April 2, 2025 • 56 mins
Join Hoover fellow and Director of the Hoover Institution's Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative Jacquelyn Schneider for the launch of her new book "The Hand Behind Unmanned: Origins of the US Autonomous Military Arsenal" at the Hoover Institution in Washington, DC on Wednesday, March 26, from 5:30 - 7:15pm ET.
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Episode Transcript
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>> Michael Horowitz (00:04):
Hey everybody.
Welcome to the hooverinstitution in DC this evening.
My name is Mike Horowitz.
I have no affiliation withStanford University or
the Hoover Institution at all, butI do know the two amazing authors next
to me that have written this incrediblebook, the Hand Behind Unmanned.
(00:25):
And really excited to be here andhelp moderate this conversation tonight
are our two authors are Jackie Schneider,who's a Hoover Fellow and
director of the War Gaming andCrisis Simulation initiative.
And Julie McDonald, who's a researchprofessor at the Corbel School
of International Studies atthe University of Denver.
(00:46):
I've known them for years andspent time with them throughout
the book writing andediting process in many ways, and
super thrilled to be here todayto talk about it with you all.
I think that this book really is going toreshape how we think about the choices
(01:06):
that the American military has made overthe last several decades concerning,
I would say probably uncrewed ratherthan a manned, uncrewed technology.
And then what that means then forthe future of war.
And this is a rare example and it's alwaysof exactly what we want in thinking about
academic scholarship thatconnects to the policy world.
(01:29):
And that this is a rigorouslyresearched social science book that
also can directly speak to some of thehuge challenges that are facing the world.
And some of the big choicesthat the American military is
gonna need to make in the comingyears about how to size and
(01:49):
shape the joint force forthe future challenges that it faces.
And before I go any further,Julia and Jackie also have created
an awesome podcast based on the book,also called the Hand Behind Unmanned.
There's a QR code kicking around somewherethat you can access to access the podcast.
(02:10):
It'll be available on Spotify,Apple, their website,
all the, all the places that you access,that you access podcasts.
They interviewed me for it, which willbe the least interesting part of it.
But there are lots ofgreat people as well.
So without further ado,why don't we, why don't we jump in?
So I guess the first questionto anybody writing a book is why
(02:33):
did you write this book?
>> Julie McDonald (02:36):
Thanks, Mike.
And thank you all for being here today.
It's very exciting for both Jackie and I.
Listen, Jackie and I met around 2012at a military workshop for students,
SWAMOS, where we were in the midstof the global war on terror.
There was drone strikes place acrossAfghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen.
(03:01):
And Jackie and I were sort oflooking out at this use of force.
And I'm really interested in why the USwas choosing to use these platforms.
And we started off on an initial lineof inquiry around risk tolerance.
Why did leaders choose drones,and did people trust drones?
And then we started to ask biggerquestions about why do we see,
(03:25):
given the array of unmannedtechnologies that are available,
this heavy investment in aerial platforms,especially amongst what
would be a service that you wouldexpect to sort of reject that, right?
So unmanned platforms.
And so when you look across time andyou see the array of unmanned technologies
that there are torpedoes, cruise missiles,ballistic missiles, mines, sort of.
(03:49):
How have we ended up at this point intime where we see this heavy investment,
mainly in the Air Force, mainly in theseexquisite sort of unmanned platforms
that perform these persistentloitering missions?
And so that begged the question of why.
Why do we have this trajectory versus manyof the others that may have been available
to the unmanned force over time.
(04:10):
Jackie, do you want toadd anything to that?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (04:12):
I think for Julia and I, I mean,
you all might come here cuz you wannahear about the technology, but Julia and
I have always been scholars thatlook at people in organizations.
And I think the fundamental puzzle for
us was there was a lot of agencybeing given the technology, and
there wasn't a lot of story or descriptionor understanding of why that technology.
(04:33):
And so this is a story,a book about people and
people more than it is the technology.
>> Michael Horowitz (04:41):
All right, so it's a story about people,
not necessarily technology.
So what's the main argument then?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (04:47):
Yeah, so I think, you know,
the big argument is how we buyweapons is not strictly rational.
And for any of you who have been aroundthe Department of Defense, that's like,
well, duh.
>> Michael Horowitz (05:00):
[LAUGH] So bad, sorry.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (05:04):
So I think in some ways,
that argument doesn'tsound particularly novel.
But despite the fact that that argumentdoesn't sound novel, most of the work
on technology actually focuses on thingsthat come after beliefs like how.
How much money did we invest?
Did we build the right capacity?
And so this is an argument thatbeliefs and identities are how we
(05:29):
process uncertainty and how we makedecisions about emerging technology.
And sowe argue that there are two beliefs and
one really important set of identitiesthat define how we bought technology,
how we thought about the investmentin these unmanned technologies.
And so just to preview the argument,the number one reason why we buy some
(05:52):
technologies over others, whether it'sunmanned or manned, is service identity.
So how the Air Force, the Navy,the army views who they are,
how they believe the futureof war should be fought, and
how Their technologies, mostly mannedplatforms, affect that future of war.
But those identities sometimesdon't have a good theory about
(06:15):
how emerging technologyaffect the future of war.
And so we identified two beliefs thatreally dominated the last 30 years.
And one of those is the beliefin military revolutions,
which comes from a office that, as of, Idon't know, a week ago, no longer exists,
the Office of Net Assessment.
And the second->> Michael Horowitz: Not ready to talk
about that yet.
(06:36):
And the second big belief is casualty aversion that
the American public will onlysupport war if it means that we
don't lose American lives.
And those two things, the kind of desireto use technology as a substitute for
human life and the belief that technology,the adoption of the correct technology,
(06:56):
creates these massive revolutionaryjumps in military effectiveness,
are the two beliefs that best explain whywe bought the types of unmanned technology
that we do.
But how those beliefs propagate,that's where the people.
And kind of this really interesting storyof how people build influence inside
the Pentagon comes across.
>> Michael Horowitz (07:18):
So this is a technology book about, about people who
are some of the, I mean, I would say dish,but it's like literally in the book, the.
Who are some of the people that thenplayed a really defining role here in
either driving, I'll use your term,unmanned investments or holding them back?
>> Julie McDonald (07:37):
I mean, one of the key, again,
returning to the Office of Net Assessment,unfortunately.
One of the key people in the book whois really the champion of the military
revolution's belief that we talk aboutis Andy Marshall in the Office of
Net Assessment,which doesn't have a budget line and
doesn't have a huge amountof political influence.
And so what he does is he builds these,these networks.
(08:00):
And educates people, and informs them and
empowers them to carry forward this beliefin different ways as they get promoted.
So, he focuses on military officersthat rise through the ranks.
And so, you end up with Bob workwith a third offset who has learned
about the military revolutionsthrough the work of Andy Marshall.
You have Krapenovich,who then translates, and
(08:23):
feeds into defensereviews in the 1990s and
shapes the force leading up to 20 2001.
And then, you have him focusing also onthe academics that go out to PMI's and
military institutions who can, again,advocate this belief in the military.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (08:42):
Yeah, so Andy Marshall is like that,
the kind of OG Pentagoninfluencer on the civilian side.
But I think the story also talks a lotabout military influencers, right?
Not every general actually is a major kindof influence in how we think about war,
and the technologies that we build.
(09:02):
So, we start this story, we have a historychapter, and LeMay comes into it.
So he's like the originalAir Force influencer.
For those of you all who aren't as versedin Air Force Corps history as I am as
an old air force officer, LeMay is the onewhere we go around with the big cigar and
every testimony in Congress.
He's got a big cigar, and it's likestrategic air power forever, right?
(09:26):
And he is really influencing thedevelopment of how the Air Force thinks
about ballistic missiles,
the relationship between ballisticmissiles, and manned bombers.
And then the next bigkind of influencer for
the Air Force inside the servicesbecomes Bernard Schreiber.
And Schriever comes at a time,a Sputnik moment,
(09:46):
where there's a big infusion of resourcesto invest in ballistic missiles,
which LeMay is not a huge fan of,but Shriver sees a world for them.
And so, you have Shriver in the Air Force,you have Rickover in the Navy.
And then,moving into the more contemporary,
you see these generations of Vietnamofficers, people like Colin Powell,
(10:09):
and then people coming upthrough the army like Starry and
Depew and these internal influencers.
So they're building influence kindof opposite from Andy Marshall.
They're building it organicallythrough doctrine, through training,
through experiences on the battlefield.
Whereas Andy Marshall is building itfrom the outside in going from a policy
(10:31):
report to a book to PME curriculum andinfluencing in a very different way.
>> Julie McDonald (10:37):
Yeah, and what we find partly because of that is that the beliefs
that are generated from experiences,
from firsthand experiences inVietnam are much more Sticky.
Much more ingrained beliefs thanthe military revolution's belief,
which seems more sort of intellectual,academic, that has to be taught,
and isn't quite as firm andingrained because of that.
>> Michael Horowitz (10:58):
So, turning in some ways from history to today,
the Department of Defense hasmade some effort over the last
few years to try to acceleratethe scaling of unmanned systems
that have different types of unmannedsystems in some ways sort of like cheaper,
(11:20):
triable, precise mass systemsthan it had in the past.
So, let me make it about me and say,
based on the theory of your book,am I going to get my robot army?
And if I don't get my robot army, why not?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (11:39):
Yeah, so this is a great question.
I love that.
So Mike, we wrote this book so long agoyou didn't get to be a main character, but
if we'd written it now,you would get to be a main character.
So, it's exciting.
So, the question of the robot army isactually one of these kind of giant
puzzles about the American arsenal.
We have this arsenal of exquisite andexpensive remotely controlled platforms.
(12:06):
And it doesn't look a lot like the typeof platforms that you're seeing.
Platforms of the wrong use,the type of munitions, and
small quadcopters thatyou're seeing in Ukraine.
It doesn't look like the largeinventories of conventional missiles
that are a key part ofthe Chinese unmanned arsenal.
So why not?
(12:26):
And will that change?
And I think a dominant answer is thata lot of these systems don't fit within
these core service identities.
The Air Force is more likely to adoptunmanned than other services, but
they're going to adopt unmannedin a way that propagates
the core idea about strategic air power.
So, it's no surprise that the Air Forceis looking at unmanned fighters
(12:49):
that do the same things thatthey value in the fighters
that they have manned platforms in, right?
Like the fact that they were focusedon creating an AI driven fighter jet.
That's not super necessarily useful,
it's definitely not the robotarmies that you wanted, right?
So then->> Michael Horowitz: To any of them.
So, unless the Air Force can make the robot army start
(13:14):
looking like something inwhich the manned pilot is
controlling those robot systems,then it has a lot more legs.
I think you would expect that the armywould be the one that adopts a lot of
the small copter systems, because that'show they're being used in Ukraine.
They are tied intrinsically to corearmy units, whether that's infantry or
(13:35):
artillery.
And they're kind of substituting orenabling core army missions very much
not the strategic airpower thatthe Air Force would prefer.
But I think the army todayis in a bit of a confusion
about who they are in this newforeign policy world, right?
What is the army doing in China?
Where is the big mass ground invasion?
(13:56):
And so, because of that,
I think somewhat limits the Army'skind of desire to adopt these.
I think you will get the robot army,and I think it will be the Marines.
