Lawfare Daily: ‘The Warhead’ with Jeffery Stern

[Intro]

Eric Columbus: Hi, I’m Eric Columbus. I’m a senior editor at Lawfare. You may know me from my coverage of litigation involving the Trump administration on this very podcast feed. At Lawfare, we know that the law is just too important to be left only to lawyers. And at a time when America’s 250-year experiment in self-government is under severe stress, we’re trying to do our part to ensure that citizens have the knowledge they need to help it continue.

But we need people like you to keep our work going so we can keep our content free and accessible to everyone. We’d love it if you could head over to lawfaremedia.org/support and become a material supporter. Just 10 bucks a month or more, if you can, really makes a big difference. Thanks for so much for listening, and now it’s back to the show.

Jeffrey Stern: So we’re sort of like barreling towards this situation where the entire system is saying strike, and the one person who may be on the loop or whatever that person’s engagement actually is, there’s not that much time to be like, “Now wait a minute. Where is this intelligence coming from?”

Loren Voss: It’s the Lawfare Podcast. I’m Loren Voss, senior editor at Lawfare, with Jeffrey Stern, author of the book “The Warhead.”

Jeffrey Stern: We have to come up with a way to defend against these weapons that we’ve sort of inspired because generally speaking, they’re becoming way more inexpensive, and there is not a, you know, a symmetrical cost savings in the weapons we use to shoot them down and protect ourselves, yet at least.

Loren Voss: Today we’re talking about Jeff’s new book, “The Warhead: The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare.”

[Main Podcast]

Let’s jump right in with what warhead are you talking about in this book and why is it important to modern warfare?

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. So the warhead I’m talking about in this book is a specific weapon called Paveway.

It was the first laser-guided bomb and arguably kind of the first smart bomb, the first guided weapon, at least the first one that was sort of widely usable and effective. So the book uses it both to tell the story of the invention of this specific weapon, and also using this weapon as sort of an avatar for the onset of precision-guided kind of long-range modern warfare, and uses the weapon also because it is a tool of disconnection, obviously, in both kind of a bodily sense, it is a bomb, and also because it allowed for easier and further engagements.

It sort of allowed for the disconnection between the person pulling the trigger and the person on the receiving end of the weapon. It tries to use the invention and the story of the evolution of this one thing to actually connect a number of stories of people to kind of put people back into warfare, since I think we’re, we often kind of forget that actually it’s families near the thing blowing up that are still affected, no matter how precise or humane ostensibly a weapon is.

Loren Voss: Yeah. So I found that really interesting. You talk to this technological advancement through stories of the individuals. So can you kind of, you know, talk to us about how did you decide to tell it that way? What, you know, what made that be the way that this is to tell the story?

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. Well, I mean, the honest answer is that I was just way more interested in cool stories about interesting people and needed to find a way to that, and for that to make sense as a book that was something more than just a collection of vignettes.

So I kind of from I backed into a justification for doing that, which was, well, okay, this weapon really does show up kind of Forrest Gump-like in all of these major and minor foreign conflicts. So, you know, for example, it was used heavily during the Shock and Awe campaign. Everybody knows about the second war in Iraq, but there are all these little stories that you don’t necessarily hear, and this thing is a totem.

It’s like a baton that I can use to connect these different stories. So the real honest answer is I wanted an excuse to tell these different stories and from an interesting perspective that you wouldn’t necessarily, you know, to sort of come in from a slant angle.

Loren Voss: To use some bombing technology terms right there, slam tangled—

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah, I’ve had to, I’ve had to catch myself. There’s a lot of, you know, I don’t know, that idea is a little bit off target. Wait a minute. You know, the sort of like all the corporate speak takes on and, you know, you can’t really say from the 30,000-foot view when you’re talking about high altitude bombing anymore.

But yeah, that, that was, that’s the honest reason. And then, but the more I dug into these different stories, the more it became clear, at least to me, that this one weapon and the capabilities it allowed really did have, I think, a sort of like really significant impact both on how we go to war, if we go to war, and then also how we interact with other nations because of that.

