Lawfare Daily: ‘The Warhead’ with Jeffery Stern

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Just 10 bucks a month or more, if you can, really makes a big difference. Thanks so much for listening, and now it's back to the show. [MUSIC PLAYING] So we're sort of like barreling towards this,

towards this situation where the entire system is saying strike, and the one person who may be on the loop, or whatever that person's engagement actually is there's not that much time to be like,

“now wait a minute, where is this intelligence coming from?”

It's the LaFair podcast. I'm Lauren Voss, senior editor at LaFair, with Jeffrey Stern, author of the book The Warhead. We have to come up with a way to defend against these weapons that we've sort of inspired because generally speaking,

they're becoming way more inexpensive, and there is not a symmetrical cost savings in the weapons we use to shoot them down and protect ourselves. Yet at least. Today we're talking about Jeff's new book, The Warhead,

the quest to build the perfect weapon in the age of modern warfare. Let's jump right in with what warhead are you talking about in this book, and why is it important to modern warfare? Yeah, so the warhead and talk about this book

is a specific weapon called pave way.

It was the first laser guided bomb,

and arguably kind of the first smart bomb, the first guided weapon, at least the first one that was sort of widely usable and effective. So the book uses it both to tell the story of the invention of this specific weapon,

and also using this weapon is sort of an avatar for the onset of precision guided kind of long range of modern warfare, and uses the weapon also because it is a tool of disconnection, obviously, in both kind of a bodily sense,

it is a bomb, and also because it allowed for easier and further engagements sort of allowed for the disconnection between the person pulling the trigger and the person on the receiving end of the weapon. It tries to use the invention and the story

of the evolution of this one thing to actually connect a number of stories of people to kind of put people back into warfare,

“since I think we're all in kind of forget”

that actually its families near the thing blowing up that are still affected no matter how precise or humane of sensibly the weapon is. - Yeah, so I found that really interesting, you talk to this technological advancement

through stories of the individuals. So can you kind of talk to us about, how did you decide to tell it that way? What made that be the way that this is to tell the story? - Yeah, well, I mean, the honest answer

is that I was just way more interested in cool stories about interesting people and needed to find a way to that, and for that to make sense as a book that was something more than just a collection of in-hetch.

So I kind of, from, I back into a justification for doing that, which was, well, okay, this weapon really does show up kind of forest gumplike

So, you know, for example, it was used heavily during the Shakenal campaign.

Everybody knows about the second war in Iraq,

but there are all these little stories that you don't necessarily hear. And this thing is sort of a totem, it's like a baton, and I can use to connect these different stories.

So the real honest answer is, I wanted an excuse to tell these different stories and from an interesting perspective that you wouldn't necessarily, you know, to sort of come in from a slant angle.

- To use some bombing technology in terms right there, a slant angle. (laughing) - Yeah, I've had to, I've had to catch myself. There's a lot of, you know, I don't know,

that idea's a little bit off target, I'd wait a minute, you know, the sort of like, all the corporate speak takes on, you know, you can't really say from the 30,000-foot view when you're talking about high altitude bombing anymore.

Yeah, that was the honest reason, and then, but the more I dug into these different stories, the more it became clear, at least to me, that this one weapon and the capability is allowed,

“really did have, I think, a sort of like,”

a really significant impact, both on how we go to war, if we go to war, and then also how we interact with other nations because of that. - So, when I told someone who's currently in the military that I was reading this book,

their first question was, does it talk about the dragon's jaw?

(laughing) And when I said yes, he immediately said, "Okay, I'm gonna read that book." - Oh great. - So, I wanna start with that story.

Can you tell us about the dragon's jaw and like all the lore around it? - Yeah, so the dragon's jaw was a bridge, that sort of connected north and south Vietnam. It was a really significant throughline

that the Vietcong used to move men and materials from the north to south, but it was a bridge. I mean, it was very thin. It was a few meters across, so it was a really hard target. And then because it was so important,

the north Vietnamese defended it really well. They had every kind of anti-aircraft artillery. There were makes of bases nearby that were surface-air missile sites fairly nearby. And so it was both a difficult target for pilots to hit

and increasingly a dangerous one. So a lot of planes got shot down. And part of that was because the military had been experimenting with various kinds of ways to bring this particular bridge down and also just to be more effective and safer at bombing.

