The US and Europe are stepping up their sanctions against the Syrian regime because of an assault on Idlib, according to Ambassador James F. Jeffrey, US Special Representative for Syria Engagement and Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIL.

He said in a news briefing on Thursday that the US government was “appalled and horrified by the unrelenting Assad regime assault on Idlib” supported by Russia and Iran. “It indicates that the regime does not want a compromise solution but rather a military solution,” Jeffrey told the media.

He was asked if he had detected a change in the activities of Iranian-backed militias as a result of sanctions and replied: “US sanctions have hurt them, every dollar they do not have is a limitation to the mayhem that they can create mainly among Syrian people. In terms of these Iranian-backed militias and Iranian Quds Force they remain very dangerous in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. They burrow into the fabric of society and politics.”

The militias infiltrated organizations and “blew up the monopoly of force” held by governments, he said.

“They try to become a state within a state that takes order from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. They are still dangerous but for the moment we took out their leader Qassem Soleimani. I cannot stress how vital he was for their evil campaign to expand Iranian influence throughout the region. They have been not quite headless but directionless to a degree that we have not seen for a long time. That will sooner or later change because they have a new leader of the Quds Force and will eventually reestablish their communication with their groups. But for the moment they have been knocked back on their heels and we are watching them closely and we are ready to act again if they threaten us.”

He said that EU and Arab League countries met in London to talk about next steps for Syria, and that the coalition’s political chiefs met in Copenhagen to discuss how to defeat Daesh and how to react to the call by the Iraqi parliament for a US troop withdrawal.

“We are seeing Daesh come back as an insurgency as a terrorist operation with some 14,000 to 18,000 terrorists between Syria and Iraq and Daesh considers both countries as a single front,” said Jeffrey.

“We are working with both the Iraqi government and the local authorities in Syria to combat this scourge. We had a setback temporarily in Syria last October with the Turkish incursion but we are back doing full operations with our local partner, the Syrian Democratic Forces.”

He added that in Iraq, with the assault on coalition facilities and calls for a US troop withdrawal, there was still a need for a coalition “including its lead country the US.”

The US was satisfied with the EU’s tough sanctions against President Bashar Assad’s regime, he said, and that there were discussions about improving the flow of humanitarian assistance. “We are being blocked by Russia in the UN from using certain crossings, but we are going to find ways around that. We are also talking with the EU about potential stabilization in the northeast where the region is basically at peace and where our allies are helping us fight against Daesh.”

Below is a full rush transcript of the press conference by Ambassador James Jeffrey U.S. Special Representative for Syria Engagement and Special Envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.

Ambassador Jeffrey:  I’m here in Brussels at the end of a week-long trip to Europe on both the defeat-ISIS account and, in particular, the U.S.-Syria policy file.  

On Syria, we met with the Small Group – that is a set of leading European Union and Arab League countries – in London on Tuesday to talk about next steps.  And then yesterday, we met with the coalition political directors, sub-cabinet-level officials, in Copenhagen to talk about how we will further carry out our operations to defeat ISIS, and in particular, how we will react to the call by the Iraqi parliament for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

Let me start with Syria.  We are all appalled and horrified, as Secretary Pompeo and others in Washington have indicated, by the unrelenting Assad regime assault on Idlib supported by Russia and Iran.  This is a violation of the 2254 ceasefire accords and that resolution from 2015 as well as several more recent ceasefires that Russia has agreed to but is now ignoring.  It indicates that the regime does not want a compromise solution, but rather a military victory.  

Meanwhile, the fight against ISIS, of course, had a signal success back in March with the defeat of the caliphate along the Euphrates in Syria, but we are seeing ISIS come back as an insurgency, as a terrorist operation, with some 14- to 18,000 terrorists between Syria and Iraq and ISIS considers both countries as – as they have always done, as a single front.  We are working with both our – the Iraqi Government and the local authorities in Syria to combat this scourge.  We had a setback temporarily in Syria back in October with the Turkish incursion, but we’re back doing full operations with our local partner, the Syrian Democratic Forces. 

In Iraq, the situation is a little bit different with the turmoil, beginning with the assault on coalition installations by elements supported by Iran, the United States reaction to that, and then finally the decision by the Iraqi parliament calling for a withdrawal of U.S. forces.  And we’re working through this with Iraq and with our coalition partners now.  There is still a need for a coalition including its lead country, the U.S.  There is still a threat from ISIS.  Iraqis recognize that, and we’re looking forward to working for ways such as a possible troop reduction – President Trump indicated that may be a way to go just today – as well as a bigger role for NATO, which already has a NATO mission in Iraq and has been looking very assiduously at ways to expand its responsibilities there.

Question:  “According to what was reported last week, you were going to discuss with the EU sanctions and other economic procedures to continue the pressure on the Assad regime.  What is the outcome of those discussions?” “What are the outcomes of the meetings with the Syria Small Group especially regarding the stalled political solution?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  Well, we haven’t finished our discussions with our EU colleagues, but we are very happy with the EU’s long record of tough sanctions against the Assad regime.  We’re happy that the EU has held the line against reconstruction assistance to that regime by either EU states or other countries who otherwise, if they do, would risk EU sanctions.  We’re also very, very pleased with the EU’s record of supporting humanitarian assistance.  That’s a big difference that we make.  Humanitarian assistance, even to regime areas, is important and necessary, but reconstruction assistance to basically rebuild the Syria that Assad has destroyed, that’s a redline for us and it remains a redline for the European Union.  So, we’re talking to them about ways to improve the flow of humanitarian assistance.  We’re being blocked by Russia in the UN from using certain crossings, but we’re going to find ways around that.  We’re also talking with the EU about potential stabilization assistance in the northeast where the region is basically at peace and where our allies are helping us, as I mentioned, fight against Daesh.

In terms of – in the Small Group, in the political process, Geir Pedersen was in the region – Beirut, Damascus – to talk.  He is the UN Special Negotiator for 2254, the relevant UN resolution, and he’s particularly focused on the constitutional committee that was inaugurated in Geneva at the end of October but has since been blocked by the Assad regime.  Pedersen is working round the clock to try to find a solution to that.  We’ll be working with him tomorrow to see where he is and what the next steps are.  We support him 100 percent.

Question: “What are you going to do specifically to stop Russia and the Assad regime attacks in Idlib against civilians?  Half a million people have already camped out near the Turkish border.  Will you take concrete steps to alleviate this humanitarian crisis?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  We are taking steps and we’ll take further steps.  First of all, we ourselves do not contemplate military action unless the Assad regime once again there uses chemical weapons, then all options are on the table and, as everybody knows, we have taken military action twice in response to chemical weapons use by that regime.  So that’s one thing.  

We’re also very supportive of Turkey’s efforts to shore up its line of outposts.  The Turks have a considerable number of troops in Idlib.  These are our NATO allies.  We want to be sure that nothing happens to them.  We’re watching that very closely.

