A New Age of Danger

Welcome to Shield of the Republic. A podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of

Virginia and dedicated to the proposition First articulated by Walter Littman during World War two that a strong and balanced foreign policy is the absolutely essential shield of our Democratic Republic. I’m Eric Edelman, counselor at the Center for Strategic and budgetary assessments, a Bulwark contributor and a nonresident fellow, at the Miller Center, My normal partner in this enterprise, Elliott Cohen, the Robert e Ozgood professor of strategy at the Johns Hopkins University school of Advanced International Studies in the Arleigh Burke Chair of Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies is traveling But I have as our very special guest today, two authors of a recent book Andrew Hone, who’s a senior vice president and director of research at the rand corporation and also a former colleague in government where he was deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. And Tom Shanker, who is currently the director of the project for media and national security at George Washington University, and also probably known to many podcast listeners as a former national security and foreign policy editor and reporter for the New York Times and a former colleague as well when he covered the Pentagon. So welcome, Andy and Tom.

It’s great to have you.

Thank you.

Really an honor to be here, Eric. Thank you for the invitation.

So I wanna talk about your new book, The Age of Danger, Keeping America safe in an era of new superpowers, new weapons and new threats published last month by Hashet publishers. Available to all our listeners at Amazon or wherever you get books. Andy, could you tell us just the the general argument, why is this an age of danger and why should our listeners and American citizens writ large be concerned about it?

Eric, Tom and I began working on this book three or four years ago, and we’ve known each other just as we’ve known you, much of our career. And and as we were looking at the world around us, looking at how problems were compounding. How new threats were rising, yet old threats were seemingly not going away, not being resolved. You know, we could we sense this problem. It was we’ve confronted a superpower in the past.

Now we’re dealing with two superpowers with nuclear weapons. As we were looking at issues of threats from disease, not only to humans, but perhaps disease to our food crops. As we were seeing the digital world growing we hear often about cyber, but also what AI might pretend in this larger world. And of course, climate which I think rightly is not necessarily the cause, but is the, you know, is the driver of the other sorts of problems that that result from climate change. And a host of other issues, we felt like the the world was much less secure from the standpoint of the United States rather than more so.

We know we spend an enormous sum to make America secure. Tom and I are both people that would believe it’s important that we should spend whatever’s needed. We don’t begin with a proposition that we should spend more. We’d like to see us spend wisely, but if spending more is what’s required, then we should do that. But we saw this problem.

We knew we spent a lot in for us. It really was looking like this world was more dangerous other than less so.

And Eric, I think in many ways, you know, my many years coming the Pentagon, I learned an axiom of the Armed Forces, which is that speed kills. And I think if nothing else the problems that Andy outlined and that we cover in our book are coming at us faster than ever before and from all sides and in fact some of them are coming not just at hypersonic speed, but at network speed. And it’s been a long time since we could count on the two great oceans to protect us, but to be sure the interconnectedness of the world today. And the fact that as Andy said, there’s not just one superpower rival but two. Never before even in World War two did the US face a pair of adversaries each of which have the ability to wipe us off the face of the Earth.

So, truly, we feel this is a new age of danger.

Yes. And then that latter point about facing two nuclear piers is one that, of course, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, drew attention to recently in his speech to the Arms Control Association and which actually I testified along with Frank Miller about in the Senate Armed Services Committee last September, One of the things I admire about your book among many is the degree to which you’ve really made this accessible to non specialist audience. You don’t have to be a national security, you know, walk to really learn a lot from your book, And you talk about the mechanisms by which we Americans deal with this more complicated, more dangerous world that you’ve been describing, you call them the warning machine and the action machine. Tom, can you talk a little bit about what you mean by by that, and what did you two of you determine where the deficiencies of the warning and action machines that are extent today that are in place.

Mhmm. I mean, that really is a central element of our book So, thank you for raising it. And just very quickly how we got there. Andy and I began this process three, four years ago with a series of dinners at Lebanese restaurant near the Pentagon, that no doubt you have dined at. And it began really as a list of, yeah, a list of the problems that we thought were not being acknowledged or for which we were unprepared.

And then after some months of that, the list was too long to even think about it being a book. So we began to think more synthetically and broadly, and that led us to understand that if we could talk about the systems that are designed to protect us, then it doesn’t matter what the specific problem is. And how do you get the systems in place to do that? And so, as a notional framework for our thinking, we divided the national security apparatus into the warning machine and the action machine. And the warning machine, of course, gathers information from around the world, assesses risks, and warns when relevant and required And this is far, far beyond just the intelligence community, you know, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Eric, you’ll remember the concept was every soldier is a sensor.

When you’re out there on patrol, you should be looking at the world around you. So we apply that to all of the departments and agencies. Health and human services, commerce, and all the others that gather information, and is it working well enough? And once the warning machine does warn, does it warn with clarity? Does it warn with power?