But all of the sort of cock-a-manly plans came up with which included, for example, dropping mines up river to float downstream and then have a targeted upward blast, also, you know, TV guided weapons and infrared guided weapons. And none of them really worked that well.

And so really, the only semi-reliable way to try to strike this bridge was to get really close to it, essentially to dive bomb, which of course brought you into range of ever more unarley kinds of anti-aircraft artillery. So because it was so actually important

and because it became this sort of venue of that became sort of a symbolic manifestation of the conflict between the super power with all of technology and the kind of scrappy military on the ground that was winning at least around the Dragon's Valley.

It sort of took on this mythology.

“And I think partially because it was so hard to hit.”

It was like, it's not real. It's a hologram, it's a connection between dimensions. I mean, all of these sort of this a Lord grew up around it. And it was really the Dragon's draw that became the theater

of the really the first use of paved way

of this particular warhead in combat. And essentially, the first mission they flew with it, they were able to drop the Dragon's draw after almost 1,000 swordies and all sorts of different missions. And so the mythology of the Dragon's draw

then kind of transmitted to the paved way to the weapon that finally filled it. - Yeah, I felt like I was cheering along at that point. I listened to the book on Audible. So it made the stories even that much more

like intriguing as you hear a voice along with it. - Oh cool. - Yeah, earlier you mentioned about telling stories to bring humanity back into warfare here. And so these long distance precision munitions,

they're often described in one of two ways, whether or not you like them. It's either a more precise weapon that gives us the ability to reduce civilian casualties, make warfare more humane, right?

We're targeting only the combatants or the military objectives. The other view of that is that it removes the human element from killing, right? Or so much more removed.

You're not actually having to do the same type of engagement before. And that sets it somewhat dangerous precedent for forced to be used more frequently. So I'm kind of curious, you know,

what's your view on that? Is it one? How there is it a mix, how do you come about that? - Yeah, well I think both are true.

“I think it's probably more important to focus on the latter”

because I think the risk is that the weapon,

It can sort of argue for its own use. You know, there's this bad actor overseas. Well, we've got this magic bullet and we won't hurt anyone nearby and it can kind of lead you, the term that I often use,

I stole from someone is that the trigger can pull the finger.

“So I think there are plenty of engagements”

where because we have this capability, we are able to eliminate the bad guy, eliminate the threat with local lateral damage. But that is not necessarily how it works. And there's a few, you know,

there's a few kind of anecdotal examples of this that I bring up sometimes.

One is in the first call for,

there's some research that compares the first call for the second call for. So the first call for these weapons were available but they were vastly outnumbered by the quote unquote dumb bombs that were used.

So, you know, 1991, then by 2003, the second Iraq war was called the most precise air war in history at that time. And by the proportion of precision munitions used, that was definitely true.

But there's some data that shows that actually, that more civilians were killed by the precision weapons than by the dumb bombs. And one of the explanations for that is that these weapons conferred a sense of confidence

on war planners on the people making these decisions. Two, for example, strike targets near to civilian centers. You know, a broader example is just like, you look at World War II and the firebombing of Dresden, for example, there's no illusion

that to take out that, you know, the cities were making capability or economic base or whatever that you were gonna somehow be able to just precisely strike. So the decision was, do we kill a lot of civilians for this end or do we not?

“And we no longer, I think, made that calculus as much”

because we just sort of believe that we have the capability to exclusively strike the, you know, the weapons or the bad guys. And that can end up leading to actually killing more civilians. And then even from less, you know, humane,

like a less humane centered framing,

there's always blowback, you know,

the bomb is always blowing up somewhere. So, you know, you could argue this is sort of, really manifest in epic fury where, you know, it was very easy to decide, let's go, let's go and shape this bomb in campaign.

Where now we're sort of in this bit of a fiasco where we don't really know how we're gonna get out, while keeping this rate of room is open, whatever, there is a real cost to the fact that we began this thing because it was so easy

to pull the trigger and launch a few air strikes. And it allows you to do that without necessarily the cooperation of allies or Congress, or arguably like that much discussion about what the overall strategy is gonna be.