Loren Voss: So when I told someone who’s currently in the military that I was reading this book, their first question was “Does it talk about the Dragon’s Jaw?” And when I said yes, he immediately said, “Okay, I’m gonna read that book.”

Jeffrey Stern: Oh, great.

Loren Voss: So I wanna start with that story. Can you tell us about the Dragon’s Jaw and like all the lore around it?

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. So the Dragon’s Jaw was a bridge that sort of connected North and South Vietnam. It was a really significant through line that the Viet Cong used to move men and materials from the north to south. But it was a bridge, I mean, it was very thin. It was a few meters across, so it was a really hard target.

And because it was so important, the North Vietnamese defended it really well. They had every kind of anti-aircraft artillery. There were MIGs bases nearby. There were surface-to-air missile sites fairly nearby. And so it was both a difficult target for pilots to hit and increasingly a dangerous one.

So a lot of planes got shot down, and part of that was because the military had been experimenting with various kinds of ways to bring this particular bridge down, and also just to be more effective and safer at bombing. But all of the sort of cockamamie plans they came up with, which included, for example, dropping mines upriver to float downstream and then have a targeted upward blast.

Also, you know, TV-guided weapons and infrared-guided weapons, and none of them really worked that well. And so really, the only reliable, the only semi-reliable way to try to strike this bridge was to get really close to it, essentially to dive bomb, which of course brought you into range of ever more gnarly kinds of anti-aircraft artillery.

So because it was so actually important and because it became this sort of venue of, that became sort of a symbolic, like a manifestation of the conflict between, you know, the superpower with all its technology and the kind of scrappy military on the ground that was winning, at least around the Dragon’s Jaw, it sort of took on this mythology.

And I think partially because it was so hard to hit, it was like, “It’s not real. It’s a hologram. It’s a, you know, it’s a connection between dimensions.” I mean, all these sort of, this lore grew up around it. And it was really the Dragon’s Jaw that became the theater of the, really the first use of Paveway, of this particular warhead in combat.

And essentially, the first mission they flew with it, they were able to drop the Dragon’s Jaw after, you know, almost 1,000 sorties and all sorts of different missions. And so the mythology of the Dragon’s Jaw then kind of transmitted to the Paveway, to the weapon that finally felled it.

Loren Voss: Yeah, I felt like I was cheering along at that point.

I listened to the book on, on Audible, so it made it made the stories even that much more, like, intriguing as you hear a voice along with it.

Jeffrey Stern: Oh, cool.

Loren Voss: Yeah. Early—earlier you mentioned about, you know, telling stories to bring humanity back into warfare here. And so these long-distance precision munitions, they’re often described in one of two ways, you know, whether or not you like them.

It’s either a more precise weapon that gives us the ability to reduce civilian casualties, make warfare more humane, right? We’re targeting only the combatants or the military objectives. The other view of that is that it removes the human element from killing, right? You’re so much more removed, you’re not actually having to do the same type of engagement before, and that sets a somewhat dangerous precedent for force to be used more frequently.

So I’m kind of curious, you know, what’s your view on that? Is it one? Is it the other? Is it a mix? How do you come about that?

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. Well, I think both are true. I think it’s probably more important to focus on the latter because I think the risk is that the weapon—this capability can kind of argue for itself.

It can sort of argue for its own use. You know, there’s this, a bad actor overseas. Well, we’ve got this magic bullet, and we won’t hurt anyone nearby, and it can kind of lead you. You know, the term that I often use I stole from someone is that the trigger can pull the finger. So I think there are plenty of engagements where because we have this capability, we are able to eliminate the bad guy, eliminate the threat with low collateral damage.

But that’s not necessarily how it works. And there’s a few, you know, there’s a few kind of anecdotal examples of this that I bring up sometimes. One is in, in the First Gulf War, there’s some research that compares the First Gulf War to the Second Gulf War. So the First Gulf War, these weapons were available, but they were vastly outnumbered by the, quote-unquote, “dumb bombs” that were used.

