"The Hand Behind Unmanned" Book Launch Event With Jacquelyn Schneider

Michael Horowitz: Hey everybody. Welcome to the hoover institution in DC this evening. My name is Mike Horowitz. I have no affiliation with Stanford University or the Hoover Institution at all, but I do know the two amazing authors next to me that have written this incredible book, the Hand Behind Unmanned.

And really excited to be here and help moderate this conversation tonight are our two authors are Jackie Schneider, who's a Hoover Fellow and director of the War Gaming and Crisis Simulation initiative. And Julie McDonald, who's a research professor at the Corbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

I've known them for years and spent time with them throughout the book writing and editing process in many ways, and super thrilled to be here today to talk about it with you all. I think that this book really is going to reshape how we think about the choices that the American military has made over the last several decades concerning, I would say probably uncrewed rather than a manned, uncrewed technology.

And then what that means then for the future of war. And this is a rare example and it's always of exactly what we want in thinking about academic scholarship that connects to the policy world. And that this is a rigorously researched social science book that also can directly speak to some of the huge challenges that are facing the world.

And some of the big choices that the American military is gonna need to make in the coming years about how to size and shape the joint force for the 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 somewhere that you can access to access the podcast. 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 will be the least interesting part of it. But there are lots of great people as well.

So without further ado, why don't we, why don't we jump in? So I guess the first question to anybody writing a book is why did you write this book?

 Julie McDonald: 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 2012 at a military workshop for students, SWAMOS, where we were in the midst of the global war on terror.

There was drone strikes place across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen. And Jackie and I were sort of looking out at this use of force. And I'm really interested in why the US was choosing to use these platforms. And we started off on an initial line of inquiry around risk tolerance.

Why did leaders choose drones, and did people trust drones? And then we started to ask bigger questions about why do we see, given the array of unmanned technologies that are available, this heavy investment in aerial platforms, especially amongst what would be a service that you would expect to sort of reject that, right?

 

So unmanned platforms. And so when you look across time and you see the array of unmanned technologies that there are torpedoes, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, mines, sort of. How have we ended up at this point in time where we see this heavy investment, mainly in the Air Force, mainly in these exquisite sort of unmanned platforms that perform these persistent loitering missions?

And so that begged the question of why. Why do we have this trajectory versus many of the others that may have been available to the unmanned force over time. Jackie, do you want to add anything to that?

 Jacquelyn Schneider: I think for Julia and I, I mean, you all might come here cuz you wanna hear about the technology, but Julia and I have always been scholars that look at people in organizations.

And I think the fundamental puzzle for us was there was a lot of agency being given the technology, and there wasn't a lot of story or description or understanding of why that technology. And so this is a story, a book about people and people more than it is the technology.

 Michael Horowitz: All right, so it's a story about people, not necessarily technology. So what's the main argument then?

Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, so I think, you know, the big argument is how we buy weapons is not strictly rational. And for any of you who have been around the Department of Defense, that's like, well, duh.

Michael Horowitz: So bad, sorry.

Jacquelyn Schneider: So I think in some ways, that argument doesn't sound particularly novel. But despite the fact that that argument doesn't sound novel, most of the work on technology actually focuses on things that come after beliefs like how. How much money did we invest? Did we build the right capacity?

And so this is an argument that beliefs and identities are how we process uncertainty and how we make decisions about emerging technology. And so we argue that there are two beliefs and one really important set of identities that define how we bought technology, how we thought about the investment in these unmanned technologies.

And so just to preview the argument, the number one reason why we buy some technologies over others, whether it's unmanned or manned, is service identity. So how the Air Force, the Navy, the army views who they are, how they believe the future of war should be fought, and how Their technologies, mostly manned platforms, affect that future of war.

 

But those identities sometimes don't have a good theory about how emerging technology affect the future of war. And so we identified two beliefs that really dominated the last 30 years. And one of those is the belief in military revolutions, which comes from a office that, as of, I don'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.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: And the second big belief is casualty aversion that the American public will only support war if it means that we don't lose American lives. And those two things, the kind of desire to use technology as a substitute for human life and the belief that technology, the adoption of the correct technology, creates these massive revolutionary jumps in military effectiveness, are the two beliefs that best explain why we 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 story of how people build influence inside the Pentagon comes across.