Or does it issue an uncertain trumpet to quote the New Testament, that the executive branch might not hear. And once a warning is received across the executive branch, the action machine When does it act and when not? When should it act and when do say political considerations, bandwidth, election cycle, get in the way of making a prompt and powerful decision. And this framework we think is really a useful way to look at how this country organizes itself to keep itself safe.

Eric, if I could just say one more word on that too. When it comes to action, it’s One of the things that really interested Tom and me in writing this book is whether in fact there was an action machine at all. So it’s one thing to have a problem arrive at the president’s desk. It’s quite another thing, is there anything the president or his advisors can do about it? So, you know, on some problems, we have, you know, well built action machines.

Think about the US military and its many many approaches to dealing with threats to the country. But on when it comes to issues, say, with pandemic preparedness, or perhaps, you know, in a chapter where Tom Tom was the lead writer on threats of drones within our own country. You know, action machines have to have the organizational pieces in place. Also have to have the proper authorities in place. That is even if the people have a mission and have a job, if they don’t have the proper authorities, then we don’t have an action machine.

And so we were looking at this across a series of problems. And when we thought about warning an action, we thought the the approach isn’t complete unless, you know, decision makers are warned and when decision makers decide, Is there an apparatus an action machine, if you will, that’s prepared to do something about it?

Yeah. I mean, a point you make is that the National Security Act of nineteen forty seven, which was adopted by the Congress in the wake of the emerging crisis of the Cold War created a kind of decision making apparatus for a very specific kind of world and a very specific kind of or set set, I would say, of problems that were, you know, not purely but, you know, largely political military problems. I mean, and part of what I took you to be saying is the world has become so much more interdependent, so much more integrated, that there are so many more actors involved in these problems globally that the system that you know, was designed in nineteen forty seven and worked, you know, reasonably well up until, you know, maybe the early two thousands. May not be that well architected for, you know, this new emerging set of problems, including the new technologies that you talked about.

No, that’s so very, very true. One of our officials that we interviewed said it’s, you know, he talked about the nineteen forty seven reforms as great model Chevrolet at the time, but it’s time to put that forty seven Chevy in the garage. And you reference the next big restructuring after nineeleven. And that restructuring certainly kept our nation safe. Creation of the Office of Director of National Intelligence, the stand up of Northern Command, the National Counter Territory Center to be a synthesis for all of the warning on terrorism, served us very, very well.

But Indian and I make the case that that zoom on terrorism after nineeleven, which, again, any death over zero is too many. But three thousand people died on nineeleven, and we launched two forever wars. A million people, a million Americans have died from COVID, the number is still counting. We never went on a war footing against pandemic. So even the nine eleven reforms have perhaps focused us too sharply on terrorism at the loss of seeing all the other challenges.

That are confronting us today.

The point you raise gets to actually the next point I wanted to kinda dig into which is the whole question of whole of government and even whole of society solutions for some of these, particularly some of the transnational national security problems as opposed to the more regionally focused ones. And we’ve clearly had a lot of difficulty coming to grips with this, to have a whole of government solution. And I would argue, I mean, and please tell me if you think this is wrong, but that the American political system is actually in some ways was built to prevent whole of government solutions. I mean, the idea of separation of powers and preventing centers of power accreting more and more power to themselves within government was sort of part of the design of the founders. And so I mean, I know having broken my own pick on this working on, you know, counterinsurgency and stabilization in Iraq and Afghanistan and the second term of Bush forty three that getting a whole of government solutions is a huge town for the United States.

In part because we really don’t have the analog for the non national security family of cabinet offices of the National Security Act. Some of those things I think can be fixed. But when it comes to whole of society, And we hear this a lot in the context of competition with China, where China clearly has a whole of society approach to, you know, many of these things like AI and civil military fusion in terms of development of future technology. But should we want to aspire to a whole of society solution. Is that really what we want in the United States?

I mean, I I that’s a genuine question. It’s not a rhetorical trap or rhetorical question. I just whenever I hear whole of society, there’s something about it that makes me, you know, a little uneasy. And whole of government, you know, I’d be happy to hear from you gentlemen about, you know, ways we can try and make that work better since been obviously very difficult for us to accomplish. Andy, do you wanna

Eric, first off, I think implied in your question is is a philosophy that Tom and I share, which is we believe in what the founders created it’s worked very, very well in this country. But we also think there’s been genius at different times in our history. That’s allowed us to be consistent with the founders at image of the country yet to be organized and deal with problems of the time. When you spoke to the forty seven reforms, there was a genius in that that served it very well. Perfectly, no.

But well, yes, and provide real security. I think we need to look at these problems in this era, consistent with what the founders gave us and see what we can do to improve. We’re not gonna make a perfect system in terms of whole society. But I think we can improve areas. And, you know, one of the conversations the readers are gonna see is with former national security adviser, Steve Hadley, toward the And Steve was reminding us that it’s the public and private sector are gonna are gonna have to cooperate on some of these key challenges.