So it becomes, I think it becomes kind of a stand-in for more rigorous debate about how we're gonna go about addressing, you know, international conflict issue X.

“- Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important”

as you talk about, you know, precision weapons that it's just one part of the process and one part of how we wage war, right? And so even if you can be very precise that doesn't necessarily mean you're being very accurate, right?

There's the whole system that goes into, have we properly identified the target? Do we actually know what's going on and around in that area?

What are the second and third order effects?

I mean, I think of-- - Exactly. - Randed this great study on Raka that the civilian harm mitigation and response action plan used is one of its foundational documents where they looked at everything that happened in Raka,

we were very, very precise. But when you took a step back and looked at the city and looked at what had been destroyed, it was almost all red, right? Like you hit each individual thing and you succeeded but you almost destroyed the entire city.

And when you don't take that step back and look at those wider effects, you miss that your precision can actually have huge impacts. - Yeah, and similarly, the most precise weapon is only as precise as the intelligence on the ground.

And we see some version of, again, a DNA of the Iran war where this girl school was struck and it seems like that happened because that building had been about 10 years before, like an IRGC base or something. We hit exactly what we were aiming at

and because the intelligence hadn't been updated or were communicated or whatever, we very precisely hit something we really would not have otherwise wanted to hit. And there's a version of this in every conflict

in which arguably every conflict in which precision weapons have been used where they very precisely hit something that the intelligence on the ground who hadn't updated and I think that that becomes

even more manifest because I think the precision can almost replace almost in a subconscious way and sort of the confidence you get from having this precision can make it seem like we can do this

- Yeah, I mean, I think that accuracy piece is critical.

“And I think when you talk about precision warfare,”

there's this desire to go faster, right? And do things faster. But it's only one piece of the puzzle. So having that accurate intelligence, having that accurate puzzle, having those checks

is critical, but all of those things slow down the process. - Right. - Yeah. - Then I guess the other thing I kind of curious about is thinking about how you talk about the paved way and like the process of military,

technological advancement through time. Today we kind of talk about drone warfare as its own distinct era and a little in separate from precision guided munitions, second offset strategy. But your book kind of goes through a through line

from Vietnam to today. And I'm kind of curious if you can talk about how you see that, how you view the technological advances through time. Do you see that as like distinct offset strategies

or have you found a way that it's all connected? - Yeah, I think it is connected.

“I think that I think both the trajectory of trying to get”

ever more precise and then also collapsing the kill chain has long been part of the driving force of each iteration of technology. And especially, you mentioned sort of time is how quickly we can identify, engage,

nominate a target for engagement, strike, after-action report. The idea is of course that the more you can contract that, the more competitive you are in any kind of international conflict.

But in the same way that I think having this capability and the promise and in some cases maybe a bit of an illusion that you can kind of instantaneously deploy a plane, drop a precision weapon, take out the target without having to talk through moving several battalions

into position or whatever. That's just the first step in an evolution that gets us to drones and then to AI-powered warfare where the decision to strike and the actual strike, the time between those two things are really contracted.

“And I think that one of the useful manifestations of this”

is if you think of the 18-year-old private or whatever in an air conditioner trailer and creature-force base, and the drone is over the bad guy, and that person just has to push a button. There's an immense amount of pressure to push the button.

And the more that gets automated, so if you have project maven or whatever, you have an AI-powered targeting system. Now, to be clear, the Defense Department has this directive

that says something along lines of there will always be,

I think the term is meaningful level of human engagement in any kinetic decision or something like that. So the ideas that will always be, even if a human is not running the process, there will be a human quote unquote on the loop.

So there will always be a person who can say, no, no, don't do that. But I think that is an immense amount of pressure on someone, on one person, where the entire apparatus is saying, there's the bad guy, weapons or pot were in position.

Do you want to not strike this bad guy? I think there's an immense amount of pressure and inertia to do it. And aside from the fact that the more technology that is involved, the more convincing it is,

it's technology has this ability to confer legitimacy and authenticity onto any process that becomes really hard to resist.