I think the Marines all throughout thebook become one of the leading innovators
to adopting unmanned technologies.
But they're limited by the fact thattheir budget comes down from the Navy.
So, all the innovation and
(14:17):
experimentation that they're going to dobecause the Marines core identity is they
are the best at whatever everybody elsehas core missions that they are good at.
The Marines are like no,we're just the best.
So, because of that, they're more flexiblewith adapting to new missions and
new technology, but they're alwayssomewhat limited by how the Navy views its
acquisition of technologies.
(14:37):
And so, I think it will be.
I think you will get your robot army, but
I think it will be the Marinesthat are most likely to adopt it.
>> Michael Horowitz (14:45):
That actually checks out very well with
the experiences I had in the Pentagon forthe.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (14:49):
That's good, that's always helpful.
>> Michael Horowitz (14:51):
For the last couple of years, over the last few years,
the Marine Corps hasconsistently been ready to push
the envelope in thinkingabout adopting cheaper,
more attributable kinds of systems andis faced various budget constraints.
And whereas making the case to the armyhas been making the why case to the army
has always been more isalways been more challenging.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (15:10):
That's always very like reassuring as an author that your.
Your book has some levelof face validity is.
>> Michael Horowitz (15:19):
So, here's another way to think about this in that the sooner
you go through in the book, how it is thatwe get the unmanned systems that we get,
and sort of most prominently in thecontext going back to sort of what Julia
said about when you met and war on terror.
When we thought about unmanned systems fora long time we thought about them
(15:40):
as sort of platforms like,like the Predator and the Reaper.
And then, we simultaneously think about
the US as an innovator when itcomes to military technology.
But the until collaborative combataircraft became a program of record for
the Air force in an FY20.
In FY24,the most recent program of record had been
(16:03):
almost 20 years before with the Reaper.
The US navy has never had a programof record for an unmanned,
for an armed unmanned, foran armed unmanned system.
So I guess a little bit of this is like,what does this tell us about the Navy?
In a world where, and in some ways,I think you, I think I know where you will
(16:25):
go with the answer, but it's important foreveryone to hear you, hear you say it.
In a world where we think about the USlike we're on the cutting edge,
like we have the best technology.
How can that be true?
And it'd be true that we've been in someways monumentally slow at adopting some
of these technologies.
>> Julie McDonald (16:45):
I mean, some of it goes back to what we've already said.
And Jackie, I'll let you add on to thisthat a lot of this comes back to these
core service identities andthese efforts to try.
And these efforts to try and push servicesto integrate technologies that do not
align with those core identities.
And you see, for example, with the Navy,
the U class system that ultimatelyfails in the early 2000s.
(17:07):
Yeah, the 2000s.
And in fact, the Navy identity,going back to your question, Mike,
in our book is clearly the strongest andthe most difficult to shift on this and
the most reticent to some of theseexternal beliefs and influences.
And so part of it is the service identity.
And also, as we talked aboutthe lack of a champion, right?
(17:28):
For this to happen,you need these internal service champions.
And in so many stories in our bookwhere actually you get past these,
these service identities,the stickiness, you need someone inside,
inside championing those technologies.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (17:43):
I think we can't forget that war is the final arbiter
on innovation, andit's also one of the major catalysts.
So in the absence of war,
the US tends to kind of revert backto what we would call no hypothesis.
But these core identities, andthose core identities tend
to focus on kind of strategicthe peacetime military.
(18:07):
And it's when war, the Korean War,the Vietnam War, the war on terror
that you see these kind of infusion oftechnology that allows for innovation and
experimentation with technology outsidethese traditional service identities.
So in the case of the Navy andthe War on terror,
the Navy had a different mission inthe war on terror than like the army and
(18:29):
the Air Force who are workingthis kind of ground battle and
having to figure out how they'reintegrating Technology on the ground and
the Navy in some ways, you know,was a little bit further removed, right?
So you don't have that impetus.
The Navy's primary mission during a lotof the time that we were doing this
(18:50):
book was really fonops, right?
They're doing presence,they're deterrents.
They are in some waysdoing kind of these core
Cold War deterrence strategic missions,right?
And so I think that that means that theykind of solidify into their core identity.
And for the Navy, somuch about how they buy weapons is this
(19:11):
competition between their differentidentities within the Navy.
So I used to be an Air Force,I am an Air Force officer.
>> Michael Horowitz (19:19):
Not biased at all.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (19:21):
But then I went to work for the Navy for a few years and
I had come from the Air Force where Ithought like maybe we weren't joint.
And then I went to the Navy and I waslike, my gosh, this service hates joints.
I did not realize that the Navy,because it has so
many core capabilities within the Navy.
You have the aircraft carry,you have surface warfare,
you have the subsurface warfare.
(19:43):
They don't really get influenced by thesejoint battles as much because the battle
is inside the Navy.
I think that helps explain the directionof naval investment in unmanned systems.
It didn't nicely fitinto these competitions.
I think if we had a shriver,if there was somebody in the,
the kind of underwaterkind of warfare world,
(20:06):
this is where the Navy shouldbe really focusing on autonomy.
I mean there's some physics problemswith remote control underwater,
which I think is also a real reluctanceto investing because you really have
to completely give the technologyfull autonomy because it's so
difficult to communicate underwater.
(20:29):
But this is the future of a lot ofthe contestation that's going to be
happening in conflict.
And so if there was somebody inthat kind of submarine warfare that
had that charisma and that stickto it Iveness that Rickover had.
And then I think we might see a lotmore innovation happening underwater.
(20:51):
And I think the air is comesback to some of these other core
concerns about platform andyou know, those type of things.
>> Michael Horowitz (21:03):
And in the U class example that Julia gave the Navy took this
potentially brilliant idea to createessentially drones that could fly off
aircraft carriers and launch weapons attargets and turn that into an air to air
refueling robotic platforms that stilllike only like is kind of deployed.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (21:21):
I mean, I think that is such a good example of how
difficult it is in our imaginationsometimes about unmanned and that was,
I know we have a difference ofopinion on unmanned versus uncrewed.
But so much of what drew us to this is wefelt there was this binary unmanned versus
man, and we were taking a manned platformwhere we were saying, we will simply take
the man out of the platform andthen it will be an unmanned thing.
(21:42):
And you weren't getting these wonderful,
the real benefit of someof the autonomy and
the unmanned element because youwere thinking beyond tank with man,
tank without man, fighter with man,fighter without man.
And instead, that's why so much of ourbook talks about missiles and mines and
(22:05):
munitions as the actual trade off andthe actual kind of set
of choices that you can make whenyou're building out the arsenal.
>> Michael Horowitz (22:13):
So I wanna change to a sort of different theoretical element in
your book that we didn't havereally talked about much yet,
which is casualty aversion.
So in some ways now, the Americanmilitary for the last eight years or so
has been primarily focused on great powercompetition with one phrase or another,
(22:33):
primarily sort of Russia andChina shifting away from the forever wars.
Now it seems to be aboutthe homeland in China to look at,
if you look at what officials fromthe Trump administration are saying,
but it wasn't so long ago, of course,that the global war on terror
(22:53):
was the dominant thing people weredealing with in a defense context.
So tell us about casualty aversion andhow it, how it then shapes some of
the developments that youtalk about in the book.
>> Julie McDonald (23:05):
Sure, so the casualty aversion belief in our book really comes
out and grows out of Vietnam soldiersexperiences in Vietnam, the grueling
war of attrition, and the loss ofpublic support, crucially for that war.
And the fact that it was televised,shown to the US Public and
political leaders in the US reallyinternalized the fact that the loss
(23:29):
of support led to a lack of ability toprosecute the war as they would want to.
And this was then internalized bythe military leaders at the time as well.
So Carl Mueller's writtenthis very famous,
he says that as casualties go up,support for war goes down.
And this is ingrained ina generation of military officers,
(23:52):
this belief that you need tomaintain public support for
war in order to be able towin wars in the future.
Carried forward, I mean, this beliefyou can see very starkly in returns
again in the 1990s when you have Bosnia,you have down forces again.
And you see an investment during thattime and actually not unmanned platforms,
(24:16):
but in missiles, precision guidedmissiles, cruise missiles,
to be able to keepUS Forces from harm's way.
And it's carried forwardthrough Colin Powell,
a number of other senior generalswho fought in Vietnam, and
then again as we enterthe global war on terror,
(24:36):
right when the military revolution'srelief was poised in 9/11,
right before that, to really take off and
to shape the development ofthe force that again reverts back.
The desire to keep US Forcesfrom harm's way and
also to protect non-US Forces, right?
To protect civilians means that that'swhen you see this doubling down on these,
(25:00):
these unmanned platforms thatcan provide persistence,
provide this loitering capability,but keeping, keeping us away from.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (25:07):
And just to give like a personal vignette, I was,
I think I'll date myself here.
I joined the air Force in 2005,which means that as I was learning to
become an officer and getting mygood old Air Force indoctrination,
I learned about Mueller andthe CNN effect and
was told that this was an important partof how we thought about strategic victory.
(25:29):
It wasn't until decades,well, maybe not a decade and
a half later, we're in grad school and
Mueller is not the last one to writeabout public opinion and support for war.
There's all sorts of workthat happens after Mueller.
And guess what?
It's not a simple story.
Actually, Americans are not as casualtyaverse as I had been taught as
(25:53):
a young officer.
In fact, Americans like to win.
So Americans are casualty averse ifthey don't believe in something or
if they feel like they're going to lose.
And those things sometimescompete with each other.
But it's not actually a clear story thatAmericans are actually casualty averse.
And so it's really fascinating, especiallywhen you read the papers that were written
(26:14):
in the time period of about 1990 tothe early 2000s by students going through
like the Naval War College, the NavalPostgraduate School, the Air University.
How important force protection became andhow internalized it came on literature
that actually ends up being not debunked,but actually, kind of revised.
>> Julie McDonald (26:35):
Qualified. >> Jacquelyn Schneider
it was really interesting.
I had been built on a beliefthat I realized, my gosh,
that this is where it came from.
But also we hadn't really updated thosebeliefs even after new information
had been put out.
>> Michael Horowitz (26:49):
So why isn't casualty aversion then enough to overcome service
identities in some of these cases?
Because if the logic of that argument iscorrect, then one might imagine that,
sure, the Navy likes to sail around andthe Air Force wants to do strategic
bombing and whatever caricaturethe services in general.
And I'm being like a littleflip to be provocative,
(27:11):
but in theory, though,if you don't want casualties,
then like substituting people out thenwould become really attractive, right?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (27:20):
Yeah, so this is complicated, right, because these beliefs
are not operating alone,they are interacting with each other.
And the interesting thing is how beliefsabout force protection start eliding and
interacting with beliefs about technologyand this revolutions in technology.
So I did some interviews with John Worden,who,
(27:41):
if you're an Air Force person,you were raised on John Warden, but yet
another example of an officer thatactually got fired for insubordination.
So it's like the Air Force way.
But John Worden was talking about howhe thought about centers of gravity and
the use of air power andtechnology going into the Gulf War.
And this was really, I wouldn't sayhe doesn't describe it as an army,
(28:05):
but this is a technology argument, right?
It fits really nicely in the Air Forceunderstanding of their role in war,
which is strategic air power,but it wasn't enough to convince,
Schwarzenegger and others.