But to get that kind of cooperation, we’re gonna have to set up some reasonable rules. That is we can’t expect you know, those that are parts of the private sector that are that are perceiving a new cyber threat, for example, to reveal themselves if what it means is unleashing the federal government on every parts of their business. We’re not talking about sanctioning criminal behavior or that sort of thing. But we are talking about at least modernizing some of these rules and interactions and so forth. Tom and I don’t know how to do all of this.

We know the problems are there, and we’re pointing to what some of the solutions are. But there’s a genius in this generation that needs to be unleashed just like the genius that that was around for that forty seven act, and we’d really like to see that get going.

And, Eric, I I love your your question about whole of society involvement. Because this is something that Andy and I wrestled with and not that he and I need to say it. But he and I are completely you know, apolitical and nonpartisan and that’s why I very much like the Lippmann quote you started with because it really does take our entire society to keep us safe. When we were tossing drafts back and forth, and yet aligned in our conclusion about We’ve been talking about the learning machine and the action machine, but we’re really talking about people. And that just struck me in my heart And that’s when we get to a whole of society response.

Not everybody in society needs to march shoulder, by shoulder, like you see on Red Square, Tiananmen Square, our country is not designed that way, but every citizen in this country needs to feel their responsibility to make decisions with their tax dollars, how they vote, and I’m not pitching a candidate or party here, but everybody has to vote for the kinds of leaders who can come together and execute on Walter Littman’s vision of a strong bipartisan national security. Because when we’re paralyzed, we’re not safe, when we’re broken, we’re not safe. And this really is part of what makes the current age of danger so worrisome.

In one of the great gaps that I see in which you talk about in the book between the sort of warning machine and the action machine, is, you know, the emerging consensus we’ve had, I think, over the last decade, that China is going to be the major national security threat that that we’re gonna have to face as a nation for the foreseeable future. And you see certain degree of bipartisanship in that. I mean, it was part of the, you know, Trump twenty eighteen national defense strategy and national security strategy. It’s clearly part of the you know, a lot of it was just taken over by the, you know, Biden team and their national defense strategy. And And you see it in sort of bipartisan support for things like the Chip’s Act and the special committee on Congress that Mike Gallagher is is chairing that has been pretty bipartisan, not, you know, you don’t see the kind of partisan food fights that you see in other precincts of the Congress.

But having said that, you know, there seems to be a disconnect between the degree of consensus and and warning about China. And the action that’s required to deal with it, and to your colleagues, at re end, put out publication Dave Ocmanic about five or six years ago looking at how the US was situated versus his colleagues versus, you know, our competitors, I should say. And it it showed that we were not in a great place, you know, dealing with China over the long run. You know, I suspect if he had to redo that today, the situation probably maybe look even worse in some some ways. So what explains that?

I mean, I have a partial answer which is and you talk about it too. I mean, we were distracted for a long time by the wars of the, you know, early two thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan and ongoing, you know, dealing with with terror. Another is just a bandwidth problem, which is that it’s very difficult for the US government to to deal with you know, sort of more than one big, you know, challenge, maybe one and a half challenges at a time, you know. And right now, for instance, the US government you get the sense that the principals and their deputies are spending the vast bulk of their time understandably. I mean, this is not a criticism.

But on on Ukraine, in the war in Ukraine with Russia, which is absolutely gonna be very essential, you know, for us to help the Ukrainians prevail. But, I mean, how do you once you’ve got, as you say the warning, how do you get, you know, the rest of the government to and and this is not something new at the Pentagon. Right? So China’s supposed to have been the pacing challenge for the last, you know, five years, but as someone who gets to look at this, from various purchase that I have as a member of the Defense Policy Board and on the NDS commission at Congress appointed You just don’t get a sense that there’s a whole lot of urgency in the Department of Defense’s response to this. Not there’s some individuals who very seized by it.

But the institution as a whole, I mean, is is very hard to reorient and not you don’t see big changes going on.

Eric, this is a gargantuan challenge, and I’m really concerned about the slowness. You know, it’s one thing to not see a problem coming, but it’s quite another to have seen it coming for a long, long time. And not have dealt with it. You know, you you talked about a consensus for the last five years. You recall Eric I was one of the people leading the strategy review in in the Department of Defense in two thousand one.

This is before now. Right. And this to begin preparing for that challenge that China presented You know, we knew at that time this was gonna unfold over two decades or so. Well, we’re now two decades later. And we just haven’t made the progress, you know, having gone from a position of of, you know, strategic advantage significant advantage to one of parity or worse over over a two decade span.

It’s just deeply deeply worrisome. And here’s one that I don’t all the people. Let’s leave the but but the institution seemed to just be sluggish and slow. And this really merits attention. This merits attention from from our leaders that it merits attention from the American public.

