princeton University I want to preface some things by just reiterating about what you're going to hear from Drukshan which is how grateful I am and we are too Mr. Morgan for having written this book as a professional historian it's basically my job to criticize books to find gaps in things and I would really struggle to do so with this one perhaps its greatest strength is that it's not just of immediate use to all of us but I think will continue to be of use to us for years to come because he's really put together an extraordinary archive of sources for people to continue drawing from I support without reservation everything Drukshan is about to say and I now turn the floor over to Mr. Morgan Alright, so I'm going to read a passage from this book that Dr. Robert Tears selected and just to provide some context for it it's from about halfway through the book and about two years before I myself first visited the Pesh Valley in eastern Afghanistan and I'll explain a little bit more about why I wrote the book and everything after that but in July 2008 there was a battle in a tributary valley called the Waigal at a village called Want in which nine American paratroopers were killed and that's what this passage is about the sort of the acrimonious aftermath of the battle of Want two weeks after that Bill Osland and the paratroopers of 2503 infantry's able battle chosen and destined companies were on their way home to Italy collectively they had been in more than 1,000 firefights 143 of their comrades had been wounded and 26 had been killed a death toll that only one other American battalion in Afghanistan would ever surpass the rock as the battalion was known had been the most at everything during its 15 months in Kunar and Nuristan provinces of all the units in Afghanistan at the time it had called in the most strikes from jets and helicopters nearly 4,000 and the most artillery and mortar fire missions more than 5,000 and the brigade's development budget even handed out the most beanie babies more than 10,000 the awards its paratroopers earned during the deployment would make the rock the most heavily decorated army battalion since Vietnam a presidential unit citation nearly 100 bronze stars for combat baller 28 silver stars and two distinguished service crosses after years of review three rock paratroopers would be awarded the Medal of Honor Seljanta battle company which of whom had battle insurgents alone when everyone around him was dead or wounded but once both the fight itself and the decision to leave rather than keep building up the base cast a shadow over the deployment two in-depth investigations followed the battle a routine one called an Article 156 inquiry that sought to piece together what had happened on July 13, 2008 and then more than a year later a SENTCOM inquiry that delved into the lead up to the fight the questions the SENTCOM investigatory team asked were wide ranging why had the rock sent soldiers to want at all why had it taken so long to start building the outpost what intelligence indicators had there been of a coming attack why hadn't a drone been overhead had the soldiers there had enough water enough construction equipment had observation post topside been appropriately sighted the basic implied question was this whose fault was it that scraggly lightly armed guerrillas had been able to kill nine American paratroopers in the middle of nowhere the investigation's final report which Oslin's old mentor David Petraeus approved blamed battalion commander Oslin and company commander Meyer for insufficient oversight of the base's opening days of construction Oslin should have visited the site personally had found Meyer should have gotten there earlier and the soldiers at the outpost should have been patrolling into the mountains in search of the enemy instead of relying on devices like thermal sites to scan for suspicious activity both officers the report recommended should be court-martialed but Matt Meyer and the odd people were earning both a silver star and a formal allegation of dereliction of duty for the same battle the former for his actions during the fight and the latter essentially for failing to prevent it from happening in the first place to some of the family members of the dead including platoon leader John Brostrom's father the SENTCOM investigation's findings seemed like a necessary check on arrogant commanders who had thrown away their loved ones lives to Oslin they were infuriating unreasonable and sometimes contradictory they fought back against them hard he was not alone to division commander Schlosser the SENTCOM investigation seemed like a kangaroo court this is not a ship running aground he objected in frustration to the marine general in charge of the inquiry this is a thinking living flexible enemy that knows the area better than we do the army in yet a third investigation in 2010 would side with Schlosser and overturn the SENTCOM findings sparing Meyer, Oslin and brigade commander Priceler from formal punishment it is critical that we not mechanically equate U.S. casualties with professional error or misconduct the army report warned in battle casualties are inevitable regrettably they are often the price of victory Watt had been a victory in a narrow sense paratroopers, marines and Afghan national army soldiers had repulsed a larger attacking force while inflicting much greater losses than they suffered the enemy had never even penetrated the main outpost's perimeter as they had at the ranch house outpost which the investigation firmly established none of the investigations evaluated how the battle fit into the larger picture of the war in Afghanistan or America's involvement in Kunar-Nuristan however if they had they might have placed some of the blame for want with the 10th mountain division commanders whose 2006 plunge into the Waigal had left the rock with the ranch house and bella outposts and some of it with the whole way the American led campaign in Afghanistan was set up a catalog of the deeper failings of the war that had led about and affected its course the frequent shuffling of top generals in Kabul had made Nuristan a high priority one year and a low one the next this in turn exacerbated the problems of a unit rotation system that both locked incoming units into the footprints of outgoing ones and limited the ability of newly arrived commanders to understand the nuances of their predecessors approaches chronic under resourcing of the Afghan theater had created a situation where most of the time just two Apache attack helicopters were loft over the mountainous three province region the size of New Jersey in Baghdad meanwhile four or more Paches often fluid once over the 15 square mile district of Sotter City and the inadvertent killings of local civilians by American aircraft an issue that top US commanders had been trying and failing to address for years had also contributed even though the assault on the new want base had been in the works long before the July 4th Apache strike near bella Waigal residents later explained to me the veteran militants who planned the attack took the opportunity to swell their forces ranks with angry local men they recruited at the emotional funeral for the victims of the botched helicopter strike viewed in this larger context want was no victory good morning everyone good morning professor Roberts good morning Mr. Morgan thank you so much for for coming to this event especially students who have their midterms and also fdx so I really appreciate you all showing up here and thank you for your time I would like to begin with a few prefatory remarks that came from a series of discussions professor Roberts and I have had on this book and more to be very clear what I'm about to say could be taken in two ways I'm about to criticize the United States military and its war in Afghanistan some listeners might choose to shrug this off and bring it up to the just another angry person from military from Middle East angry at the West or angry at being humiliated or angry at American empire or this could be taken as a critical academic reading of an absolutely brilliant text which I'm genuinely grateful to Mr. Morgan for having written I might have particular insights as an Afghan like that language and cultural practices but this is a reading and commentary that I hope can be taken as a response from any person schooled in history and international affairs we asked Mr. Morgan to read this passage because it highlights some of the central paradox is inherent in why or how the US military was adrift in Afghanistan what I would like to do here now in about 10 minutes is unpack a bit using his book how the Americans were so adrift on page 159 Morgan has finished describing a brutal ambush of US soldiers in which several were killed and more wounded shaken by the experience the lieutenant who soldiers had been ambushed a quote bookish looking university of Pennsylvania graduate ponder I think that things were going on beneath the surface that we weren't fully aware of at the time from our privilege of hindsight and historical inquiry we can easily conclude that this young lieutenant was spot on there were in fact many things going on beneath the surface of events that the Americans did not ever come to understand and we will talk about some of those things here on the other hand on the other hand though the young lieutenant was also incorrect there were blatant easily observable elementary level ignorance and arrogance there were elementary level things going on that the Americans did not understand for various reasons arrogance and ignorance the inefficiency inherent in any large military operation no matter how streamlined strategic miscalculations like diverting funds and material to Iraq and more what were some of the surface level things that the Americans got wrong that can be interpreted as symbolizing the entire failure of the war and yes before we go further we should put this out there by very by every objective the Americans set out for the Americans lost even though bin Laden and now Zawahiri are dead note what I just said bin Laden Morgan uses the name bin Laden through the book throughout the book and rightfully so he was the person why the Americans went to Afghanistan as they should have but to be absolutely clear whenever in all history has been a person named bin Laden calling someone bin Laden is an egregious grammatical mistake in the Arabic language it would be laughably wrong even to a school child he was Osama bin Laden bin only being the word used when following the first name and proceeding the last name as opposed to ibn Laden when the first name is dropped this is not to get into the nitty-gritty of semantics this matters it symbolizes just how ignorant the United States was of what it was getting into it did not even understand the grammatical construction of the person they were starting a trillion dollar war to find and kill throughout the book Morgan points out how the Americans went to places not only to kill people but also to win their hearts and minds without anyone who could even speak the language in fact even when they did bring even when they did sometimes bring Afghans with them as translators those Afghans they chose to bring didn't speak the correct language or dialect how does one win hearts and minds without being able to say hello perhaps it might be argued the United States did not bother to understand these nitty-gritty to learn or learn languages or send translators because they thought they did not need to why? the Americans had overwhelming technological superiority so superior that to even say that is an understatement in one instance that Morgan describes in his usual lyrical prose the Americans using AC-130 Specter gunships, A-10s and other machines of war unparalleled in the savagery of their destruction the Americans demolished several buildings in a mountain village the American barrage destroyed a mosque and at least eight civilians one young woman was found dead running for her life from an AC-130 gunship loading its pickup truck-sized cannon on her a baby was found ripped apart at the mouth of a cave where its mother had been trying to shield it what did the Americans find in that village? one single old man with a bold action rifle this incredibly lopsided asymmetry of power is a major theme of Morgan's work as Morgan puts it on page 133 for all the US military's technological prowess the grinding day-to-day combat would be more like something out of Korea than the higher tech war that the American public and many American troops expected but in another way the asymmetry can be flipped the Afghans fighting the Americans some of whom but not all were Taliban they really need technology they had the ultimate power they were on their own turf fighting