Bill Conley - Communication and Deterrence: Concert of Europe vs. Modern Day Diplomacy? - CSP S04E14

Yes, so Jason, a phenomenal way to start the conversation. It's interesting because you and I are sitting here having a communication right now, ideally effective and ideally for everyone that has the chance to join and watch as well, that they also find it effective. What's interesting about communication is it's something that all of us understand, and yet it is simultaneously something we very infrequently really spend the time on to go, 'Is the message I thought I delivered actually what the other person heard?' Effective communication may be exactly what you and I are doing right now. It may be something that I do with my wife around the dining room table later. We strive to have effective communication. It occurs in the business place. If I look yesterday at the different meetings I was in, did we truly have effective communication as I wear my day job at being the Chief Technology Officer at Mercury Systems, talking about technology and our investment and where we're going and why? You can talk about effective communication when you think about how we in industry communicate with the government, but you can also think about effective communication when governments communicate with each other. No different than you and I can sometimes end up having a disconnect in our personal relationships or our professional relationships, the exact same thing can also happen between nation states. So then the question is, when we think about deterrence, to your earlier point, and we think about, 'Hey, are we truly having that effective communication such that both sides really understand what it is that each other are trying to do?' My hope is over the hour that we spend together that we have effective communication, but also that overall how we think about deterrence, how we think about geopolitical history and the balance of power over a century, we also think about what it means to have effective communication in that regard too.

No, it's a very interesting topic. If we step away from the raw emotion of the concept of having our airspace penetrated by another nation and what does this mean, what are they trying to do, and I'm sure sitting here in this forum there's what we can say. I'm confident that there's a whole bunch of stuff behind some big thick green doors that reasonably gets pretty interesting to get to know as well. But if you think about it, as publicly as the balloon getting shot down was, with an F-22, interestingly the first F-22 kill ever in terms of air-to-air combat was actually going after a balloon. It is interesting. If you look at the first combat use of the F-22, it actually was in Syria back in 2014. A platform to the earlier conversation, really kind of at the end of the Cold War, it was all about air dominance and what was going to be required, how and when and why does it get used much later, a couple decades later. What is the logic behind that? It becomes really interesting. You think about the cost of a balloon versus the cost of an F-22 per flight hour and the cost of an AIM-9X missile. You can think through: balloons generally run at higher altitude, what aircraft can get up there, therefore whatever I can take the shot. You can sit there and think about, 'Hey, is the gun system?' I don't think the low observability features of the F-22 are particularly important when we think about this, but obviously that ability to say, 'Okay, what weapon system am I going to use?' Ideally would be a bullet that only cost a couple bucks, ignore the flight cost per hour to get the F-22 up there and to pull off the targeting, etc. Ultimately, an AIM-9X missile. The ability to make use of all the modern electronics to be able to go ahead and have that moment to say not only did we see what you were doing, but we chose to take action, and we want to make sure that you understand that this is what we may choose to do again in the future. But then the question is from both sides: what is it that we were hoping to communicate? Candidly, if I step back from it a little bit and we think about the Cold War as we hit on there with the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and John Kennedy, etc., think about the U-2 flights, think about the SR-71. The entire purpose of many ways of developing that platform was to provide that picture. If you want to go to a dark corner of the internet, you actually can read things talking about Eisenhower intentionally waiting to launch Sputnik first because satellites don't turn 90 degrees very well. After the Soviet Union had launched, for the United States to then overfly the Soviet Union seemed completely reasonable because Sputnik had already overflown everything too. Again, what is the timing of that communication? What is the message that you hope to send? How do you talk about how much national treasure I am willing to expend to be able to counter something that you think would be valuable? When you think about all the different ways of getting intelligence, all the different ways of having that communication, what is it we choose to engage? What is it we choose not to? And what are those things that then capture the overall everyday American and cause them to feel in some way, shape, or form? What's interesting though, and I think a really interesting thread to pull on, is when does something go from a skirmish? The number of times that all of us have said, 'Well, if the balloon goes up in the South China Sea, then...' It's a little bit amusing we now can make jokes about balloons that actually did go up. But there's actually some really interesting history coming out of the beginning of World War II, and in particular the German U-boats that were going after Allied shipping. In many ways, it really was just a skirmish until both sides converged on the same metric. The metric was the number of tons of Allied shipping lost divided by the number of German submarines lost. One side wanted to maximize that, the other side wanted to minimize it. Because they were fighting over the same metric, it very quickly begins to push you into a conflict because you're working to pull on the rope in a game of tug of war in exactly the opposite directions. In comparison, if you don't converge on the same metric, in many cases you can find strategic off-ramps that allow both sides to feel good about what they accomplished and simultaneously de-escalate and back away from a conflict. Again, effective communication: do we want to purposefully converge on those same metrics or do we not? We get a choice in that.