Meanwhile, we are stepping up our sanctions efforts and our international diplomatic coordination to ensure that Russia and Iran, as well as the Assad regime, know that this is absolutely unacceptable.  It’s a humanitarian crisis.  It’s a devastating attack on civilians so massive that the secretary general has – of the UN has already called for a board of inquiry to look into the deliberate attack on civilians, particularly the deliberate attack on UN-protected areas that were identified to the Russians and the regime but have been hit, we think deliberately, in any case.  

So, this is a very terrible situation we’re facing.  We’ll do everything we can short of major military operations to try to bring some sense to Moscow, to Tehran, and to Damascus. 

Question: “President Erdogan reacted to the Syrian Government’s Idlib offensive, accusing Russia of not honoring Syria deals.  There are reports that the Turkish military is sending new military reinforcement.  Could this tension lead to a military confrontation?” 

Ambassador Jeffrey:  There is already a military confrontation in Idlib.  The Turks, as I said, have a set of outposts.  Several have been cut off by regime forces.  There’s a risk of further surrounding of Turkish installations.  Obviously, President Erdogan is a leader who has been through several conflicts.  He’s an experienced leader in terms of dealing with the situation in Syria, but he is our partner and our NATO ally and we stand with him.  We have made it clear to him, however, that his efforts to try to work deals with the Russians in the northeast, in the northwest, all the way to President Erdogan – we, including I, have told him you cannot trust Putin, and he’s seeing the results of that right now.

Question: “Focus has shifted from military activities to protecting Iraqi bases that host coalition personnel.  How prevalent are the attacks on those bases?” “Do the foreign troops – do you think the foreign troops will ultimately be forced to leave Iraq?  What would be the impact?  And then, in relation to Iraq, what impact has the pausing of military activities had on Daesh?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  Well, the good news in Iraq is that the Iraqi military is continuing its counter-Daesh operations and they had a very successful one recently with what we call combined arms, using F-16s, using different kind of forces effectively to take down a set of Daesh units.  So, we’re seeing some of that, and that’s encouraging.  But nonetheless, there’s a reason that in numbers in excess of 5,000 U.S. troops and thousands more coalition forces are in Iraq – it is to make the Iraqi military more effective in the fight against Daesh.  Right now, we’re limited in doing that because our focus is on force protection and we’re very – we’re quite optimistic that the Iraqi Government and we will be able to end this period of force protection and a halt on joint or partnered operations, we call it, and that we’ll be able to get back into the field at 100 percent efficiency. 

Meanwhile, attacks on U.S. bases – they’re not U.S. bases, they’re Iraqi bases and we need to remind ourselves of that because Iraqis have been – several of them have been killed, more than coalition soldiers who have been wounded.  And we haven’t seen too many attacks on them in the last week, and these have been relatively desultory attacks.  Unfortunately, we saw two attacks, one of them injuring an individual, on the American embassy.  That has us very concerned in a bilateral context with the Iraqi Government.  We are demanding that the Iraqi Government take more action, and we’ll see what happens.

Question: “President Trump declared ISIS 100 percent defeated in Syria.  Does this mean the terrorist organization is no longer a threat in this country?  And the Pentagon said that the reason U.S. soldiers are staying in Syria is to protect the oil fields from ISIS.  So when do you expect the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  We’re not planning any withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria in the near future.  Their mission is ultimately the enduring defeat of ISIS, and that, as I’ll get to in a second, in response to the first part of the question, will still take some time.  A major part of our efforts to defeat ISIS in Syria is to first of all keep ISIS away from the oil fields that funded their terror for years, and ensure that the local communities who are working with us against ISIS have the wherewithal to continue the fight and to sustain themselves, because they’re not only under pressure from ISIS, they’re under pressure, of course, from the Assad regime. 

Now, President Trump was absolutely on target when he said last year that ISIS had been 100 percent defeated as a territorial entity, as a caliphate.  That was its claim, that was its mark.  It was a caliphate.  Unlike al-Qaida, it held territory and had an army of 35,000 troops.  It held sway over 7 million people.  We have taken that down.  However, ISIS as a insurgent or terrorist group is still very, very threatening.  In Iraq and Syria, between 14- and 18,000 people.  President Trump, when he spoke to the coalition ministers in February of last year, made very clear that he recognizes that particular threat emanating from ISIS is very much present, and he’s on the record saying so.

Question:   “How is your latest strategy going to change the migration crisis in Europe in the near future and in the long run?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  A good question but, frankly, dealing with migration is a extremely important, some would say existential, question here in Europe, but also in the United States.  It was a major reason or a major issue in the 2016 elections, of course.  So, it’s not my job or America’s job to fix Europe’s immigration crisis.  That has many causes, it comes from many sources, and Europe is seized with the necessity of doing something about it.

Now, in terms of Syria, what we’re doing first of all is a massive humanitarian effort for those refugees who have left the country.  We have provided $10.5 billion since 2011 for Syrian refugees and internally displaced persons, or IDPs.  That’s the largest of any nation in the world.  But I have to say the European Union as an institution and all of its nation-states have actually provided more money.  So, there’s a massive international effort to support the refugees basically where they are.  I think many of your viewers know about the negotiations between the EU and Turkey.  Turkey has done more than any other country to house refugees – over 3 million.  It’s a huge burden.  They’ve spent tens of billions of dollars and they’re getting some support from the EU.  That’s good.  

But at the end of the day, to solve the problem of refugees coming from Syria, we need a solution to the Syrian conflict.  The Assad regime, backed by Russia and Tehran, have been weaponizing refugees, massive flows of them, to put Europe, to put Turkey, to put us under pressure.  That’s unacceptable.  We need a solution now to that conflict.

Question:  “It’s been reported that you are pushing for increased sanctions from European partners on the Syrian Government.  Do you believe that this can be achieved in terms of affecting the Syrian Government’s behavior, and are you encountering any reluctance from European partners?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  Our European partners have been very, very good on overall policy towards Syria.  That is, both individually – countries such as Britain, France, and Germany, who are with us in the so-called Small Group – and the EU as an institution, and the EU member-states in general.  So, we’re very happy all across the board with the EU.  

Of course, we always want more sanctions.  We’ve just gotten in the United States two new pieces of sanctions powers: one, an executive order that we used during the Turkish incursion, but is far broader on people who are blocking the negotiation process in Syria, and what is called the Caesar Act, named for the code name of that heroic individual who took pictures of tens of thousands of people being tortured in Assad’s prisons.  That is a very, very hard set of sanctions.  We are briefing the European Union on it.  We hope to work with them to see even more European sanctions decisions being taken by the institution.

Do sanctions work?  First of all, they make it harder for Assad and his friends to pursue their military victory strategy.  In and of itself, that’s enough justification for them.  But as we see with the total freefall of the Syrian pound right now and other indicators – shortages of gas and other fuels – the Assad regime is under tremendous economic pressure because it and its allies are putting all of their money into this awful campaign in Idlib and other efforts to essentially wage war on their own population.  So, we believe that the sanctions are eventually going to take money away from the war machine.