You're basically now asking for someone to go up

against what feels like the entire military industrial complex in order to say, I don't know about this. So I do see both drones. And then AI enhanced targeting as just the next step in an evolution that starts with precision warfare.

One quick edit more talking about AI, the DOD directive, the standard is not mean for human control. The standard actually used in a DOD directive is appropriate levels of human judgment. Which to me, I think, doesn't even necessarily

mean a human on the loop, definitely not in the loop. But I mean, with that language, it doesn't necessarily even mean to me on the loop that could be anything. Yeah, I have good point. Yeah, I mean, it's probably deliberately

kind of woolly language to allow for some of this. But yeah, I think you're right. So if I can ask a follow-up to that, then, there's a whole bunch of AI conversations going on today, not just for Iran, but we had the anthropic DOD

being fight about autonomous weapons. So based on what you researched for your book, you know, what is there any lessons learned that you would take that you say we should be thinking about when we're having these conversations

on AI-enabled warfare today? One of the things, and this is a little bit of a tangent, but because the book doesn't-- is not focused on, of course, nuclear weapons. In a way, it's about the anti-nuclear weapon.

But a lot of it takes place over the course of the Cold War

And part of course, what happened then and why there was such

that emphasis around developing more nuclear weapons here was because the USSR was so far ahead of us. And then, of course, after the war, it comes to find out they weren't. So I'm not an expert in, for example,

what the Chinese are doing around AI. But, of course, you hear constant. And we need to take off the brakes because we don't want to lag behind them. They might be way ahead of us.

And I don't know that that's not true, but I'm a little skeptical. I sort of want to know, is that true or are we--

“is that just sort of becoming a self-affluent prophecy?”

Because, again, I think the idea is both not

to lose technological superiority, but also,

we don't want to be slower than they are. We don't want it to take much longer for us to decide to react to engage than it does them, because then we're at this advantage. And so the momentum, just like it was

in the nuclear competition and developing more weapons and more quicker means to deliver them, is to less and less time, which then means lower and lower margin of error. And one of the other examples people bring up all the time

is I think it was a kernel in the Soviet military who was at one of the early warning system radars or whatever, and the system started blinking red. There's incoming ICBMs from US. I'd put you turned out to be a solar flare or something.

But his job at that point was to launch was to begin a launch process. And he just decided on his own. This doesn't seem right. I'm not going to do it.

And arguably saved us from Armageddon. So we're not really talking right now about, for example, nuclear weapons powered by AI. Maybe that's happening to--

“I believe that's the one restriction is right now”

is that the weapons cannot be AI controlled. OK, well, let's check in on that in a week and see. But that guy had very little time. Whatever it was, 25 minutes, 30 minutes between what he thought what the system was saying

was a launch and strike to sort of launch nuclear rushes entirely nuclear arsenal. That seemed like a very contracted period of time. And that period of time between something's happening, are we engaging?

Yes or no, is shrinking. Because, OK, right now it's not nuclear weapons. But it's maybe a bunker-busting bomb at a major urban center in Russia, whatever. And there's less and less time, because we

think they can move faster, and maybe they can. So we're sort of like barreling towards this situation where the entire system is saying strike. And the one person who may be on the loop or whatever that person's engagement actually is,

there's not that much time to be like, now, wait a minute. Where is this intelligence coming from? [MUSIC PLAYING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] [SPEAKING SPANISH]

[SPEAKING SPANISH] [SPEAKING SPANISH] [SPEAKING SPANISH] Yeah, now that you've scared us. So let's talk about, you know, I'm thinking

of Ukraine lessons learned, or even arguably some of the stuff coming out of Iran today.

“And for Ukraine, it was the value of cheap drones at scale, right?”

Not really a new lesson, but the idea that you can use cheap improvised weapons versus expensive precision weapons. And so I'm wondering just your thoughts on what are actually the limitations on these exquisite weapons?

Is that benefit eroding someone we see in these conflicts? Just the amount of money and how quickly you can run through those when you have a cheap alternative on the other side. Yeah, I mean, the asymmetry is something

that is confounding war planners now and is worrying. It was really inspiring when Ukraine was doing it. Now it's really worrying that Iran is doing it. This is a bit of a generalization, but it is generally way more expensive and technologically

involved to develop defensive weapons.

