Defense, Power & Security, Technology, The Global Cable, United States The Serious Business of War with Ash Carter

On this episode of The Global Cable, we sit down with Ash Carter, U.S. Secretary of Defense from 2015 to 2017. A Philadelphia native, he trained as a physicist before starting his career with government. As Secretary of Defense, he built bridges between the military and Silicon Valley, opening Pentagon outposts in American tech hubs and establishing the Department’s first Defense Innovation Board.

In conversation with our host and his former chief speechwriter John Gans, Secretary Carter shares his thoughts on how to make decisions about new technology, what he’s learned about management from running the world’s biggest organization, and what he’s reading right now – the answer might surprise you.

Music & Produced by Tre Hester.

Transcript

Ash Carter [00:00:04] Now, I happen to be a technologist, so it's not hard for me to not be fooled or bamboozled when somebody starts using artificial intelligence, or cyber weapons, and so forth. But for most people, these are pretty mysterious things. But war is a serious business. And we need to be good at it and we need to win and defend ourselves. And therefore, we can't afford to allow mystery of technology to displace good, hardheaded thinking when it comes to technologically assisted warfare.

John Gans [00:00:46] Welcome back to season three of The Global Cable, a podcast from Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, where we discuss the world's most pressing issues with people for on. I'm John Gans, the director of communications and research here. In our latest episode, we're speaking to former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

A Philadelphia native, Secretary Carter trained as a physicist and then spent over 35 years inside government under presidents of both political parties. In 2015, he became Secretary of Defense, where he opened up Pentagon outposts in American tech hubs and established the Defense Department's first defense innovation board. He's currently director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and an innovation fellow at M.I.T.. In addition to all that, Secretary Carter was my boss for a time. I served as his chief speechwriter at the Pentagon and left government with him. Together we traveled around the world and the country. As a result, it's quite special to welcome Secretary Carter to Perry World House for our 2019 Fall Colloquium, which explored how emerging technologies are rewiring the global order, a topic he is perhaps better positioned than anybody to discuss. And it's an honor to have him as a guest on The Global Cable. Today, we're going to talk about decisions on using new technologies, about managing the world's biggest organization, about what Secretary Carter is reading right now - an answer that might surprise you - and about what you can do to get fired from a car wash when you're eleven years old. This is The Global Cable. Welcome, Secretary Carter.

John Gans [00:02:18] Well, we're back on The Global Cable here with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, and we're going to talk a little bit about some lessons in his book, Inside the Five Sided Box. And one of them is about investing in technology. And so I thought I would ask you, what are some of the questions you'd ask yourself and your team before you finally deployed new tech?

Ash Carter [00:02:37] Well, there are the usual things that we require, which is that it perform to the specs we've asked for and hopefully exceed them, that it's delivered on time, and that it's delivered on budget. But with respect to technological systems of the future, and really starting now, there's going to be another dimension. And let me answer your question by pointing to that other dimension - and the example is so-called autonomous weapons. It is systems that are digitally enhanced, like an artificial intelligence or A.I. assisted weapon, which is essentially a so-called autonomous weapon, whose workings are very complicated to explain, or a cyber weapon or a cyber defense, which is very difficult to understand. What's really important is that we, that is, the leaders of the Defense Department, no longer me, but my successors, be able to locate within those new technological forms the things that really matter when it comes to defending ourselves.

[00:04:00] In the case of artificially assisted weapons, you have to retain the concepts of precision, proportionality, discrimination that are part of waging warfare according to rules and norms that have been accepted for a long time. And also that, for example, if an autonomous weapon were to take the lives of innocent people, that responsibility for that could be determined afterwards. Because somebody has got to be responsible when someone's life is taken. And likewise with cyber defense, that the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans or the Iranians understand that if they attack the United States with cyber weapons, that at least to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who's now no longer secretary of defense, that's an attack.

[00:04:59] And you can't hide that with a lot of talk about cyber weapons and so forth. Now, I happen to be a technologist, so it's not hard for me to not be fooled or bamboozled when somebody starts using artificial intelligence or cyber weapons and so forth. But for most people, these are pretty mysterious things.

[00:05:23] But war is a serious business. And we need to be good at it and we need to win, and defend ourselves. And therefore, we can't afford to allow mystery of technology to displace good, hard-headed thinking when it comes to technologically assisted warfare.

John Gans [00:05:47] Continuing this sort of one of the themes of the book, which is about management, and we have a lot of Wharton students here, and undergrad and graduate students who spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to manage. What's your first rule of management? What do you think about first, and as you're trying to lead an organization?

Ash Carter [00:06:04] Well, the Pentagon, as you know, is the largest organization in the world by far. But I think that one very important lesson applies to leadership at all, at any scale, not just the largest in the world, but at any scale. And that is this. So much is written, and there are books in every airport, about one aspect of management, which is leading organizations in directions that they may not know they need to go or want to go.