So at the same time that he's making thisargument about this makes us more military
effective, we can do this type of warfare.
(28:27):
He's also realizing that, butthis also is gonna save civilians.
It's gonna make war less bloody.
And so we can both be technologicallydominant and we can avoid killing people.
And I actually think that's what ends upkind of culminating in the war on terror
is we are using these beliefs to say notonly can we insulate ourselves and in some
(28:49):
ways kind of decrease civilian violenceby substituting these technologies.
It's why you get these precise andpersistent technologies, but also, like,
we're so dominant that theoreticallywe should be able to get in the war and
get out.
Now, that ended up not playingout in Afghanistan, right?
And so, [LAUGH] yeah, and so you startquestioning whether these beliefs
(29:11):
actually can exist next to each other,and then you get third offset.
>> Michael Horowitz (29:16):
So, then where do you think that this means we end up heading
next?
So, I mean, you've said in some waysthat the Marine Corps is most likely to
deliver my robot army and so I'mgrateful in advance to the Marine Corps.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (29:31):
As long as the old Marines don't hold her.
>> Michael Horowitz (29:34):
But the-.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (29:35):
Marines don't cut it.
>> Michael Horowitz (29:36):
100%, but the where do you think that this nets out?
After all, we've now had many years oftraining to think about great power
competition again there,
the sort of lessons learned fromthe battlefield of Ukraine.
How do you think that this kindof nets out moving forward?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (29:56):
I have a depressing story here.
>> Julie McDonald (29:57):
[LAUGH] >> Jacquelyn Schneider
>> Michael Horowitz (29:59):
So excited.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (30:00):
[LAUGH] So I think we are in a idea void where
we don't have a clear idea about or
belief about the future of war.
The Office of Net Assessment is closed.
>> Michael Horowitz (30:17):
I mean, only as of like two weeks ago.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (30:19):
It's gone, right?
Where are the idea entrepreneursthat are telling us
about what the future of war looks like?
>> Julie McDonald (30:31):
Mike, Mike is.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (30:32):
Well, we identify you as a possible,
as a possible one in the podcast.
>> Michael Horowitz (30:37):
That's horrifying.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (30:38):
[LAUGH] But you need a clear theory of victory.
And I think we came into the last30 years with two core beliefs.
And absent those core beliefs,
what's gonna drive the decisionswe make about the arsenal?
Well, we're gonna goback to service identity.
I think that's gonna bethe null hypothesis.
But if you look Doge andSecretary Hegseth,
(31:00):
they seem to be trained to destroya lot of those kind of core
bureaucrats elements that are partof what makes service identity so
powerful in terms oftechnological acquisition.
And in the absence of a clear ideaabout the future of war and potentially
these kind of outside influences that aretearing down some of the capabilities that
(31:23):
the services have built in budgets,then what fills the void?
And I think what I'm seeing is,and this is actually new for
our story, is an emerging,a burgeoning tech community that is
characterized just as much bythe Lockheeds and the Rapeians,
who generally followed kind ofsignals that came from the services
(31:48):
as much as it is by YouTubevideos put out by Palmer Lecky.
And you could be in a situation wherewe have an influx of investments.
You have gotten rid of some ofthe entrenched bureaucratic kind of
ways in which the servicesbuy technology and
you still are absenta theory of future victory.
(32:10):
And so we might get an arsenal that isdominated by what the new kind of defense
tech ecosystem thinks are the coolweapons that we should be investing in.
>> Julie McDonald (32:22):
Yeah, I mean there's one thing,
one thing that we do know from the bookis that you know that war matters, right?
War creates this learning experienceon a battlefield for experimentation.
And so to some extent, and
you would hope there was learningfrom going on from Ukraine.
And so that's to the extent that thereis some guiding force that they may be
(32:46):
taking the military andmaybe the defense industrial base as well,
taking lessons about the lackof US munitions, for example.
And the fact that in a war of attritionand a much longer term war potentially
against China, for example, that weneed to invest in ammunitions again.
So there are some lessons tobe learning from Ukraine.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (33:07):
What kind of munitions.
Like I think there's a lot ofinvestment right now, for example,
in quadcopters and these smallertechnologies that are dominating a really
land based war in Ukraine.
But what does that mean for what will beprimarily a naval conflict in the Pacific?
And then I had a conversationearlier today.
(33:28):
Where are the tech companies that areselling long range conventional strike?
Not many places, partly because there'snobody really, really clamoring for this.
And yet is one of the kind of keycomponents that is not in our arsenal
is that long range conventional strikethat doesn't require an aircraft or
(33:49):
a big platform in order to fire it.
>> Michael Horowitz (33:52):
And this is a good example in some ways going back to the,
where some of these investmentshave gone in the past,
where both the Air Force and the Navynow have experimental programs for
a really low cost long rangelong range cruise missile.
Neither of them have actuallycommitted to buy it.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (34:09):
Yeah, I think if those support the platforms that they
really demand, platforms primarilythat they would prefer to buy,
next generation fighters,the next generation of large ships,
then those are more likely to be adopted.
But I'm sitting here today justa girl asking the army to invest in
long range conventional strength.
>> Michael Horowitz (34:31):
I mean it- >> Jacquelyn Schneider
an Air Force officer, which I feel likeLeMay is turning grave right now [LAUGH].
Well, just to give a little more context to that,
think about something like whatIran has done with the Shaheed 136,
which is a weapon that you can produce forless than $100,000 that can go about
1,000 kilometers andcarry a 50 to 100 kilogram warhead.
(34:54):
That's something that could,in theory, be really useful for
the United States army seeking to projectpower and you could mass produce tomorrow.
But yet we don't see that.
Okay, two more questions andthen we'll open it up for the audience,
which is really just a hint.
Like, hey,think of questions that you're gonna ask.
So the first question is, what wouldit take to crack the fighter and
(35:18):
bomber mafia in the Air Force?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (35:20):
Okay, so I feel like this is unfair.
And I mean, full disclosure,I worked in a fighter squadron.
My husband's a fighter pilot.
This is my world.
But, like,
I really feel like fighter pilotsgot a bad rap on the unmanned stuff.
There was so much like,those fighter pilots,
they're like the cavalry officer flyinginto the conflict with old horses.
(35:44):
Flying into conflict with horses.
And like, this is not the storythat we find in the book.
>> Michael Horowitz (35:48):
This is exactly why I asked.
>> Julie McDonald (35:49):
[LAUGH] >> Jacquelyn Schneider
people that are buying unmannedaircraft over the last 30 years?
They are fighter pilots.
It is General John Jumper.
So I think this is a misnomer.
I mean, if anything, it is one ofthe kind of remarkable questions that
(36:13):
motivates the book is why the Air Force,the service of fighter pilots,
becomes the primary adopter ofunmanned systems in this world.
And I think part of why they do that.
Now, Jumper is actually interestingbecause he was in a position where he
was very intimately involved whena manned fighter was shot over Bosnia and
(36:35):
said that we had to do a reallycomplicated search and rescue effort.
And we have quotes in the book from,you know,
him talking about how impactful thatmoment was and how that led him to really
think about unmanned systems asan alternative to doing this manned work.
So I think for him,
there was also that kind of personalrelationship with a personal experience.
(36:59):
But I think in general,if you look at how the.
I mean, there is.
There are unmanned systems that are in thecafeteria, as at the Air Force Academy.
So I don't think there is a fighter bombermafia that is actively against unmanned
systems.
I actually think the biggest problem thatthe Air Force has had is that instead
(37:20):
is that because of their obsession,which is a good obsession,
because I'm married to a fighterpilot with the fighter aircraft.
They have focused too much onunmanned systems that replicate those
fighting those fighter pilotkind of core missions.
We do not->> Michael Horowitz: That's where I was
hoping you were going.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (37:39):
Okay [LAUGH],
we do not need an unmanned fighteraircraft doing dogfighting.
I used to be an intel officerin a fighter squadron.
We very rarely had a lot of dog fighting.
Almost everything is over the horizon.
Sensor fusion, using AMRAAMs and
other technology to shoot further andfurther along.
(37:59):
I mean, if anything, the dog fighting kindof was just an anachronism at the time.
So I don't think we need tocrack the fighter bomber mafia.
I think though, where the Air Forceneeds to think imagination wise is not
just thinking about how theseunmanned things can replicate what
their mapping has been doing.
(38:19):
But instead this kind of enablingmechanism that you've worked so
hard to develop to kinda try and
get technologies over that kind ofacquisition and funding line for.
>> Michael Horowitz (38:30):
All right, last question and then we will open it up,
which is, for both of you,what didn't you say in the book that you,
that you wish you could, that you wish youcould say and could share with us now?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (38:42):
You go first.
>> Julie McDonald (38:43):
I mean I don't think it's necessarily what we didn't say in
the book, but I'm struck when rereading abook, which I did recently cuz I was like,
it was a long time since we published,since we submitted this for publication.
That how close like Andy Marshallgot to realizing the sorta military
revolution stream twice, right?
(39:05):
And he got taken off course and his->> Michael Horowitz: 9/11.
9/11, yeah, 9 11.
And then even just like postGulf war budget shrinking,
had a bunch of people in the senior levelswho were not supportive of his ideas,
but poised right then to sort of takeunmanned technologies in the US Military
in a very different direction andhow contingent it was on just these key
(39:29):
events because the networks that hedeveloped were really astounding.
And we've sort of got a separate pieceon this that stems from the book on how
he built influence.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (39:39):
It's like that Kevin Bacon where like how many
Kevin Bacon.
>> Julie McDonald (39:43):
It's like you can trace people back.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (39:45):
In this room,
how many Kevin Bacons untilwe get to Andy Marshall?
>> Michael Horowitz (39:51):
I met Andy Marshall when I was 22.
>> Julie McDonald (39:53):
There we go.
There we go.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (39:55):
And he's dead.
So like impressive.
>> Julie McDonald (39:57):
Yeah.
And the games that he developed andthe different techniques and
tactics that he instituted topromulgate his beliefs and how so
close to being very effective.
That was.
And isn't to say it's not effective.
But there were just moments where itwas like, poor military revolutionists.
(40:18):
You were so close.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (40:19):
I think for me.
So this book took a little bitlonger than maybe it should have,
but there was a lot that->> Michael Horowitz: Every book
takes longer.
There was a lot that happened while we were writing or
after we submitted the first draft forpublication.
And one of the big things that happenedwas the creation of the Space Force.
And here you have a force that reallyis a force of unmanned things.
(40:43):
And look, I would have loved to doa better job of representing kind of why
we got to the point where somebody feltlike they needed to make a space force.
Why Eisenhower did not want a space force,and
then how the role of a servicethat is striving to make its own
identity could impact the makeupof our space based arsenal.
>> Michael Horowitz (41:08):
All right, well, you all have been very patient.
I know I've learned a lot fromthis conversation already, and
I look forward to taking your questions.
There's a microphone in the back.
>> Phil (41:18):
Thank you, everyone.
That was really awesome.
I'm Phil from the State Department,and I have just.
My question is about.
It's kind of an academic question,which is about the hand.
And I get your argument about RMAs, I getabout the service culture competition.
(41:38):
So it's good that Goldwater and Jifcomdidn't kill that and aversion to boots on
the ground and civilian harm,mitigation, lethality and all of that.