Question:  “Have you detected any change in the activities of Iranian-backed Syrian, Iraqi, or Lebanese militias in Syria?  Are they becoming more or less aggressive or provocative?  What role are they playing in the regime’s Idlib offensive, and are there any empirical indications that U.S. sanctions have hurt them?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  U.S. sanctions have hurt them.  Again, as in my answer to the last question, every dollar that – or every Syrian pound or Russian ruble that they do not have at their disposal is a limitation to the mayhem that they can create, mainly among the Syrian people.

In terms of these Iranian-backed militias and Iranian Quds Force people themselves, they remain long-term very, very dangerous in both Iraq and Syria, in both countries, as well as next door in Lebanon.  As we have seen, they burrow into the fabric of society and of politics.  They create their own alternative institutions that are answerable to Tehran, not to Damascus, Baghdad, or Beirut.  They infiltrate organizations, they blow up the monopoly of force held by governments, they try to become a state within a state that takes orders from Supreme Leader Khamenei.  

Are they still dangerous?  Yes.  But for the moment, because we took out their leader, Qasem Soleimani – and I cannot stress too much how vital he was for their evil campaign to expand Iranian influence throughout the region – they have been not quite headless, but they have been directionless to a degree that we have not seen for a long time.  That will, sooner or later I’m sure, change somewhat because they do have a new leader of the Quds Force and eventually they will reestablish their communications with their groups.  But for the moment, they have been knocked back on their heels and we are watching them closely, and we are ready to act again if they threaten us.

Question: “Moscow says that they were fighting against terrorists in Idlib – in Idlib, but as per Ankara, the fighters in Idlib are not terrorists; they are fighting for their freedom.  What is the U.S. stance on that?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  Our stance is there are groups that are – been designated by us and by the United Nations as terrorist organizations in Idlib.  We have taken military operations against several of them, several al-Qaida elements, and, as everybody knows, ISIS’s leader, al-Baghdadi, several months ago.  So, we recognize that there are terrorists in Idlib.  

There’s also a very large group, the al-Nusra or Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, HTS, that is an al-Qaida offshoot.  It is considered a terrorist organization, but it is primarily focused on fighting the Assad regime.  It itself claims – we haven’t accepted that claim yet, but they do claim to be patriotic opposition fighters, not terrorists.  We have not seen them generate, for example, international threats for some time.  

Nonetheless, none of them have been threatening the Russians or the Syrian military in any way out of Idlib.  We watch very closely the claims that the Russians say that these people are launching attacks and the Russians are only retaliating, or the Syrian regime is only retaliating.  That’s not true.  There are a few inconsequential attacks from time to time – drones and the like – coming out of Idlib, but extremely minor, rare, and doing little damage, creating little, few, or no casualties.  These are just used as an excuse for this massive thing.  

We saw 200 Russian and Syrian regime airstrikes in the last three days, mainly against civilians – as I said, the Secretary General is so alarmed that he’s created a board of inquiry into the attacks on civilians – and massive movements of troops pushing back hundreds of square kilometers and setting I think now 700,000 people who are already internally displaced on the move, once again, towards the Turkish border, which would then create an international crisis.

Question:  “Can you please explain in detail the role of the U.S. forces in Syria and discuss the last interactions with Russian forces near the Syrian city of Qamishli?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  U.S. forces are in Syria on orders of the President of the United States, carrying out the military mission as part of the International Coalition to Defeat ISIS, or doing exactly that: ensuring the enduring defeat of ISIS in Syria, just as we’re trying to do the same thing in Iraq.  That’s their basic mission.  Now, the mission has certain elements.  We talked a little bit earlier about securing the oil fields.  We do think that they’re effective in this mission.  We cannot give a date for when they would be withdrawn.  Right now, they’re there; they’re carrying out their missions.

Question: “What is the U.S. Government’s current total count of Islamic State affiliates worldwide?  Can you provide a breakdown by geographic region?” 

Ambassador Jeffrey:  We’ve already handled the President Trump statement.  They have been 100 percent defeated as a caliphate, but they still exist as a terrorist insurgency.  No more – nowhere are we more concerned than in Western Africa and the area around Burkina Faso.  That was a major issue that we discussed at the coalition political directors meeting yesterday.  We issued a declaration at the end of it where we called attention specifically to that area of West Africa.  

What we’re doing is the U.S. is organizing a coalition meeting later on this year to look at how the coalition can help our French allies who are in the lead in the fight against Daesh, as well as al-Qaida, in that part of Africa.  The UN is also present there as are, of course, many other nations.  And we’re very, very committed to ensuring that we have our own troops there as well supporting the French and carrying out our own operations.  This is a big threat and we believe that it requires an international effort, and that that effort needs to be enhanced.

Question: “Could you please comment on the coordination with Russia on deconfliction in Syria?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  Yeah, that actually was asked a second ago with our U.S. troops.  We deconflict every day with the Russians in Syria and have been doing so for a number of years since both U.S. and Russian aircraft began operating in Syria in closed areas.  

The deconfliction channels are very effective.  They work at each level.  People with language skills are in constant coordination.  We have had incidents where U.S. forces and Russian forces on the ground have come close.  The Qamishli incident was mentioned – that’s an area where we, Russians, regime troops, our partners, the Syrian Democratic Forces and, unfortunately, a few Daesh elements are all in close proximity.  It’s an active combat zone, so obviously there’s a need for deconfliction from time to time.  There are minor misunderstandings.  We are very pleased with the deconfliction mechanisms so far.

Question: “What would NATO’s expanded role be in the Middle East, and to take – would it be to take over command of the training missions of individual NATO member-states?”

Ambassador Jeffrey:  NATO is looking at the entire gamut of possibilities following President Trump’s suggestion that NATO play a bigger role not just in Iraq, but overall in the Middle East.  There are opportunities with several training or peacekeeping missions, monitoring missions, including in the Gulf, NATO and also, of course as we just discussed, West Africa – could NATO play a bigger role there?  

NATO is looking into all of this right now.  Right down the road from here we have Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is our ambassador to NATO.  She is seized with this issue, as is Secretary General Stoltenberg.  We’re working closely with them.  I have been in constant touch with the NATO authorities.

In Iraq, they already have a military training mission that focuses on high-level capacity building and training of staffs in the ministry of defense.  NATO is trying to expand its capabilities and the forces present to do its current mandate.  It’s also looking at taking over perhaps some of the mandates that the coalition is now doing, again, in response to the Iraqi call for American troops to withdraw.  But essentially, a more international face to the effort to defeat Daesh alongside our Iraqi partners.