 Michael Horowitz: 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 then played a really defining role here in either driving, I'll use your term, unmanned investments or holding them back?

 Julie McDonald: I mean, one of the key, again, returning to the Office of Net Assessment, unfortunately. One of the key people in the book who is really the champion of the military revolution's belief that we talk about is Andy Marshall in the Office of Net Assessment, which doesn't have a budget line and doesn't have a huge amount of political influence.

And so what he does is he builds these, these networks. And educates people, and informs them and empowers them to carry forward this belief in different ways as they get promoted. So, he focuses on military officers that rise through the ranks. And so, you end up with Bob work with a third offset who has learned about the military revolutions through the work of Andy Marshall.

You have Krapenovich, who then translates, and feeds into defense reviews in the 1990s and shapes the force leading up to 20 2001. And then, you have him focusing also on the academics that go out to PMI's and military institutions who can, again, advocate this belief in the military.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, so Andy Marshall is like that, the kind of OG Pentagon influencer on the civilian side. But I think the story also talks a lot about military influencers, right? Not every general actually is a major kind of influence in how we think about war, and the technologies that we build.

 

So, we start this story, we have a history chapter, and LeMay comes into it. So he's like the original Air Force influencer. For those of you all who aren't as versed in Air Force Corps history as I am as an old air force officer, LeMay is the one where we go around with the big cigar and every testimony in Congress.

He's got a big cigar, and it's like strategic air power forever, right? And he is really influencing the development of how the Air Force thinks about ballistic missiles, the relationship between ballistic missiles, and manned bombers. And then the next big kind of influencer for the Air Force inside the services becomes Bernard Schreiber.

And Schriever comes at a time, a Sputnik moment, where there's a big infusion of resources to 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 Vietnam officers, people like Colin Powell, and then people coming up through the army like Starry and Depew and these internal influencers. So they're building influence kind of opposite from Andy Marshall. They're building it organically through doctrine, through training, through experiences on the battlefield.

Whereas Andy Marshall is building it from the outside in going from a policy report to a book to PME curriculum and influencing in a very different way.

 Julie McDonald: Yeah, and what we find partly because of that is that the beliefs that are generated from experiences, from firsthand experiences in Vietnam are much more Sticky.

Much more ingrained beliefs than the military revolution's belief, which seems more sort of intellectual, academic, that has to be taught, and isn't quite as firm and ingrained because of that.

 Michael Horowitz: So, turning in some ways from history to today, the Department of Defense has made some effort over the last few years to try to accelerate the scaling of unmanned systems that have different types of unmanned systems in some ways sort of like cheaper, triable, precise mass systems than 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: Yeah, so this is a great question. I love that. So Mike, we wrote this book so long ago you 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 is actually one of these kind of giant puzzles about the American arsenal. We have this arsenal of exquisite and expensive remotely controlled platforms. And it doesn't look a lot like the type of platforms that you're seeing. Platforms of the wrong use, the type of munitions, and small quadcopters that you're seeing in Ukraine.

It doesn't look like the large inventories of conventional missiles that are a key part of the Chinese unmanned arsenal. So why not? And will that change? And I think a dominant answer is that a lot of these systems don't fit within these core service identities. The Air Force is more likely to adopt unmanned than other services, but they're going to adopt unmanned in a way that propagates the core idea about strategic air power.

So, it's no surprise that the Air Force is looking at unmanned fighters that do the same things that they value in the fighters that they have manned platforms in, right? Like the fact that they were focused on creating an AI driven fighter jet. That's not super necessarily useful, it's definitely not the robot armies that you wanted, right?

So then-

Michael Horowitz: To any of them.

Jacquelyn Schneider: So, unless the Air Force can make the robot army start looking like something in which the manned pilot is controlling those robot systems, then it has a lot more legs. I think you would expect that the army would be the one that adopts a lot of the small copter systems, because that's how they're being used in Ukraine.

They are tied intrinsically to core army units, whether that's infantry or artillery. And they're kind of substituting or enabling core army missions very much not the strategic airpower that the Air Force would prefer. But I think the army today is in a bit of a confusion about who they are in this new foreign policy world, right?

What is the army doing in China? Where is the big mass ground invasion? And so, because of that, I think somewhat limits the Army's kind 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 the book become one of the leading innovators to adopting unmanned technologies.