My question is like, should we thinkof the hand as the invisible hand, or
is it like a puppeteer hand?
So I was really thinking about,what is driving the telos.
Now it could be a social, technicalimaginary that you need to play Alphago
(42:00):
and you need AI and you need technologyto kinda see existentially where you are.
And so maybe fighter pilots needdogfights with, with technology.
But I really want to know, like, what handis it in our milieu and in our ethos?
Because China and the PLA isfetishizing our military culture.
(42:21):
And they actually think that theycan win a war by engineering it.
So they don't believe in fog of war orart and science.
They're doubling down on technologybecause they think they can actually
engineer it.
And so if our adversary is doing that,then again,
there's a telos there that we haveto match with them in technology.
And our defense industrial congressionalcomplex is more than happy to
(42:42):
pony up for that.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (42:42):
Yeah. >> Phil
I mean, I think our goal here was to make what we thought
the assumption was an invisible hand,a visible hand.
Though the invisible hand isvery helpful for our reference.
Like a nice analogy to like Adam Smith.
So that was our goal,was to make it more visible.
But I think what I alluded to with Mike's.
>> Michael Horowitz (43:02):
It's very visible on the COVID.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (43:05):
Which was a fight with this.
See, it's like Godfather, right?
But what I'm concerned aboutis that we're in a time,
a moment in which we are activelytrying to remove that human hand
by shutting down places like office andnet assessment.
(43:29):
I think there's a generation ofveterans that were built in Iraq and
Afghanistan and I am not clear whatlessons are going to be taken from that.
Two decades of conflict that is going toreally be that organic set of beliefs that
guides how we train the nextgeneration of officers.
(43:49):
I think that's really up in the air.
All of these things mean that Ithink we're in a situation or
a moment where one strong handcould have an outside outsized
influence on the directionof weapons technology.
And I really, I am not kidding,I'm not being flippant when I say,
(44:13):
I see that in the defense techcommunity that is evolving and
the strong personalities that are leadingthese civilian kind of unicorn companies.
And I think they could playan outsized role and for good or
bad, in being that humanhand that is the arsenal.
>> Speaker 5 (44:35):
Thank you very much.
It was fascinating.
I'm wondering where you would put the,the, you know,
the announcement just the otherday about the new F47 platform,
about which we don't know a lot, but isthat, it apparently is a drone platform.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (44:54):
I feel like Mike should answer that.
>> Speaker 5 (44:58):
How would your analysis apply to that?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (45:01):
Mike, you want to give us any secrets about the F47?
>> Michael Horowitz (45:05):
There are a lot of details about it that we,
that we still don't know.
I mean, the Air Force conducteda reexamination of what a sixth-gen
fighter would look like andthe result of that is the F47.
The F47 announcement, I would say fromthe perspective of my own preferences
toward like the acquisition of likemore precise math, sorta cheaper,
(45:27):
attributable sorta systems andan overall kind of a high, low mix.
A platform like the F47 could fitthat as long as it's not so so
expensive that it crowds out the rest oflike essentially I could imagine the F47.
It's always as a win for the sort of high,low mix for like the high,
(45:49):
low vision for the force.
You could also imagine it as justthe exquisite high that crowds everything
else out.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (45:56):
Yeah, I mean,
I think it showcases howstrong the preferences for
platforms that resemble thingsthat we already understand.
And so to me it was about worrisome and
I think I agree wholeheartedly with Mike
about how important economic costs can be.
(46:18):
And the concern is that you'reinvesting in a technology that might
be extremely expensive and not be ableto be replicated in large quantities or
in a sustainable amount in anysorta significant conflict.
But maybe it's just like soawesome that you only need two of them.
That's the dream.
>> Michael Horowitz (46:40):
Sure.
>> Simone Williams (46:41):
Hi, good evening.
Simone Williams.
You mentioned earlier inthe conversation that absent of a war,
it may be left to defense industry to bethe ones to develop the next capability.
But realistically,
without an indication from the DefenseDepartment like requirements, money, etc,
industry really isn't going tobe the leading factor there.
(47:02):
So I'm curious your thoughts onwhat does that relationship between
the Defense Department and the servicesbetween industry look like in terms of
thinking through the nextgeneration on men?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (47:14):
Yeah, historically and at least in the.
Sorry, I'm->> Julie McDonald: No, no, no.
In the near recent history for the Department of Defense and
in our book, certainly there are very fewexamples of the defense industrial base,
putting their kind of significantinvestment and capital resources into
technology that the government has notalready seen signaled a requirements for.
(47:37):
A good example though of a companythat did quite successfully was
General Atomics.
And General Atomics saw unmanned aerialsystems being used in Israel and
brought them to the United States andactually put a significant capital outlay
into a technology that did nothave a large demand signal.
And I think they probably would havefailed if 9/11 had not occurred.
(48:00):
And then they became kindof a really pivotal moment.
And don't get me wrong,I think that I am not for
the amount of bureaucracy that has becomea feature of the US acquisition system.
But the current administrationis focusing on OTAs and
other ways to buy stuff quicker,which means that you don't
(48:21):
necessarily have to have thesemore formulaic requests for
proposal, these formulaic requestsfrom individuals, industry.
And I think that there isa desire to reward companies
that are sticking their neck out andinvesting in systems
(48:42):
before the Defense Department hascreated a really formal request.
So I think it could change.
I think there could be a shift wherethe defense is guides the defense
industrial base starts guidinga Pentagon that is a lot has a lot less
(49:03):
regulation towards certain technologiesthat are kind of in their wheelhouse.
That would be a significantchange in the balance for
the Department of Defense, good or bad.
I think that would thathistory will tell us meaning.
>> Michael Horowitz (49:21):
Keep in mind, every major defense acquisition program is
either behind schedule over cost or both.
And there's only the or there becausethe B21 is still on schedule.
>> Simone Williams (49:35):
So in a world where the Air Force gets their champion for
unmanned weaponry andthe fighter pilots and
the bomber pilots still get to flytheir aircraft, so they're not upset,
what does the robot army, the Air Force'srobot army look like like then?
And how do you recruit, train and retainan Air Force people for that Air Force?
>> Julie McDonald (50:01):
That is definitely a you question.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (50:05):
I think what they want is something that looks like a manned
aircraft in which still exquisite andexpensive unmanned
munitions are controlled inthe air by the manned aircraft.
I would like to see cheaper things.
That's been a tension,I think for the Air Force.
(50:27):
I think they really do like thatprecision and the exquisiteness, I think.
And then the pilot, they've already kindof alluded to it like an F35 kind of
becomes like the cloud,the central node in the cloud.
And then the F35 pilot is as much abouttheir ability to manage all of the sensors
as it is like any stick and rudder kindof like pilot feel to the aircraft.
(50:52):
And actually that's been like kind of a.
A gradual move anyway.
So I think that's the mostlikely future for the Air Force.
I think I'm less concernedactually about the Air Force and
more concerned that the army and theMarines and to some extent the Navy think
(51:15):
about buying systems that don't looknecessarily unmanned flying aircraft.
But how does that train them?
I don't know.
I mean, I think it is a lot lesslike the physiological feel
of flight than it used to be.
But anybody who's worked in a fightersquadron knows that these are people who
are just as much experts in howthe radars work as they are about their
(51:37):
ability to manipulatethe aircraft in flight.
And that's just becoming a larger andlarger tendency so
that they are truly engineers inthe aircraft who are really experts
in the technologies theirplane is utilizing.
And that's already a gradualtransition that's happening.
So, those pilots are people thatare comfortable with getting
(52:00):
under the hood of the technologythat they're using.
>> Speaker 7 (52:05):
So you had mentioned before that this book took a while to write.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (52:11):
How good are managing?
>> Speaker 7 (52:14):
In a previous question, challenges in History was mentioned.
So my main question is, in the timewhen you began writing this book and
the concepts of identity and casualties,
was there any concept that you wrote inthe book that first you had began with?
And then, I don't know, maybe somethinghappened within the administration
(52:37):
that you lived through or through yourwork that was challenged through this?
Just anything.
>> Julie McDonald (52:44):
I mean, a lot of things changed during that we won't divulge how
long this book took,but quite a long time.
I mean, Ukraine happenedwhile we wrote the book, so
we, we had to rewrite our conclusionquite significantly from.
From the outset, from when westarted writing the book to now.
I mean, the state of the world has changedquite fundamentally during this period
(53:08):
of time.
And so I think what the implications arefor the theory, for what our beliefs mean,
the beliefs that we.
We talk about in the book,what service identity means for
the future sort of trajectory of unmannedtechnologies had to be sort of rethought
in light of the contemporarypolitical geopolitical environment.
So Ukraine, the space force,creation of the space force, and
(53:31):
technology doesn't stop.
So everything, we're writing aboutsomething that is constantly evolving.
And so while our historychapters very much remained,
very much remained the same, we hadto reevaluate them often in light of
the events that were happeningat pace while we were drafting.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (53:49):
I mean,
I think Ukraine changed what wethought was the core framing puzzle.
When we started writing this book,Julian, I were saying, hey, we don't.
Why are we investing in the Predator andthe Reaper?
And that got us a lot of flak, remember?
At the time, people were really upset,and so it was like, we're out on a limb.
(54:09):
We're saying that we should bebuying smaller and cheaper things.
I remember writing a memo for
the Joint Staff while I was still atthe Naval War College in like 2017.
And it felt like I was ontosomething new about like, hey,
we should not just be buying expensive,exquisite things.
And fast forward to the book coming out.
It does not feel new to say that weshouldn't be investing in expensive,
(54:32):
exquisite things.
It feels like yada.
>> Julie McDonald (54:35):
The world caught up with us.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (54:37):
Yeah, and so, I mean,
things that we thought were revolutionary.
>> Julie McDonald (54:42):
Yeah.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (54:43):
Don't sound as surprising now.
>> Michael Horowitz (54:47):
The perils of being right.
All right, sorry, one last question.
And apparently it's.
>> Speaker 8 (54:53):
This just goes with what you were just saying to a degree.
But, in a world where we have deficitsthat are wartime level deficits,
we are shooting down Houthi $10,000drones with million dollar missiles.
Why isn't simple economics and
innovation the sole driving reasonwe can move things forward with
(55:17):
technology rather than why are weweighed down by these other aspects?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (55:22):
Well, Julia and I have a great paper in the Journal of
Strategic Studies that actually arguesthat what the theorists who came up with
Revolutions in Military affairs got wrongwas that they forgot about economic costs.
And that the it was always a dream thatwe would win a war in two weeks and
(55:42):
that we failed to think about whatit meant to sustain conflict over
a long period of time.
And had built an arsenal thatwas focused on political cost to
the expense of our bankrupting ourselves.
When we wrote that,I felt like it was new again.
And I think it is not new.
(56:03):
And Mike has, I think one of the best,
if not the best summaries ofwhere we should be going,
which is this balance of mass andcost, but also with precision.
And I think part of what has changedtechnologically is that precision is
cheaper now.
Yeah, it used to be that precision.
>> Michael Horowitz (56:23):
40 year old technology.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (56:25):
Yeah.
>> Michael Horowitz (56:26):
All right, well, I think we are out of time.
Jackie Schneider and Julie McDonaldhave written an awesome book,
the Hand Behind Unmanned.