Yes. Where and why I like to use that quotation: it's actually Jimmy McStravic, who was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense that I worked for when I first started working in the Pentagon. He had a very large number of quotations, but one of them that you often found him using was, 'We move at the speed of trust.' I think there's a lot of ways where that becomes really interesting. What is the trust that we have? What is the trust that we have with our government? What is the expectation that we set on both sides? That allows us then to go quickly because we understand each other, we understand the mental model that each other have. But when you take that to the nation-state level and you now start thinking about moving at the speed of trust between different governments, are they willing to actually completely intertwine their systems together and become completely dependent on each other? With that comes a whole lot of trust. When is that trust given and why is that trust given and what are the ramifications of that? Oftentimes documented through treaties, and those treaties can obviously end up with more games that I imagine we'll end up talking about later going into World War I that suddenly result in very different behaviors coming out the far side. But to your point, we move at the speed of trust. How do we end up building those trust-based relationships? We're communicating.

I learned very little when I'm right. I learn a lot when it turns out that I'm incorrect. So I enjoy minimizing the impact of incorrectness, because if that's an asteroid hitting the Earth, we're all dead.

I think I'm going to back up and take the question maybe in a slightly different direction that I hope sequentially helps everyone else that's listening to us as we go through. One of the foundations of overall deterrence is you have to understand if this happens, then what is it I need to do? War gaming, which is easy to say and then you go, 'Well, what does it really mean?' If you look at all of the war games going into World War I, they basically said whoever moves first will end up with an advantage, and everybody said, 'But to move is crazy, so never move. But if you think someone else is moving, you must immediately mobilize, break glass here in case of war, and use this plan.' The plan basically said however quickly you can get to the front, this is what is going to make the difference. Ultimately, what did that lead us to? It led us into the trenches of World War I and very little motion in many ways for nearly the entire duration of the war. What's interesting about war gaming is all of those war games have assumptions, and some of those assumptions are going to be correct and several of those assumptions will most likely not be. The assumptions that go into a conflict the day after the previous one ends, you feel pretty good about because you actually know what is the equipment that is available and how is it going to be used and what are the tactics and what are the exchange ratios and how capable is this missile or that missile or platform, how survivable is a battleship or an aircraft carrier or any other platform that is out there. What's interesting though is the longer that you go between two peers actually having a war, the worse and worse those assumptions get as time goes on. It's interesting when you look into the buildup into World War I: the previous true peer-on-peer conflict of real duration was actually the American Civil War. It becomes an interesting debate that all of us can argue over: which is the situation we find ourselves in today more like, right before World War I, or is it the interwar period between World War II and World War I? I fall pretty strongly in the camp that I actually think that we are much closer to the World War I scenario because between the end of the American Civil War when the Gatling gun was this brand new thing, horse-drawn, mechanically turning the crank, and the machine gun, which logically is a logical thing to do but is a very different volume of fire and therefore created a very different environment on the battlefield. What is it we have today? We have low observable stealth aircraft, we have much more capable kinds of munitions, we have a lot more data links, we have the entire concept of what it means to fight a war under informationalized conditions. That's the Chinese language way of describing it, roughly translated. On the American side, we would say C2. When we have all of these new conflicts but an expectation of everything in our world being densely connected, as we both have our cell phones in front of us and the ability to globally dial anyone and just immediately have that conversation, I have a hunch today that there are some really bad assumptions that lead us to believe if this occurs, then this is the right thing to do. The reality is many of those assumptions are correct, and we don't know which ones are wrong. Unfortunately, the only way to really prove that is to end up in some sort of crucible conflict that forces some part of that to get played out. Going back to World War I, it was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 into 1905 that I think in many ways emboldened Japan over the next four or five decades in terms of what they were capable of, but also just the amount of geography that lays into it, the length of time it took for the Russians to be able to move ships to do what they thought they needed to accomplish and ultimately didn't play out well for them. The length of time required, geography is still a thing. Moving fleets still takes a lot of time. With that in mind, on the historical battlefield, you can decide that you're going to just give the diplomats a little bit of time to figure out what it is that's going on. I think the challenge is when all of the military war gaming says whoever moves first fastest most likely gets an advantage. Going back to space and debris tracking in space, is it a first mover advantage in space? Is it a first mover advantage in the ocean? Is it a first mover advantage going after airfields? Where does someone believe that having that first move is advantageous, and they therefore don't choose to give any of the other diplomatic forums the ability to say, 'Let's stop, do we really want to do this?' Continental Europe through the end of the 19th century believed they built something that was stable. Ultimately, it proved out not to be the case. How do we not make the same mistake today, believing that we have created an ecosystem where going into a war is so silly that no one would ever dare do it, right up until we have a couple leaders that decide that they want to? Because as Clausewitz said, 'War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.'