We should expect more And as we hide in the highlight in the book, there are people that are coming up with terrific ideas. We’re not here to say this idea is better than another, we feature some of that. But there are good ideas coming out of these institutions, but we’re just not seizing the moment. Acting one of them, bringing resources to those problems so that we can we can design and experiment, test, and reform. Things that this country, we we know we can accomplish because we’ve done it in the past over and over again, but we don’t seem to be doing it now.

And that’s really a deep concern for me So getting the action machine right, even the parts that we count on like the defense department, we need to look really carefully at them because We don’t have you know, we don’t have the luxury of two more decades to deal with this growing China growing threat that China presents. In the Pacific region and be is up to on. It’s time for us to to act now. And the ideas are out there, but we need to get the in tutians, the people in the institutions to get moving. One one last brief point on this, you know, we we had a terrific conversation that readers are gonna see with former secretary of defense Robert Gates, you work for a matter.

A terrific person, super thoughtful on these issues. And we were asking him about the slowness, and his answer was, he said, you know, the thing that really bothered him as secretary of defense is that only two people in the defense department could say yes. The Secret Podcast Defense and the Deputy Secretary Defense. He pointed up the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff can’t say that doesn’t have money. The the secretaries of the military departments and the and the service chiefs, they have resource.

But there’s there’s this organizational structure that sits on top of them. All those people can say no. Lots of people invested with the ability to say no. Only two people could say, yes. We need to do better.

We need to be able to get the good ideas. We try to highlight a few of them. And so that people can say yes and and get on with it. Because we know that there are answers to some of these problems, but we we’ve gotta move up.

Yeah. I mean, he tells a story about something he did while I was there, which was the decision to build the mrap, which you know, was done, essentially, over the objections of his deputy and, you know, every other part of the known bureaucratic universe. I mean, nobody wanted to do this thing, except Bob Gates, and and he did it, I think, out of, you know, two motives. One was very keen sense of responsibility to the young men and women who are executing the surge, and who were getting blown up by IEDs and shaped explosives and whatnot, and making sure they had everything they could to protect them. And I think that was a very noble motive even if it was a twenty billion dollar expenditure for things we probably won’t use very much again ever.

If ever. But the other motive, of course, was to give president Bush’s surge strategy the time to succeed because the casualties were eroding political support for the strategy. So it was a good strategic decision, but it highlights the fact that frequently we find ourselves in the position of having to work around the system. In order to, you know, to get results, you know. And this happens not just in the department, but with the Congress, as well.

I mean, so two of the efforts to deal with both Russia and China and the Indo Pacific have been essentially workarounds around the system, right? The Pacific deterrents initiative and the European deterrence initiative which had a different name originally. But, you know, both of those were essentially congressionally kind of mandated things worked around the system in order to, you know, start addressing these problems with more more urgency. What did you guys think about that aspect of this?

Yeah. I mean you’ve actually foreshadowed Eric, some of our solutions because we did speak to secretary Gates at length about the MRAP situation. And the lesson of that is that as secretary of defense, the senior civilian over this massive department He had to create his own tiger team

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Right. — that would work around the rest of the bureaucracy to successfully you know, field a brand new weapon system in under a year to save lives. And while very, very different, there’s another example of that which is operation Warp Speed. When the pandemic hit, this country was standing still when it came to pandemic defense. As Andy likes to point out, yes, some things have been purchased and there was some mRNA research done years before, that was absolutely essential.

But in one year, this nation got a fabulous vaccine into the arms of its citizens. By bringing together public private partnerships by giving legal protections and all of that. And so if we take the lessons of Warp Speed and the Mrap, which drives much slower than Warp Speed having been in many of them. You know, we proposed that this government begin experimenting with a series of standing joint task forces to anticipate these kinds of problems, a data crisis, another pandemic, a crop and food crisis, things like that, you bring the people together from all across the government, all the smart people, create these tiger teams, and formalize them to exercise several times a year to identify requirements and resources, those sorts of things. So even if you can’t predict the exact risk, the risk that drove MRAPS or that drove the vaccine, the government is more nimble, more ready to operate, and it won’t be a pickup game.

I guess, so my question Tom to you and to Andy is if you because I I noted the, you know, the idea of using like the standing joint task force. I mean, in the book you you talk about the amazing, you know, work that Stan McCrystal did at JSoc, and and, you know, all three of us were out to Belad and visited you stand and saw, you know, how he turned the US special forces into an extremely efficient you know, mechanism for finding fixing and finishing terrorists. I guess my question though is, you know, if we end up having to design a, you know, a a standing joint task force for each one of these problems, you know, that you outline you know, in the book, are we gonna end up with this sort of kind of jerry rigged monster where the, you know, ad hoc solution for each one of them as opposed to something more streamlined and capable of flexibly dealing with a variety of problems. Going back to the, you know, the National Security Act, I mean, great thing about the National Security Act nineteen forty seven is created. I’ve got very flexible system for dealing with national security challenges, which each president got to remake essentially in their own image for better or for worse, which is to say you could use that mechanism to suit the both the learning and the leadership style of each president, some cases to a fault in, I would say, with previous incumbent.