I would strongly encourageeveryone to buy it.
This book is already reshaping how weare thinking about unmanned technology in
the military.
And please join me in thanking them fora tremendous conversation.
>> [APPLAUSE]
Hey everybody.
Welcome to the hooverinstitution in DC this evening.
My name is Mike Horowitz.
I have no affiliation withStanford University or
the Hoover Institution at all, butI do know the two amazing authors next
to me that have written this incrediblebook, the Hand Behind Unmanned.
(00:25):
And really excited to be here andhelp moderate this conversation tonight
are our two authors are Jackie Schneider,who's a Hoover Fellow and
director of the War Gaming andCrisis Simulation initiative.
And Julie McDonald, who's a researchprofessor at the Corbel School
of International Studies atthe University of Denver.
(00:46):
I've known them for years andspent time with them throughout
the book writing andediting process in many ways, and
super thrilled to be here todayto talk about it with you all.
I think that this book really is going toreshape how we think about the choices
(01:06):
that the American military has made overthe last several decades concerning,
I would say probably uncrewed ratherthan a manned, uncrewed technology.
And then what that means then forthe future of war.
And this is a rare example and it's alwaysof exactly what we want in thinking about
academic scholarship thatconnects to the policy world.
(01:29):
And that this is a rigorouslyresearched social science book that
also can directly speak to some of thehuge challenges that are facing the world.
And some of the big choicesthat the American military is
gonna need to make in the comingyears about how to size and
(01:49):
shape the joint force forthe future challenges that it faces.
And before I go any further,Julia and Jackie also have created
an awesome podcast based on the book,also called the Hand Behind Unmanned.
There's a QR code kicking around somewherethat you can access to access the podcast.
(02:10):
It'll be available on Spotify,Apple, their website,
all the, all the places that you access,that you access podcasts.
They interviewed me for it, which willbe the least interesting part of it.
But there are lots ofgreat people as well.
So without further ado,why don't we, why don't we jump in?
So I guess the first questionto anybody writing a book is why
(02:33):
did you write this book?
>> Julie McDonald (02:36):
Thanks, Mike.
And thank you all for being here today.
It's very exciting for both Jackie and I.
Listen, Jackie and I met around 2012at a military workshop for students,
SWAMOS, where we were in the midstof the global war on terror.
There was drone strikes place acrossAfghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen.
(03:01):
And Jackie and I were sort oflooking out at this use of force.
And I'm really interested in why the USwas choosing to use these platforms.
And we started off on an initial lineof inquiry around risk tolerance.
Why did leaders choose drones,and did people trust drones?
And then we started to ask biggerquestions about why do we see,
(03:25):
given the array of unmannedtechnologies that are available,
this heavy investment in aerial platforms,especially amongst what
would be a service that you wouldexpect to sort of reject that, right?
So unmanned platforms.
And so when you look across time andyou see the array of unmanned technologies
that there are torpedoes, cruise missiles,ballistic missiles, mines, sort of.
(03:49):
How have we ended up at this point intime where we see this heavy investment,
mainly in the Air Force, mainly in theseexquisite sort of unmanned platforms
that perform these persistentloitering missions?
And so that begged the question of why.
Why do we have this trajectory versus manyof the others that may have been available
to the unmanned force over time.
(04:10):
Jackie, do you want toadd anything to that?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (04:12):
I think for Julia and I, I mean,
you all might come here cuz you wannahear about the technology, but Julia and
I have always been scholars thatlook at people in organizations.
And I think the fundamental puzzle for
us was there was a lot of agencybeing given the technology, and
there wasn't a lot of story or descriptionor understanding of why that technology.
(04:33):
And so this is a story,a book about people and
people more than it is the technology.
>> Michael Horowitz (04:41):
All right, so it's a story about people,
not necessarily technology.
So what's the main argument then?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (04:47):
Yeah, so I think, you know,
the big argument is how we buyweapons is not strictly rational.
And for any of you who have been aroundthe Department of Defense, that's like,
well, duh.
>> Michael Horowitz (05:00):
[LAUGH] So bad, sorry.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (05:04):
So I think in some ways,
that argument doesn'tsound particularly novel.
But despite the fact that that argumentdoesn't sound novel, most of the work
on technology actually focuses on thingsthat come after beliefs like how.
How much money did we invest?
Did we build the right capacity?
And so this is an argument thatbeliefs and identities are how we
(05:29):
process uncertainty and how we makedecisions about emerging technology.
And sowe argue that there are two beliefs and
one really important set of identitiesthat define how we bought technology,
how we thought about the investmentin these unmanned technologies.
And so just to preview the argument,the number one reason why we buy some
(05:52):
technologies over others, whether it'sunmanned or manned, is service identity.
So how the Air Force, the Navy,the army views who they are,
how they believe the futureof war should be fought, and
how Their technologies, mostly mannedplatforms, affect that future of war.
But those identities sometimesdon't have a good theory about
(06:15):
how emerging technologyaffect the future of war.
And so we identified two beliefs thatreally dominated the last 30 years.
And one of those is the beliefin military revolutions,
which comes from a office that, as of, Idon't know, a week ago, no longer exists,
the Office of Net Assessment.
And the second->> Michael Horowitz: Not ready to talk
about that yet.
(06:36):
And the second big belief is casualty aversion that
the American public will onlysupport war if it means that we
don't lose American lives.
And those two things, the kind of desireto use technology as a substitute for
human life and the belief that technology,the adoption of the correct technology,
(06:56):
creates these massive revolutionaryjumps in military effectiveness,
are the two beliefs that best explain whywe bought the types of unmanned technology
that we do.
But how those beliefs propagate,that's where the people.
And kind of this really interesting storyof how people build influence inside
the Pentagon comes across.
>> Michael Horowitz (07:18):
So this is a technology book about, about people who
are some of the, I mean, I would say dish,but it's like literally in the book, the.
Who are some of the people that thenplayed a really defining role here in
either driving, I'll use your term,unmanned investments or holding them back?
>> Julie McDonald (07:37):
I mean, one of the key, again,
returning to the Office of Net Assessment,unfortunately.
One of the key people in the book whois really the champion of the military
revolution's belief that we talk aboutis Andy Marshall in the Office of
Net Assessment,which doesn't have a budget line and
doesn't have a huge amountof political influence.
And so what he does is he builds these,these networks.
(08:00):
And educates people, and informs them and
empowers them to carry forward this beliefin different ways as they get promoted.
So, he focuses on military officersthat rise through the ranks.
And so, you end up with Bob workwith a third offset who has learned
about the military revolutionsthrough the work of Andy Marshall.
You have Krapenovich,who then translates, and
(08:23):
feeds into defensereviews in the 1990s and
shapes the force leading up to 20 2001.
And then, you have him focusing also onthe academics that go out to PMI's and
military institutions who can, again,advocate this belief in the military.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (08:42):
Yeah, so Andy Marshall is like that,
the kind of OG Pentagoninfluencer on the civilian side.
But I think the story also talks a lotabout military influencers, right?
Not every general actually is a major kindof influence in how we think about war,
and the technologies that we build.
(09:02):
So, we start this story, we have a historychapter, and LeMay comes into it.
So he's like the originalAir Force influencer.
For those of you all who aren't as versedin Air Force Corps history as I am as
an old air force officer, LeMay is the onewhere we go around with the big cigar and
every testimony in Congress.
He's got a big cigar, and it's likestrategic air power forever, right?
(09:26):
And he is really influencing thedevelopment of how the Air Force thinks
about ballistic missiles,
the relationship between ballisticmissiles, and manned bombers.
And then the next bigkind of influencer for
the Air Force inside the servicesbecomes Bernard Schreiber.
And Schriever comes at a time,a Sputnik moment,
(09:46):
where there's a big infusion of resourcesto invest in ballistic missiles,
which LeMay is not a huge fan of,but Shriver sees a world for them.
And so, you have Shriver in the Air Force,you have Rickover in the Navy.
And then,moving into the more contemporary,
you see these generations of Vietnamofficers, people like Colin Powell,
(10:09):
and then people coming upthrough the army like Starry and
Depew and these internal influencers.
So they're building influence kindof opposite from Andy Marshall.
They're building it organicallythrough doctrine, through training,
through experiences on the battlefield.
Whereas Andy Marshall is building itfrom the outside in going from a policy
(10:31):
report to a book to PME curriculum andinfluencing in a very different way.
>> Julie McDonald (10:37):
Yeah, and what we find partly because of that is that the beliefs
that are generated from experiences,
from firsthand experiences inVietnam are much more Sticky.
Much more ingrained beliefs thanthe military revolution's belief,
which seems more sort of intellectual,academic, that has to be taught,
and isn't quite as firm andingrained because of that.
>> Michael Horowitz (10:58):
So, turning in some ways from history to today,
the Department of Defense hasmade some effort over the last
few years to try to acceleratethe scaling of unmanned systems
that have different types of unmannedsystems in some ways sort of like cheaper,
(11:20):
triable, precise mass systemsthan it had in the past.
So, let me make it about me and say,
based on the theory of your book,am I going to get my robot army?
And if I don't get my robot army, why not?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (11:39):
Yeah, so this is a great question.
I love that.
So Mike, we wrote this book so long agoyou didn't get to be a main character, but
if we'd written it now,you would get to be a main character.
So, it's exciting.
So, the question of the robot army isactually one of these kind of giant
puzzles about the American arsenal.
We have this arsenal of exquisite andexpensive remotely controlled platforms.
(12:06):
And it doesn't look a lot like the typeof platforms that you're seeing.
Platforms of the wrong use,the type of munitions, and
small quadcopters thatyou're seeing in Ukraine.
It doesn't look like the largeinventories of conventional missiles
that are a key part ofthe Chinese unmanned arsenal.
So why not?
(12:26):
And will that change?
And I think a dominant answer is thata lot of these systems don't fit within
these core service identities.
The Air Force is more likely to adoptunmanned than other services, but
they're going to adopt unmannedin a way that propagates
the core idea about strategic air power.
So, it's no surprise that the Air Forceis looking at unmanned fighters
(12:49):
that do the same things thatthey value in the fighters
that they have manned platforms in, right?
Like the fact that they were focusedon creating an AI driven fighter jet.
That's not super necessarily useful,
it's definitely not the robotarmies that you wanted, right?
So then->> Michael Horowitz: To any of them.
So, unless the Air Force can make the robot army start
(13:14):
looking like something inwhich the manned pilot is
controlling those robot systems,then it has a lot more legs.
I think you would expect that the armywould be the one that adopts a lot of
the small copter systems, because that'show they're being used in Ukraine.
They are tied intrinsically to corearmy units, whether that's infantry or
(13:35):
artillery.
And they're kind of substituting orenabling core army missions very much
not the strategic airpower thatthe Air Force would prefer.
But I think the army todayis in a bit of a confusion
about who they are in this newforeign policy world, right?
What is the army doing in China?
Where is the big mass ground invasion?
(13:56):
And so, because of that,
I think somewhat limits the Army'skind of desire to adopt these.
I think you will get the robot army,and I think it will be the Marines.
I think the Marines all throughout thebook become one of the leading innovators
to adopting unmanned technologies.
But they're limited by the fact thattheir budget comes down from the Navy.