Is there a chance of using it to avoid? I would like to hope so. Is there a chance that we blow right by that guardrail? Absolutely. Working in my day job in the microelectronics space, spending a lot of time following the supply chain and where materials are coming from and what is fabbed where and how long does it take and all the moving parts and pieces there, it's actually interesting when you look at the number of times from the United States side as we go, 'What would an invasion of Taiwan by China look like and what are the ramifications?' We very quickly start talking about the semiconductor industry because the vast majority of semiconductors that go into the devices that we are talking on right now are coming through Taiwan, are fabbed there, are packaged in Southeast Asia. There is a massive amount of that which is occurring, and in many ways not a bad thing. What's interesting though is you look at the Chinese logic behind what they call reunification. One could argue that maybe the better word is unification as opposed to reunification, which implies that it previously was together. But whichever word you prefer, the time span when China first started talking about reunification actually predates the movement of substantial portions of the semiconductor industry into Taiwan. It predates the formation of TSMC as a company by about a decade. I think on the United States side, we are very much looking at this through an economic center and lens. In comparison, I think China is looking at it much more through a national pride and what does this mean in terms of our ability to bring everyone back together under one flag and one system, if we actually look at largely what they've done in Hong Kong. With that in mind, are we going to posture attempting to use economics as the deterrent because it's what we value, in comparison with someone like China who chooses to attempt to use that overall diplomatic national pride argument because it's what they value to attempt to create some level of deterrence? Again, effective communication: if we understand that about both sides, what is a very narrow path that we may be able to walk that means that we don't actually have to shoot at each other? In comparison, if we pick the same metrics and if we line up and we don't actually think what the other person is trying to say, I think there is the probability for the same miscalculation that ultimately led us into World War I.

I don't know the answer, is a good honest way of putting it. The amount of capital that is tied up in the semiconductor facilities is massive, which therefore obviously makes it a strategically very interesting target for everybody to look at, given the value that is there. Arguably though, the real asset is actually the people that run the facilities and are capable of running it. When you look at the process engineers that no kidding know how to make the stuff run, you can always get new equipment. It's really hard to get someone to use equipment that they've never used previously.

Short answer: yes. In a variety of ways. I think it's who has been in power, how is it that the UK was deriving economic power and overall military, diplomatic, and everything through the nature of their colonies and how they got there. By controlling shipping, what is it that they were able to do? The amount of coastline in the UK obviously exceeds the amount of coastline in Germany, and as important as it became in that era to be able to have that global trade ecosystem and to be able to own and run them. Over my shoulder I actually have the book 'The End of the British Empire,' which is an interesting look into why through the 1960s and 70s it all basically came to an end without really a shooting fire, which is a different interesting history we'll have to come back and spend an hour at some point as well. In comparison, Germany was maybe a little bit of a late bloomer, for a lack of a better way of putting it, coming onto the stage and therefore said, 'Hey, this is what we think right looks like. Historically, this is our appropriate place that we believe that we belong, and as a result of that, these are the things that we are going to begin valuing and building toward and making sure that we are prepared to be able to do.' The interesting one as I look at this question and think about it a little bit: if you ask anybody in the United States, 'What percentage of world power does the United States have?' we would probably start our x-axis right, it would end today because 2023 is interesting, but we probably would begin about the late 1930s to the mid-1940s because that's when America really began playing on the global stage. If you were to go and ask someone in China, 'How much does China contribute to global GDP?' would they start in 1945? Probably not. When would they start? I think everyone tends to like to start from a position when they were in relative dominance. Would someone in China actually start two to three thousand years ago and say, 'This is the role of China looking across global production, and therefore this is the appropriate share today that we should still have, looking at the heyday?' The century of humiliation, in many ways I think led to what we see today. But again, are we communicating? Do we actually understand what the other side values? Are we therefore finding ways that provide those off-ramps that don't require us to line up at the OK Corral at noon tomorrow?