But, I mean, if you just have all these, you know, standing joint task forces, if you just made this sort of unwieldy hydra headed mess.

Eric, I think we have a little different take on this in the sense that we’re not asking to create you know, a new b m f. In fact, we Tom and I were reluctant to to suggest you know, new building, new institutions, new cabinet departments to deal with these things. We thought more bureaucracy. But it it was that very long detailed conversation with Sam a crystal that lit, you know, put a in a light bulb in our minds that The military knows how to create joint task forces to deal with problems. You can stand them up.

You can shut them down. They can get bigger. They can get smaller. There’s a certain flexibility, much in the way you discussed about that genius of the of the forty seven National Security Act, presidents can adopt that. You know, you see a problem intensifying.

That is the warning machine is beginning to tell you, this thing is emerging. You connect these parts that you now have a responsibility. But if you haven’t thought ahead of time, it isn’t even clear what it is you’re trying to connect. We’d like to see those connections thought about ahead of time. And then you can begin to dial this up, dial it down as you see the problem’s emerging.

Some of these things are gonna be on dial all the time. I mean, these things are out there if you were looking at sort of cyber related challenges. But, you know, a pandemic response, at least let’s know who needs to be talking to each other and and who needs to be interacting. And when that warning is moving, then you can begin to dial this. We I I’m intrigued with the whole, you know, defcon idea, the defense readiness condition.

You know, that was the system that was built for political decision, but it had very specific actions that was associated with it. So as you move from def con five to four to three to two, to one. Now, ultimately, each step had its own set of actions which, you know, that we’re associated with it. We’re not trying we’re not suggesting let’s build whole def con apparatus. But let’s think about that.

So there can be a political decision. You know, we’re at a heightened sense of alert and readiness, and then we get the action machine that’s responding accordingly. That’s the idea that we have in mind. We’re not trying to create a hide or a hydra. What we are trying to do is think about having more ready capable responses at the president’s discretion?

So I I detected the spirit of the late Andy Marshall, the long the long tenure director of the Pentagon’s office of net assessment, which, yeah, he ran for over forty years and passed away a few years ago at age ninety seven. Andy, can you tell us a little since Andy Marshall came from the Rand Corporation where you’re sitting right now, Andy, can you tell us a little bit about Andrew Marshall? And am I am I correct that his spirit infuses your book?

Well, first. Absolutely. I mean, we I think among the three of us where you’ve got, you know, all three of us are admirers of Marshall as a person, Andy Marshall as a person, but also Andy Marshall as an institution you know, was somebody who devoted his life to the national security of this country who had the foresight to see problems and not just see them, but stick with them. So Marshall had a twenty year career career ran before he entered the government. And listeners to this podcast are gonna know names like Albert Olstetter, Fred Hoffman.

You know, Bernard Brody. These are the early mines of the nuclear era. Marshall worked with them all. And in in the early seventies, it was actually when Henry Kissinger was a national security adviser, They created an office of net assessment. It was in the NSC staff on the national security council staff, but it moved soon over to the Pentagon.

And that’s where Marshall spent the rest of his career, really looking out into the future, identifying problems. Marshall was one early one to see the fragility in the Soviet system that how the Soviet economy couldn’t continue to support their military efforts, and and particularly once the war in Afghanistan their war in Afghanistan got underway. Just how they were being pulled in the direction. So it was gonna be ultimately, you know, just exacerbating the the fragility of this. Of the Soviet economy.

You know, we were really looking I was looking early on with Tom at the origins of the China. Story. That is when did really we really become interested in China as a national security question, you know. And And we think we found the answer, and, of course, it was Andy Marshall. Andy Marshall, with an old colleague from Miranda, Charlie Sykes, an economist.

In the mid eighties, nineteen eighty five. I think February of eighty five. Marshall was quick to remind me, and this was just, you know, a few months before, his death, February of eighty five. They wrote a paper that was projecting the that by twenty ten, the China’s economy would surpass the Soviet economy. And they saw that as the signal of something to really watch because as China’s economy was gonna be on the move and growing, it was gonna create surplus.

China was gonna have growing interests in the world. It was gonna wanna protect those interests by investing more and more in its military capabilities. And that was a signal to them that we had we’d need really need to watch this. Marshall himself then invested in this through a series of games. Some through the the to your institution, the center for strategic and budgetary assessment that that was in the early nineties.