But they're limited by the fact that their budget comes down from the Navy. So, all the innovation and experimentation that they're going to do because the Marines core identity is they are the best at whatever everybody else has core missions that they are good at. The Marines are like no, we're just the best.

So, because of that, they're more flexible with adapting to new missions and new technology, but they're always somewhat limited by how the Navy views its acquisition of technologies. And so, I think it will be. I think you will get your robot army, but I think it will be the Marines that are most likely to adopt it.

 Michael Horowitz: That actually checks out very well with the experiences I had in the Pentagon for the.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: That's good, that's always helpful.

 Michael Horowitz: For the last couple of years, over the last few years, the Marine Corps has consistently been ready to push the envelope in thinking about adopting cheaper, more attributable kinds of systems and is faced various budget constraints.

And whereas making the case to the army has been making the why case to the army has always been more is always been more challenging.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: That's always very like reassuring as an author that your. Your book has some level of face validity is.

 Michael Horowitz: So, here's another way to think about this in that the sooner you go through in the book, how it is that we get the unmanned systems that we get, and sort of most prominently in the context going back to sort of what Julia said about when you met and war on terror.

When we thought about unmanned systems for a long time we thought about them as sort of platforms like, like the Predator and the Reaper. And then, we simultaneously think about the US as an innovator when it comes to military technology. But the until collaborative combat aircraft became a program of record for the Air force in an FY20.

In FY24, the most recent program of record had been almost 20 years before with the Reaper. The US navy has never had a program of record for an unmanned, for an armed unmanned, for an 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 go with the answer, but it's important for everyone to hear you, hear you say it. In a world where we think about the US like 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 some ways monumentally slow at adopting some of these technologies.

 Julie McDonald: I mean, some of it goes back to what we've already said. And Jackie, I'll let you add on to this that a lot of this comes back to these core service identities and these efforts to try.

And these efforts to try and push services to integrate technologies that do not align with those core identities. And you see, for example, with the Navy, the U class system that ultimately fails in the early 2000s. Yeah, the 2000s. And in fact, the Navy identity, going back to your question, Mike, in our book is clearly the strongest and the most difficult to shift on this and the most reticent to some of these external beliefs and influences.

And so part of it is the service identity. And also, as we talked about the lack of a champion, right? For this to happen, you need these internal service champions. And in so many stories in our book where actually you get past these, these service identities, the stickiness, you need someone inside, inside championing those technologies.

 

 Jacquelyn Schneider: I think we can't forget that war is the final arbiter on innovation, and it's also one of the major catalysts. So in the absence of war, the US tends to kind of revert back to what we would call no hypothesis. But these core identities, and those core identities tend to focus on kind of strategic the peacetime military.

And it's when war, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the war on terror that you see these kind of infusion of technology that allows for innovation and experimentation with technology outside these traditional service identities. So in the case of the Navy and the War on terror, the Navy had a different mission in the war on terror than like the army and the Air Force who are working this kind of ground battle and having to figure out how they're integrating 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 lot of the time that we were doing this book was really fonops, right? They're doing presence, they're deterrents. They are in some ways doing kind of these core Cold War deterrence strategic missions, right? And so I think that that means that they kind of solidify into their core identity.

And for the Navy, so much about how they buy weapons is this competition between their different identities within the Navy. So I used to be an Air Force, I am an Air Force officer.

 Michael Horowitz: Not biased at all.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: But then I went to work for the Navy for a few years and I had come from the Air Force where I thought like maybe we weren't joint.

And then I went to the Navy and I was like, 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. They don't really get influenced by these joint battles as much because the battle is inside the Navy.

I think that helps explain the direction of naval investment in unmanned systems. It didn't nicely fit into these competitions. I think if we had a shriver, if there was somebody in the, the kind of underwater kind of warfare world, this is where the Navy should be really focusing on autonomy.

I mean there's some physics problems with remote control underwater, which I think is also a real reluctance to investing because you really have to completely give the technology full autonomy because it's so difficult to communicate underwater. But this is the future of a lot of the contestation that's going to be happening in conflict.

And so if there was somebody in that kind of submarine warfare that had that charisma and that stick to it Iveness that Rickover had. And then I think we might see a lot more innovation happening underwater. And I think the air is comes back to some of these other core concerns about platform and you know, those type of things.