I would argue at some level we are nearly always continuously at risk of that occurring. The interesting part, and kind of implicit in the question, if we look across so-called DIME-FIL: diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, legal. Seven levers of international power. The question kind of intrinsically focuses on the economic side of it, but there are six other levers that are also out there that I think we simultaneously have to consider, because each of them will also end up getting some level of a vote as we go through. The longer I think a society stays in a time of relative peace and the more equipment and material that gets accumulated, the war games and the assumptions tend to say we're making the right decisions. You then feel really confident in your strategy, which also can make you a little bit big for your britches. With that in mind, I think there's a lot of different competing forces that begin to push us broadly into that direction. The German word 'Geist' — we live in this lens that we believe the world that we see it today. Someday we're going to look back and go, 'What were we thinking?' But for where we sit today, it was the perfect thing to do and it was the right action, and we modeled it, we understood it, and this is the best thing to do. Famously, hindsight is 2020. If you would have told me that the year 2020 was going to largely be a pandemic lockdown year, I don't know if I really want to say hindsight in 2020 is necessarily being a good model. There's a little bit of a pun somewhere inside of that. But I think the question that you pose, the longer that everybody continues accumulating, and that desire for the independence of your governing system, the independence of your economy, the independence of your military, your financial system, your legal system, the ability to do something in the way that you desire or want, in many ways I think is a rational thing for someone to desire. But the reality is we oftentimes end up actually advancing faster and getting a lot more done that adds value when we actually are dependent on each other. So it's an interesting conjunction position.

I would say yes, and I actually think it's much deeper in our society than any of the examples you just gave. Using the Thomas Kuhn definition of the word 'paradigm,' which really is the mental model that we have for the world. If you believe the world is flat, you cannot simultaneously believe it is round. Over time, society will make transitions into whatever that new way of thinking is. Kuhn wrote about it through the lens of scientific advancement and how long a scientific theory will stay valid before we have to go to the next one, and what is the substantial increase in understanding that comes with each of those paradigm changes. Using that term very strictly, I actually believe that we are seeing the cracks in postmodernism, and we are seeing the cracks in postmodern thinking. That is the part I think when you ask about what are the cracks in the foundation and what do those mean, it actually in my opinion is the overall postmodern Zeitgeist that we live in and we believe is anchored because we don't know what model comes next and it makes pretty good sense. But what is there that ends up occurring next and how do we get there? With that in mind, if you actually look, in many cases the movement of what's happening in art, in literature, in science, in industry, in warfare, we end up going through some period of transformation where we go to whatever the next era is. Would we have had postmodernism if not for World War II? Would we have entered into the modern era if not for the failing of the legacy system at the end of the 19th century and without having gone through World War I? I think it's a different but interesting question to say what does it take to actually lead through one of these changes and how do we get there to the other side. But yeah, I actually think that the cracks are much deeper than just a little bit of order here and a little bit of structure there. I actually think it's baked into how basically all of us as humans think.

A different book to add to your reading list, but also for everybody listening, is Robert Kegan's 'In Over Our Heads.' He is a developmental psychologist, and it is a look at the models we build for ourselves and the world around us and the societies around us. He basically argues, with the book title 'In Over Our Heads,' that we have too few people that have built a mental model that actually allows us to operate society at the scale that it now operates at. That is a little bit of a take a deep breath and contemplate that one for a minute. What does that mean? Arguably, the way that we get people to build a new and different mental model is through their crucible of change. The entire study of change management in general: we don't like change. But there are points in time where we actually go through really, really big changes in the grand scheme very, very quickly, and we come out the other side and we are as a generalization okay on the other side, as long as you're not in Nagasaki.

The 'how' part is pretty easy. I'm relatively speaking active on LinkedIn. There are people that are much more active than I am, but it's a good and globally available place to be able to find me quickly. But the 'who' part is arguably the piece that is the most interesting to me anyway. Wrapped up in that, there's a lot of us that are very comfortable inside of the world that we live in, and there's a relatively small handful of us that are trying to go, 'Hey, what is it that's going to be important with the intersection of technology, military power, nation-state power, economics, and all of that? What does it look like in 10 to 20 years in the future?' Are we indeed reaching the end of postmodernism, and what does that mean for technology? How is ChatGPT and AI broadly going to change the way that we interface with each other in the world? What does that mean when someone can run something through a translator and get closer to capturing the same meaning? I think there's a lot there to unpack, but it's that fusion of art, history, literature, warfare, technology, industry. Not just the history side of it, but what line if we draw through it, be it linear, be it exponential, be it whatever, what is it that we can begin to assert about society in the future?

DIME-FIL. I don't know, but I became very familiar with it in my years in government. With a little bit of Googling, it'll pop up. It's diplomatic, information, military, economic. Originally it was DIME, and then financial, intelligence, and legal got added, I don't know, five or ten years ago, at least that's when I started getting into it. Now that I've been out of government for a few years, there probably is some new letter that also pops up. But too often we focus on one of those levers without really thinking through the implications to all of the others. I'm an advocate for let's think holistically about the problem, as opposed to every I have a hammer, therefore everything must be a nail and therefore must be assaulted with military or economics.

I appreciate it, Jason.