[00:06:35] And there's a fair amount of that that I needed to do at the Defense Department, whether it was in terms of managing people or managing technology or managing warfare and operations. But there's another side as well, and that is sustaining and reinforcing the things in your organization that are already good. And that's important to do for two reasons. The first is that unless you have a truly broken institution, in which case you might ask yourself why you're taking the job - but that wasn't my problem. I had a 240-year-old institution, so it needed change in many ways, but still an institution that was, in my judgment, excellent at what it did, by and large, and well-respected - which is important in a democracy - by its society. And if I wanted it to go in those new directions, it helped that I also was able to reinforce what people were doing well, and to tell them that they were doing well, and to defend them when they were doing it well, and to stick up for them, and to insist that they behave properly, and that they behave with excellence. Now, I say all this because in today's Washington, demolition is everywhere, and it's so easy to destroy things and it's hard to build them, it takes a long time. And I, for the Defense Department, which I love and have spent much of my life in, I wouldn't want to see that happen, but I feel that way about other public institutions as well. And likewise, you see very poor conduct on the part of public officials. And I insisted upon good conduct. And I think it makes for a organization that, in general, aims to do better. If doing better is reflected in people's own personal conduct. So I thought conduct and comportment were very important. I tried to behave myself and I required good conduct on the part of my subordinates. And if they didn't show it, they got fired.

John Gans [00:09:08] Well, this leads to our next question, which I think is pretty perfect, which is, you grew up near here, and Philadelphia is known for its vigorous attitude. And one of the things I learned when I worked for you is that you had actually been fired from your first job for mouthing off to the boss.  So I thought I would ask you what you learned from that first experience, and how a little Philadelphia mouthiness can work in Washington?

Ash Carter [00:09:33] Well, I was 11 years old and I wanted to work. And you can get your working papers when you're 11. So I got them, and I went to work at Sparkle Quick Car Wash, on North Broad Street in Philadelphia. And I was by far and away the youngest employee. And in those days, maybe it's still this way, the workforce of a carwash were drifters. They were all armed, all heavy drinkers, if not users of drugs. And that was fine with me. And they gave me the worst job, which was to stand outside and do the last wipe down. And they could be in the steamy interior of the building, particularly during the winter, which was an advantage not to be outside in the cold. All that was fine with me.

[00:10:21] I knew I was the little kid, and these guys were all at least in their 20s, 30s, 40s. But right in front of me was a big red tip box with a padlock on it. And at the end of the day, the padlock would be taken off, the box would be opened up, and the tips would be divided. And I was cut out of the tips, because I was 11, and they figured why do we have to give this kid anything? And I thought I was working at least as hard, in fact, in some ways even harder, because I was outside and they were inside, and I wanted my share of the tips. And so I went to complain to the boss. And the boss didn't back me up. So I told him what I thought of that. And he asked me to seek other employment, which I did. And so what I did was walk up Broad Street to a gas station. And I worked the next five years at a gas station on North Broad Street, and I kept that job.

John Gans [00:11:31] All right. Well, we'll get to our questions here from somebody who was another auspicious worker at a young age, Ben Franklin. And somebody who also was probably pretty mouthy, but also a pretty good technologist and statesman. And he developed a questionnaire three hundred years ago, for conversations among fellow Philadelphians interested in global affairs. We've updated it and it sort of anchors our Global Cable podcast. So I'll ask a few short questions and you can give short answers. So you've obviously met a lot of people in public affairs, and is there anybody you'd love to meet today, or anybody in history would like to meet, that you've not had a chance to or never will have a chance to, in the case of history?

Ash Carter [00:12:09] Winston Churchill. I liked his strength and I liked his determination. And he was erudite and learned, as was Franklin, as well as being practical. He knew how to get the best out of people. And in that form of leadership of which I was speaking, he brought out in the people of Great Britain their pride in their own strength and heritage and used that, jujitsued that against the Nazis. And I admire his strength. It turns out, compared to some other leaders in the past, you can have a conversation with Churchill in a sense, because nobody wrote as much about his own life as Winston Churchill did.

John Gans [00:13:11] Yeah, for sure. Hey, speaking of reading, is there anything you've read or watched or listened to of late that you're encouraging other people to tune into or pick up?

Ash Carter [00:13:22] I'm a voracious reader. Here's a tip - I am a big fan of reading textbooks. And let me tell you why. It nay sound exotic, but if you'd like to learn. I'm not a reader of fiction, I should begin by saying, I'm a reader of nonfiction. I like to learn about things I don't know anything about. And textbooks are an efficient way to do that, because if you think about it, they are written for people who don't know anything about a topic. So they're perfect for learning something new. And second, it's not as onerous as it feels when you're a student, because you don't actually have to learn it. And if the textbook you're reading doesn't give a good explanation of the subject, you can go off to another one and read it. So I obviously like the science, but I've done things like linguistics and so forth. I've read a textbook on linguistics till I've known enough about that subject, and I do with particular aspects of history, historiography, and so forth. So I recommend it.

John Gans [00:14:43] That's great. And then I guess the last question to ask, is there anything in particular right now Penn students should be doing in service to the country or to the world?

Ash Carter [00:14:51] Well, from what I know about Penn, both from visiting here, but more importantly, by reading what is done, including here at Perry [World House], they're doing lots already. And I met with some students today, and I was very heartened by the spirit that they have. And I'm heartened by that everywhere in the country. By the way, I was heartened always by soldiers and sailors, airmen, and Marines. When I got tired of Washington, I'd say, let's get on an airplane and go to a base and talk to the troops. And then you then you'd remember why it was worth putting up with Washington, because they gave you heart and hope. In this generation, they know that there are some things are wrong and that we need to do better and they need to do better. And it's very heartening.

 [00:16:00] And if I can applaud them, help them, as Penn does by its nature of being the institution in which they exist. I think it's a big way of making a contribution to to public life. One is to be secretary of defense. OK, fair enough, and serve. But another is to teach and inspire another generation.

John Gans [00:16:29] That's great. Thank you for coming in, thanks for stopping by The Global Cable.

Ash Carter Good to be here. Thank you.