a war for their own homeland in fact some Taliban or Taliban affiliated fighters used to taunt Americans saying to them in a basic translation quote you have the watches but we have the time end quote what this means is the Taliban would not have to win on any battlefield with the Americans all they had to do was not lose and not losing meant just waiting the Americans out many of these people had waited enemies out before some of the figures Morgan traces throughout the work like Gulbuddin Rabani or Gulbuddin Hikmatiar had fought the Soviets by the way as American allies in the 80s and just waited them out now they were doing the same using much of the training and weapons the Americans had given them in the first place by waiting out their old allies this then brings up another very important issue Morgan raises throughout the work the nature of the Taliban and how the Taliban changed over time we can argue that the Americans in their grinding decades long war turned the Taliban into something they had not been in the first place and exactly what they dreaded the most by the end of the war the Taliban were a far more centralized card carrying bureaucratic state based organization than they had been in 2001 when the Americans went in but just as much as the Taliban became more centralized throughout the war this does not mean that all those who fought the Americans necessarily were a Taliban like we might be registered as Democrats or Republicans here in the USA or that just because in one year they fought with the Taliban they always did from then on out many Afghans who fought against the United States fell along a spectrum of accommodations whether they were accommodating the Taliban Al Qaeda, Pakistan ISIS, Afghan national groups nationalist groups or just simply defending their homes in one very shrewd insight Morgan notes how Afghan government officials the government backed by the United States began referring to some fighters as Naraz Wuruna meaning the sad brothers or disgruntled brothers in fact I remember sitting in my home watching former president Hamid Karzai on the news when he first used the phrase describing for us as what was obvious for the but for Americans seemed entirely impossible some Afghans who fought the USA were not Taliban and even people who ever who were Taliban disagreed with other Taliban to bring my comments here to a close I want to bring up something that kept coming to my mind as I read Morgan's work at first I kept wanting to hear more of the voice in the work granted this is a book about the US military and its failings in Afghanistan but to what extent can one talk about the US military in Afghanistan without including the Afghan side of things as I thought about the book more having completed it I realized that perhaps the strongest trade of Morgan's book is how when diving beneath the surface of the book it is profoundly sympathetic to the experience of everyday Afghans during the American occupation in the post world war era and especially the post Vietnam era it can be a common assumption that contemporary wars have been less violent or less destructive after all we have drones now we have precision strikes and laser guided weapons any idea of war being less violent or less destructive comes exclusively from a perspective of American privilege make no mistakes the American war ravaged Afghanistan there are entire generations of Afghan children young adults and adults who will forever be marred with psychological trauma to be clear the American military and government went further than probably any other government would in trying to avoid civilian casualties and that is honorable and respectable but it only takes one mistake to feed into the kind of messaging of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and one mistake to leave entire generations marred with trauma if there is a lesson to be learned from this especially from the Afghan perspective we might end with a quote from Thucydides who might be considered the father of military history of all the manifestations of power none are more impressive than restraint thank you I'll take the mic back now for a few minutes what I'm going to do is describe how I came to write this book and then very briefly walk you through kind of what it covers just a quick outline and in doing so I think I'm going to try and hit some of Drukshan's points describe a little further some of the things that she's talking about which I think were great examples to pull from the book that I'm really gratified that she picked up on about 100 miles northeast of Kabul relatively near the Pakistani border in incredibly rugged terrain steep jagged mountains big pine cedar fur forests that you don't see in other parts of the country that make surveillance with drones and landing helicopters really really difficult compared to flatter or less vegetated areas of the country and I first went there in 2010 on what was my fourth war zone trip embedded with US forces and my second to Afghanistan and I spent the summer of 2010 which was the summer of President Obama's surge bouncing around the country embedding with different US and British infantry battalions in different parts of Afghanistan British Battalion in Sangin District in Helmand American Battalion in the Argendab Valley American Battalion in Pactika and then sort of almost by accident because another embed was cancelled I wound up in the Pesh and I just became totally fascinated and fixated and have remained so since then and really have been working on the story of the Pesh whether just sort of keeping an eye on it on the back burner or actively working on the book ever since then starting with a senior thesis that I wrote when I went back to Princeton for my senior year after that trip the reasons that I got so fascinated with the Pesh lead into the reasons why I thought it would be a good place to write a book about one the difficulties that US forces faced in Afghanistan which were many classified in the Pesh many of them it just seemed like everything was harder there that's why I called the book the hardest place for one the terrain was just unbelievable getting anywhere required either helicopter aerosols using very scarce assets or required grueling hikes up into the mountains similarly the trees prevented as I said a lot of surveillance from working successfully limited the number of helicopter landing zones brought a lot of helicopters actually brought more helicopters down than enemy fire did in the course of the war just helicopters clipping their blades clipping trees as they were coming into landing zones and so forth and finally the other difficulty that was really magnified is sort of the intelligence difficulty the difficulty of understanding what's going on around you because the passionate tributaries are an incredibly ethnolinguistically diverse area you can imagine everywhere that US forces went in Afghanistan they're juggling two languages to rely on interpreters for right Pashto and Dari sometimes they're dealing with different regional dialects of Pashto as well in the passionate tributaries they're dealing with security forces that speak Dari valley floor populations that speak Pashto and then tributary valley populations that speak about seven other mutually unintelligible languages that have no written form Waigali Gambiri, Tragami, Kourangali a bunch of other ones that often get lumped together as Neurostani but actually are completely distinct languages and you've got an interpreter for one of them he's not going to be able to help you with the next one over so this as you can probably imagine magnified the difficulties in trying to run sources trying to understand the motivations of people who are feeding you intelligence trying to understand the motivations of your local partners trying to understand when they might be playing you when they might be using you as their proxy rather than vice versa all of these things were harder up there which is not to dismiss any other AO in Afghanistan you could write a similar book about Sangin or the Argandad or any number of other places and equally use it to serve as kind of a microcosm of the war I think any district that you choose to serve as a microcosm will sort of have some of the major threads of the war and not others if you were to write a book about Sangin you would get the sort of the flavor of NATO coalition war fighting British and Australians and Marines switching off you don't get that in the Pesh where it's all Americans but the Pesh for me seemed like the perfect place to write about because the two threads that are always present there and often intention with one another are the broader counterinsurgency and nation building strategy and the counterterrorism strategy that supposedly the counterinsurgency and nation building strategy was in service of but what you see in the course of the war in the Pesh is that very often these two approaches were intention often really stepping on each other's toes as different organizations that did not enjoy unity of effort or unity of command worked at cross purposes with one another counterterrorism organizations made mistakes in the service of their goals that then made more difficult the counterinsurgency mission and so on I'll provide one quick anecdote also about visiting the Pesh and what made it so interesting relative to other fascinating AOs that I was visiting at that time in 2010 the battalion commander in the Pesh Valley in the summer of 2010 was a guy named Joe Ryan who now commands the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii and he winds up being a recurring character in this book because just basically by the luck of the draw and how long the United States spent involved in northeastern Afghanistan Joe kept going back there he had gone up to the Pesh as a major in the first Ranger Battalion in 2003 back when the story was all about light footprint counterterrorism trying to figure out where bin Laden had gone after Torah Bora he returned in 2010 as an infantry battalion commander in the 101st Airborne Division he returned later as the commander of the JSOC task force back to kind of the counterterrorism mission doing the manhunting he returned yet again in 2018 to the northeast as the senior advisor to the Afghan National Army Corps in northeastern Afghanistan and he returned yet again in 2020 into 2021 as the operations second to last operations officer of the overall U.S. effort in Afghanistan working for the four star general that's not because he was sort of volunteering for tours and trying to get back to the same exact place over and over again but it was just the luck of the draw and like a number of other people he wound up being a really valuable character who kind of contrast these different tours and see the place evolve over time but what was fascinating to me about Colonel Ryan, then Lieutenant Colonel Ryan in the summer of 2010 was how different the way he talked about the Pesh Valley was from how other battalion commanders I was visiting talked about their AOs and it basically the difference was in these other AOs that I was visiting they were places where U.S. forces had relatively recently started fanning out into many outposts and doing counterinsurgency work even though the United States had been in Afghanistan since 2001 in the Argendab Valley that's a place where U.S. forces really were arriving there in strength in 2010 and getting to work similarly in Pectica you know more forces were flowing in for the surge a province that had one outpost you know now was going to have ten and so all of these commanders that I was talking to in these other districts they were ambitious, they were optimistic and these were not disingenuous things they were telling me they believed what they were telling me and they believed it with reason they were telling me about the kilometers of road that they were paving the new outpost that they were building the ratings of effectiveness of their ANA and how many of their patrols were accompanied by the ANA and basically how much farther they were going to push the counterinsurgency ball forward by the time they handed things off to their successor you know in a few months or next year in the Pesh Jo Ryan had a very different just a different tenor to his comments he was very blunt I'm just going to pull up a comment really quickly here one thing that he said this was very blunt for speaking to an embedded reporter coming through was I came in here looking for a counterinsurgency victory and here there is no such thing meaning specifically the Pesh Valley not Afghanistan he wasn't sort of speaking outside his lane as a battalion commander but that was what he was seeing and the argument that he was making to his superiors at that time was that basically