So, all the innovation and
(14:17):
experimentation that they're going to dobecause the Marines core identity is they
are the best at whatever everybody elsehas core missions that they are good at.
The Marines are like no,we're just the best.
So, because of that, they're more flexiblewith adapting to new missions and
new technology, but they're alwayssomewhat limited by how the Navy views its
acquisition of technologies.
(14:37):
And so, I think it will be.
I think you will get your robot army, but
I think it will be the Marinesthat are most likely to adopt it.
>> Michael Horowitz (14:45):
That actually checks out very well with
the experiences I had in the Pentagon forthe.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (14:49):
That's good, that's always helpful.
>> Michael Horowitz (14:51):
For the last couple of years, over the last few years,
the Marine Corps hasconsistently been ready to push
the envelope in thinkingabout adopting cheaper,
more attributable kinds of systems andis faced various budget constraints.
And whereas making the case to the armyhas been making the why case to the army
has always been more isalways been more challenging.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (15:10):
That's always very like reassuring as an author that your.
Your book has some levelof face validity is.
>> Michael Horowitz (15:19):
So, here's another way to think about this in that the sooner
you go through in the book, how it is thatwe get the unmanned systems that we get,
and sort of most prominently in thecontext going back to sort of what Julia
said about when you met and war on terror.
When we thought about unmanned systems fora long time we thought about them
(15:40):
as sort of platforms like,like the Predator and the Reaper.
And then, we simultaneously think about
the US as an innovator when itcomes to military technology.
But the until collaborative combataircraft became a program of record for
the Air force in an FY20.
In FY24,the most recent program of record had been
(16:03):
almost 20 years before with the Reaper.
The US navy has never had a programof record for an unmanned,
for an armed unmanned, foran armed unmanned system.
So I guess a little bit of this is like,what does this tell us about the Navy?
In a world where, and in some ways,I think you, I think I know where you will
(16:25):
go with the answer, but it's important foreveryone to hear you, hear you say it.
In a world where we think about the USlike we're on the cutting edge,
like we have the best technology.
How can that be true?
And it'd be true that we've been in someways monumentally slow at adopting some
of these technologies.
>> Julie McDonald (16:45):
I mean, some of it goes back to what we've already said.
And Jackie, I'll let you add on to thisthat a lot of this comes back to these
core service identities andthese efforts to try.
And these efforts to try and push servicesto integrate technologies that do not
align with those core identities.
And you see, for example, with the Navy,
the U class system that ultimatelyfails in the early 2000s.
(17:07):
Yeah, the 2000s.
And in fact, the Navy identity,going back to your question, Mike,
in our book is clearly the strongest andthe most difficult to shift on this and
the most reticent to some of theseexternal beliefs and influences.
And so part of it is the service identity.
And also, as we talked aboutthe lack of a champion, right?
(17:28):
For this to happen,you need these internal service champions.
And in so many stories in our bookwhere actually you get past these,
these service identities,the stickiness, you need someone inside,
inside championing those technologies.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (17:43):
I think we can't forget that war is the final arbiter
on innovation, andit's also one of the major catalysts.
So in the absence of war,
the US tends to kind of revert backto what we would call no hypothesis.
But these core identities, andthose core identities tend
to focus on kind of strategicthe peacetime military.
(18:07):
And it's when war, the Korean War,the Vietnam War, the war on terror
that you see these kind of infusion oftechnology that allows for innovation and
experimentation with technology outsidethese traditional service identities.
So in the case of the Navy andthe War on terror,
the Navy had a different mission inthe war on terror than like the army and
(18:29):
the Air Force who are workingthis kind of ground battle and
having to figure out how they'reintegrating Technology on the ground and
the Navy in some ways, you know,was a little bit further removed, right?
So you don't have that impetus.
The Navy's primary mission during a lotof the time that we were doing this
(18:50):
book was really fonops, right?
They're doing presence,they're deterrents.
They are in some waysdoing kind of these core
Cold War deterrence strategic missions,right?
And so I think that that means that theykind of solidify into their core identity.
And for the Navy, somuch about how they buy weapons is this
(19:11):
competition between their differentidentities within the Navy.
So I used to be an Air Force,I am an Air Force officer.
>> Michael Horowitz (19:19):
Not biased at all.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (19:21):
But then I went to work for the Navy for a few years and
I had come from the Air Force where Ithought like maybe we weren't joint.
And then I went to the Navy and I waslike, my gosh, this service hates joints.
I did not realize that the Navy,because it has so
many core capabilities within the Navy.
You have the aircraft carry,you have surface warfare,
you have the subsurface warfare.
(19:43):
They don't really get influenced by thesejoint battles as much because the battle
is inside the Navy.
I think that helps explain the directionof naval investment in unmanned systems.
It didn't nicely fitinto these competitions.
I think if we had a shriver,if there was somebody in the,
the kind of underwaterkind of warfare world,
(20:06):
this is where the Navy shouldbe really focusing on autonomy.
I mean there's some physics problemswith remote control underwater,
which I think is also a real reluctanceto investing because you really have
to completely give the technologyfull autonomy because it's so
difficult to communicate underwater.
(20:29):
But this is the future of a lot ofthe contestation that's going to be
happening in conflict.
And so if there was somebody inthat kind of submarine warfare that
had that charisma and that stickto it Iveness that Rickover had.
And then I think we might see a lotmore innovation happening underwater.
(20:51):
And I think the air is comesback to some of these other core
concerns about platform andyou know, those type of things.
>> Michael Horowitz (21:03):
And in the U class example that Julia gave the Navy took this
potentially brilliant idea to createessentially drones that could fly off
aircraft carriers and launch weapons attargets and turn that into an air to air
refueling robotic platforms that stilllike only like is kind of deployed.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (21:21):
I mean, I think that is such a good example of how
difficult it is in our imaginationsometimes about unmanned and that was,
I know we have a difference ofopinion on unmanned versus uncrewed.
But so much of what drew us to this is wefelt there was this binary unmanned versus
man, and we were taking a manned platformwhere we were saying, we will simply take
the man out of the platform andthen it will be an unmanned thing.
(21:42):
And you weren't getting these wonderful,
the real benefit of someof the autonomy and
the unmanned element because youwere thinking beyond tank with man,
tank without man, fighter with man,fighter without man.
And instead, that's why so much of ourbook talks about missiles and mines and
(22:05):
munitions as the actual trade off andthe actual kind of set
of choices that you can make whenyou're building out the arsenal.
>> Michael Horowitz (22:13):
So I wanna change to a sort of different theoretical element in
your book that we didn't havereally talked about much yet,
which is casualty aversion.
So in some ways now, the Americanmilitary for the last eight years or so
has been primarily focused on great powercompetition with one phrase or another,
(22:33):
primarily sort of Russia andChina shifting away from the forever wars.
Now it seems to be aboutthe homeland in China to look at,
if you look at what officials fromthe Trump administration are saying,
but it wasn't so long ago, of course,that the global war on terror
(22:53):
was the dominant thing people weredealing with in a defense context.
So tell us about casualty aversion andhow it, how it then shapes some of
the developments that youtalk about in the book.
>> Julie McDonald (23:05):
Sure, so the casualty aversion belief in our book really comes
out and grows out of Vietnam soldiersexperiences in Vietnam, the grueling
war of attrition, and the loss ofpublic support, crucially for that war.
And the fact that it was televised,shown to the US Public and
political leaders in the US reallyinternalized the fact that the loss
(23:29):
of support led to a lack of ability toprosecute the war as they would want to.
And this was then internalized bythe military leaders at the time as well.
So Carl Mueller's writtenthis very famous,
he says that as casualties go up,support for war goes down.
And this is ingrained ina generation of military officers,
(23:52):
this belief that you need tomaintain public support for
war in order to be able towin wars in the future.
Carried forward, I mean, this beliefyou can see very starkly in returns
again in the 1990s when you have Bosnia,you have down forces again.
And you see an investment during thattime and actually not unmanned platforms,
(24:16):
but in missiles, precision guidedmissiles, cruise missiles,
to be able to keepUS Forces from harm's way.
And it's carried forwardthrough Colin Powell,
a number of other senior generalswho fought in Vietnam, and
then again as we enterthe global war on terror,
(24:36):
right when the military revolution'srelief was poised in 9/11,
right before that, to really take off and
to shape the development ofthe force that again reverts back.
The desire to keep US Forcesfrom harm's way and
also to protect non-US Forces, right?
To protect civilians means that that'swhen you see this doubling down on these,
(25:00):
these unmanned platforms thatcan provide persistence,
provide this loitering capability,but keeping, keeping us away from.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (25:07):
And just to give like a personal vignette, I was,
I think I'll date myself here.
I joined the air Force in 2005,which means that as I was learning to
become an officer and getting mygood old Air Force indoctrination,
I learned about Mueller andthe CNN effect and
was told that this was an important partof how we thought about strategic victory.
(25:29):
It wasn't until decades,well, maybe not a decade and
a half later, we're in grad school and
Mueller is not the last one to writeabout public opinion and support for war.
There's all sorts of workthat happens after Mueller.
And guess what?
It's not a simple story.
Actually, Americans are not as casualtyaverse as I had been taught as
(25:53):
a young officer.
In fact, Americans like to win.
So Americans are casualty averse ifthey don't believe in something or
if they feel like they're going to lose.
And those things sometimescompete with each other.
But it's not actually a clear story thatAmericans are actually casualty averse.
And so it's really fascinating, especiallywhen you read the papers that were written
(26:14):
in the time period of about 1990 tothe early 2000s by students going through
like the Naval War College, the NavalPostgraduate School, the Air University.
How important force protection became andhow internalized it came on literature
that actually ends up being not debunked,but actually, kind of revised.
>> Julie McDonald (26:35):
Qualified. >> Jacquelyn Schneider
it was really interesting.
I had been built on a beliefthat I realized, my gosh,
that this is where it came from.
But also we hadn't really updated thosebeliefs even after new information
had been put out.
>> Michael Horowitz (26:49):
So why isn't casualty aversion then enough to overcome service
identities in some of these cases?
Because if the logic of that argument iscorrect, then one might imagine that,
sure, the Navy likes to sail around andthe Air Force wants to do strategic
bombing and whatever caricaturethe services in general.
And I'm being like a littleflip to be provocative,
(27:11):
but in theory, though,if you don't want casualties,
then like substituting people out thenwould become really attractive, right?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (27:20):
Yeah, so this is complicated, right, because these beliefs
are not operating alone,they are interacting with each other.
And the interesting thing is how beliefsabout force protection start eliding and
interacting with beliefs about technologyand this revolutions in technology.
So I did some interviews with John Worden,who,
(27:41):
if you're an Air Force person,you were raised on John Warden, but yet
another example of an officer thatactually got fired for insubordination.
So it's like the Air Force way.
But John Worden was talking about howhe thought about centers of gravity and
the use of air power andtechnology going into the Gulf War.
And this was really, I wouldn't sayhe doesn't describe it as an army,
(28:05):
but this is a technology argument, right?
It fits really nicely in the Air Forceunderstanding of their role in war,
which is strategic air power,but it wasn't enough to convince,
Schwarzenegger and others.
So at the same time that he's making thisargument about this makes us more military
effective, we can do this type of warfare.
(28:27):
He's also realizing that, butthis also is gonna save civilians.
It's gonna make war less bloody.