And then what they were really saying is if China has greater wherewithal and it begins to invest in the military, what might that look like? And was coming out of that, you know, the challenges that we talk about today, any access, Eric Genile. Those are all ideas that Marshall invested. And in terms of really trying to understand what time I meant. And, of course, we know the story of where where I had today.

We talked about it earlier that you know, a couple of decades have passed. We’re not ready. But here was somebody that’s not formally part of the intelligence community who was providing serious warning of a problem that was coming and doing serious analysis about what the actions might be.

Yeah. I mean, he also was part of the commission on long term strategic competition that did a report at the tail end of the Cold War, which actually was very prescient in terms of some of the technologies that you talk about in the book, including unmanned Aviation and cyber and various other kinds of technological development. So, yeah, I mean, I I I agree with you. The other thing, of course, Marshall was very focused on, as a strategist, was identifying both comparative strategic in, you know, areas of advantage and disadvantage and trying to figure out how to offset those disadvantages by Cott’s trading on, you know, US advantages and setting them against the weaknesses of and propensities. Of adversaries, you know, for instance.

So Andy identifying the Soviet predisposition for, you know, strong investment in integrated air defenses, leading him to be a big supporter of the b two, for instance, as a cost imposing strategy. And you talk about cost to position.

Yeah. Cost to position. I I think we all learned it from Marshall. And it’s something we all need to stay focused on. And this is a moment, by the way, where there may be some ideas out there that could impose costs on some of our competitors.

We need to really follow those ideas.

Andy, it’s that’s a great segue to what I wanted to go to next. You talk a bit about some ideas that some of your colleagues at Rand have have worked on as well as others in the Air Force, which is the use of unmanned attritable aircraft, perhaps in very large numbers to deal with the very large investment that China has made in building up its naval and air air forces to the point that they now are potentially in the inner Pacific, really, you know, from a quantitative point of view, just dwarfing what we’re capable of producing. Do you do either one of you wanna talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. Let let me just talk a little. I know Tom will wanna say a little more here. These these are really interesting ideas. And and what this group of analysts working with the Air Force are really looking at is that the problem China faces, particularly vis a vis taiwan, is it ultimately has to get over a hundred miles of water.

That means it’s gonna have to bring people and equipment on ships if it wants to invade Taiwan. And that but but that presents a target identification problem. You if you just put a hundred ships across the timeline straight, that, you know, we we could stall that. But if you flood that straight with lots of decoys, fishing boats, any kind of craft, and so forth, maybe thousand, you know, different water craft out there. What’s a real military target and what isn’t?

Well, their their thinking is let’s build a sensor grid, but let’s do this inexpensively. Their idea is you would get, you know, very inexpensive unmanned aircraft you’d put sensors on them that are using essentially iPhone technology. You have these sensors interacting with each other, and you fly them in big numbers, you know? The analysts that we talked to said, let’s put a thousand up if a thousand doesn’t well, put two thousand up. Fly them.

Let’s say put them up. Fly these sensors over the time line straight. But make them inexpensive you know, if they’re if they cost a hundred thousand dollars each, that’s fine. Because if it takes a million dollar missile, to shoot down a hundred thousand dollar sensor or small unmanned aircraft back to the cost and position idea, you’re on the right side of that equation. And they they wouldn’t have the ability to shoot all these down.

And and if you lost some, you’d fly some more. But the idea is you create this sensors, and then, you know, if there’s an invasion force that come across this strait, we we could identify what the real targets are. And we have the ability to deal with that. These are the kind of ideas that I think are exciting. It’s not the only idea that’s out that’s out there.

There are other ideas too. These are the kind of things we’d like to see get elevated in the system, you know, run experiments on these types of things, see if it you know, no idea is gonna work in totality the first time you try it. So run the experiment, learn what you can, and then improve on. You know, this is the kind of thing that in a timely way, we’re gonna we’re gonna really have to get after. But I love the idea of you know, you’ve got physicists at a place like Rand and other places with, you know, with military leaders that are really trying to think about and solve real problem.

Which goes back a little bit to the origins of of rand when you had people who were mathematicians or physicists and economists, historians, you know, sitting down with, you know, other interdisciplinary in an interdisciplinary setting. I mean, you know, that’s something we haven’t really done since the dawn of of the nuclear age, and we probably need to get get back to it, I would say.

Here here. We need to do it in a lot of different places, and we need those kind of people on ideas connecting and coming up with answers and, you know, or at least, you know, good hypotheses. Some of these aren’t gonna work. That’s alright.

In the spirit of Andy Marshall, I should have said demographers also.

And this also brings us to one of our other sort of thematic high points of the book, which is quite simply the future needs a seat at the table. I mean, the kind of of asymmetrical advantages that the U. S. Could bring to the Taiwan straits are antithetical to the current system of having these smaller number of exquisite platforms like aircraft carriers that with the number of Chinese missiles that are fielded. They really do have anti access area denial.