 Michael Horowitz: And in the U class example that Julia gave the Navy took this potentially brilliant idea to create essentially drones that could fly off aircraft carriers and launch weapons at targets and turn that into an air to air refueling robotic platforms that still like only like is kind of deployed.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: I mean, I think that is such a good example of how difficult it is in our imagination sometimes about unmanned and that was, I know we have a difference of opinion on unmanned versus uncrewed. But so much of what drew us to this is we felt there was this binary unmanned versus man, and we were taking a manned platform where we were saying, we will simply take the man out of the platform and then it will be an unmanned thing.

And you weren't getting these wonderful, the real benefit of some of the autonomy and the unmanned element because you were thinking beyond tank with man, tank without man, fighter with man, fighter without man. And instead, that's why so much of our book talks about missiles and mines and munitions as the actual trade off and the actual kind of set of choices that you can make when you're building out the arsenal.

 Michael Horowitz: So I wanna change to a sort of different theoretical element in your book that we didn't have really talked about much yet, which is casualty aversion. So in some ways now, the American military for the last eight years or so has been primarily focused on great power competition with one phrase or another, primarily sort of Russia and China shifting away from the forever wars.

Now it seems to be about the homeland in China to look at, if you look at what officials from the Trump administration are saying, but it wasn't so long ago, of course, that the global war on terror was the dominant thing people were dealing with in a defense context.

So tell us about casualty aversion and how it, how it then shapes some of the developments that you talk about in the book.

 Julie McDonald: Sure, so the casualty aversion belief in our book really comes out and grows out of Vietnam soldiers experiences in Vietnam, the grueling war of attrition, and the loss of public support, crucially for that war.

And the fact that it was televised, shown to the US Public and political leaders in the US really internalized the fact that the loss of support led to a lack of ability to prosecute the war as they would want to. And this was then internalized by the military leaders at the time as well.

So Carl Mueller's written this very famous, he says that as casualties go up, support for war goes down. And this is ingrained in a generation of military officers, this belief that you need to maintain public support for war in order to be able to win wars in the future.

Carried forward, I mean, this belief you 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 that time and actually not unmanned platforms, but in missiles, precision guided missiles, cruise missiles, to be able to keep US Forces from harm's way.

And it's carried forward through Colin Powell, a number of other senior generals who fought in Vietnam, and then again as we enter the global war on terror, right when the military revolution's relief was poised in 9/11, right before that, to really take off and to shape the development of the force that again reverts back.

The desire to keep US Forces from harm's way and also to protect non-US Forces, right? To protect civilians means that that's when you see this doubling down on these, these unmanned platforms that can provide persistence, provide this loitering capability, but keeping, keeping us away from.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: 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 my good old Air Force indoctrination, I learned about Mueller and the CNN effect and was told that this was an important part of how we thought about strategic victory.

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 write about public opinion and support for war. There's all sorts of work that happens after Mueller. And guess what? It's not a simple story.

Actually, Americans are not as casualty averse as I had been taught as a young officer. In fact, Americans like to win. So Americans are casualty averse if they don't believe in something or if they feel like they're going to lose. And those things sometimes compete with each other.

But it's not actually a clear story that Americans are actually casualty averse. And so it's really fascinating, especially when you read the papers that were written in the time period of about 1990 to the early 2000s by students going through like the Naval War College, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Air University.

How important force protection became and how internalized it came on literature that actually ends up being not debunked, but actually, kind of revised.

 Julie McDonald: Qualified.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, and so it was really interesting. I had been built on a belief that I realized, my gosh, that this is where it came from.

But also we hadn't really updated those beliefs even after new information had been put out.

 Michael Horowitz: So why isn't casualty aversion then enough to overcome service identities in some of these cases? Because if the logic of that argument is correct, then one might imagine that, sure, the Navy likes to sail around and the Air Force wants to do strategic bombing and whatever caricature the services in general.

And I'm being like a little flip to be provocative, but in theory, though, if you don't want casualties, then like substituting people out then would become really attractive, right?

 Jacquelyn Schneider: 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 beliefs about force protection start eliding and interacting with beliefs about technology and this revolutions in technology. So I did some interviews with John Worden, who, if you're an Air Force person, you were raised on John Warden, but yet another example of an officer that actually got fired for insubordination.