Oslo, Norway – In a ceremony held at the Akershus Fortress, in Oslo, Norway, command of Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group One (SNMCMG1) was transferred to Commander S.G. Henning Knudsen-Hauge of the Royal Norwegian Navy, on Wednesday, January 15, 2020. The outgoing commander, Denmarks’s Commander S.G. Peter Krogh, had commanded the group for a 12-month planned rotation which began in January, 2019.

Over the last twelve months, 16 ships have participated in SNMCMG1, patrolling the waters of Northern Europe.

SNMCMG1 ships provided NATO with a constant presence in the North to re-assure Allies and deter any potential aggressors; monitored NATO’s sea lanes contributing to maritime security; routinely trained with Allies and Partners, including participation in several large multinational exercises and numerous individual training opportunities, enhancing Allied interoperability.

Ceremony in Oslo was presided by Commodore Jeanette Morang, Commander Surface Forces NATO.

Quotes

“All the nations that contributed the 16 ships and personnel to Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group One over the last year have shown outstanding dedication to NATO’s mission in the North. The achievements over the last year speak highly for Denmark, Commander Peter Krogh and his team, to which we express our greatest appreciation. I look forward to working with Commander Henning Knudsen-Hauge, another highly capable officer who I am sure will continue the outstanding efforts in NATO’s mine countermeasures mission over the next six months.”     

—    Commodore Jeanette Morang, Commander Surface Forces NATO

“It has been a true pleasure both professionally and socially to Command the elite Mine Countermeasures forces of NATO. I have met nothing but open doors and willingness from key players to assist no matter which nation we visited or operation we conducted.  Thank you for the support and cooperation to all involved. I wish the best of luck to my successor and I am convinced he will appreciate his time as much as I have!” 

—    Commander S.G. Peter Krogh, Royal Danish Navy, Outgoing Commander of Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group One

“I’m humbled and proud to be able to assume command of SNMCMG1. As an officer who has spent my entire career in the MCM environment, this is the pinnacle of my career. My time in the MCM environment has confirmed my beliefs that the MCM community, both socially and professionally are a group of people working for the greater good. The MCM is truly multinational, and my time as Commander is a true testimony to this, with a multinational staff, with the majority from Norway, deploying aboard a German ship, and becoming one united crew, working for NATO and safe shipping. Time and time again, MCM proves that the slogan “We are NATO” is not just a slogan, but a description of our reality. I’m looking forward to the next 6 months, and I find myself humbled by the huge effort each serving member, ship and nation put into this ongoing effort.”

—    Commander S.G. Henning Knudsen-Hauge, Royal Norwegian Navy, Incoming Commander of Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group One Commander

Quick Facts

·       SNMCMG1 is one of four standing forces that comprise the maritime component of the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), which is part of the NATO Response Force (NRF). To respond to contingency situations additional forces can be added to these groups, with the NATO command staff onboard and the ships of the group as the nucleus, capable of providing timely support to NATO operations. 

·       Since January 2019, SNMCMG1 has had 16 ships participating from across the Alliance:

·       Commander S.G. Peter Krogh assumed Command of SNMCMG1 on January 14, 2019, and hoisted his flag on HDMS Thetis.

·       His command was supported by a total of 19 dedicated Danish staff members, 13 international staff members (from 9 different nations), and a number of flagship staff members who provided double-hatted support.

·       In 2019, the group carried our 7 Historic Ordnance Disposal (HOD) operations, destroying a total of 148 mines.

·       They spent 85 days looking for mines and searched over 210 square nautical miles.

‘Deep fakes’ pose a major threat to elections and even world peace, Air Force Lt. Gen. John Shanahan, Director of Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, U.S. Department of Defense has warned.

“What if a senior leader was to come on and announce that the nation was at war, but it was a deep fake?,” he asked.

“It’s something I think a lot about because the level of realism and fidelity has vastly increased from just a year ago,” the Director of the US Joint Artificial Intelligence Center said.

“People have such a growing cynicism and scepticism about what they’re reading, seeing and hearing, that this could become such a corrosive effect over time that nobody knows what is reality anymore.

“Those are areas that are of increasing concern across the whole of society, not just the US military.”

“Within probably 30 minutes you can get online and start developing fairly high fidelity deep fakes,” he said.

The General also sought to provide reassure that as AI capability developed, the US military would not seek to develop autonomous “killer robots”.

“There are aspects of AI that feel different – the black box aspect of machine learning – but overall we have the process and policies in place to ensure that we [stick to] the laws of war, rules of engagement and proportionality.

“We will not violate those core principles.

“Humans will be held accountable. It will not be something that we say ‘the black box did it, no-one will be held accountable’. Just like in every mistake that has happened on a battlefield in our history, there will be accountability.

“We are not looking to go to this future of..killer robots: unsupervised, independent, self-targeting systems.

“Lethal, autonomous weapon systems, right now for the Department of Defence, is not something we are working actively towards.”

Below is a full rush transcript of the press conference by Air Force Lt. Gen. John Shanahan, Director of Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, U.S. Department of Defense.

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  I am Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the Director of the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, also known as the JAIC, located in Washington, D.C.  I’m joined on the call by our Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Nand Mulchandani.  Nand joined our team last year after an impressive 25-plus-year career in Silicon Valley, where he founded, sold, and bought several tech startups and guided them to success.  He has exactly the kind of experience and technical expertise that is so important for a new government organization like the JAIC that is trying to adopt emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.  

Nand’s invaluable insights and contributions to the JAIC and his presence with me on this trip underscore the importance of cooperation between the commercial technology sector and the military.  These partnerships are vital to the future of our shared values in this era of emerging and disruptive technologies.  In fact, more than ever before, our militaries are looking to the commercial sector to help us integrate AI-enabled capabilities that are safe, ethical, reliable, and aligned to our respect – with our respect for international law and human rights. 

This week we are meeting with NATO and European Union leaders to discuss how AI will transform our respective militaries in the coming years.  From the U.S. viewpoint, we see AI as a transformational technology, one that will help preserve the strategic military advantage that the United States and our allies and partners in NATO have enjoyed for more than 70 years.  In that respect, we recognize the value of AI for a wide range of capabilities across the full spectrum of the defense enterprise in a manner that is joint and interoperable with our allies and partners.

Europe, like the United States, thrives on a vast marketplace of ideas and freedom of expression.  We recognize that there are skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic concerning the military applications of AI.  As you might imagine, I have a pragmatic worldview on AI.  I compare AI to electricity or to computers.  Like electricity, AI is a transformative, general purpose technology.  AI is capable of being used for good or for bad, but is not a thing unto itself.  In essence, AI equates to machines that perform as well or better than humans in a variety of functions.  For the U.S. and our allies, our most valuable contributions will come from how we use AI to make better and faster decisions and optimize human-machine teaming.  

The U.S. envisions that as AI in its different fields such as machine learning and natural language processing mature, it will help commanders in the field make safer and more precise decisions during high consequence or mission critical operations.  We also believe that AI will help create a more streamlined organization for so-called back-office functions by reducing inefficiencies from manual, laborious operations, with the objective of simplifying workflows and improving the speed and accuracy of repetitive tasks.