And so we can both be technologicallydominant and we can avoid killing people.
And I actually think that's what ends upkind of culminating in the war on terror
is we are using these beliefs to say notonly can we insulate ourselves and in some
(28:49):
ways kind of decrease civilian violenceby substituting these technologies.
It's why you get these precise andpersistent technologies, but also, like,
we're so dominant that theoreticallywe should be able to get in the war and
get out.
Now, that ended up not playingout in Afghanistan, right?
And so, [LAUGH] yeah, and so you startquestioning whether these beliefs
(29:11):
actually can exist next to each other,and then you get third offset.
>> Michael Horowitz (29:16):
So, then where do you think that this means we end up heading
next?
So, I mean, you've said in some waysthat the Marine Corps is most likely to
deliver my robot army and so I'mgrateful in advance to the Marine Corps.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (29:31):
As long as the old Marines don't hold her.
>> Michael Horowitz (29:34):
But the-.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (29:35):
Marines don't cut it.
>> Michael Horowitz (29:36):
100%, but the where do you think that this nets out?
After all, we've now had many years oftraining to think about great power
competition again there,
the sort of lessons learned fromthe battlefield of Ukraine.
How do you think that this kindof nets out moving forward?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (29:56):
I have a depressing story here.
>> Julie McDonald (29:57):
[LAUGH] >> Jacquelyn Schneider
>> Michael Horowitz (29:59):
So excited.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (30:00):
[LAUGH] So I think we are in a idea void where
we don't have a clear idea about or
belief about the future of war.
The Office of Net Assessment is closed.
>> Michael Horowitz (30:17):
I mean, only as of like two weeks ago.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (30:19):
It's gone, right?
Where are the idea entrepreneursthat are telling us
about what the future of war looks like?
>> Julie McDonald (30:31):
Mike, Mike is.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (30:32):
Well, we identify you as a possible,
as a possible one in the podcast.
>> Michael Horowitz (30:37):
That's horrifying.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (30:38):
[LAUGH] But you need a clear theory of victory.
And I think we came into the last30 years with two core beliefs.
And absent those core beliefs,
what's gonna drive the decisionswe make about the arsenal?
Well, we're gonna goback to service identity.
I think that's gonna bethe null hypothesis.
But if you look Doge andSecretary Hegseth,
(31:00):
they seem to be trained to destroya lot of those kind of core
bureaucrats elements that are partof what makes service identity so
powerful in terms oftechnological acquisition.
And in the absence of a clear ideaabout the future of war and potentially
these kind of outside influences that aretearing down some of the capabilities that
(31:23):
the services have built in budgets,then what fills the void?
And I think what I'm seeing is,and this is actually new for
our story, is an emerging,a burgeoning tech community that is
characterized just as much bythe Lockheeds and the Rapeians,
who generally followed kind ofsignals that came from the services
(31:48):
as much as it is by YouTubevideos put out by Palmer Lecky.
And you could be in a situation wherewe have an influx of investments.
You have gotten rid of some ofthe entrenched bureaucratic kind of
ways in which the servicesbuy technology and
you still are absenta theory of future victory.
(32:10):
And so we might get an arsenal that isdominated by what the new kind of defense
tech ecosystem thinks are the coolweapons that we should be investing in.
>> Julie McDonald (32:22):
Yeah, I mean there's one thing,
one thing that we do know from the bookis that you know that war matters, right?
War creates this learning experienceon a battlefield for experimentation.
And so to some extent, and
you would hope there was learningfrom going on from Ukraine.
And so that's to the extent that thereis some guiding force that they may be
(32:46):
taking the military andmaybe the defense industrial base as well,
taking lessons about the lackof US munitions, for example.
And the fact that in a war of attritionand a much longer term war potentially
against China, for example, that weneed to invest in ammunitions again.
So there are some lessons tobe learning from Ukraine.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (33:07):
What kind of munitions.
Like I think there's a lot ofinvestment right now, for example,
in quadcopters and these smallertechnologies that are dominating a really
land based war in Ukraine.
But what does that mean for what will beprimarily a naval conflict in the Pacific?
And then I had a conversationearlier today.
(33:28):
Where are the tech companies that areselling long range conventional strike?
Not many places, partly because there'snobody really, really clamoring for this.
And yet is one of the kind of keycomponents that is not in our arsenal
is that long range conventional strikethat doesn't require an aircraft or
(33:49):
a big platform in order to fire it.
>> Michael Horowitz (33:52):
And this is a good example in some ways going back to the,
where some of these investmentshave gone in the past,
where both the Air Force and the Navynow have experimental programs for
a really low cost long rangelong range cruise missile.
Neither of them have actuallycommitted to buy it.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (34:09):
Yeah, I think if those support the platforms that they
really demand, platforms primarilythat they would prefer to buy,
next generation fighters,the next generation of large ships,
then those are more likely to be adopted.
But I'm sitting here today justa girl asking the army to invest in
long range conventional strength.
>> Michael Horowitz (34:31):
I mean it- >> Jacquelyn Schneider
an Air Force officer, which I feel likeLeMay is turning grave right now [LAUGH].
Well, just to give a little more context to that,
think about something like whatIran has done with the Shaheed 136,
which is a weapon that you can produce forless than $100,000 that can go about
1,000 kilometers andcarry a 50 to 100 kilogram warhead.
(34:54):
That's something that could,in theory, be really useful for
the United States army seeking to projectpower and you could mass produce tomorrow.
But yet we don't see that.
Okay, two more questions andthen we'll open it up for the audience,
which is really just a hint.
Like, hey,think of questions that you're gonna ask.
So the first question is, what wouldit take to crack the fighter and
(35:18):
bomber mafia in the Air Force?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (35:20):
Okay, so I feel like this is unfair.
And I mean, full disclosure,I worked in a fighter squadron.
My husband's a fighter pilot.
This is my world.
But, like,
I really feel like fighter pilotsgot a bad rap on the unmanned stuff.
There was so much like,those fighter pilots,
they're like the cavalry officer flyinginto the conflict with old horses.
(35:44):
Flying into conflict with horses.
And like, this is not the storythat we find in the book.
>> Michael Horowitz (35:48):
This is exactly why I asked.
>> Julie McDonald (35:49):
[LAUGH] >> Jacquelyn Schneider
people that are buying unmannedaircraft over the last 30 years?
They are fighter pilots.
It is General John Jumper.
So I think this is a misnomer.
I mean, if anything, it is one ofthe kind of remarkable questions that
(36:13):
motivates the book is why the Air Force,the service of fighter pilots,
becomes the primary adopter ofunmanned systems in this world.
And I think part of why they do that.
Now, Jumper is actually interestingbecause he was in a position where he
was very intimately involved whena manned fighter was shot over Bosnia and
(36:35):
said that we had to do a reallycomplicated search and rescue effort.
And we have quotes in the book from,you know,
him talking about how impactful thatmoment was and how that led him to really
think about unmanned systems asan alternative to doing this manned work.
So I think for him,
there was also that kind of personalrelationship with a personal experience.
(36:59):
But I think in general,if you look at how the.
I mean, there is.
There are unmanned systems that are in thecafeteria, as at the Air Force Academy.
So I don't think there is a fighter bombermafia that is actively against unmanned
systems.
I actually think the biggest problem thatthe Air Force has had is that instead
(37:20):
is that because of their obsession,which is a good obsession,
because I'm married to a fighterpilot with the fighter aircraft.
They have focused too much onunmanned systems that replicate those
fighting those fighter pilotkind of core missions.
We do not->> Michael Horowitz: That's where I was
hoping you were going.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (37:39):
Okay [LAUGH],
we do not need an unmanned fighteraircraft doing dogfighting.
I used to be an intel officerin a fighter squadron.
We very rarely had a lot of dog fighting.
Almost everything is over the horizon.
Sensor fusion, using AMRAAMs and
other technology to shoot further andfurther along.
(37:59):
I mean, if anything, the dog fighting kindof was just an anachronism at the time.
So I don't think we need tocrack the fighter bomber mafia.
I think though, where the Air Forceneeds to think imagination wise is not
just thinking about how theseunmanned things can replicate what
their mapping has been doing.
(38:19):
But instead this kind of enablingmechanism that you've worked so
hard to develop to kinda try and
get technologies over that kind ofacquisition and funding line for.
>> Michael Horowitz (38:30):
All right, last question and then we will open it up,
which is, for both of you,what didn't you say in the book that you,
that you wish you could, that you wish youcould say and could share with us now?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (38:42):
You go first.
>> Julie McDonald (38:43):
I mean I don't think it's necessarily what we didn't say in
the book, but I'm struck when rereading abook, which I did recently cuz I was like,
it was a long time since we published,since we submitted this for publication.
That how close like Andy Marshallgot to realizing the sorta military
revolution stream twice, right?
(39:05):
And he got taken off course and his->> Michael Horowitz: 9/11.
9/11, yeah, 9 11.
And then even just like postGulf war budget shrinking,
had a bunch of people in the senior levelswho were not supportive of his ideas,
but poised right then to sort of takeunmanned technologies in the US Military
in a very different direction andhow contingent it was on just these key
(39:29):
events because the networks that hedeveloped were really astounding.
And we've sort of got a separate pieceon this that stems from the book on how
he built influence.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (39:39):
It's like that Kevin Bacon where like how many
Kevin Bacon.
>> Julie McDonald (39:43):
It's like you can trace people back.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (39:45):
In this room,
how many Kevin Bacons untilwe get to Andy Marshall?
>> Michael Horowitz (39:51):
I met Andy Marshall when I was 22.
>> Julie McDonald (39:53):
There we go.
There we go.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (39:55):
And he's dead.
So like impressive.
>> Julie McDonald (39:57):
Yeah.
And the games that he developed andthe different techniques and
tactics that he instituted topromulgate his beliefs and how so
close to being very effective.
That was.
And isn't to say it's not effective.
But there were just moments where itwas like, poor military revolutionists.
(40:18):
You were so close.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (40:19):
I think for me.
So this book took a little bitlonger than maybe it should have,
but there was a lot that->> Michael Horowitz: Every book
takes longer.
There was a lot that happened while we were writing or
after we submitted the first draft forpublication.
And one of the big things that happenedwas the creation of the Space Force.
And here you have a force that reallyis a force of unmanned things.
(40:43):
And look, I would have loved to doa better job of representing kind of why
we got to the point where somebody feltlike they needed to make a space force.
Why Eisenhower did not want a space force,and
then how the role of a servicethat is striving to make its own
identity could impact the makeupof our space based arsenal.
>> Michael Horowitz (41:08):
All right, well, you all have been very patient.
I know I've learned a lot fromthis conversation already, and
I look forward to taking your questions.
There's a microphone in the back.
>> Phil (41:18):
Thank you, everyone.
That was really awesome.
I'm Phil from the State Department,and I have just.
My question is about.
It's kind of an academic question,which is about the hand.
And I get your argument about RMAs, I getabout the service culture competition.
(41:38):
So it's good that Goldwater and Jifcomdidn't kill that and aversion to boots on
the ground and civilian harm,mitigation, lethality and all of that.
My question is like, should we thinkof the hand as the invisible hand, or
is it like a puppeteer hand?
So I was really thinking about,what is driving the telos.
Now it could be a social, technicalimaginary that you need to play Alphago
(42:00):
and you need AI and you need technologyto kinda see existentially where you are.