So, you know, 1991. Then by 2003, the Second Iraq War was called the most precise air war in history at that time. And by the proportion of precision munitions used, that was definitely true. But there’s some data that shows that actually that, that more civilians were killed by the precision weapons than by the dumb bombs.

And one of the explanations for that is that it, is that these weapons conferred a sense of confidence on war planners, on people making these decisions to, for example, strike targets near to civilian centers. You know, a broader example is just like you look at World War II and the firebombing of Dresden, for example.

There was no illusion that to take out that, you know, the city’s war-making capability or economic base or whatever, that you were gonna somehow be able to just precisely strike. So the decision was, do we kill a lot of civilians for this end or do we not? And we no longer, I think, make that calculus as much because we just sort of believe that we have the capability to exclusively strike the, you know, the weapons or the bad guys.

And that can end up leading to actually killing more civilians. And then even from a less, you know, humane, like a less humane-centered framing. There’s al- there’s always blowback. You know, the bomb is always blowing up somewhere. So, you know, you could argue this is sort of, really manifest in epic fury where, you know, it’s very easy to decide, let’s go initiate this bombing campaign, where now we’re sort of in this bit of a fiasco where we don’t really know how we’re gonna get out while keeping the Strait of Hormuz open or whatever.

There, there’s a real cost to the fact that we began this thing because it was so easy to pull the trigger and launch a few airstrikes, and it allows you to do that without necessarily the cooperation of allies or Congress, or arguably like that much discussion about what the overall strategy is gonna be.

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

Loren Voss: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s really important as you talk about, you know, precision weapons, that it’s just one part of the process and one part of how we wage war, right?

And so even if you can be very precise, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being very accurate, right? Mm-hmm. There’s the whole system that goes into have we properly identified the target? Do we actually know what’s going on and around in that area? Exactly. What are the second and third order effects?

I mean, I think of—

Jeffrey Stern: Exactly.

Loren Voss: RAND did this great study on Raqqa that the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan used as one of its, like, foundational documents, where they looked at everything that happened in Raqqa. We were very precise. But when you took a step back and looked at the city and looked at what had been destroyed, it was almost all red.

Jeffrey Stern: Mm-hmm.

Loren Voss: Right? Like w- you hit each individual thing and you succeeded, but you almost destroyed the entire city.

Jeffrey Stern: Mm-hmm.

Loren Voss: And when you don’t take that step back and look at those wider effects, you c- you miss that your precision can actually have huge impacts.

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. And when similarly, the most precise weapon is only as precise as the intelligence on the ground, and we see some version of, and again, at the beginning of the Iran War, where this girls’ school was struck, and it seems like that was that happened because that building had been about 10 years before, like an IRGC base or something.

We hit exactly what we were aiming at, and because the intelligence hadn’t been updated or c- or communicated or whatever, we very precisely hit something we really would not have otherwise wanted to hit. And this, there’s a version of this in every conflict in which, arguably every conflict in which precision weapons have been used, where they very precisely hit something that the intelligence on the ground hadn’t updated.

And I think that becomes even more manifest because I think the precision can almost replace, e- but almost in a subconscious way, can sort of the confidence you get from having this precision can make it seem like we can do this even without really good human intel on the ground.

Loren Voss: Yeah. I mean, I think that accuracy piece is critical, and I think when you talk about precision warfare, there’s this, like, desire to go faster, right?

And do things faster. But it’s only one piece of the puzzle, so having that accurate intelligence, having that accurate puzzle, having those checks is critical, but all of those things slow down the process, right? I guess the other thing I kind of—I’m curious about is thinking about how you talk about the Paveway and like the process of military technological advancement through time.

Today, we kind of talk about drone warfare as its own like distinct era and a little—and separate from, you know, precision-guided munitions, second offset strategy. But your book kind of goes through, you know, a through line from Vietnam to today. And I’m kind of curious if you can talk about, you know, how you see that, how you view the technological advances through time.

Do you see that as like distinct offset strategies, or have you found a way that it’s all connected?