So it's like the Air Force way. But John Worden was talking about how he thought about centers of gravity and the use of air power and technology going into the Gulf War. And this was really, I wouldn't say he doesn't describe it as an army, but this is a technology argument, right?

It fits really nicely in the Air Force understanding 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 this argument about this makes us more military effective, we can do this type of warfare.

He's also realizing that, but this also is gonna save civilians. It's gonna make war less bloody. And so we can both be technologically dominant and we can avoid killing people. And I actually think that's what ends up kind of culminating in the war on terror is we are using these beliefs to say not only can we insulate ourselves and in some ways kind of decrease civilian violence by substituting these technologies.

It's why you get these precise and persistent technologies, but also, like, we're so dominant that theoretically we should be able to get in the war and get out. Now, that ended up not playing out in Afghanistan, right? And so, yeah, and so you start questioning whether these beliefs actually can exist next to each other, and then you get third offset.

 Michael Horowitz: So, then where do you think that this means we end up heading next? So, I mean, you've said in some ways that the Marine Corps is most likely to deliver my robot army and so I'm grateful in advance to the Marine Corps.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: As long as the old Marines don't hold her.

 Michael Horowitz: But the-.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Marines don't cut it.

 Michael Horowitz: 100%, but the where do you think that this nets out? After all, we've now had many years of training to think about great power competition again there, the sort of lessons learned from the battlefield of Ukraine. How do you think that this kind of nets out moving forward?

 Jacquelyn Schneider: I have a depressing story here.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: I think-

 Michael Horowitz: So excited.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: 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: I mean, only as of like two weeks ago.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: It's gone, right? Where are the idea entrepreneurs that are telling us about what the future of war looks like?

 Julie McDonald: Mike, Mike is.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, we identify you as a possible, as a possible one in the podcast.

 Michael Horowitz: That's horrifying.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: But you need a clear theory of victory.

And I think we came into the last 30 years with two core beliefs. And absent those core beliefs, what's gonna drive the decisions we make about the arsenal? Well, we're gonna go back to service identity. I think that's gonna be the null hypothesis. But if you look Doge and Secretary Hegseth, they seem to be trained to destroy a lot of those kind of core bureaucrats elements that are part of what makes service identity so powerful in terms of technological acquisition.

And in the absence of a clear idea about the future of war and potentially these kind of outside influences that are tearing down some of the capabilities that 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 by the Lockheeds and the Rapeians, who generally followed kind of signals that came from the services as much as it is by YouTube videos put out by Palmer Lecky.

And you could be in a situation where we have an influx of investments. You have gotten rid of some of the entrenched bureaucratic kind of ways in which the services buy technology and you still are absent a theory of future victory. And so we might get an arsenal that is dominated by what the new kind of defense tech ecosystem thinks are the cool weapons that we should be investing in.

 Julie McDonald: Yeah, I mean there's one thing, one thing that we do know from the book is that you know that war matters, right? War creates this learning experience on a battlefield for experimentation. And so to some extent, and you would hope there was learning from going on from Ukraine.

And so that's to the extent that there is some guiding force that they may be taking the military and maybe the defense industrial base as well, taking lessons about the lack of US munitions, for example. And the fact that in a war of attrition and a much longer term war potentially against China, for example, that we need to invest in ammunitions again.

So there are some lessons to be learning from Ukraine.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: What kind of munitions. Like I think there's a lot of investment right now, for example, in quadcopters and these smaller technologies that are dominating a really land based war in Ukraine. But what does that mean for what will be primarily a naval conflict in the Pacific?

And then I had a conversation earlier today. Where are the tech companies that are selling long range conventional strike? Not many places, partly because there's nobody really, really clamoring for this. And yet is one of the kind of key components that is not in our arsenal is that long range conventional strike that doesn't require an aircraft or a big platform in order to fire it.

 Michael Horowitz: And this is a good example in some ways going back to the, where some of these investments have gone in the past, where both the Air Force and the Navy now have experimental programs for a really low cost long range long range cruise missile. Neither of them have actually committed to buy it.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, I think if those support the platforms that they really demand, platforms primarily that 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 just a girl asking the army to invest in long range conventional strength.

 Michael Horowitz: I mean it-

 Jacquelyn Schneider: And an Air Force officer, which I feel like LeMay is turning grave right now.

