What's your understanding of the constraints on what the Pentagon allows a drone or an autonomous weapon to do without a human deciding, kill this person, shoot this person?

The more important thing is what it doesn't say, right?

It doesn't say you're not allowed to automate the kill chain.

So you're allowed to do that.

You are not not allowed to do that.

Right.

Chris Brose, welcome to interesting times. Thank you. Great to be here. So it seems to me like the future of high-tech warfare has arrived, that we are living through a revolution in war fighting, unlike

any, at least in my own lifetime, in which drones and robots and autonomous weapons are

remaking battlefields.

And your professional work puts you at the center of this shift.

You are the president and chief strategy officer of Anderil, which is a defense technology

company that's trying to be the hub, or a hub, at least, for autonomous warfare. But you're also

someone with a deeper background in national security in American government. You worked as a policy

advisor to Condoleezza Rice, to John McCain, and you're the author of a book about the high-tech

military future. So I want to start by asking you to just describe where we are now generally

to someone, let's say, who fell asleep at the end of the Iraq War and just woke up.

Probably to talk about the future, we also have to talk about that sort of past and present,

right?

So if you kind of look at, I'd say, the assumptions that we have been operating under for,

you know, call it the past 30, 40 years, I think that's what's sort of driven the kind of

military that we have.

So we have assumed that if America is ever going to have to fight a war,

...