And so maybe fighter pilots needdogfights with, with technology.
But I really want to know, like, what handis it in our milieu and in our ethos?
Because China and the PLA isfetishizing our military culture.
(42:21):
And they actually think that theycan win a war by engineering it.
So they don't believe in fog of war orart and science.
They're doubling down on technologybecause they think they can actually
engineer it.
And so if our adversary is doing that,then again,
there's a telos there that we haveto match with them in technology.
And our defense industrial congressionalcomplex is more than happy to
(42:42):
pony up for that.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (42:42):
Yeah. >> Phil
I mean, I think our goal here was to make what we thought
the assumption was an invisible hand,a visible hand.
Though the invisible hand isvery helpful for our reference.
Like a nice analogy to like Adam Smith.
So that was our goal,was to make it more visible.
But I think what I alluded to with Mike's.
>> Michael Horowitz (43:02):
It's very visible on the COVID.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (43:05):
Which was a fight with this.
See, it's like Godfather, right?
But what I'm concerned aboutis that we're in a time,
a moment in which we are activelytrying to remove that human hand
by shutting down places like office andnet assessment.
(43:29):
I think there's a generation ofveterans that were built in Iraq and
Afghanistan and I am not clear whatlessons are going to be taken from that.
Two decades of conflict that is going toreally be that organic set of beliefs that
guides how we train the nextgeneration of officers.
(43:49):
I think that's really up in the air.
All of these things mean that Ithink we're in a situation or
a moment where one strong handcould have an outside outsized
influence on the directionof weapons technology.
And I really, I am not kidding,I'm not being flippant when I say,
(44:13):
I see that in the defense techcommunity that is evolving and
the strong personalities that are leadingthese civilian kind of unicorn companies.
And I think they could playan outsized role and for good or
bad, in being that humanhand that is the arsenal.
>> Speaker 5 (44:35):
Thank you very much.
It was fascinating.
I'm wondering where you would put the,the, you know,
the announcement just the otherday about the new F47 platform,
about which we don't know a lot, but isthat, it apparently is a drone platform.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (44:54):
I feel like Mike should answer that.
>> Speaker 5 (44:58):
How would your analysis apply to that?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (45:01):
Mike, you want to give us any secrets about the F47?
>> Michael Horowitz (45:05):
There are a lot of details about it that we,
that we still don't know.
I mean, the Air Force conducteda reexamination of what a sixth-gen
fighter would look like andthe result of that is the F47.
The F47 announcement, I would say fromthe perspective of my own preferences
toward like the acquisition of likemore precise math, sorta cheaper,
(45:27):
attributable sorta systems andan overall kind of a high, low mix.
A platform like the F47 could fitthat as long as it's not so so
expensive that it crowds out the rest oflike essentially I could imagine the F47.
It's always as a win for the sort of high,low mix for like the high,
(45:49):
low vision for the force.
You could also imagine it as justthe exquisite high that crowds everything
else out.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (45:56):
Yeah, I mean,
I think it showcases howstrong the preferences for
platforms that resemble thingsthat we already understand.
And so to me it was about worrisome and
I think I agree wholeheartedly with Mike
about how important economic costs can be.
(46:18):
And the concern is that you'reinvesting in a technology that might
be extremely expensive and not be ableto be replicated in large quantities or
in a sustainable amount in anysorta significant conflict.
But maybe it's just like soawesome that you only need two of them.
That's the dream.
>> Michael Horowitz (46:40):
Sure.
>> Simone Williams (46:41):
Hi, good evening.
Simone Williams.
You mentioned earlier inthe conversation that absent of a war,
it may be left to defense industry to bethe ones to develop the next capability.
But realistically,
without an indication from the DefenseDepartment like requirements, money, etc,
industry really isn't going tobe the leading factor there.
(47:02):
So I'm curious your thoughts onwhat does that relationship between
the Defense Department and the servicesbetween industry look like in terms of
thinking through the nextgeneration on men?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (47:14):
Yeah, historically and at least in the.
Sorry, I'm->> Julie McDonald: No, no, no.
In the near recent history for the Department of Defense and
in our book, certainly there are very fewexamples of the defense industrial base,
putting their kind of significantinvestment and capital resources into
technology that the government has notalready seen signaled a requirements for.
(47:37):
A good example though of a companythat did quite successfully was
General Atomics.
And General Atomics saw unmanned aerialsystems being used in Israel and
brought them to the United States andactually put a significant capital outlay
into a technology that did nothave a large demand signal.
And I think they probably would havefailed if 9/11 had not occurred.
(48:00):
And then they became kindof a really pivotal moment.
And don't get me wrong,I think that I am not for
the amount of bureaucracy that has becomea feature of the US acquisition system.
But the current administrationis focusing on OTAs and
other ways to buy stuff quicker,which means that you don't
(48:21):
necessarily have to have thesemore formulaic requests for
proposal, these formulaic requestsfrom individuals, industry.
And I think that there isa desire to reward companies
that are sticking their neck out andinvesting in systems
(48:42):
before the Defense Department hascreated a really formal request.
So I think it could change.
I think there could be a shift wherethe defense is guides the defense
industrial base starts guidinga Pentagon that is a lot has a lot less
(49:03):
regulation towards certain technologiesthat are kind of in their wheelhouse.
That would be a significantchange in the balance for
the Department of Defense, good or bad.
I think that would thathistory will tell us meaning.
>> Michael Horowitz (49:21):
Keep in mind, every major defense acquisition program is
either behind schedule over cost or both.
And there's only the or there becausethe B21 is still on schedule.
>> Simone Williams (49:35):
So in a world where the Air Force gets their champion for
unmanned weaponry andthe fighter pilots and
the bomber pilots still get to flytheir aircraft, so they're not upset,
what does the robot army, the Air Force'srobot army look like like then?
And how do you recruit, train and retainan Air Force people for that Air Force?
>> Julie McDonald (50:01):
That is definitely a you question.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (50:05):
I think what they want is something that looks like a manned
aircraft in which still exquisite andexpensive unmanned
munitions are controlled inthe air by the manned aircraft.
I would like to see cheaper things.
That's been a tension,I think for the Air Force.
(50:27):
I think they really do like thatprecision and the exquisiteness, I think.
And then the pilot, they've already kindof alluded to it like an F35 kind of
becomes like the cloud,the central node in the cloud.
And then the F35 pilot is as much abouttheir ability to manage all of the sensors
as it is like any stick and rudder kindof like pilot feel to the aircraft.
(50:52):
And actually that's been like kind of a.
A gradual move anyway.
So I think that's the mostlikely future for the Air Force.
I think I'm less concernedactually about the Air Force and
more concerned that the army and theMarines and to some extent the Navy think
(51:15):
about buying systems that don't looknecessarily unmanned flying aircraft.
But how does that train them?
I don't know.
I mean, I think it is a lot lesslike the physiological feel
of flight than it used to be.
But anybody who's worked in a fightersquadron knows that these are people who
are just as much experts in howthe radars work as they are about their
(51:37):
ability to manipulatethe aircraft in flight.
And that's just becoming a larger andlarger tendency so
that they are truly engineers inthe aircraft who are really experts
in the technologies theirplane is utilizing.
And that's already a gradualtransition that's happening.
So, those pilots are people thatare comfortable with getting
(52:00):
under the hood of the technologythat they're using.
>> Speaker 7 (52:05):
So you had mentioned before that this book took a while to write.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (52:11):
How good are managing?
>> Speaker 7 (52:14):
In a previous question, challenges in History was mentioned.
So my main question is, in the timewhen you began writing this book and
the concepts of identity and casualties,
was there any concept that you wrote inthe book that first you had began with?
And then, I don't know, maybe somethinghappened within the administration
(52:37):
that you lived through or through yourwork that was challenged through this?
Just anything.
>> Julie McDonald (52:44):
I mean, a lot of things changed during that we won't divulge how
long this book took,but quite a long time.
I mean, Ukraine happenedwhile we wrote the book, so
we, we had to rewrite our conclusionquite significantly from.
From the outset, from when westarted writing the book to now.
I mean, the state of the world has changedquite fundamentally during this period
(53:08):
of time.
And so I think what the implications arefor the theory, for what our beliefs mean,
the beliefs that we.
We talk about in the book,what service identity means for
the future sort of trajectory of unmannedtechnologies had to be sort of rethought
in light of the contemporarypolitical geopolitical environment.
So Ukraine, the space force,creation of the space force, and
(53:31):
technology doesn't stop.
So everything, we're writing aboutsomething that is constantly evolving.
And so while our historychapters very much remained,
very much remained the same, we hadto reevaluate them often in light of
the events that were happeningat pace while we were drafting.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (53:49):
I mean,
I think Ukraine changed what wethought was the core framing puzzle.
When we started writing this book,Julian, I were saying, hey, we don't.
Why are we investing in the Predator andthe Reaper?
And that got us a lot of flak, remember?
At the time, people were really upset,and so it was like, we're out on a limb.
(54:09):
We're saying that we should bebuying smaller and cheaper things.
I remember writing a memo for
the Joint Staff while I was still atthe Naval War College in like 2017.
And it felt like I was ontosomething new about like, hey,
we should not just be buying expensive,exquisite things.
And fast forward to the book coming out.
It does not feel new to say that weshouldn't be investing in expensive,
(54:32):
exquisite things.
It feels like yada.
>> Julie McDonald (54:35):
The world caught up with us.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (54:37):
Yeah, and so, I mean,
things that we thought were revolutionary.
>> Julie McDonald (54:42):
Yeah.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (54:43):
Don't sound as surprising now.
>> Michael Horowitz (54:47):
The perils of being right.
All right, sorry, one last question.
And apparently it's.
>> Speaker 8 (54:53):
This just goes with what you were just saying to a degree.
But, in a world where we have deficitsthat are wartime level deficits,
we are shooting down Houthi $10,000drones with million dollar missiles.
Why isn't simple economics and
innovation the sole driving reasonwe can move things forward with
(55:17):
technology rather than why are weweighed down by these other aspects?
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (55:22):
Well, Julia and I have a great paper in the Journal of
Strategic Studies that actually arguesthat what the theorists who came up with
Revolutions in Military affairs got wrongwas that they forgot about economic costs.
And that the it was always a dream thatwe would win a war in two weeks and
(55:42):
that we failed to think about whatit meant to sustain conflict over
a long period of time.
And had built an arsenal thatwas focused on political cost to
the expense of our bankrupting ourselves.
When we wrote that,I felt like it was new again.
And I think it is not new.
(56:03):
And Mike has, I think one of the best,
if not the best summaries ofwhere we should be going,
which is this balance of mass andcost, but also with precision.
And I think part of what has changedtechnologically is that precision is
cheaper now.
Yeah, it used to be that precision.
>> Michael Horowitz (56:23):
40 year old technology.
>> Jacquelyn Schneider (56:25):
Yeah.
>> Michael Horowitz (56:26):
All right, well, I think we are out of time.
Jackie Schneider and Julie McDonaldhave written an awesome book,
the Hand Behind Unmanned.
I would strongly encourageeveryone to buy it.
This book is already reshaping how weare thinking about unmanned technology in
the military.
And please join me in thanking them fora tremendous conversation.
>> [APPLAUSE]
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