 Michael Horowitz: Well, just to give a little more context to that, think about something like what Iran has done with the Shaheed 136, which is a weapon that you can produce for less than $100,000 that can go about 1,000 kilometers and carry a 50 to 100 kilogram warhead.

That's something that could, in theory, be really useful for the United States army seeking to project power and you could mass produce tomorrow. But yet we don't see that. Okay, two more questions and then 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 would it take to crack the fighter and bomber mafia in the Air Force?

 Jacquelyn Schneider: 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 pilots got a bad rap on the unmanned stuff.

There was so much like, those fighter pilots, they're like the cavalry officer flying into the conflict with old horses. Flying into conflict with horses. And like, this is not the story that we find in the book.

 Michael Horowitz: This is exactly why I asked.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Who is the primary people that are buying unmanned aircraft 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 of the kind of remarkable questions that motivates the book is why the Air Force, the service of fighter pilots, becomes the primary adopter of unmanned systems in this world.

And I think part of why they do that. Now, Jumper is actually interesting because he was in a position where he was very intimately involved when a manned fighter was shot over Bosnia and said that we had to do a really complicated search and rescue effort. And we have quotes in the book from, you know, him talking about how impactful that moment was and how that led him to really think about unmanned systems as an alternative to doing this manned work.

So I think for him, there was also that kind of personal relationship with a personal experience. But I think in general, if you look at how the. I mean, there is. There are unmanned systems that are in the cafeteria, as at the Air Force Academy. So I don't think there is a fighter bomber mafia that is actively against unmanned systems.

I actually think the biggest problem that the Air Force has had is that instead is that because of their obsession, which is a good obsession, because I'm married to a fighter pilot with the fighter aircraft. They have focused too much on unmanned systems that replicate those fighting those fighter pilot kind of core missions.

We do not-

 Michael Horowitz: That's where I was hoping you were going.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Okay we do not need an unmanned fighter aircraft doing dogfighting. I used to be an intel officer in 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 and further along. I mean, if anything, the dog fighting kind of was just an anachronism at the time. So I don't think we need to crack the fighter bomber mafia. I think though, where the Air Force needs to think imagination wise is not just thinking about how these unmanned things can replicate what their mapping has been doing.

But instead this kind of enabling mechanism that you've worked so hard to develop to kinda try and get technologies over that kind of acquisition and funding line for.

 Michael Horowitz: 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 you could say and could share with us now?

 Jacquelyn Schneider: You go first.

 Julie McDonald: I mean I don't think it's necessarily what we didn't say in the book, but I'm struck when rereading a book, 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 Marshall got to realizing the sorta military revolution stream twice, right?

And he got taken off course and his-

 Michael Horowitz: 9/11.

 Julie McDonald: 9/11, yeah, 9 11. And then even just like post Gulf war budget shrinking, had a bunch of people in the senior levels who were not supportive of his ideas, but poised right then to sort of take unmanned technologies in the US Military in a very different direction and how contingent it was on just these key events because the networks that he developed were really astounding.

And we've sort of got a separate piece on this that stems from the book on how he built influence.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: It's like that Kevin Bacon where like how many Kevin Bacon.

 Julie McDonald: It's like you can trace people back.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: In this room, how many Kevin Bacons until we get to Andy Marshall?

 Michael Horowitz: I met Andy Marshall when I was 22.

 Julie McDonald: There we go. There we go.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: And he's dead. So like impressive.

 Julie McDonald: Yeah. And the games that he developed and the different techniques and tactics that he instituted to promulgate 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 it was like, poor military revolutionists. You were so close.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: I think for me. So this book took a little bit longer than maybe it should have, but there was a lot that-

 Michael Horowitz: Every book takes longer.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: There was a lot that happened while we were writing or after we submitted the first draft for publication. And one of the big things that happened was the creation of the Space Force. And here you have a force that really is a force of unmanned things. And look, I would have loved to do a better job of representing kind of why we got to the point where somebody felt like they needed to make a space force.

Why Eisenhower did not want a space force, and then how the role of a service that is striving to make its own identity could impact the makeup of our space based arsenal.

 Michael Horowitz: All right, well, you all have been very patient. I know I've learned a lot from this conversation already, and I look forward to taking your questions.

There's a microphone in the back.

 Phil: 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 get about the service culture competition.