We have a lot of work to do in the U.S. military in this regard.  Success with AI adoption requires a multi-generational commitment with the right combination of tactical urgency and strategic patience.  The U.S., along with our NATO allies, will face difficult decisions regarding the future of legacy systems and platforms in an era where technological innovations are transforming every aspect of the human experience.  We are entering a new era of global technological disruption, one that is fueled by data, software, AI, cyber, and cloud, with 5G soon to explode globally.  The pace of change is breathtaking.  With no end in sight to the speed or scope of change, the United States understands that we must embrace this technological transformation to meet future global security challenges.  

This is why the United States military is prioritizing the acceleration of AI adoption.  In fact, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper started – stated publicly that AI is his number one technology modernization priority.  Our response is spelled out in the U.S. administration’s American AI Initiative and the Department of Defense AI Strategy, the unclassified summary of which was released last February and is available online.  These are the documents that explicitly called for the creation of our Joint AI Center, which serves as the focal point for execution of our AI strategy.

Broadly, the JAIC has three major roles.  First, we are developing and delivering AI capabilities that make use of existing AI-enabled technologies from commercial industry and academia.  We have six AI projects underway, each of which represent areas where we know there is off-the-shelf AI technology that can be modified for Department of Defense missions.  These missions range from humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to aircraft predictive maintenance, cyber defense, warfighter health, intelligent business automation, and our priority project for the next year, joint warfighting.  With our mission initiatives, we’re looking for projects that can demonstrate initial return on investment in one to four years.  

Our second major role is working on the long-lead items or foundational building blocks that are preventing wider adoption of AI technology throughout the U.S. military – critical first steps, including building an enterprise cloud-enabled platform, human capital management, acquisition reform, and data management.  With its formal launch in 2020, the JAIC’s AI platform as a service, which we call the Joint Common Foundation, will lower the barriers to entry for AI developers and users throughout the Department of Defense.

Presently, much of the best commercial AI technology is being developed through open-source tools that demonstrate high performance but also contain significant cyber vulnerabilities.  We want AI developers to have easy access to these open-source tools, but given today’s ubiquitous cyber threat, we are taking steps to ensure cyber security is considered at every stage of the AI delivery lifecycle.  

Our third role is to serve as the DOD’s AI center of excellence, managing the DOD-wide governance process for AI to address areas such as acquisition reform as well as key policy questions, to include how we use AI-enabled capabilities safely, lawfully, and ethically.  Through the JAIC’s role in AI governance, we are diligently reviewing recommendations from organizations such as the United States Defense Innovation Board, an independent forum of subject matter experts from private industry and academia, along with the national – U.S. National Security Commission on AI, to adopt ethical standards and principles for AI adoption that are aligned with our nation’s values but still enable the United States and our allies to maintain a strategic military advantage through the use of AI-enabled technology.  

We are keenly aware that our strategic competitors are embracing this technological revolution and are moving very deliberately towards a future of artificial intelligence.  Many of the AI applications of both Russia and China run in stark contrast to the values of Europe and the United States, and raise serious questions regarding international norms, human rights, and preserving a free and open international order.  At the same time, we are concerned that some countries in Europe are at risk of becoming immobilized by debates about regulation and the ethics of the military use of AI.  We recognize that there are legitimate ethical concerns with any military technology, but we have crafted an approach that allows us to move forward in adopting the technology in parallel with addressing these ethics concerns.

Given the importance of the NATO alliance, we desire a future that enables digital-age cooperation and interoperability between the U.S. and NATO while respecting and honoring the strong commitment to safe, responsible, and ethical uses of technology.

From the U.S. viewpoint, the best way to preserve responsible and ethical values in AI military technology is to work alongside our allies and partners to provide global leadership in this consequential field.  And the stakes could not be higher for both the United States and NATO.  We are encouraging our allies to work with us to develop and implement strong AI principles for defense. 

Russia and China are cooperating on AI in ways that threaten our shared values and risk accelerating digital authoritarianism.  For example, China is utilizing AI technology to strengthen censorship over its people and stifle freedom of expression and human rights.  China is also facilitating the sale of AI-enabled autonomous weapons in the global arms market, lowering the barrier of entry of potential adversaries and potentially placing this technology in the hands of non-state actors.  Perhaps most concerning, Chinese technology companies, including Huawei, are compelled to cooperate with its Communist Party’s intelligence and security services no matter where the company operates.

Russia’s use of AI for national security has been characterized not so much by superior technology but by a greater willingness to disregard international ethical norms and to develop systems that pose destabilizing risks to international security.  Russia is also pursuing greater use of machine learning and automation for its global disinformation campaigns as well as lethal autonomous weapons systems.  

These security challenges and the technological innovations that are changing our world should compel likeminded nations to shape the future of the international order in the digital age, and vigorously promote AI for our shared values.  AI, like the major technology innovations of the past, has enormous potential to strengthen the NATO alliance.  The deliberate actions we take in the coming years with responsible AI adoption will ensure our militaries keep pace with digital modernization and remain interoperable in the most complex and consequential missions, so that we can continue to rely on the collective security architecture that has preserved peace, prosperity, and stability in Europe and beyond for decades.

Over the long term, as electricity and computers did for us in the past, I believe that AI technologies will set the stage for transforming the NATO alliance.  The future of our security and freedoms depends on it. 

Question:  What are the kind of safeguards that you think should be put in place to make sure that the technology that you are developing or commercial players are developing won’t end up in the hands of malicious actors or in the hands of countries, organizations where it’s not supposed to be?

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  Well, I think Nand will want to talk on this as well.  Because this technology is coming largely from commercial industry in terms of how rapidly it’s being developed and fielded, we have serious concerns about non-state actors and their ability to grab these capabilities from the open-source market.  That is an area which we are beginning to place a lot more attention on to protect the technology not getting out into other non-state-actor hands for ill purposes.  

That’s not easy to do because it is so widely available.  And I can’t get into details in this forum, but we are taking steps to look very closely at how that technology could be exported to people that choose to use it for bad purposes.  But it is also difficult to do that given how easy it is to develop these technologies today.  

I think that’s what makes this different from a lot of technology in the past that was developed by the military and U.S. military allies and partners, and then you had commercial spinoffs.  In this case it’s almost the opposite, where it’s the commercial technologies have been developed first and then we’re repurposing those for military purposes.  But when you do that, those technologies will be available to almost anyone with not a lot of effort to go get them.  That risks a future which destabilizes the international order in the digital age, so I will tell you that we’re looking carefully about how we would prevent proliferation of those capabilities.  But I will not pretend that we can do that easily or immediately.

Mr. Mulchandani:  Just to add to what the General pointed out and get a little more – deeper into the tech, one thing that makes artificial intelligence algorithms and systems different is the need and presence for data for training.  And the algorithms and the toolsets are becoming widely available in an open-source model, which in today’s day and age, the democratization of and availability of these libraries and toolkits – we’re seeing that in crypto, we’re now seeing this in AI.  It’s very hard controlling that because, I mean, the world is flat when it comes to software and the proliferation of this.