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah, I think it is connected. I think that- I think both the trajectory of trying to get ever more precise and then also collapsing the kill chain, you know, has long been part of the driving force of each iteration of technology, and especially, you know, you mentioned time is the how quickly we can identify, engage, nominate a target for engagement, strike after action report.

The idea is, of course, that the more you can contract that, the more competitive you are in any kind of international conflict. But in the same way that I think having this capability and the promise, and in some cases maybe a bit of an illusion, that you can kind of instantaneously, you know, deploy a plane, drop a precision weapon, take out the target without having to talk through moving several battalions into position or whatever.

That’s just the first step in an evolution that gets us to drones and then to AI-powered warfare, where the decision to strike and the actual strike, the time between those two things are really contracted. And, you know, I think like one of the useful manifestations of this is if you think of, you know, the 18-year-old private or whatever in an air-conditioned trailer in Creech Air Force Base, and the drone is over the bad guy, and that person just has to push a button.

There’s an immense amount of pressure to push the button, and the more that gets automated, so, you know, if you have Project Maven or whatever, if you have an AI-powered like targeting system. Now—And to be clear, I mean, the Defense Department has this directive that says something along the lines of, there will always be, I think the term is meaningful level of human engagement in any kinetic decision or something like that.

So the idea is there will always be, even if a human is not running the process, there will be a human, quote-unquote, “On the loop.” So there will always be a person who can say no, don’t do that.” But I think that is an immense amount of pressure on someone, on one person, where the entire apparatus is saying, “There’s the bad guy.

Weapons are hot. We’re in position. Do you wanna not strike this bad guy?” I think there’s an immense amount of pressure and inertia to, to do it. And aside from the fact that like the more technology is involved, the more convincing it is. It’s, you know, technology has this ability to sort of to, to confer legitimacy and authenticity onto any process that becomes really hard to resist.

You know, you’re basically now asking for someone to go up against what feels like, you know, the entire military industrial complex in order to say, “I don’t know about this.” So I do see both drones and then, you know, AI-enhanced targeting as just the next step in an evolution that starts with precision warfare.

Loren Voss: One quick edit when we’re talking about AI. The DoD directive, the standard is not meaningful human control. The standard actually used in a DoD directive is appropriate levels of human judgment, which to me, I think doesn’t even necessarily mean a human on the loop. Definitely not in the loop, but I mean, with that language, you—it does, you know, doesn’t necessarily even mean to me on the loop.

It could be anything.

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. Good point. Yeah. I mean, it’s probably deliberately kind of wooly language to allow for some of this but yeah, I think you’re right.

Loren Voss: Well, so then if I can ask a follow-up to that then, you know, is there’s a whole bunch of AI conversations going on today, not just for Iran, but we had the Anthropic DOD fight, right?

Mm-hmm. About, you know, autonomous weapons. So based on what you researched for your book, you know, what—Is there any lessons learned that you would take that you say we should be thinking about when we’re having these conversations on AI-enabled warfare today?

Jeffrey Stern: One of the things, and this is a little bit of a tangent, but because, you know, the book doesn’t—is not focused on, of course, nuclear weapons.

In a way, it’s about the anti-nuclear weapon, but a lot of it takes place over the course of the Cold War, where the terms were really set by nuclear weapons. And part of course, what happened then and why there was such an emphasis around developing more nuclear weapons here was because the USSR was so far ahead of us.

And then, of course, after the war, come to find out they weren’t. So I’m not an expert in, for example, what the Chinese are doing around AI, but of course, you hear constantly, I mean, we need to take off the brakes because we don’t wanna lag behind them. They might be way ahead of us. And I don’t know that’s not true, but I’m a little skeptical.

I sort of wanna know, you know, is that true, or are we—is that just sort of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy? Because again I think the idea is both not to lose technological superiority, but also we don’t wanna be slower than they are. We don’t want it to take much longer for us to decide to react, to engage than it does them because then we’re at a disadvantage.