And there has to be someone at the table who’s charged with the authorities to look around the corner and toward the horizon and saying, okay, that may have worked so far, but I don’t want to say break China. That’s a bad analogy, but can kind of use some sharp elbows to make people think in new and fresh ways. And we have to apply that to the China conundrum as we have to, to all of the problems that we identify.

One of the terms that you use in the book, which is a great Pentagon term, which I I would love for you to talk about for our audience is the idea of unobtainium. Andy, do you wanna explain to our listeners what unobtainium is?

Yeah. It’s It’s you know, it’s it’s you’re right, Eric. It is it is a term that’s bounced around the Pentagon, but it’s the idea that you’ve got a problem and somebody imagined something that has yet to be ever ever invented, you know, might defy the laws of physics, but that’s gonna be our solution. Let’s not let that be our solution. Let’s get on you know, what we’re really talking about practical things that can let you solve real problems, not imagining a technology that suddenly solves all things.

You know, the army future combat system was burdened with this. There was some unobtain in there. That is it was depending upon batteries, power source that had never even been proven in a laboratory. I mean, if a if a laboratory has never proven that a battery is capable of holding that amount of power for over a certain period of time, we certainly don’t wanna want we certainly don’t want to have, you know, our next ground combat vehicle depend upon a comet. Technology that folks in the laboratory have never even proven to be feasible.

So that’s what we mean in my and we just want to avoid those kind of solutions. We’d rather put iPhones on inexpensive unmanned aircraft and use them as sensors, which we know can connect. By the way, how do we know it can connect? Because Uber does it all the time. If you wanna see how a set of iPhones are are operating as a set of sensors, dial up an Uber ride on the on Manhattan someday.

And you’ll see how a couple thousand sensors are working together.

And in partnership with that Eric, it has to be an understanding that most of the problems that are presenting this new age of danger can’t be solved. We can’t win. They can at best be managed. And so, you know, you think about the years that we were finding a war on terror as if we could eradicate terrorism. And this country finally pulled out of it when we realize that we have to mitigate the problem, do what we can, but it’s never going to go away.

So the opposite of an obtaining is mitigation strategies. And that’s what our government needs to adopt.

Yeah, I mean, to me, challenge of the unobtainium was it was always the excuse for not disturbing the program of record because someday we were gonna get unobtainium and that was gonna solve you know, solve everything. It goes to the issue of urgency we were talking about. So I want to ask both of you what surprised you most while you were in the process of preparing and then and then writing this book?

Well, I don’t want your listeners to lose sleep at night, but what surprised me the most it has since the book’s been published is as grim as Andy and I became about some of our problems. When we’re out talking about it and we bump into people, they say that we’re not actually as Grim as we should have been. I was out in Des Moines, Iowa two weeks ago. We have a whole chapter about the risk of crop blight, and food, a mass starvation, whether naturally occurring like a pandemic, or brought to us by adversaries. And the examples we have in our book have been well known in the Agribusiness community for a long time, and they are just shocked it hasn’t happened yet.

So even though our book ends on some optimistic and hopeful notes, I actually have to acknowledge that Andy and I were a little too optimistic as we start describing, even the risks of this new age of danger.

I’m gonna take a little different tack on that error, and not Tom’s right. But we had some other surprises. There are smart people out there on all these problems. They’re working on them. They’re thinking about them.

This country’s got to find we have to tap into the smarts. You know, we we showcase, you know, a couple dozen you know, several dozen people here, we could have showcased double or triple that amount. We’ve got to tap into this this creativity that exists in this country, these people that have a real sense of duty to their country. These are real patriots that wanna work on solving some of these problems. We’ve gotta get this machinery that we’re talking about.

Get these people so these ideas and these thoughts can take hold and we can get moving. We need to get our institutional processes. We talked about Congress We’ve got money tied up in things that we don’t need anymore. We’ve gotta let go of that. We’ve gotta let go of that.

We understand the policy through that. But there’ll be new things that come behind that. Let’s get on with the new ideas. And we’re never gonna free up the resources to get on with the new thing as long as we’re hanging on to some of these old things well, well past their client. I mean, that applies to all the military service.

To be sure we’re hanging on to equipment and approaches that we just know is not gonna not gonna help us and and meeting our future security needs. Let’s let that go to the past. Let’s get all of these new ideas. And there are some very exciting people on very smart things out there that people Bulwark working on.

Although, you know, as you know, the commandant the outgoing commandant of the Marine Corps has you know, tried to do just that with the marine corps, and he is excited an enormous amount of antibodies, particularly from retired, you know, marine four star community, which I think tells you how challenging it is to do what the two of you are suggesting we do more broadly throughout, not just the defense establishment, but the and not just the national security establishment, but throughout the entire U. S. Government to deal with some of these problems. One last question I have for you.