However, the data – which is a key ingredient in building effective AI models to go do this – is something that every organization owns for themselves, and keeping the data, making sure that the data is curated properly, is stored properly, and controlling access to that is an incredibly important part of this data protection and AI protection systems that we’re putting in place.  But that’s actually a key piece that we need to make sure doesn’t get out there.

Question:  Will artificial intelligence also be practiced in targeted killings, as we experienced about a week ago?  And if it’s so, maybe you could define for me at least how could that be defensive and so, keeping peace?

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  Yeah, so this is an important question.  Let me – let me state up front that that is not anything that we’re working on in the U.S. military right now.  Accountability is a principle that is first and foremost in any of our weapons technology throughout the history of the Department of Defense.  We go through a rigorous and disciplined process through test and evaluation, validation and verification, before we would ever field this.  That has been no different than any technology the department has developed in its history.  And there are aspects of artificial intelligence that feel different – the black box aspect, say, of machine learning.  

But overall, we have a process and policies in place to ensure that we have the laws of war, international humanitarian law, rules of engagement, the principles of proportionality and discrimination and so on, that we will not violate those core principles.  AI does not – does not change that.  Humans will be held accountable.  It will not be something that we say, “The black box did it – no one will be held accountable.”  Just like in every mishap or mistake that’s happened in a battlefield in our history, there will be accountability, and that is a core principle of how we’re developing these capabilities.  We are not looking to go to this future of what some would say is the worst-case assumption for the “Department of Killer Robots,” of, say, unsupervised, independent, self-targeting systems.  None of us are looking for that future.  We have a very disciplined approach to fielding those, beginning with lower consequence mission sets, taking the lessons and principles we learned from those lower consequence, less critical missions and beginning to apply them to warfighting operations.

So we – I don’t see the scenario as you described it being something that we’re working for.  We have safeguards in place to ensure that that outcome actually doesn’t happen the way that you talk about it.

Mr. Mulchandani:  I mean, the laws – the laws on our books are not changed by technology that easily, and AI is another one of these things where it needs to be absorbed into the frameworks and ethical rules and laws in society and what we have as a government.  So there’s nothing here we’re planning on that, and just to echo this point:  AI is a technology in its infancy, and part of it is every company and organization adopting it is adopting it in a sort of decision-support model for personalization.  I mean, think about where AI, this current sort of phase of AI has come from, is ad tech, right, which sort of pushed these sort of boundaries and has created the sort of movement here.  All of it is around personalization and support, which is really the projects and things that the General outlined in our opening statements.  Those are the projects that we’re working on to learn and absorb this into the mode of operation, which then leads us to more sophisticated use cases, but over time, in the careful way.

Question:  You mentioned the challenge posed by China and Huawei, at the same time saying you wanted to cooperate with NATO allies.  If a NATO ally like the UK went ahead with awarding a contract to Huawei for 5G, would that undermine that cooperation?  Would that – would that be a problem in sharing information, knowhow, skills with an ally?

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  I’ll be careful not to go outside of my qualified – well, my qualifications to answer that question, which is largely a policy question.  But let me just get to the broader point.  5G and AI will have a future that will be inextricably linked.  Whatever AI looks like today will advance even much faster as 5G becomes promulgated throughout the world.  What our concerns are is access to data – as Nand said earlier, if you have access to data, you basically have access to algorithms and can defeat the models – and then how is the data being shared, who is it being shared with.  

So I guess my starting point to answer that question would be if that were to happen in a theoretical case, we would have these discussions at a policy level as well as at a technical level to under – to really appreciate the full ramifications of having Huawei in a network anyplace in the world that was touching other allies and partners’ systems.  There are a lot of unknowns about this right now.  So what safeguards could be put in place if that were to happen?  And if there weren’t sufficient safeguards, what could we do to ensure that technology wasn’t stolen and given away to an adversary without even us understanding how it took place?

So I’ll answer that largely as a theoretical as opposed to this is about to happen, but these will be questions we will have to address at a policy level as well as the technical level to understand what might be the case if we’re developing artificial intelligence with a 5G backbone, and then what happens – what are the ramifications of that for all of the countries involved that may be touching that network.

Question:  You were talking earlier about the – your concern about the proliferation of some of these AI tools, and I wondered since AI is so broad and there are so many different types of applications, what do you see as having the biggest risk in the short term?  Is it, for instance, some of these tools that do predictive modeling, or surveillance tools, things like facial recognition, or some of the tools that can, for instance, mimic human voices or deep fakes, things like that?

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  I know Nand will want to also weigh in.  My answer is a couple of those – I think we’re all concerned, deeply concerned, right now about deep fakes.  It’s not an area a year ago I was thinking that much about as we stood up the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.  It’s something I think a lot about now because the level of realism and fidelity is vastly increased over just a year ago, using capabilities such as generative adversarial networks to build these capabilities.  Now what do we – what do we develop a similar technology to defeat or at least to recognize when a deep fake is happening?  We’ve seen the corrosive influence of some of these disinformation campaigns against political election cycles.  What if a senior leader were to come on and announce that the nation is at war but it was a deep fake?  Those are areas that are of increasing concern across all of society, not just the United States military but they could be used anywhere across the world.  They’re not hard to get access to either.  I think within probably 30 minutes you can get online and start developing fairly high-fidelity – not perfect but high-fidelity deep fakes.  So that’s an area of concern.

Ubiquitous social surveillance, facial recognition is an area that we have a concern about, used by authoritarian regimes.  Again, it’s not the technology itself I’m worried about; it’s how the technology is being used.  So this aspect of what’s available and how quickly it can be used, and go back to what Mr. Mulchandani had said earlier:  It’s the data behind it that really matters more than just the algorithm itself.  The algorithm is becoming a commodity.  It’s how you train it against the data to develop a model, then the model is fielded, and then how is that model continuously updated based on new information.  That’s what matters the most.  

But in the near term, I do worry about the deep fake piece of this, and people have such a growing cynicism and skepticism of what they’re reading, seeing, and hearing that this could become such a corrosive effect over time that nobody knows what reality is anymore.  So we have to – we have to help develop tools, and there are a lot of big commercial industries as well as startups and DARPA in the United States that are working on how to detect deep fakes and counter them.  But those are the areas I’d say in the immediate term I’m worried about.

Mr. Mulchandani:  Yeah, and I would add just broader information operations, so deep fakes as a component of a concerted sort of effort.  But really going back to sort of our original point, the tools themselves are going to be open-source.  We – now, that’s actually somewhat asymmetrical in the sense that we do know that China, all the work that they do in terms of extending or moving those algorithms along, et cetera, we are not going to benefit from those because those don’t get published.  Our – in our society and academic and other institutions, most of the toolkits and work that’s been going on in AI gets published immediately and then gets democratized very, very quickly.  