And so the momentum, just like it was in, you know, the nuclear competition and developing more weapons and more quicker means to deliver them, is to less and less time, which then means lower and lower margin of error. And, you know, and one of the other sort of examples people bring up all the time is, I think it was a colonel in the Soviet military who was at one of the early warning system radars or whatever, and the system started blinking red.

There’s incoming ICBMs from the U.S. which turned out to be a solar flare or something. But his job at that point was to launch, was to begin a launch process, and he just decided on his own, “This doesn’t seem right. I’m not gonna do it,” and arguably, you know, saved us from Armageddon. So, you know, we’re not really talking right now about, for example, nuclear weapons powered by AI, although maybe that’s happening too.

Loren Voss: I believe that’s the one restriction is, right now is that nuclear weapons cannot be AI controlled.

Jeffrey Stern: Is it? Okay. Well, let’s talk back—let’s check in on that in a week and see. But you know, that, that guy had very little time, whatever it was, 25 minutes, 30 minutes between what he thought what the system was saying was a launch and strike to sort of launch nuclear Russia’s entire nuclear arsenal.

That, that seemed like a very contracted period of time, and that, that period of time between something’s happening, are we engaging, yes or no is shrinking because, you know, okay, right now it’s not nuclear weapons, but it’s maybe a bunker-busting bomb at a, you know, at a major urban center in, in Russia or whatever.

And there’s less and less time because we think they can move faster, and maybe they can. So we’re sort of like barreling towards this situation where the entire system is saying strike, and the one person who may be on the loop or whatever that person’s engagement actually is, there’s not that much time to be like, “Now wait a minute.

Where is this intelligence coming from?”

Loren Voss: Yeah, now that you’ve scared us. So let’s... But let’s talk about, you know, I’m thinking of Ukraine lessons learned or even, you know, arguably some of the stuff coming out of Iran today. And for Ukraine, it was the value of cheap drones at scale, right? Or, you know, not really a new lesson, but the idea that you can use cheap improvised weapons versus expensive precision weapons.

And so I’m wondering just your thoughts on like, you know, what are actually the limitations on these exquisite weapons? You know, is that is that benefit eroding some when we see in these conflicts just the amount of money and how quickly you can, you know, run through those when you have a cheap alternative on the other side?

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah, I mean, the asymmetry is something that is, you know, confounding war planners now and is worrying. You know, it was really inspiring when Ukraine was doing it. Now it’s really worrying that Iran is doing it. This is a bit of a generalization, but it is generally way more expensive and technologically involved to develop defensive weapons.

You know, the Patriot system is whatever, it’s a billion-dollar system, and each missile something like $4 million, and we’re using these to shoot down like 20, $30,000 drones, which are also not just cheaper, but way easier and faster to produce. And again, this is a, this is a—there’s a heritage here.

You know, one of the things that was so advantageous about Paveway and about as a precision weapon is that it was so cheap and relatively simple. And we saw this beginning to invol-evolve with enemies or potential enemies, where every time there was a new capability in Paveway and the other sort of its cousins, there was a new way that foreign countries tried to plan for them.

You know, whether it was better surface-to-air missile systems or more, more strongly reinforced bunkers. And it’s, you know, a bunker-busting Paveway is maybe $100,000; to rebuild a bunker to be more defensive against that is, you know, however many millions of dollars. And we’re sort of seeing the other side of this now.

We have to come up with a way to defend against these weapons that we’ve sort of inspired, because generally speaking, they are becoming way more inexpensive, and there is not a, you know, a symmetrical cost savings in the weapons we use to shoot them down and protect ourselves, yet at least.

Loren Voss: I also wonder if you’re a little bit on the political limitations.

So your book covered Operation Unified Protector in Libya in 2011, and you had this line after the death of Gaddafi that was something like, “It began to look less like the end of a conflict and more like the beginning of one.”

Jeffrey Stern: Mm-hmm.

Loren Voss: And that’s from a time when, you know, I was in uniform, and I felt that line a lot.

Jeffrey Stern: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And so I’m just, you know, kind of thinking if you could talk a little bit about, of those types of limitations and what you’ve seen. And I think, you know, Libya is a perfect example, but by no means the only one.