The Patriot system is whatever it's a billion dollar system

in each missile, something like $4 million and we're using these to shoot down like $20,000,000 drones, which are also not just cheaper, but way easier and faster to produce.

One of the things that was so advantageous

“about paved way and about as a precision weapon”

is that it was so cheap and relatively simple. And we saw this beginning to evolve with enemies or potential enemies where every time there was a new capability in paved way in the other sort of its cousins,

there was a new way that foreign countries tried to plan for them, whether it was better surface to air missile systems or more strongly reinforced bunkers and it's a bunker-busting paved way is maybe $100,000 to rebuild a bunker

to be more defensive against that as however many millions of dollars. And we're sort of seeing the other side of this now. We have to come up with a way to defend against these weapons we've sort of inspired because generally speaking,

they're becoming way more inexpensive

and there is not a symmetrical cost savings in the weapons we use to shoot them down and protect ourselves yet at least. - I also wonder here a little bit on the political limitations. So your book covered Operation Unified Protection

in Libya in 2011. And you had this line after the death of Gaddafi that was something like it began to look less like the end of a conflict and more like the beginning of one. And that's from a time when I was in uniform

and I felt that line a lot. And you have people from the non-air services like the army constantly saying, you can't win a war from the air. And so I'm just kind of thinking

if you could talk a little bit about those types of limitations

“and what you've seen, and I think Libya is a perfect example”

by no means the only one. - Yeah, I think Libya is a really good example of that because the air services were really effective initially. I mean, not initially, throughout the entire course, I mean, the US air services and also the NATO allies,

I mean, basically everything they were supposed to do they did.

Part of the UN authorization for that restricted NATO boots on the ground. But either way, I think there was a confidence that we just have to prevent Gaddafi from being able to use the resources regime had to oppress

and massacre his own people. And as that campaign were on, just became clear that you could use air strikes to drive regime forces back from a position and but they come back in a week or two. So that's one example of why like you just can't really,

you need someone on the ground to hold that territory to take that thing over. As many gains as you can make purely from air power, if you're trying to stabilize a country or occupy it, you just can't really do that from the air.

And one of the reasons that ended up being such a tragic was because one of the solutions was, well, we have all these repatriating Libyans who were living abroad who were coming back and want to free their country.

But a lot of them were just people. I mean, they were not trained. So you had, and a lot of them were really young. So you have a lot of really young, non-professional people coming back because of the opportunity

to help liberate their country who are then seeing awful things who are not trained. And I use this one example of one of them came back and ended up bombing the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, which we can't get too far

into the minds of a terrorist. But clearly what he had seen and been through and in Libya was part of what drove him on this course, and the fact that because it became so chaotic after the death of Gaddafi, Libya became the next safe

haven for ISIS. And in particular, this part of ISIS that is sort of like the shock troops, sort of the international kind of shock troops of ISIS. So it became kind of a breeding ground

for a lot of the terrorist attacks we saw in the aftermath of that around the world. - Yeah, I mean, Libya is to me like such a tragic story. The reasons that NATO and the United States got involved, and there really was this hope that if you could stop Gaddafi,

there could be a better Libya.

“And then as we found that just air power is not enough, right?”

Like you had to have the follow-through, and especially in a country with a dictator, right? So there had been there for so long. You didn't have, you didn't have the infrastructure, you didn't have the forces, you didn't have the other side.

And with an unwillingness to put boots on the ground. - Yeah. - It's just such a sad story to see how it plays out and for everyone who was involved in it. - And I think we saw version of that also prior to that

in the second Iraq war, where of course we did put boots on the ground, but it wasn't nearly as many as the generals as the people who, you know, Tommy Franks requested. And part of that was because it was for political reasons

and the people inside the Bush White House

People who aside from Rumsfeld didn't necessarily

have any reason to know.

“And also there was a lack of intelligence on my ground”

then too. By the time the Shokkenok campaign started, there had been a CIA covert operations campaign where to talk about the book, which had been stood up, but it had been started from scratch.