US forces had run out of track in the Pesh Valley because they'd been at the border there and the window of opportunity had closed the sort of the attitudes of the people had hardened and you know the sort of you know my observation this is not his observation but my observation is that by 2010 outposts that had been built to provide you know kind of the nucleus of bubbles of security for the people you know built near villages in order to protect those villages from the Taliban these outposts had instead become bubbles of insecurity and bubbles of danger because the war had come down from the hills where it had been a couple of years earlier and now it was right in the villages and on the road that US forces had built you know to facilitate their access to the valley and so people had basically clamped up people who two or three years earlier had had great relationships with US troops and had been telling them where IEDs were and all this kind of stuff they now were just backing off keeping quiet and it was it was very clear that they just in the middle of this very brutal fight that you could hear the numbers of ordnance that I described in that passage and I've never seen so much artillery fired probably in all the other embeds I've ever done combined as I saw in the Pesh valley in 2010 they're just trying to live their lives without sort of being pinned to one side or the other not knowing which side was going to win the government or the Taliban but knowing that the Americans were not going to be there forever there's an episode that that Ms. Farhad alluded to that I want to talk a little bit about you know the way I wrote this book was I took as my jumping off point my personal experience trips that I took to the Pesh embedded with US forces trips that I took to the Pesh embedded with Afghan National Army forces after US forces had drawn down but from there I also I went and interviewed Afghan civilians in these villages or bringing them down to Kabul once I couldn't get to the villages anymore because ISIS had moved in about their experiences and back here in the United States I interviewed about 400 American veterans of this valley everybody from privates and corporals up to commisaps and CIA base chiefs and so on to sort of to just try and understand this from as many sides as possible and one of the episodes that I always knew it had happened but it took a really really long time to get to the bottom of to the extent that I was able to get to the bottom of it is an episode of the 2012 valley in 2003 and this is a this is a perfect illustration both of the disunity of command problem disunity of command and disunity of effort and it's a perfect illustration of the intelligence problem that was posed by trying to do counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in this incredibly complex place basically in the fall of 2003 the Bush administration sent the word out to the CIA and JSOC via sent com that they needed to pick bin Laden's trail back up JSOC and the CIA had shifted their efforts over to Iraq in the earlier part of the year but now they needed to refocus in Afghanistan and they needed to pick bin Laden's trail back up and so both JSOC and the CIA surged assets up into this very remote part of northeastern Afghanistan half the ranger regiment went up there on an operation called winter strike spread out into these incredibly remote valleys where they mostly didn't find anything and they didn't yet have contract interpreters they were relying on CIA surrogate they were not from those valleys and did not speak the relevant languages and the CIA for its part its role in this operation was it received a piece of intelligence I have learned subsequently where that piece of intelligence came from it came from two members of the CIA backed Afghan intelligence service national director of security who were actually from the Waigal Valley and spoke the language of that valley and therefore the CIA was completely reliant on them because it had no other people like that there was no one else for them to turn to and these two these two informants told the CIA that Gulbud and Hikmachiar who at the time was thought to be the man harboring bin Laden which was not totally wrong he had been doing that a little earlier in the war was at a certain compound way up in the northern part of the Waigal Valley the military declined to action the target Stan McChrystal who had just come into Bagram to oversee this JSOC surge said his troops weren't ready yet and he wasn't he wasn't confident in the intelligence without his own his own you know DIA informants going up there and confirming it but the pressure was so great to produce results that George Tenet signed off on a strike anyway a military strike under you know under CIA command that used an AC-130 followed by well there was also there was a B1 bomber involved B1 was you know many platforms involved to come and basically to level this this compound on the mountain side in a way that had it been a military pure strike rather than one directed you know at the highest levels from from the CIA director probably wouldn't have gone down the way that it did but the result is that Hecomache was never there a family a family is destroyed the numbers are either seven or eight civilians killed largely women and children US forces learned this when they kind of hike up the valley 10th Mountain Division guys hike up the valley to sort of try and figure out what happened do some sensitive site exploitation and they find that well impossible for them to confirm whether Hecomache was there or not he's certainly not dead is the result of the strike but what you kind of what I piece together subsequently was that basically this was an example well first of this disunity of command where the CIA strike really created huge difficulties for subsequent military forces who had to live and do counter insurgency in the Waigel Valley with very little knowledge of the secret operation and two it was an example of the CIA being played by its by sources who had other motives which was an incredibly common experience especially in the early years of Afghanistan as various sources and proxies tried to harness US military power and you know trick or con or nudge otherwise get the US military to take out rivals of theirs people that they had grudges against people people that they had you know familial disputes with territorial disputes with disputes over water rights all kinds of things and this was an instance where actually these two informants they in the 1980s had worked as part of the communists the KGB trained communist intelligence service in Afghanistan and and their portfolio at the time because they were from this valley had included both hunting the same guy Hikmatiar who mind you at the time was backed by the United States and kind of an uneasy partnership but also a guy named Gulom Robani who had been a major Mujahideen commander in the province at the time and they had never caught Gulom Robani and he was sort of their their opposite number in the Waigal valley they were the communist officials for the Waigal valley and Gulom Robani was the chief Mujahideen commander for the Waigal valley now come 2003 when this strike happens Gulom Robani has nothing to do with any insurgency troops who have been the provincial governor of Nuristan and he's known as kind of a provincial peacemaker he's a person who he was allied with the Afghan government and really would have been in subsequent years a perfect person for U.S. counterinsurgency troops going into Nuristan to have had a relationship with but this was all destroyed because essentially these NDS sources whether they deliberately misled the CIA and they knew that Hikmatiar was not or whether they thought Hikmatiar might have been there and that was a good enough reason to also help finish off this other old enemy of theirs they probably saw no distinction from their end between Robani and Hikmatiar these were the reasons that resulted in this strike they over represented to the CIA how confident they were in the intelligence the CIA station chief actually advised against the strike and yet the director caused it to go forward so that's the strike that Nuristan is talking about there one more point that I'll add there's one of the great ironies of the story of U.S. involvement in Kunar province in Nuristan province the areas that the Pesh Valley spans is that unlike Kandahar or Helmand which are the Taliban heartland Kunar was not the Taliban heartland Kunar is Salafi territory a different Islamic doctrine that is pretty incompatible with the Taliban and it is really only the arrival of United States forces talking here not about young paratroopers but about CIA paramilitaries and Green Berets who are better attuned than most to the problems of working with sources and of being played it was mistakes by these guys that were enough to essentially spark an insurgency which the Taliban then moved into the province and co-opted there's a fascinating dynamic to this involving the timber trade that the book describes we talk about some other time the arc that you see is basically various enemies follow the United States into this province even as the United States is following its initial enemies into the province the CIA and Jaisak go up to Kunar trying to find bin Laden they actually are right about that we know in retrospect from jihadi sources that Kunar is where bin Laden went after Torah Bora but they were always just a few months behind hitting a place that he had been at a month before things like that and then by 2003 in Afghanistan but the momentum was already there, Jaisak turned things over to Green Beret teams, Green Beret teams turned things over to Marines, Marines turned things over to conventional army infantry and over time things just snowballed as each of these tribes of the U.S. military without the benefit of the knowledge of what the original purpose had been embraced more and more expansive versions of the mission as encouraged to do so by a succession of ISAF commanders and U.S. presidential administrations to this point that I saw in 2010 where it was just this incredibly violent stalemate up there and by the end you have a bureaucratized heavily entrenched Taliban insurgency in two provinces where the Taliban had had only the most limited light footprint before 2001 as a result of that you also get al-Qaeda advisors coming in to support the Taliban bringing an al-Qaeda presence to the province that was not there before 2001 including a figure named Faruq Al-Qatani who is not well known among academics who study al-Qaeda but who in the second term of the Obama administration was seen as one of the top three al-Qaeda figures that they were trying to kill anywhere in the world because he was seen as a potential heir to the whole al-Qaeda enterprise and basically he was a guy who had moved up to the mountains in the Pesh just to gain combat experience to go fight there with his Taliban brothers but over time received directions from bin Laden before bin Laden's death to establish a backup sanctuary in the mountains north of the Pesh that U.S. forces had just withdrawn from in case al-Qaeda senior leadership needed to move from Pakistan as they were sort of being punished there by the CIA drone campaign so you see this irony again of the final years of the war after U.S. troops have withdrawn JSOC is doing this aerial manhunting campaign going after this figure who came up there because U.S. troops were there and who became entrenched there because U.S. troops left and then, you know, kind of the final irony is that no sooner than does JSOC kill Farooq al-Qahtani in the final weeks of the Obama administration in October 2016 then ISIS appears in the province and in fact many of the Salafi groups that had fought against the Taliban before 2001 then aligned with the Taliban against the United States as an alliance of convenience because of the rise of ISIS and many of the Salafi groups now join ISIS which is a better ideological fit for them and so the war continues and I end one of the chapters of the book with a quote from a guy who did two tours up in the Pash Silver Star recipient he was first as a platoon leader then as a company commander and when I told him that JSOC was still hitting targets up in the Waterport Valley where he'd done aerosols in 2011 he was just I'll read you his response he said for as long as the soldiers, intelligence officers and contractors charged with America's counterterrorism went looking for people to kill in the Waterport that is they would keep on finding them there will always be dragons to slay up there he said and of course that's over now but it's actually not over quite in the Pesh Valley and its environs because that's where ISIS is