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. Yeah. I think Libya’s a good, a really good example of that because the air services were really effective initially.

I mean, th- not initially, throughout the entire course. I mean, they—the U.S. Air Services and also the NATO allies, I mean, basically everything they were supposed to do, they did. Part of the UN authorization for that restricted NATO boots on the ground. But either way, I think there was a confidence that we just have to prevent Gaddafi from being able to use the resources regime had to oppress and, you know, massacre his own people.

And as that campaign wore on, it just became clear that, you know, you could use airstrikes to, to drive regime forces back from a position but they’d come back in a week or two. So that’s one example of why, like, you just can’t really—You need someone on the ground to hold that territory, to take that thing over.

As many gains as you can make purely from air power, if you’re trying to stabilize a country or occupy it you just can’t really do that from the air. And one of the reasons that ended up being such a, so tragic was because one of the solutions was, well, we have all these repatriating Libyans who are living abroad who are coming back and wanna free their country, but a lot of them were just people.

I mean, they were not trained, and so you had—And a lot of them were really young. So you have a lot of really young non-professional people coming back because of the opportunity to help liberate their country, who are then seeing awful things, who are not trained. And the—I, and I use this one example of one of them came back and ended up bombing the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, which, you know, we can’t get too far into the minds of a terrorist, but clearly what he had seen and been through and, in Libya was part of what drove him on this course, and the fact that because it became so chaotic after the death of Gaddafi, Libya became the next safe haven for ISIS, in particular, this part of ISIS that is sort of like the shock troops, the international kind of shock troops of ISIS.

So it became kind of a breeding ground for a lot of the terrorist attacks we saw in the aftermath of that around the world.

Loren Voss: Yeah. I mean, Libya’s to me like such a tragic story. The reasons that NATO and the United States got involved, right? And there really was this hope that if you could stop Gaddafi, there could be a, you know, a better Libya.

And then as we found that, you know, just air power is not enough, right? Like you, you had to have the follow through, and especially in a country with a dictator, right? So that had been there for so long, you didn’t have, you know, you didn’t have the infrastructure, you didn’t have the forces, you didn’t have the other side, and with an unwillingness to put boots on the ground.

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah.

Loren Voss: You know, the—It’s just such a sad story to, to see how it plays out and for everyone who was involved in it.

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. And I think, you know, we saw a version of that also prior to that in, in the Second Iraq War, where of course we did put boots on the ground, but it wasn’t nearly as many as the generals, as the people who, you know, Tommy Franks requested.

And part of that was because, was for political reasons, and the people inside the Bush White House were sort of saying, “We don’t need that many.” People who, aside from Rumsfeld, didn’t necessarily have any reason to know. And also there was a lack of intelligence on the ground then too. By the time the Shock and Awe campaign started, there had been a CIA covert operations campaign, which I talk about in the book, which had been stood up, but it had been started from scratch in, in 2000, late 2001, early 2002.

There had literally been no intelligence presence on the ground. And you could sort of see that as things like, for example, de-Ba’athification, where, you know, we thought we had to sort of drive all the people who were part of Saddam’s party out of power. And it turned out, you know, a lot of them were Ba’athists because you kinda had to be an engineer, work at the water treatment plant or whatever.

And so there was this very obvious mistake where we set back that country from re-developing because we just got rid of all the technocrats really unnecessarily. So those are things that, again, I mean, a really precise, effective initial air campaign without boots on the ground, or at least sufficient boots on the ground and intelligence on the ground still ends up leading to disaster.

Loren Voss: Yeah. Okay. So this also then makes me think of precise air campaigns with no boots on the ground and what that means for the War Powers Resolution.

Jeffrey Stern: Good segue.

Loren Voss: We’ve had this in the news a lot lately. Mm-hmm ... and so I’m just thinking, you know, the War Powers Resolution was created due to concerns about escalation and democratic accountability, right?