So it's good that Goldwater and Jifcom didn'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 think of 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, technical imaginary that you need to play Alphago and you need AI and you need technology to kinda see existentially where you are. And so maybe fighter pilots need dogfights with, with technology. But I really want to know, like, what hand is it in our milieu and in our ethos?

Because China and the PLA is fetishizing our military culture. And they actually think that they can win a war by engineering it. So they don't believe in fog of war or art and science. They're doubling down on technology because they think they can actually engineer it. And so if our adversary is doing that, then again, there's a telos there that we have to match with them in technology.

And our defense industrial congressional complex is more than happy to pony up for that.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah.

 Phil: So, thanks.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: 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 is very 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: It's very visible on the COVID.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Which was a fight with this. See, it's like Godfather, right? But what I'm concerned about is that we're in a time, a moment in which we are actively trying to remove that human hand by shutting down places like office and net assessment.

I think there's a generation of veterans that were built in Iraq and Afghanistan and I am not clear what lessons are going to be taken from that. Two decades of conflict that is going to really be that organic set of beliefs that guides how we train the next generation of officers.

I think that's really up in the air. All of these things mean that I think we're in a situation or a moment where one strong hand could have an outside outsized influence on the direction of weapons technology. And I really, I am not kidding, I'm not being flippant when I say, I see that in the defense tech community that is evolving and the strong personalities that are leading these civilian kind of unicorn companies.

And I think they could play an outsized role and for good or bad, in being that human hand that is the arsenal.

 Speaker 5: Thank you very much. It was fascinating. I'm wondering where you would put the, the, you know, the announcement just the other day about the new F47 platform, about which we don't know a lot, but is that, it apparently is a drone platform.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: I feel like Mike should answer that.

 Speaker 5: How would your analysis apply to that?

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Mike, you want to give us any secrets about the F47?

 Michael Horowitz: There are a lot of details about it that we, that we still don't know. I mean, the Air Force conducted a reexamination of what a sixth-gen fighter would look like and the result of that is the F47.

The F47 announcement, I would say from the perspective of my own preferences toward like the acquisition of like more precise math, sorta cheaper, attributable sorta systems and an overall kind of a high, low mix. A platform like the F47 could fit that as long as it's not so so expensive that it crowds out the rest of like essentially I could imagine the F47.

It's always as a win for the sort of high, low mix for like the high, low vision for the force. You could also imagine it as just the exquisite high that crowds everything else out.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, I mean, I think it showcases how strong the preferences for platforms that resemble things that 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. And the concern is that you're investing in a technology that might be extremely expensive and not be able to be replicated in large quantities or in a sustainable amount in any sorta significant conflict.

But maybe it's just like so awesome that you only need two of them. That's the dream.

 Michael Horowitz: Sure.

 Simone Williams: Hi, good evening. Simone Williams. You mentioned earlier in the conversation that absent of a war, it may be left to defense industry to be the ones to develop the next capability.

But realistically, without an indication from the Defense Department like requirements, money, etc, industry really isn't going to be the leading factor there. So I'm curious your thoughts on what does that relationship between the Defense Department and the services between industry look like in terms of thinking through the next generation on men?

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, historically and at least in the. Sorry, I'm-

 Julie McDonald: No, no, no.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: In the near recent history for the Department of Defense and in our book, certainly there are very few examples of the defense industrial base, putting their kind of significant investment and capital resources into technology that the government has not already seen signaled a requirements for.

A good example though of a company that did quite successfully was General Atomics. And General Atomics saw unmanned aerial systems being used in Israel and brought them to the United States and actually put a significant capital outlay into a technology that did not have a large demand signal.

And I think they probably would have failed if 9/11 had not occurred. And then they became kind of a really pivotal moment. And don't get me wrong, I think that I am not for the amount of bureaucracy that has become a feature of the US acquisition system. But the current administration is focusing on OTAs and other ways to buy stuff quicker, which means that you don't necessarily have to have these more formulaic requests for proposal, these formulaic requests from individuals, industry.

And I think that there is a desire to reward companies that are sticking their neck out and investing in systems before the Defense Department has created a really formal request. So I think it could change. I think there could be a shift where the defense is guides the defense industrial base starts guiding a Pentagon that is a lot has a lot less regulation towards certain technologies that are kind of in their wheelhouse.

That would be a significant change in the balance for the Department of Defense, good or bad. I think that would that history will tell us meaning.