still at the war is not over in the Pesh the war between the Taliban and ISIS and actually that's the exact same place which continues to have drone strikes in it not US drone strikes but Pakistani drone strikes so I'll leave it there oh yeah thank you Mr. Farhad and Mr. Morgan we have a few minutes here for questions I'm sure there will be quite a few we'll make the most of our time if you can keep your questions as concise as possible just come here to either side we'll alternate between the sides well Afghan security forces failures and attacking coalition forces and different tribes and no conception of nationalism with all the critique of US policy do you think Afghanistan is better now the Taliban engages in general mutilation do you think that's the same as Republicans and Democrats how does one valley determine the outcome of the war I'm not quite sure I got all of that but I'll start with I mean the role of the Afghan security forces is obviously a key one throughout the book the dynamic that I described basically in the hardest place is one where US forces early on especially Green Berets were very invested in the development of Afghan security forces but they quickly had the rug pulled out from under them because the particular Afghan security forces that they were developing were not seen as part of the future Afghan National Army and then for many subsequent years you have Afghan National Army Battalions in the Pesh that US Army Battalions as kind of auxiliaries rather than partners they drag them along on missions in a token way to check a box because headquarters requires them to have Afghans on missions you've got Marine advisors with these Afghan troops who are sort of screaming into the wind saying look this is not the way to handle these Afghan troops if you want them to ever be able to do anything on their own but nevertheless that is the dynamic for many years in the Pesh in many other areas of eastern Afghanistan in 2011 when the US first withdraws from the Pesh in the Afghan Army Battalion that's left behind they're essentially collapsing on itself and forcing the United States to reinsert itself into the district just six months after leaving to sort of try to do it better this time and finally do kind of the low level, small scale advising that arguably they should have been doing the entire time as far as the enemy I think this is probably the books biggest weakness is that it doesn't contain much of the enemy perspective but it remains as much as I could get I interviewed low level Taliban fighters people who were from communities who had taken up arms because a brother had been killed by American troops things like that I was not able to interview senior Taliban leaders or even mid-level Taliban leaders other than I was able to use some declassified or leaked interrogation reports things like that especially from a key figure named Abu Qas who was an Egyptian al-Qaeda figure who was up there for a long time but I certainly hope to be able to learn more about that in the future returning to Afghanistan and talking to the Taliban who are generally in a more talkative mood now that they've won Thank you It is 1150 so anyone who does have to go feel free although the three of us can stay right until noon so please Adam can I ask you to spell your name just so I know it It's DRUKH First name sorry How do you pronounce your name so I'm not You just want to get it right It's a torture I go by D for my first name because it's hard to say the khaw voice here and in the core I go by Farhad my last name I'll be very quick I am the chairman of the Selection Committee Colby Award I had never imagined that I would have this experience being a part of that board I wanted to say that this everybody in this room should be incredibly proud of this institution you could wear the uniform that you're wearing in the oldest private military college in the United States and have the strength and the articulacy and the passion to say what you said is a wonderful wonderful thing we should welcome that with great credit to this institution Thank you very much Thank you so much It definitely is a privilege and even though I'm from Afghanistan I haven't seen my family for three years I don't even know when the next time I will be able to see them but I'm still privileged because I'm here and I'm sitting here and so many people are not able to the only thing I hope that this institution and students who are commissioning who are part of the military is to not turn a blind eye to what happened and what's going to happen because as human beings I can give the benefit of the doubt to every single American or every single person in the military because like as human beings we have our insecurities we have ego, we have our own pride which can be hurt and nobody loves to be criticized but at the same time as Americans you hold a lot of power and privilege is that a lot of people do not have the chance to entertain so and with that power there should come a lot of responsibilities to make sure that this doesn't happen again which honestly I don't know at this point what to feel like but as students as intellectuals, as someone who are like futures of this nation and this nation who makes a lot of decisions we need to hold our panelists at this level as they like this symposium level those who keep talking about China Russia and America we need to speak to them and raise a question that these products, these intelligence robots that you're creating are they going to be used in these lands or they're going to be used in another country like Afghanistan, like Iran in Pakistan in all these third world countries that they were not even part of a panel for creation of them when they're so excited about the intelligence of all these EIs and how much they are like making lives of human beings easy or the war easy for us how do you talk to a veteran and ask them how easy it is for them to carry the burden of killing innocent civilians how easy was it very much, within seconds they were able to demolish a whole village are they able to carry that and right now are they able to be a better father, a better husband a better member of the society is the government right now who is investing millions of dollars into EI right now have they even been able to go to that veteran and see how they're doing I want every single one of you to ask these questions as an Afghan this is not just my responsibility to bring these questions and ask these hard questions they're like snowballs they will get bigger and they will lead to other injustices injustices in terms of Afghanistan, in terms of all these other countries that they have no voice those are injustices that you can relate to them even in the United States it's not a matter of who is the subject, it's the practice once you get used to it you will continue to practice that and you will continue to use it in different scenarios in different people because you're used to it because you don't know what is the alternative because you don't know when it's the time to step up and say the right thing in the military we're always told to do as we are told to we're supposed to take orders is it easy to stand up and say I'm not going to do it because it's wrong it's absolutely horrifying it's so annoying because I do it every single time to my chain of command because I'm part of the international section do they welcome it with open arms no, it takes three or four more extra conversations with them because I have to set them down because I have the patience and I hate to give up and I'm stubborn enough that even though they think it's annoying as hell and they want to like rip me apart in that moment I have to talk to them with compassion, with love with all the kindness in my heart that I can find and tell them that I'm not going to do it and here's why and if they ask of me something they need to tell me why because I need to know the reason and if they don't have it they need to go find it for me if I could add just one brief thing to Kit at Farhad it's really powerful remarks there what is it like for people who have been involved in the inadvertent killings of innocent civilians after writing this book I was contacted a few months ago by the weapons officer on the B-1 that dropped those bombs on that particular village and for him it was hard to read this book but he also it was not the first that he heard about it especially when he got back to Alludite or Diego Garcia I forget which it was the squadron commander was waiting with champagne for the B-1 crew because the mission was assumed to have been a success they had struck the target and it was only a week later that he learned from the Wall Street Journal that they had in fact only killed civilians and it really was a crushing experience for him and the end of his military career because he made clear to his squadron before their next rotation that he was not going to be willing to drop on residential targets and so they said well then you're not coming because that's not how it works and that was the end of his air force career and it's something that has haunted him to this day and from the last time I talked to him it certainly still haunts him he was carrying out legal orders in pursuit of a top national mission and the result was just unmitigated tragedy with no no upside to it and that really has weighed on him for a long time Good afternoon my name is John Walsh Mr. Morgan I have a question for you you talked briefly about the difference between counter insurgency and terrorism what is the difference between in your opinion between an insurgent and a terrorist and how do we fight both threats well in the context of Afghanistan what I'm talking about is by terrorist groups I mean international terrorist organizations that commit terrorist attacks overseas in this context meaning Al Qaeda and by insurgent organizations I mean the Taliban although the Taliban also uses terrorist tactics within the context of Afghanistan to go after you know to launch high profile attacks in Kabul obviously doesn't do that now but did during the course of the war and you know where it gets messy is where these two groups are closely affiliated and there's a lot of crossover between them for instance there are certainly the insurgent organization the Taliban certainly contains terrorists like say Hakani bomb makers, Hakani suicide vests guys, they're terrorists similarly Al Qaeda although it is we think of it as an international terrorist organization and it is it also contains people who are not involved in international terrorism and who instead are essentially the jihadi equivalent of Green Berets and spend their lives advising local jihadis in the pursuit of local aims and actually you can see this, you can see one of the difficulties inherent in this in the story of the pesh for years the US military chased a guy around eastern Afghanistan called Abu Baklas an Egyptian guy who was a bonafide card carrying member of Al Qaeda but he was not involved in international terrorism he was essentially a red herring he was more visible to the US military and US intelligence than peers who were involved in international terrorism because of the nature of his relationship with local and surgeon groups and his presence therefore distracted from other figures who probably would have been a lot more worthwhile to go after in counterterrorism terms you see this play out again later in the war with the case of Faruq al-Qaqani who I talked about where you kind of had indicators that he was a really serious international terrorist but then other people who because of the Abu Baklas experience were skeptical and say well how sure are we that this guy is really up to anything when he's you know we've hammered him in in the far mountains of Nurstam how bad could anything he's really up to be which then the question becomes well so how long do you have to keep him in with drone strikes is this sort of a permanent condition that has to be maintained how do you know when you've succeeded or failed and that's when you're dealing with covert organizations that deliberately hide their aims from you and deliberately disguise the importance of their leaders and so on that's a really really hard question and it's one that I think is going to be especially hard going forward in Afghanistan you know as the US intelligence community has lost many of its key sources of intelligence on the ground kind of it's the surrogate units that the paramilitary surrogate units that the CIA used to gather intelligence about al-Qaida battlefield advisors by capturing them those units are all gone so you know we're sort of back to this question of even if you know that a terrorist is in the country you know your successor to Swahili or whoever it may be how will