So your book kind of goes through, you know, these technologies can make war more limited more politically manageable. And so I’m wondering what your thoughts on what does that mean for congressional oversight now in the president’s use of force?

Jeffrey Stern: So yeah, so it’s a good question and good segue.

I mean, one of my hypotheses is that part of the reason we have that debate now is because of these capabilities. So in other words If we were deciding to go to war with Iran and we didn’t have these capabilities and we needed to, you know, forward mobilize a few battalions or whatever, we needed to move a bunch of air assets, it’s just practically you can’t really do that without anyone knowing.

You can’t move, you know, 100,000 troops without people knowing and needing to approve of it. But if you can sort of pull the trigger and a few people inside the Oval Office can make a decision and, you know, a few minutes later, precise weapons are falling overseas, then practically you have the capability to do that, where previously this wasn’t as much of an issue because there wasn’t the capability to do it anyway.

I think we saw this probably most clearly the f- the first U.S. intervention in Libya in the ‘80s, Operation El Dorado Canyon, where we launched a pretty significant air raid, one-night air raid in Libya, and nobody knew about it. No one in Congress, none of our allies, except for a few people in the U.K. because some of the planes took off from Lakenheath in the U.K.

But even inside the White House, you know, it was Reagan and a few advisors. Even inside the National Security Council, not everybody knew it was happening. And that was only possible because there was Paveway and weapons like Paveway and planes capable of flying low radar signature that were able to drop a bunch of bombs on Libya, and no one knew until they were on their way home.

And so we’re beginning to see that more and more where, okay, well, we can do this. Why would we wait and signal to everyone and lose the element of surprise by notifying Congress and allies when practically we, we don’t need to?

Loren Voss: Yeah, and it wouldn’t be Lawfare if we didn’t bring some of the legal pieces in here.

So for Libya, the 2011 version, there was an OLC opinion that basically, you know, uses the technology that you’re talking about here and says that, “Well, you know, we’ve got to talk about if it’s war within the meaning of the declare war clause of the Constitution,” right? And so with today’s wars where there’s no boots on the ground, very little to no threat to U.S. forces, that’s not declare war as the founders thought of it. And therefore, you know, the War Powers Resolution and those restrictions don’t apply.

Jeffrey Stern: Right. Right.

Loren Voss: And, you know, that, that was written for Libya in 2011, but that has been referenced for a number of Syria strikes various other things. You know, and there’s this kind of—it’s the war of today is not the war of our founders and therefore the limitations don’t apply, you know, is the type of argument.

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. And one of the, one of the editors, a brilliant writer, editor named Andy Kifer who helped a lot with this book, wanted to call it, wanted the subtitle to be “The Quest for War Without War,” which by, I think by, you know, by that the idea is war where we don’t, you know, we can fight without feeling the effects ‘cause we can do it over there precisely.

But partially also this, like, you know, this war we’re starting is not actually a war. We don’t have to call it a war because of, you know, this minutia in how we’re articulating it. But I think that it is not just the case that, okay, well, we’re not putting a few hundred thousand troops in harm’s way, so therefore it’s not really war as the founders, you know, conceived of it or whatever.

But even faraway wars or faraway non-wars, there can still be blowback. You know, there, there’s still people getting hurt and killed and people losing families and livelihood, and there’s still a threat that is potentially eliminated by that conflict, but also potentially inspired by that conflict that will, you know, incur a cost on the homeland.

So, I, you know, I understand the desire to sort of come up with a semantic justification for things that need to be quick and need to eliminate a threat before it really becomes manifest. But, you know, no matter how far away or how precise, like the thing is exploding somewhere, you know, it, it is war a-at least to the people on the receiving end.

Loren Voss: Yeah. I mean, it just makes me think it, it’s the difference between domestic law and international law, right? For international law purposes, we’re absolutely saying it is war, therefore you know, that’s why we can bomb and kill.

Jeffrey Stern: Mm-hmm.

Loren Voss: It’s just domestically the, there’s a different story to be told.

Jeffrey Stern: Right. Right, right.