So controlling that or trying to put a sort of framework around that, et cetera, is just not going to work.  I mean, that tech is out there.  So again, data protection, ensuring the accuracy and security of our data – there’s a lot, a lot of work that we’re doing around tests and eval, making sure that the models are performing correctly, but then using that stuff – if adversaries are using that for information operations, offensive operations on the cyber side is another big area of concern.  So that’s another set of things that we’ll be working on in terms of defensive technologies or being able to unravel or understand how these – countering many of these things is actually going to be a very active area of research but also development.

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  And before we go to the next question I just want to make another point on this idea of how this technology can be used.  The spotlight is on artificial intelligence right now for all the reasons that we live every day.  But I think more about how would I combine artificial intelligence and genetic engineering or bioengineering.  That actually worries me a lot more in terms of the combination of those together and the proliferation of capabilities, genetically modified or genetically engineered capabilities that promulgate much faster than anybody intended.  So it’s not one or the other.  How I use those together makes us think about a little bit of a dystopian future that we want to prevent to the max extent that we can.

Mr. Mulchandani:  Yeah, which is why ethics and policies and frameworks – we’re engaging in this discussion early on to make sure that we at least have the basis for policy and structure to guide these discussions as these new use cases pop up.  We really need to have inclusive frameworks to make sure all this can be handled.

Question:  I wanted to ask you regarding still some autonomous weapons systems.  As you know, for instance, the U.S. Navy is already operating autonomous working – what they call sub hunters, submarine hunting vessels, who can operate for several months autonomously on the sea.  How do you combine that kind of developments with the human responsibility all the time?  Because these developments are there; DARPA is very much invested in this.  Could you explain a little bit more on that issue?

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  I – first, most important starting point is to make the distinction between autonomous systems and AI-enabled autonomy.  They are two different things that tend to be conflated.  The Department of Defense has semiautonomous and, to some extent, autonomous systems, and some of these have been used for 30 years, and some element of autonomous systems – say, the guns on a ship, a Navy ship, that protect from close-in attack that can be operated in a semiautonomous – in some cases missile systems even autonomously for defensive purposes.  But now we start adding AI-enabled autonomy.  That is where the process by which we will go through test and evaluation, validation and verification, and applying our policy principles that the department has in place already.  Well before AI became – became sort of the hottest commodity on the market, we have a policy document on autonomy in weapons systems that governs this, and we will abide by that now as we apply the AI-enabled piece of this.

There is a tendency sometimes, and I say it’s an unfortunate tendency, for people who want to jump straight to this – and I know this is becoming a cliché, but “killer robots,” and I say these lethal autonomous weapons systems, which is right now for the Department of Defense not something that we’re working actively toward.  We are working towards autonomous systems and AI-enabled autonomy, but the idea of these sort of unsupervised, independent, self-targeting systems is a future which is not something that any commander I’ve ever worked with, worked for or been part of a command and organization myself is interested in, in sort of “killer robots” with self-agency roaming indiscriminately.  That’s not something we’re interested in.  We have humans that will be at some point in the loop, or on the loop, or outside the loop.  

These are the things that we’re working through right now, and the questions of the appropriate levels of human judgment are one phrase that we use in this policy world, but the other is meaningful human control.  Those are areas we’ll work through on some of these lower consequence mission use cases.  We’ll also do tabletop exercises and experiments in gaming to understand what are those principles and policies that we have to work our way through before we get to the point that you’re talking about, is fully autonomous systems that also have AI-enabled capabilities that might be weapons capabilities.  We are a long way from that.  We know that future could be there, so we’re working our way through all these other questions before we ever get to that point.

Mr. Mulchandani:  The Defense Innovation Board is a board of independent experts in the area that the Defense Department, 15 months ago they started on a project to come up with a set of broad principles that the DOD should abide by, and they’ve just released a report – again, available online, great read.  But it outlines five core principles that the Defense Department should abide by and consider as it’s building out its systems, and literally the first one is governance.  It’s about human oversight, human in the loop, and that is a principle that goes directly into all of the systems.  And the distinction that the General brought up between right now, one of the other points that the DIB report makes which very clearly says AI and autonomy are getting very, very confused right now.  A vast majority of the AI that’s being applied today is in machine learning, clustering algorithms, image recognition, decision support to make us better, faster or more accurate, but in no cases is it taking over the responsibility for any of the work that anyone does.  Even at commercial industry we wouldn’t be doing that.  That’s absolutely still the case here at the DOD.

Question:  Will we witness any kind of cooperation between Russia and China in this field ?

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  We are seeing very clear evidence of Russia and China cooperation on artificial intelligence.  Like any two countries, they don’t necessarily have all the same interests so there will be differences in how they approach it.  There’ll be concerns by one country and the other.  But I do see, and we do see, just very clear evidence that they are working together in joint ventures, partnerships, artificial intelligence development of capabilities.  

So yes, we see that.  It’s concerning to us.  But we – the whole – one of the primary reasons we’re here this week is these discussions with NATO allies and partners, European Union, and the same conversations that we’ll have with our partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific is to ensure that we take an approach that abides by the same principles we have lived by as we’ve developed this technology for as long as we’ve had a Department of Defense around.

I think we actually have time for three more questions, if we can do that, and then we’ll wrap that up.

Question:   The White House recently released a statement saying that with regards to future – the future regulation of AI, “Europe should avoid heavy-handed innovation-killing models, and instead consider a similar regulatory approach” to the U.S.  What are the ramifications of the bloc adopting a tougher regulatory stance in AI, and don’t you think that a more stringent approach, regulatory approach, would help mitigate some of the security concerns regarding suppliers of equipment emanating from totalitarian regimes worldwide?   

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  I think the most important starting point for the answer to that question is let’s separate the two things on security and supply chains, which is a problem that we are addressing, and it is a serious problem about everything from where the chips come through – come from and designed and developed and fielded, to how the data is produced, how the data is curated and stored, all the way to the security of physical weapons systems that might now have AI-enabled capabilities.  So there is a lot going on in not just the Department of Defense but across many countries on how to do better at protecting the physical aspects of a supply chain.

That I take – we look at that differently than we would on this other part of the regulations and frameworks behind it.  The White House recently released, within the last week, and some of you I’m sure have seen it, sort of the principles for AI for outside the United States Government, looking at regulatory and non-regulatory approaches.  Our starting point and the White House’s starting point is light-touch regulation wherever possible.  The last thing we want to do in this field of emerging technology moving as fast as it is, is to stifle innovation.  Over-regulating artificial intelligence is one way to stifle innovation and do it very quickly.