And in 2000, late 2001 or early 2002, there had literally been no intelligence presence on the ground. And you could sort of see that as things like, for example, de-bathification, where we thought we had to sort of drive

all the people who were part of Saddam's party out of power and it turned out, you know, a lot of them were bathists because you kind of had to be to be an engineer or look at the water treatment plan or whatever.

And so there was this very obvious mistake where we set back that country from redeveloping, because we just got rid of all the technocrats really unnecessarily. So those were things that, again,

I mean, a really precise, effective initial air campaign without boots on the ground, or at least sufficient boots on the ground and intelligence on the ground still, it's up leading to disaster. - Yeah, okay, so this also then makes me think

of precise air campaigns with the boots on the ground and what that means for the war power is the resolution. - Good segue. - We've had this in the news a lot lately. And so I'm just thinking, you know,

the war power's resolution was created due to concerns about escalation and democratic accountability, right? And that was the framework. And so your book kind of goes through,

you know, these technologies can make war more limited, more politically manageable. And so I'm wondering what your thoughts on, what does that mean for congressional oversight now and the presidents use to force?

- So yeah, so it's a good question and good segue. I mean, one of my hypotheses is that part of the reason we have that debate now is because of these capabilities.

So in other words, if we were deciding to go to war with Iran and we didn't have these capabilities and we needed to, you know, forward mobilize a few battalions or whatever,

we needed to move a bunch of air assets. It's just practically, you can't really do that without anyone knowing. You can't move, you know, 100,000 troops without people knowing and needing to approve of it.

But if you can sort of pull the trigger and a few people inside the Oval Office can make a decision and, you know, a few minutes later, precise weapons are falling overseas, then practically, you have the capability to do that.

We're previously, this wasn't as much of an issue because there wasn't the capability to do it anyway.

“I think we saw this probably most clearly,”

the first U.S. intervention in Libya in '80s,

Operation El Dorado Canyon, where we launched a pretty significant air raid, one night air raid in Libya and nobody knew about it, no one in Congress, none of our allies, except for a few people in the U.K.,

because some of the planes took off from lack in the U.K., but even inside the White House, you know, it was Reagan and a few advisors, even inside the National Security Council, not everybody knew what was happening.

And that was only possible because there was pave way and weapons like pave way and planes, capable of flying, flow radar signature that were able to drop a bunch of bombs on Libya and no one knew until they were on their way home.

And so we're beginning to see that more and more, where, okay, what we can do this, why would we wait and signal to everyone and lose the element of surprise by notifying Congress and allies

when practically we don't need to? - Yeah, and it wouldn't be law fair if we didn't bring some of the legal pieces in here. So for Libya, the 2011 version,

there was an OLC opinion that basically uses the technology

that you're talking about here and says that, well, we've got to talk about if it's war within the meaning of the declare war cause of the constitution, right? And so with today's wars where there's no boots on the ground,

very little to no threat to US forces, that's not declare war is the founder of ThoughtFit. And therefore, the war powers resolution and those restrictions don't apply. - Right.

- And that was written for Libya in 2011, but that has been referenced for a number of serious strikes, various other things. And there's this kind of, the war of today is not the war of our founders

and therefore, the limitations don't apply. It was the type of argument. - Yeah, one of the editors, a brilliant writer editor named Andy Kai for who helped a lot with this book,

wanted to call one of the subtitles to be the quest for war without war.

“Which, but I think by that, the idea is war”

where we can fight without feeling any effects, 'cause we can do it over there, precisely. But partially also this, like this war we're starting is not actually a war. We don't have to call it a war

because of this minutia in how we're articulating it.

okay, well, we're not putting a few hundred thousand troops

in a harm's way, so therefore it's not really war as the founders conceived of it or whatever. But even far away wars for far away non-wards, there can still be blowback. There's still people getting hurt and killed

and people losing families in livelihood and there's still a threat that is potentially eliminated by that conflict, but also potentially inspired by that conflict that will incur a cost on the whole man.

So I understand the desire to sort of come up with a semantic justification for things that need to be quick and you do eliminate a threat before it really becomes manifest. But no matter how far away or how precise, the thing is exploding somewhere,

it is war, at least to the people on the receiving end. - Yeah, I mean, it just makes me think

it's the difference between domestic law and international law.