you ever know what they're doing there is there any such thing as a retired al-Qaida operative Abu Baklas may be retired now I don't know seems plausible to me other people think no once he's once you're al-Qaida you're sort of died in the wool forever and you should sort of always remain a focus of efforts to try and capture and capture or kill him so it's a really tough intelligence question and it's one that is tougher now thank you we can conclude there with another round of thanks Bessie don't worry you can come up here and ask your question thank you to everyone but I need there we go check one two one one and then so here's the thing test test test test test test test test okay and presentations and I walked the whole way across the stage so it should work from way over there I will leave it to them whether they want to actually wander or stay in position all they got to do is from beginning actually I should come show them her presentation is in this web browser you can sit here use a clicker there's a fun pointer should you choose the point okay that's okay not yet test test test test test test make sure you hear yourself then you know people are if you're getting feedback okay does it stay all you should leave it off hello hello so good afternoon welcome to the 28th military writer symposium and we are extremely glad that you're here in person and also for those of you that are watching online wherever you may be we are extremely proud of you joining us today so this is the last official event for our two day session and I must say that this year has been incredibly powerful from multiple different dimensions from talking about artificial intelligence and it's the nexus between robots to the Kobe Award presentation interacting with a student of Norwich and also a faculty member it's just been an incredible time and the great aspect of this in technology is not only have we been able to broadcast this out live but we're able to record it and to use it later on so one of the unique attributes of the military writer symposium is the focus on student research and you're going to hear from three of our student researchers here in a little bit but before we do that one of the things that we've discussed over the course of these past two days is just the importance of cultural intelligence and also just the importance of recognizing that when we talk about anything as it relates to artificial intelligence and robotics that it's not a English centric conversation we're talking about a subject in which certain nation states are leading the narrative and we're also talking about a subject in which other nation states will receive the outcome of the narrative and so one of the ways in which we want to internationalize our time together is just to give a couple of minutes to student voices some of them in English and some of them in their native dialect and so Drakshan if you could come forward we're going to ask Drakshan to share just a little bit about her thoughts on the military writer symposium in the intersection of our topic and then also just how it relates to her time here at Norch and we've asked her to do that a little bit in her native tongue and then some in English and then we're going to turn that over to the panel but without further ado you have the podium welcome and good afternoon everyone I'm Drakshan Farhad senior English major at Norwich University also second lieutenant for international section in the Corps of Cadets so Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim in the name of merciful and kind God is what we say in the beginning of every speech when we present back in Afghanistan something that for years I have not done but today it felt like the right thing to do and you will know later why I was asked to present on this day weeks ago I kept thinking of different topics that I could reflect on as part of my speech I also came up with a script none of them none of those scripts provided a convincing enough idea to contribute to the dialogue in the manner I wanted them to yesterday after attending several sessions and panels for the symposium I noticed different aspects about artificial intelligence and the rise of robotics I heard about the future of robotics and the challenges of implementing these robotics in different environments but mostly important in one of the quotations or phrases that I heard over and over again that something that was science fiction is now a reality or the future and most of the countries the name of the countries that I heard the most were the United States China, Russia names that entertain the privilege of creating weapons of mass destruction and fulfill their ambitions at the expense of third world countries where these weapons are mostly used and it is a very pressing matter because I grew up in Afghanistan and I know the effects of these weaponaries and what they do to humankind one of the questions I asked yesterday during one of the sessions was how the countries who are mostly affected by AI into all the decision making processes that go into creating these elements the short response was honestly they're not even at the table and their perspective is most of the time is missing and it was very obvious because questions like these weapons are created but what do we know about the fact that there are ethical concerns about using them what are the grounds in which they should be used in third world countries and countries like Afghanistan are they going to be intelligent enough to be able to make decisions based on human intelligence and emotional intelligence to be able to tell who is the enemy and the good thing is that this symposium and this institution has entertained the idea of starting a dialogue a dialogue in which we need to ask these questions because this is a matter that is globally entertained and it's globally effecting the countries that are not necessarily part of this process of creating such a thing so if you are here to learn something one of the things you need to learn is to be able to ask those questions and say what is the scope of how these elements can affect other countries which countries would be affected the most and what is the level of destruction and is it needed so today as one person as someone who has this podium and who has this chance to be able to speak on behalf of so many Afghans who might not be able to get this chance ever I want to say in the name of merciful and kind God to start a dialogue and bring them to a direction where we see this as a global matter and not just something limited to a symposium or just United States thank you thanks Dr. Shahn so as you've deducted over the past couple of days one of the things that we emphasize at the symposium is bringing in subject matter experts who could advance our understanding on the theme at hand we are interested in student engagement from last night from the 40 some students that lined up to ask questions to the other students over the past couple of days that have engaged with our authors formally through questions but also out in Mac and around campus but something that you may not know is that there are students that are awarded fellowships to conduct research over the theme each year and one of those is endowed it's called the Schultz Fellowship and that is given from the Schultz family from class of 1960 the Schultz symposium and it started I'm supporting it from the onset the family is endowed a fellowship which we can gratefully say that it's grown to the degree where this year we're able to fund two Schultz Fellows and then the other is a Peace and War Research Fellow and these students conduct research funded research for the course of the summer they are given really an open dossier of how they want to proceed they could travel overseas, they could build something they could paint something, they can write about something they can do interviews really or they can engineer something, some sort of product the point here is that the military writer symposium is something that's interdisciplinary and we want students from multiple different disciplines to be involved to do research but also we want to give them a platform and that's what we're doing today so it is my privilege and honor to introduce one of my colleagues Dr. Steve Sodergren who is also the only Coby Award winner from Norwich University he's a Civil War Historian and he's also the Chair of the Department of History and Political Science it's my honor and privilege to turn the podium over to him as he takes care of the panel and introduces our student research fellows so Dr. Sodergren, cheers Thank you very much Professor Morris podiums aren't built for people of my height so forgive me if I stoop it is my pleasure to stand before you today to introduce these outstanding Norwich students what is the final panel the final discussion related to this year's Norwich Symposium which has been I think a tremendous success and throughout the past two days we have been talking about the future the future forgive the praise but this is the future these are the students who are going to be shaping not just the technologies at our disposal but the manners in which we use them so these are the voices that we need to be hearing right now and it is my pleasure to introduce them and I just once again like many others I want to thank Professor Morris I want to thank Megan Liptak I want to thank Yang Moku I want to thank all of those who helped make this year's symposium such a wonderful success what we'll do is I'm going to read off the biographies of all the student presenters and then we're just going to do one presentation after another and save time at the end for questions that I will moderate but from left to right here the you see are three students the first one to my left is Elena Latino who is one of the recipients of the 2022 Richard S. Schultz class of 1960 symposium fellowships Elena is from Atkinson, New Hampshire she is currently a junior at Norwich University studying computer safety and information assurance with a concentration in digital forensics although relatively new to the field her summer research presentation on AI forensics has helped her engage with experts in both artificial intelligence and digital forensics this opened new doors for her and sparked an interest in her future over the summer Elena had the chance to study abroad through Norwich's Maymester the immersive class on cyber surveillance allowed her to explore new areas of computer safety in Germany Elena has a passion for digital forensics but on the side she also enjoys surfing when she is home for the summer as well as playing club field hockey while at school to Elena's left is the other recipient of this year's Richard S. Schultz class of 1960 symposium fellowship Gabriel Williams Gabriel is a Norwich senior from Suffolk, Virginia Campton Rose Academy where he was captain of the track and field discovering early on that he thoroughly enjoyed the field of government and politics Gabriel chose to attend Norwich University as a political science major planning to work in the government sector or intelligence community upon graduation at Norwich Gabriel co-founded the Norwich University boxing program and made history this past year as he was part of the first Norwich boxing team to ever compete in the National Collegiate Boxing Association as a member of the Corps of Cadets Gabriel thoroughly enjoys working with the Rook class as he was cadre staff in his junior year and as an officer in cadet training company this year outside of Norwich Gabriel has had internship and contracting experiences in the Department of State and the Department of Defense finally to my far left is the recipient of the 2022 military writer symposium research fellowship Wesley Dewey Wesley is a student at Norwich class of 2023 he believes in personal and professional growth, hard work and furthering the great legacy that Norwich University holds Wesley is studying for his bachelor of science and marketing management he has also spent time playing for the Norwich University eSports program and spends time outside of class with friends and family or in the gym just before we begin a round of applause for these wonderful scholars we cannot heap too much praise upon them but to begin with I'd like to hand over the podium to our first speaker of the afternoon Elena Latino Hello, as you just heard my name is Elena Latino and I'm a junior here at Norwich University so I can skip the intro that you just heard over the summer I did research on the current uses of artificial intelligence and how and why there's a need for the subfields of AI forensic specifically in warfare so my real conclusion to this research was because of the rapid and widespread adoption of various AI embedded systems and their