Loren Voss: So we talked a little bit about the future and AI, but I’m also just wondering, you know, all of this research you did on modern warfare, is there something that like really worries you about the future? Is there some piece that you’re like, this is gonna be the next piece that we’re not ready for yet, or that’s gonna have catastrophic effects?

Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. Although it’s probably less of a, you know, sexy answer than you might hope for, which it’s just the continuing momentum towards shorter and shorter time, you know, towards more and more collapsed skill chain, which to me, I think creates the opportunity for a lot more mistakes and a lot more engaged in conflict that could have been resolved otherwise.

I mean, I don’t wanna sound naive. I mean, there are bad actors who wanna hurt Americans and our allies who, you know, for... And these are situations for which weapons and capabilities like this are a really good way of eliminating them without destroying entire cities But the, you know, human on the loop or whatever, the one person who may or may not be the one who’s supposed to say, “No, don’t do this,” the pressure on that person and the time they have to evaluate engaging or not in a particular strike is just getting smaller and smaller.

And I think that as a result, you know, the easier it gets to execute a strike and the harder it gets to resist, you know, the other side of that equation is just more and more conflict, not all of which is necessary, and a lot of which I think will lead to further conflict.

Loren Voss: But then what’s the answer, right?

Like, you want your decision timeframe to be short. I mean, the Air Force has a whole OODA loop, right? Like, it’s all about shortening your decision timeline, you know, making it faster than your enemy.

Jeffrey Stern: Mm-hmm. Right.

Loren Voss: So, you know, what’s the answer if, you know, we keep trying to make it shorter and that leads to more and more mistakes?

Like, what do you do to reduce risk there?

Jeffrey Stern: Well, I think, you know, and I’m not a military expert or a legal expert or really any kind of expert, but to me it’s the decision-making process for there to be as much attention on that as there is on the technological and practical means of collapsing the kill chain and quickening the decision loop.

It’s one of these things where it actually reminds me a little bit of, you know, the early days of drone warfare and surve- and surveillance drones where the technology, you know, for example, it’s way easier to get congressional justification for a shiny new thing than it is for seven more analysts behind computers, you know, in Reston, Virginia or whatever.

But we were collecting way more intelligence than we had the capability to process. And so I think there’s a similar thing here where the technology and the capabilities are really sexy and easier to get funding for and easier to get attention for. But how we keep up in terms of like how we make the decisions, the legal justification, you know, there probably are ways maybe also with AI to accelerate that process as well and to allow almost as much thoughtfulness or at least more thoughtfulness in that contracted timeline and for that to keep pace with all of the technological ability we have to collapse the timeline.

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

And you know, we did this with drone warfare where Predator base had, you know, JAGs and people evaluating targets for legal justification in real time. That slows it down, but there’s probably a way for it to slow it down less.

Loren Voss: Yeah, I like the idea of like focusing on process and your process should be developed along with these advances, right?

Like you sh- we should always be saying, “Okay, who does what? What can you do? What can you not do? Who’s overseeing it? How are you recording what the decision was, right, for evaluation later?” And I think that’s a fair point is sometimes we’re so focused on that advancement and making those things happen that the process is less exciting, that oversight is less exciting, and so you’re not having that go at the same speed.

Jeffrey Stern: Mmhm. Yeah.

Loren Voss: So maybe not a exciting answer, but here at Lawfare we want the right answer, not necessarily the exciting answer.

Jeffrey Stern: Maybe neither, but—

Loren Voss: No, I think this was good. So we’ll leave it there for today. Thanks, Jeff. It was great to hear about your new book, “The Warhead.”

Jeffrey Stern: Thank you, Loren. This was great. Thank you so much.

[Outro]

Loren Voss: The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you want to support the show and listen ad-free, you can become a Lawfare material supporter at lawfaremedia.org/support. Supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don’t share anywhere else. If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen.

It really does help. And be sure to check out our other shows, including Rational Security, Allies, The Aftermath, and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written work at lawfaremedia.org.

The podcast is edited by Jen Patja, with audio engineering by Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from ALIBI Music, and as always, thanks for listening.