For international law purposes, we're absolutely saying

“it is war, therefore, that's why we can bomb and kill.”

It's just domestically, there's a different story told. - Right, right. - So we talked a little bit about the future and AI, but I'm also just wondering, you know, all of this research you did on modern warfare,

is there something that really worries you about the future? Is there some peace that you're like, this is gonna be the next piece that we're not ready for yet or that's gonna have catastrophic effects?

- Yeah, although it's probably less of a sexy answer than you might hope for, which it's just the continuing momentum towards shorter and shorter time, towards more and more collapsed kill chain, which to me, I think creates the opportunity

for a lot more mistakes and a lot more engaging in conflict that could have been resolved otherwise. I mean, I don't want to sound naive. I mean, there are bad actors who want to hurt Americans in our allies who, you know,

for these are situations for which weapons and capabilities like this are a really good way of eliminating them without destroying entire cities. But the, you know, human on the looper or whatever, the one person who may or may not be the one who's supposed

to say, "No, don't do this." The pressure on that person and the time they have to evaluate engaging or not in particular strike is just getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And I think that as a result, you know,

the easier it gets to execute a strike and the harder it gets to resist, you know, the other side of that equation is just more and more conflict and not all of which is necessary

“and a lot of which I think will lead to further conflict.”

- But then what's the answer, right? Like you want your decision time frame to be short. I mean, the Air Force has a whole Uta loop, right? Like it's all about shortening your decision timeline, you know, making it faster than your enemies.

So, you know, what's the answer if, you know, we keep trying to make it shorter and shorter and that leads to more and more mistakes. Like what do you do to reduce risk there? - Well, I think, you know,

and I'm not a military expert or a legal expert or really any kind of expert, but to me, it's the decision-making process, for there to be as much attention on that as there is on the technological and practical means

of collapsing the kill chain and quickening the decision loop. It's one of these things where it actually reminds me a little bit of, you know, the early days of drone warfare and surveillance drones, where the technology, you know, for example, it's way easier to get congressional justification

for a shiny new thing than it is for seven more analysts behind computers, you know, in rest in Virginia or whatever. But we were collecting way more intelligence than we had the capability to process.

“And so, I think there's a similar thing here”

where the technology and the capabilities are really sexy and easier to get funding for. And these are to get attention for. But how we keep up in terms of like how we make the decisions the legal justification, you know,

there are probably our ways maybe also with AI to accelerate that process as well and to allow almost as much thoughtfulness or at least more thoughtfulness in that contracted timeline and for that to keep pace with all of the technological ability we have to collapse the timeline.

So in other words, for these two things to be rising in parallel, rather than just, well, we have to make this as fast as possible so we're not slower than the enemy. Because again, you know, you can create as much blowback as the threat that you eliminate or the threat

that you can respond to quickly. And, you know, we did this with Drone Warfare where Predator Bays had, you know, jags and people evaluating targets for legal justification in real time, that slows it down.

But there's probably way for it to slow it down less. - Yeah, I like the idea of like focusing on process and your process should be developed along with these advances, right?

Like we should always be saying, okay,

who does what, what can you do, what can you not do?

How are you recording what the decision was, right,

for evaluation later? And I think that that's a fair point and sometimes we're so focused on

“that advancement in making those things happen”

that the process is less exciting that oversight is less exciting. And so you're not having that go at the same speed. - Yeah.

- So maybe not a exciting answer,

but here at Laugh Fair we went the right answer, not a exciting answer. - Maybe neither, but. (laughing) - No, I think this was good. So we'll leave it there for today.

Thanks Jeff, it was great to hear about your new book The Warhead. - Thank you, Lauren, this is great. Thank you so much. (upbeat music)

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(upbeat music) - So, here's what's core to the series here. I'm a new host, Lucas Bodozki. I want to show you a song from Cargnet 10. Cargnet is the app with the crypto-entic offer.

Hundreds of coins trading, portfolio-and-blick behalden, and the whole with millions of users worldwide. But Cargnet Mark is, that the app lasts for a long time. There must be no finance profile. Cargnet.com/polie or on App Store.

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