complexities it is now necessary for the need of forensics expertise and forensics tools for commercial and military applications to understand this I interviewed many different experts from professors here at Norwich professors at different universities as well as workers in private sector and for the government I read and reviewed many different peer reviewed sources as well as books I attended two AI conferences I watched many informational videos and listened to podcasts and through all this I was able to form my opinion which I will share today so to get started I would like to explain the field of digital forensics itself so the field of digital forensics teacher professor Atkins explains digital forensics is the intersection of criminology, computer science and law the field of digital forensics came about when computer related incidents began to occur these incidents brought about the need for scientific and legally acceptable findings which I'll talk more about in a minute with the field it became apparent that different technological incidents required different tools even for example network forensics and email forensics although at some point may overlap their differences required different solutions the same will go for the new fields of AI forensics as I mentioned before these findings must be legally acceptable according to the United States federal rule of evidence for scientific evidence to be used in court and must meet certain tests these tests come about with the Doberts standard as you can see here they need to be tested with known potential errors and subject to peer review or publication so now with the understanding of digital forensics we can move on and discuss artificial intelligence in simple terms artificial intelligence leverages computers and machines to mimic problem solving and decision making capabilities of the human mind however as you might have learned from attending a conference over the past two days the field of artificial intelligence is in no way simple AI consists of different layers as shown such as machine learning, deep learning and many more complex integrations of these methods although AI might be complex there are very many common uses you might be familiar with virtual assistants on your phone such as Siri or Google assistant utilize machine learning algorithms to gather the information you requested ads and recommendations on streaming platforms might seem targeted towards you well that's because they are through deep learning algorithms content can be personalized facial recognition, surveillance and self-driving vehicles are widely popular in both commercial and military in the military worlds think about the car you drive how many of your vehicles with have lane assistance features or automatic braking alright so a few well according you can think sorry you can think artificial intelligence for these features how about a plane that you've flown on recently has anyone flown on a plane recently well according to an expert I spoke with Dr. Haig humans are only responsible to approximately three to ten minutes of this flight everything else is done by AI so next time you take a flight you might want to think about the fact that the pilot really isn't doing much the use of AI in warfare is very expansive just as I mentioned before it is used in unmanned vehicles including aerial, ground and water vehicles UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles specifically are being used in about half over 90 of the militaries around the world specifically in that group 16 of those countries have armed drones surveillance, navigation, smart munitions and cyber attacks are a few more areas where AI is being used many of these advancements are helping to make improvements with the efficiency and safety in war however no system is 100% effective everything is prone to failures and this brings me to my next point AI issues data poisoning, adversarial attacks deception, complex environments and unexplainable decisions are just some of the issues that have arose that have and will arise due to the use of artificial intelligence one issue I believe to be highly concerning was unexplainable decisions as you can see from the graphic today AI is not explainable many decisions made do not have an understandable reasoning however the goal is to get to the point where these algorithms are explainable and however from the experts I heard from it might be quite impossible to get to this task my paper goes more into depth on this part of research another issue could be complex environments for example in 2019 a driver of a Tesla Model 3 turned on autopilot 10 seconds later the vehicle drove into a semi truck that crossed in front of it killing the driver and this is just one of several scenarios of this happening and then although we try to test for every scenario for example a semi truck crossing in front of a driver mistakes can still be made so although this happened in the commercial world issues like this can and will happen in war as well and with that I come to conclude that AI is in heavy use in both civilian and military sectors in all different parts AI enabled systems can be attacked they can be confused and they can also be inadequately trained so when failures occur in these systems forensics evaluations will be needed just like any other digital forensics field these evaluations will be dependent on tested theories and methods but where we are today we are lacking the forensic specialists and the forensic tools that are needed to help this field grow so although there may be a lack of AI forensics experts today I hope to have sparked an interest and even one person to want to become an AI forensics expert for tomorrow thank you excellent work let me step in here and set up our next slide presentation and introduce Gabriel Williams for his presentation first and foremost I just want to say thank you to everyone who's here in the auditorium today it's a pleasure to be here speaking with you moving forward project today is going to be artificial intelligence and the electromagnetic spectrum specifically focusing on electromagnetic warfare and how the intersection of the two are creating some new capabilities on the field of battle and why there's need to educate the warfighter on those so first and foremost let's have a conversation about what is the electromagnetic spectrum many people don't know many people confuse the electromagnetic spectrum with cyberspace and to be quite frank the definition is very simple the electromagnetic spectrum is a series of frequencies that vary in wavelength within that you have a new spectrum which is we're talking about right now speakers microphones this right here you have microwaves which are more complex components that house data links transition between aircraft tanks ships, missile systems you have visible light as well and you have gamma rays and x-rays so everyone in the room and everyone in the military environment is also affected by the electromagnetic spectrum for instance who has a cell phone raise your hand 4G, 5G, 6G all spectrum who has talked on the radio before raise your hand a few people spectrum operations who has flown a airplane in some regard raise your hand there's a hint of spectrum operations within that right so it's important to understand that the electromagnetic spectrum has a key impact not only on civilian life but also military life and military operations as well within the military the electromagnetic spectrum is utilized in more or less three core environments the first one we talk about is characterization we discuss the operational environment the field of battle between ourselves and the adversary one of the first important things we have to do is characterize and understand what that battlefield looks like whether that be enemy units on the ground tanks, missile systems weapons systems whatever they are we have to identify them and identify their capabilities and how they compare with us compare and contrast so one of those core concepts is command control computers C4ISR these are some of the systems and capabilities that the United States military in our near peer and unfortunately in one day may be pure adversaries used to characterize and understand the battlefield in which our warfighters operate in and the electromagnetic spectrum underlays within all of that another subset is more focused on direct action so jamming radio frequencies, jamming communications between soldiers on the ground jamming communications between satellites and soldiers on the ground jamming communications between two different naval vessels these are what we call direct actions and then within that we have destruction of laser beams to destroy communication centers and arrays or other critical infrastructure needs to the military apparatus these things are very key and important things that we have to be cognizant about as warfighters and as people that support the warfighting operation the third one is deception so reducing the electromagnetic footprint that friendly forces have in the battlefield a key example of this would be stealth technology the United States Air Force reducing the footprint of a B-2 bomber or F-22 on our radar system that's all emphasized and all depends on the electromagnetic spectrum to actually achieve that goal these are things that are often forgotten about moving forward to complete some of those utilization tasks the DOD and our NATO partners we really focus on electromagnetic warfare this is kind of the core concept that we want to achieve so in those core utilization tasks and electromagnetic warfare is comprised of three different sub-sex you have electromagnetic attack electromagnetic protect and electromagnetic support each of them map directly to those core concepts deception is all about protection protecting our systems protecting our planes warfighters what have you from enemy surveillance and detection attack on enemy systems denying to grade their ability to access a spectrum and how they can use that to eliminate our capability to operate and electromagnetic support is all about sensing and characterizing the environment understanding the battlefield in which our warfighters existed compliments signals intelligence at a very high rate now I gather within the first five to seven minutes many of you may be asking this is an artificial intelligence conference about spectrum operations and electromagnetic warfare many people may not see the overlay but as we move forward to an age where there are more sophisticated technologies and more sophisticated threats to our nation we have to begin to think at interdisciplinary level we have to understand where there can be overlap to meet the needs that the nation has and fight the threats that are here now and that will be in the future that comes to this intersection there we go the overlap and often times in AI circles we talk about artificial intelligence the ODA loop gets thrown around which is Observe, Orient, Decide, Act kind of the framework in which members of the artificial intelligence community build cognitive systems from a deep learning or machine learning perspective within the ODA loop it maps directly to a correlation with electromagnetic warfare observing is all about electromagnetic support orientation is all about electromagnetic support understanding, characterizing the environment that our war fighters exist in and then acting making that decision comes with action, electromagnetic attack what do we have to do, what are our options so these are things that there is an overlap in and in my experiences working in the Department of State I've been to many AI oriented conference I've worked at the JAX Center for a couple of rotations and these are the conversations that our key leaders are having it's about building interdisciplinary solutions to complex problems in the modern age so these are some of the conversations our leaders are having, it's very important for me my contribution to this conversation which is important thinking about how do I distill that concept of how do we protect the war fighter or how do we protect our civilians how do we distill that concept down to undergraduate academia level so the focal point of my research was to conduct a study an informational manner, understand these two topics, how they correlate and then build out a pathway to bridge this concept to academia and that's where my certificate pilot program comes into play I've been in coordination with the DOD and NATO forces for the last five months about building a certificate program that would enable students at the undergraduate level to take courses and understand electromagnetic spectrum and how it impacts their particular career field whether it be in cyber or electrical engineering or spectrum