 Michael Horowitz: Keep in mind, every major defense acquisition program is either behind schedule over cost or both. And there's only the or there because the B21 is still on schedule.

 Simone Williams: So in a world where the Air Force gets their champion for unmanned weaponry and the fighter pilots and the bomber pilots still get to fly their aircraft, so they're not upset, what does the robot army, the Air Force's robot army look like like then? And how do you recruit, train and retain an Air Force people for that Air Force?

 Julie McDonald: That is definitely a you question.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: I think what they want is something that looks like a manned aircraft in which still exquisite and expensive unmanned munitions are controlled in the air by the manned aircraft. I would like to see cheaper things. That's been a tension, I think for the Air Force.

I think they really do like that precision and the exquisiteness, I think. And then the pilot, they've already kind of 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 about their ability to manage all of the sensors as it is like any stick and rudder kind of like pilot feel to the aircraft.

And actually that's been like kind of a. A gradual move anyway. So I think that's the most likely future for the Air Force. I think I'm less concerned actually about the Air Force and more concerned that the army and the Marines and to some extent the Navy think about buying systems that don't look necessarily unmanned flying aircraft.

But how does that train them? I don't know. I mean, I think it is a lot less like the physiological feel of flight than it used to be. But anybody who's worked in a fighter squadron knows that these are people who are just as much experts in how the radars work as they are about their ability to manipulate the aircraft in flight.

And that's just becoming a larger and larger tendency so that they are truly engineers in the aircraft who are really experts in the technologies their plane is utilizing. And that's already a gradual transition that's happening. So, those pilots are people that are comfortable with getting under the hood of the technology that they're using.

 Speaker 7: So you had mentioned before that this book took a while to write.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: How good are managing?

 Speaker 7: In a previous question, challenges in History was mentioned. So my main question is, in the time when you began writing this book and the concepts of identity and casualties, was there any concept that you wrote in the book that first you had began with?

And then, I don't know, maybe something happened within the administration that you lived through or through your work that was challenged through this? Just anything.

 Julie McDonald: 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 happened while we wrote the book, so we, we had to rewrite our conclusion quite significantly from.

From the outset, from when we started writing the book to now. I mean, the state of the world has changed quite fundamentally during this period of time. And so I think what the implications are for 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 unmanned technologies had to be sort of rethought in light of the contemporary political geopolitical environment.

So Ukraine, the space force, creation of the space force, and technology doesn't stop. So everything, we're writing about something that is constantly evolving. And so while our history chapters very much remained, very much remained the same, we had to reevaluate them often in light of the events that were happening at pace while we were drafting.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: I mean, I think Ukraine changed what we thought 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 and the 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.

We're saying that we should be buying smaller and cheaper things. I remember writing a memo for the Joint Staff while I was still at the Naval War College in like 2017. And it felt like I was onto something 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 we shouldn't be investing in expensive, exquisite things. It feels like yada.

 Julie McDonald: The world caught up with us.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, and so, I mean, things that we thought were revolutionary.

 Julie McDonald: Yeah.

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Don't sound as surprising now.

 Michael Horowitz: The perils of being right. All right, sorry, one last question. And apparently it's.

 Speaker 8: This just goes with what you were just saying to a degree. But, in a world where we have deficits that are wartime level deficits, we are shooting down Houthi $10,000 drones with million dollar missiles.

 

Why isn't simple economics and innovation the sole driving reason we can move things forward with technology rather than why are we weighed down by these other aspects?

 Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, Julia and I have a great paper in the Journal of Strategic Studies that actually argues that what the theorists who came up with Revolutions in Military affairs got wrong was that they forgot about economic costs.

And that the it was always a dream that we would win a war in two weeks and that we failed to think about what it meant to sustain conflict over a long period of time. And had built an arsenal that was 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. And Mike has, I think one of the best, if not the best summaries of where we should be going, which is this balance of mass and cost, but also with precision.

And I think part of what has changed technologically is that precision is cheaper now. Yeah, it used to be that precision.

Michael Horowitz: 40-year-old technology.

Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah.

Michael Horowitz: All right, well, I think we are out of time. Jackie Schneider and Julie McDonald have written an awesome book, the Hand Behind Unmanned.

I would strongly encourage everyone to buy it. This book is already reshaping how we are thinking about unmanned technology in the military. And please join me in thanking them for a tremendous conversation.