So wanna say one thing here. We talked to a very nice person. We happen to be talking to him. This is really hard.

Yes. My one contribution to your book.

More than one, but really are.

So the two of you, you know, set out to write a book about the potential, you know, the future of potential conflict. And as frequently happens in these kinds of projects, you know, as you were coming to a conclusion, the actual conflict broke out that’s been probably the most intense, you know, military engagement, well, certainly, since Vietnam. But you know, maybe going back to World War two. So what from the Russia, Ukraine war either influenced or affected or changed your view of anything that you were looking at.

Right. Well, Eric, you’ll remember very well the Munich Security Conference in two thousand seven when Vladimir Putin gave this incredible speech laying out his disgust with America that he called the Hyperpower, and asserting that Russia was back and would take over its near abroad. And he identified Georgia and Ukraine and other things. That was two thousand and seven. He invaded Georgia a year later.

He made his first invasion of Ukraine, the Crimean in twenty fourteen. So I think, you know, other than the fact that Andy and I more or less predicted the invasion of Ukraine, The book wasn’t ready, so we had to rewrite the entire chapter from start to finish. I think the lessons there is that Vladimir Putin always tells us in advance what he’s going to do, and we don’t listen. And so if anything, the war in Ukraine is a challenge to our government that you don’t necessarily need a telephone intercept of a Kremlin phone call or a mole pouring chai for the Russian leader because Putin says what he’s going to do. But we willfully blinded ourselves to Russia.

We had — we talked to the NATO commander who was in charge in twenty fourteen, Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine.

Phil breed loves, yeah.

Exactly right. And he told us Eric, he had zero tactical warning. None whatsoever that Russia was going to invade Ukraine the first time in twenty fourteen. And he said, He was so angry. He went off like a well hit nine iron in a tile bathroom, flew back to Washington and asked what happened.

And he was told by the intelligence community that on the day before the Berlin Wall fell, there were about fifteen thousand analysts looking at the Soviet Union. The day before the invasion of Ukraine in twenty fourteen, that numbered dwindled to one thousand or two thousand. Before the Berlin Wall fell, fifty percent of the Intel budget looked at the Soviet Union before the invasion of Ukraine the first time, that number had dropped to fifteen percent. So we need to be smarter. Andy and I are not arguing for a larger national security budget, but it needs to be spent wiser.

A one more thing on this. I think the war Russia’s war on Ukraine tells us one thing. The machinery work. I don’t suggest everything’s gone perfectly there. I think I’d like to see some things have gone faster in terms of the decision process.

But when we had real warning, it was used. CIA Director Burns was very effective not only with signaling to Russia, but signaling to our allies. This is this is coming. They were about to invade Ukraine. Use that evidence in ways maybe that the pictorial evidence may be in ways we hadn’t seen since the cuban missile crisis.

You know, the NATO machinery snapped into action. In terms of support to Ukraine and not only weapons, but training, and so forth. You know, I think there’s a lot we could debate about how all the particulars Bulwark. But the machinery was there. When we put it to work, it worked.

We’d like to see that machinery work on some of these other problems in a similar way.

Yeah. I mean, I guess I would say on the resource question, you know, particularly given the incredibly complex security environment that you describe in this book with both Russia, China, the other ongoing problems that, you know, we have to deal with as well. Iran, North Korea, you know, violent extremism. And then the the new issues that we’ve gotten a just a big wake up call about, you know, recently in terms of pandemics and climate all these other things. I think if you look at what we’re spending on national defense as a percentage of GDP, it’s relatively low compared to what we spent for instance during the cold war.

So I guess the way I would frame it, Tom, is we may well need to spend more But Scenic went on for getting the more from the American people and from the Congress is being able to show them that we’re spending it better.

I would not — Eric, I would not disagree at all. We should spend what is important. And again in a very nonpartisan apolitical way, I do want to say that when there are for partisan and polarizing reasons, members of congress and want to hold our economy as a hostage. You know, all of the defense spending in the world is not going to keep us safe. So yes, I agree one hundred percent we should spend what is necessary, but we need to be wiser in the entire process of what keeps our country safe.

And polarization and paralysis is just as dangerous as too small a defense budget.

I couldn’t agree more. And the other point I would make is It’s, you know, some of these very people who’ve been criticizing the Biden Administration for not spending enough on defense who are now straight straight jacking the department in, as a result of this budget deal. We may not need to spend more, but spending less probably isn’t gonna work.

We don’t need to spend less we do need to spend a lot wisely, and we don’t need great jacketing the people that are trying to do the hard work of protecting this country.

I couldn’t agree more. Our guests have been Tom Shanker and Andy Hone, the all sorts of age of danger, keeping America safe in the era of new super powers, new weapons and new threats. I urge our listeners to get themselves a copy and they will learn a lot from reading its book. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you, Eric. It was a great discussion.

Thank you very much.