management anything in science technology or in ROTC so these are concepts that I've been working with the DOD first in the amount of time and we've made excellent progress and this is my contribution to that point bringing awareness of the spectrum and how coordination with artificial intelligence to change the future that we exist in that's all I have, thank you so much alright, thank you Gabriel our last speaker of the afternoon is Wesley Dewey how's it going everybody my name is Wesley and this summer I focused on studying the weaponization of echo chambers more specifically the weaponization of echo chambers using artificial intelligence and so to start things off I just wanted to find what an echo chamber is an echo chamber is an environment where a person only encounters opinions or perspectives that align with their own on social media or online in general companies use artificial intelligence commonly referred to as the algorithm to market and personalize the online experience for the user and this results in the creation of these echo chambers and so if you were to for example be searching for a lawn mower online you would be most likely given ads down the road for other lawn care equipment as well as search results relating to that and as I said the benefit to that is that you get more efficient marketing for companies as well as a more personalized experience for the user however the downfall again is that it increases the creation of echo chambers and increases polarization as a result cognitive bias is at the root psychologically as to why echo chambers happen it's defined as a logical natural pattern of thought in response to certain stimuli that would produce illogical findings and so these are just errors in our brains and they affect everybody in the dawn of time confirmation bias more specifically is a cognitive bias that really centers in why echo chambers happen it's our brains tendency to gravitate towards information or data that supports predetermined ideas and so if you already believe something you will automatically reject evidence that contradicts your belief so if you ever hear something that goes totally against your beliefs you feel that little emotional bit of anger that's where that comes from so echo chambers have already had a pretty major impact on the world more specifically intentional echo chambers as a result of using artificial intelligence to create them the four examples that I focused on in my research are the capital riots of 2020 the Syrian white hats the Philippines election and the terrorist organization ISIS and in all of these examples the algorithm was used to create echo chambers to manipulate groups of people either into inciting violence or into electing corrupt politicians etc and so with these echo chambers online we've also seen a great increase in polarization within politics and so I followed a study that looked at Facebook, Twitter, Gab and Reddit which were all social platforms and what was found was that with Facebook and Twitter there was an increased amount of polarity wherever there was a greater amount of echo chambers and with Gab and Reddit as the amount of echo chambers increased they each individually went on their own way so Gab became more radically right-wing while Reddit became more radically left-wing and so what this study did was polarity between the left and right wings with the presence of echo chambers and what it found was that users online tend to prefer information adhering to their world views ignoring dissenting information and form polarized groups around shared narratives and so in conclusion people don't recognize when they're caught in echo chambers because they feel liberated online and so the difference between echo chambers that occur naturally and echo chambers that occur because of algorithms is that you feel like you're making all of your own decisions when you get caught into these echo chambers online. You feel like you're doing all of your own research or you have full control over what you're looking at when in reality there's artificial intelligence behind the scene that's pushing you in one direction or another and so this is dangerous because there is an unlimited reach through the internet for people to get caught into these echo chambers. It's as if a cult for example which is a very historically famous and generalized example of echo chambers working in the real world, it's as if a cult could reach out to anybody who is susceptible to their ideas across the world all at once and the people who are most at risk with these echo chambers as a result of these algorithms are people who are the least skeptical of the information they receive online and so the greatest way to battle this issue is to educate all countries and all students on how to do proper research and educate people to be willing to see both sides of every story or be willing to understand things from multiple perspectives and lastly I just want to say thank you to the Peace and War Committee for allowing me to take on this research. I want to thank my mentor Professor Bosley for pushing me in this direction and I want to thank everybody for coming out today. Thank you. Thank you, Wesley. We have about 10 to 15 minutes left. This is open for questions so please I encourage people from the audience questions about any of the research topics that you've heard before you, the implications of some of what you've heard, please feel free to come down to one of our two microphones at the front here. While you think about questions and move to the front, I'll guess I'll start off here and just first of all congratulations to the panelists it's all interesting, particularly for an old historian like myself in lightning material. You all called for research, you all called for more education into your fields. Where do you think the impetus for this really has to come from? Are these you know I can see both commercial and military applications just like with AI for each one of your research fields, perhaps more so than others, but does the push for this have to come out of the private sector or does it have to come out of the public public sector? Where do the solutions and the research and the education for this? Where does that have to emerge from? I open up to anybody. Okay, this is on. It's an interesting question, very brilliant. The concept of where does the advocacy come from for this, and I think it has to be both if not all. We have to think about it from a holistic approach so it needs to be a partnership between private, public and industry sectors to really push this, including academia as well. We were talking about building an educational framework or advocacy for a certain topic, especially something like AI which could revolutionize the way the world operates and the way we as people interact with each other is something that has to be a multilateral approach or partnership between all different groups to get that done. And that would be the best way to push for advocacy. And that would be resources, training, tools, monetary needs as well. We have a line of students here so far be it for me to take up the podium for too long. Please, your first question. My first question is kind of directed towards Williams over here. So you kind of spoke about the electromagnetic spectrum when it comes to AI. So my question is when it comes to risk when introducing AI and technology to the battlefield, do you believe that fratricide is more going to be more of a prominent risk because of hacking and being able to use the electromagnetic spectrum to mess with radio frequencies and waves? And what is a possibility that, like, how can we prevent our AI from being hacked and turned against us if we do introduce it into the battlefield? That's a loaded question. Thank you. I think we have to unpack that a little bit. So when we talk about integrating, so AI is a broad term, right? And people create many different fantasies or concepts when they define AI, you know, there's concepts and human-machine teaming meaning that there's a robot and a, you know, infantryman working together on the battlefield, right? Or, you know, that could just be as simple as saying there is something like a serial and Alexa platform helping a human being understand something. I think to prevent the situation which we're talking about, which is an enemy taking advantage of a cognitive system aiding human beings in a battlefield operation, we have to, first and foremost, create AI-enabled cognitive systems that are responsible and governable, right? And that we have oversight over and that there's a verification process underlined so they can verify the decisions that that machine learning algorithm comes to rather than the day, right? And when you think about responsible ethical or governable AI, these are kind of the protocol and policy issues that have not been worked out yet. So you have a very valid question. I think that should be the first step making sure that we create a governable and responsible AI. The second step is when you talk about a cognitive system in spectrum operations or cognitive VW as it's referred to many times, it threads along the subject of human machine teaming being that that cognitive system isn't taking over that a human operator or warfighter would do. It's simply supplementing and aiding, right? It's enabling that warfighter to have a greater decision advantage on the battlefield as compared to our adversaries because it's able to perform the same cognitive functions that a human being can but at a fraction of the time. And when you look at something that's like the electromagnetic spectrum, one of the slides I had up there you know, it shows cyberspace is being six components when the six bullets up there, but there's a whole vast spectrum outside of cyberspace. That's a lot for a human operator to process. That's why we need the cognitive systems to aid us in that decision making aid. But to your point, to be bottom line upfront, you have to have governable, responsible AI that is protected at a fundamental level and when we integrate into the warfighting scheme we have to make sure that the level of which we integrate cognitive systems override the responsibilities of a human operator and it just provides a decision advantage or as an aid. Supplements does not take over. Thank you. Next question please. Hello, my name is Dan. I have a question for Elena. I'm also a CSIA major. You mentioned that in AI warfare is used for cyber attacks and my question is, are you more focused on like cyber attacks or offense cyber and which one of the two should we focus more for the future or could make stronger? When it comes to warfare cyber attacks cannot happen in both terms. You need to make sure your systems are protected as well as many adversaries will attack you. Sorry, could you just repeat the second part of the question again? If they're like what can we focus on more in the future like how we could make it more stronger for either defense or offense? I think it depends on really what your country wants to focus on. I think in many ways it is important to focus on both aspects. You have a strong defense to have a strong offense as well as a strong offense to have a strong defense. So I think in reality you want to have you need to focus on both aspects although if your country is more prone to attack then it might be necessary to really focus on the attacks. However you don't want to be the one getting attacked so again really honing in on defense is also important. Thank you. My question is for Second Lieutenant Williams. With our military being more reliant on our official intelligence and robotics what training or new technologies that our military need to use to be defended from electromagnetic warfare since we're more reliant on technologies that are weak against it? So just to clarify you're asking what training do we have at our disposal to make sure that well I'm asking if our military is going to be more using it in the future like weapons that are a week to make electromagnet pulses or like you said structures or stuff what would we be doing to make sure that we're better defended or able to combat these offensive weapons? Right. Excellent question. That brings up a key point. As we move into this more sophisticated age of warfare and we're introducing some of these new technologies AI and spectrum operations we have to understand the place that we're at in terms of our superiority in these regions and to be frank our superiority is evaporating and eroding in a very quick place very quick pace our key adversaries being the Chinese nation and the Russians have outdone us in these fields when the last five years in terms of investment on training and research and actually developing operational systems so to make sure that our systems that we're developing in this realm remain safe and verifiable for our own usage we have to make sure there's a couple components. One we have to make sure that our warfighters are properly trained to actually understand the impact of the spectrum and how it correlates to their operational duties in the field of battle. So we have to make sure we have to bring awareness like this make sure our operators are aware of what the spectrum is. And two we have to coordinate and essentially codify some plans in the background to ensure that these systems don't fall in to enemy hands. And that's more of a technical question in terms of how do we secure components of our electromagnetic operational space, right? That's electronic protect regions. And what that looks like we can a couple of things. We can do spoofing, we can do radar jamming we can deny the enemy's usage of the spectrum. Therein they have no ability to touch us when we conduct spectrum operations to make sure that we maintain a freedom of maneuver and access in that realm. So to make sure our defenses are up we have to make sure that we deny the enemy's ability to access the spectrum. That's the first step, second step. So first one make sure our warfighters are properly trained on the spectrum and how it affects their battlefield capabilities. And second step is making sure that we continue to deny the enemy's ability to access the spectrum. As long as we deny their ability to access the spectrum, we maintain a safety for our systems, we maintain security in that realm as well. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Off to my right here. Hello everybody, Kedet Cranston class 2023. Thanks to all the students for providing this awesome research really inspiring for everybody in here. But my question is mainly for Elena, but any of the panelists can pop in here. You talk a lot about the accidents that can happen with AI and considering that as kind of independent to human error in a way. I was curious if any of your experts that you talked to commented on who gets held accountable when these accidents happen, whether it be in the military U.S. law who's being accountable for the accidents that occur and what are the legal implications of that both on the U.S. and what NATO is coming up with in the future? So that gets very much into ethical dilemma and although I did some research on ethics behind it I did not fully dive into it. However, I do know specifically NATO speaking, they've been trying and trying to pass certain regulations specifically on laws which is the autonomous weapons and there's really a stalemate in the like where they're going with it. Not much from my perspective, at least from what I understand, not much has come out that really allows us to put blame in where we're supposed to put it. Same with even here in America when it comes to a lot of the incidents that happen with Tesla there's not they kind of deflect the blame saying that they just need to do more training in their systems but it's in reality most people don't bring it to court because Tesla probably finds a way to influence them not to but if it was brought to court, there's many implications that really haven't been decided yet. Thank you, that's very interesting. Yes, sir. My question is for Second Lieutenant Williams. I was wondering based on your research, you've developed a curriculum for a certificate. Is there a plan to implement that curriculum here at Norwich and if so what is the timeline for that look like? So in short, yes there's a plan to implement that curriculum here at Norwich University. I've been coordinating with the Peace and War Center and the Norwich University Applied Research Institutes to get the ground work up on integrating that curriculum where we run into in terms of timeline issues we have to wait on DoD and NATO counterparts right so I work in the I work as they attach in the chief information office where I work for one of the directors of spectrum enterprise and policy and I'm on a allied and coalition partners working group so the problem is this whole thing just got stood up in 2019 right so 2019 was when the electromagnetic spectrum cross-function team was established and then we completed the study in 2021 and then we've been moving forward since then with building out an educational framework so we've identified the competency models, we understand where the gaps are in training and proficiency within our war fighters but now comes the hard work like you said which is building out that curriculum and coordination with our NATO partners right so we're moving through that process of essentially collecting all the curriculum managers within the individual services and then actually mapping out curriculum between the Navy, Air Force Marine Corps Army and then coordinating and codifying that curriculum with our NATO partners within their respective branches and fields and then within that once we put that together we put that together within the DOD working group and then we'll sign off on it then we'll be able to push that out to academia industry so the timeline for that is looking about six to nine months and we're about month two in that so I would say stay tuned hopefully before I graduate I can speak more on the matter but right now the hard work begins essentially I just read and write on it all day does that answer your question? Are there students helping to design their own curriculum outstanding? I think that's outstanding, absolutely Mr. Bassett, please Good afternoon, this question is primarily for Mr. Dewey on your research regarding the creation of echo chambers you noted the utilization of AI in both positive and negative way that echo chambers can be a negative outcome of AI can be utilized in a negative outcome of creating echo chambers which has a detrimental effect on society or has your research ever taken a look at the foreign influence in essentially artificially supporting or creating echo chambers that may lead to increased political polarization the most commonly prevalent example of this is Russian influence in say the 2016 or 2020 election and creating echo chambers on Trump's election and how he lost the election and could you provide, if your research has any form of recommendations for say some future politicians in the room here regarding what policy can be implemented to help combat the artificial tampering not only through increased education and knowledge of the individuals agency but also what the government can do to step in and intervene Right, so I think because of the nature of how they come about and as I had stated the fact that they come from a place that the internet where you shouldn't necessarily censor it to a certain degree or try to control how people use the internet because that will lead to civil unrest for example North Korea is very well known for that I don't think there's a great way to combat it from a government perspective, I believe that with the right education there wouldn't be a need for that the general population could be able to look at information and decide whether or not on their own that it's coming from a reputable source or decide to research further against the point that they're reading versus researching further to support the point they're reading I also believe that it comes down a lot to companies because it's companies like Facebook for example that instill these algorithms into use and implement them into society to try to make a change versus a government I believe that if the way the algorithm works was changed to a certain degree maybe regarding specifically politics it could have a really positive influence on elections but no I don't believe that governments should have I guess a stand or an opinion when it comes to I don't think they should be able to influence how people use the internet or what people see and obviously my research does say that they do it in a negative way but at the same time the only way to really combat that is to better education surrounding the subject and it is a very new thing even the research on it usually doesn't date back past 2016 so I think we're still very early into it and hopefully as it becomes more apparent to people and as people who are more affected by it start to realize it we'll see I guess an improvement thank you for your question thank you we have time for one or two more questions and we have one or two more people so go ahead good afternoon my question is in regard to Mr. Williams presentation we've seen as per the other presentations that AI and automated technology has been increasingly integrated into armed forces around the world as this integration continues do you foresee EM jamming and overloading weaponry at some point overtaking conventional weaponry in terms of importance on the battlefield these are excellent questions deep in thought right now do I foresee electromagnetic weapons essentially EM jamming EM pulses laser beams the whole thing I don't think there'll be a point in time where they overtake the usage of conventional weapons conventional weapons have a certain place in the multi-domain operational environment missiles are very effective at destroying buildings destroying hard targets, things that are tangible things that we can see it's also very effective at making people disappear these are hard targets, tangible but what I would say and caveat that I'd say that as we move forward into the future the number of targets that aren't necessarily tangible will increase right so we may enter an era where electromagnetic weapons may be of greater importance that they are today but I'd never believe that they'll overtake conventional weapons I think maneuvering in the electromagnetic spectrum and utilizing those weapons to our advantage are meant to circumnavigate conventional weapons to a certain degree but that doesn't take away the importance of conventional weapons they still remain king top of the deck but electromagnetic weapons in the future may be able to disable conventional weapons talking about missile tracking systems infrared navigation systems within missile systems electromagnetic weapons can make that go away so render them crippled they're meant to circumnavigate and render conventional weapons somewhat less effective but that doesn't take away the importance of a conventional weapon on the battlefield it serves a very specific purpose and that purpose will remain as long as we have physical hard targets so that's a very specific question yes thank you thank you and our last question will be from our first question I don't think I got your name the first time my name is Annalise Hughes my second question is directed more towards Elena for AI and forensics I know that in your presentation you kind of mentioned that AI relies on having like validated and tested methods but you also kind of mentioned the Tesla incident expressing that AI has this unpredictable aspect to it so there must be like a significant challenge finding these methods and tests for all these unpredictable outcomes even with code so my question for you is what do you believe is stunting the AI forensics field growth would you say it's a lack of in-depth research and security when it comes to figuring out these outcomes and possibilities even with code or do you think it's a lack of research in people or something else thank you that's a great question to start off I just want to clarify digital forensics has the like needed theories including the Dabbert standard AI forensics really hasn't gotten there yet but hopefully one day it will be at the point where it will be we will have the tools needed to have forensically sound evidence however I do think it's a lack of both as you mentioned there's definitely a lot of people interested in artificial intelligence as a whole but there's not a lot of people specifically thinking about the failures that might and will occur when AI gets used so heavily as it is today and will continue to be used so I think one there is a lack of interest in the field and I also do believe with the issues that are already occurring including unexplainable AI it is hard to get there and I think people are scared because of how hard this task might be to take on but just because something is hard doesn't mean it shouldn't happen so I think because of the AI issues and also because of a certain lack of interest this is kind of a hard field to tackle but I do think it's necessary thank you thank you and thank you all for your excellent questions it's at this point that I'd like to ask a round of applause for these stellar students if you have anything on your mind I'm sure the students would be willing to engage in some discussion afterward apart from that I thank you for your attendance today have a wonderful afternoon