Now, we realize that self-regulation will not work everywhere all the time, so what are the – what are the right combinations of self-regulation, government-enforced regulation, and how do we work together as an alliance with NATO and with the European Union to find common ground?  I think just in the discussions we’ve had in the last two days, there are far more commonalities than there are differences, especially when we talk about principles of artificial intelligence and the ethical and safe lawful use of it.  So we’re careful on the regulation piece.  I think there is a grave danger of over-regulating and stifling innovation, but we also realize the technology is so immature and new that there are risks introduced by bringing these capabilities.  So what can we do to ensure that we minimize those risks, or mitigate those risks, turn the unknowns into the knowns, and then come up with a mitigation plan?

Question: What ethical assurances does the military have in order to champion and give private sector tech companies the confidence to work with DOD; a position seemingly at odds with many ethical demands of younger employees?

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  I’m particularly well-qualified to answer this, having led Project Maven for a couple of years.  And anybody who’s followed Project Maven understands the relationship with Google and what happened at the end of that, which so many lessons learned on both sides.  So there’s – so from our side, I think Google had as many lessons, if not more than we did, and this applies to any company we’re working with right now.  

This idea of trust and transparency – how much can we tell what we’re doing at the Department of Defense?  My finding, as I’ve been working this now for about three years: it’s a lack of understanding of what DOD is doing and why we’re doing it.  More often than not, there is an assumption about what the Department of Defense is doing, which is just wrong.  It’s inaccurate, because nobody’s ever explained what the department is doing.  We have to balance sort of our operational security and how much we reveal, but I think we can do that in ways that will make people more comfortable – never perfectly comfortable.  I think some people just don’t like the idea of military use of artificial intelligence.  As a dual or omni-use use technology, you will not keep it out of the military throughout the world.  This is just a classic case of a technology that starts in commercial industry and is going to promulgate, and rapidly, throughout military.  So how do we get it right?

So this idea of trust and transparency and explaining what we’re doing and why, that’s made a difference just in the last year the more we’ve been willing to talk about our approach to AI-enabled capabilities.  And also there is a little bit of a generational – at least in the United States – a lot of people have never worked with the United States military, have never known – truly have never known anybody that’s worn a uniform, and they don’t understand what the Department of Defense does.  They grew up in a commercial industry that is doing it for online sales.  They don’t know what we’re doing it for.

Mr. Mulchandani:  I mean, what the General mentioned is absolutely true, which is California and Washington, D.C., are on different sides of the coast.  They may as well be on different planets in the sense of just the level of work and contact that the two industries and organizations used to have has been very limited historically.  And there was this sort of throw-it-over-the-fence model where we threw technologies over and they just got used in this black box, and nobody knew what was going on.

The level of transparency that the DOD is now taking towards the working we’re doing around AI is astonishing.  I mean, Gen. Shanahan has been on the road explaining the work we’re doing – the ethics work, the input from industry, the level of contact that we have ongoing with industry.  The JAIC’s mission and work is almost entirely commercial.  We almost build no technology inside.  And having that contact and sustained contact and building trust and transparency takes time, but we’re seeing some incredibly great work with industry and it’s just going to get better.

So I think that’s the sort of the key piece, is the trust, transparency, building that out is going to be the basis for it.  And there are things that we’re going to be working on that we can’t discuss outside, et cetera, but rest assured, the contract with society is still the legal basis for the ethics work and everything that’s all out there.  And we’ll be enforcing that legally, but also just philosophically, that’s the way the department works.  So it’s been really refreshing after such a long career in tech to be on the other side of this and seeing how it is, and there are really not a lot of mysteries on this side.

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  And I’ve also found just doing this is having come up with a common vocabulary, what we say and what others hear are two different things sometimes.  So a taxonomy and an ontology of what we mean when we say – just artificial intelligence by itself brings a dozen different definitions very quickly.  So resetting the baseline so that we’re talking a common language is as important working with NATO and the European Union as it is anybody else.  So that’s a great starting point.

Question:  Very interesting that you mentioned the different AI projects that are already underway, and I wondered – you mentioned humanitarian aid, aircraft predictive maintenance, and I wondered which of the few that you mentioned you’re seeing the most progress on with applying AI.  And could you also talk a little bit about some of the companies you’re working with on those projects? 

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  We prefer not to get into which companies we’re working with, and that’s mainly to respect their preferences.  Some I’m more than happy to mention them, but if I mention one and don’t mention the others, I just – I’d prefer we stay away from that.

On the projects we’re working on right now, both on the humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, predictive maintenance, they’ve been – I’ve been impressed by the results, but they’re also sort of what I would call foundational results.  Just part of this is as we’ve built out this organization, getting muscle memory or getting reps at doing artificial intelligence projects, to get credibility and expertise so that we become known as the center of excellence for artificial intelligence, for fielding AI.  Very careful not to step into the great work that continues to go on in research and development through DARPA and the research labs, the national labs.  Wonderful work continues to go on.  I think we actually need more of it.  So this is about fielding.

But what we’ve learned on those other projects is I think it’s the art of the possible and what is feasible.  My experience with AI so far has been science fiction for most people because they’ve never seen it in action, and yet they use it on their personal electronic devices 100 times a day.  Just by showing – for the two examples on HADR is wildfire line/perimeter mapping.  Imagine the differences that can make in a fast-moving, unfolding crisis scenario where the current method of mapping a fire line is manual: acetate, back of a pickup truck, grease pencil and doing it that way.  And it takes potentially hours to get each subsequent update.  That is an archaic way of doing business – good as a backup but not where technology is.  So we’ve seen some very promising results in fire line/perimeter mapping as well as in flood – flood damage assessment, road obstruction analysis.  Some of these are commercial technologies available today, some are being a little bit repurposed for the purposes of what we were asking for, and some have been by our academic partners, which has been very helpful.

On predictive maintenance, again, starting with a narrow case of an H-60 helicopter in one of the services – in this case, the Special Operations Command – showing promising initial results to say this part is likely to fail in this many hours in the next number of flights.  Very good, encouraging, but still not good enough.  So what we’re doing is getting the building blocks, knowing that the whole world of AI, especially on these algorithms that we field, is dependent on continuous integration and continuous delivery.  They have to be updated faster and faster, which for the Department of Defense is a new way of doing business for the most part.  I came from a background in which we were doing block upgrades of big weapons systems in five-year increments that were so far behind by the time you fielded that essentially some parts of it were obsolete.  That won’t work in this environment.

So we’re trying to understand all the elements of the AI delivery pipeline from data reception to data curation, data management, data labeling, build an algorithm or a model off of an algorithm with data, test and evaluation, integrate it to weapons systems, and then on and on into continuous integration, continuous delivery.  Every step of that is relatively new for the Department of Defense – it’s brand new for many people, but what we’re doing is building those repetitions so we understand what it takes to do that in every other project.

So I actually feel very pleased by the results, limited as they are.  I will never be the person that overstates the results.  But what we’re learning from those will allow us to accelerate in all our other different projects that we’re going to take on over the course of the upcoming year of 2020, which I think I’ll be calling it the year of AI for DOD because I think we’re going to see – we’re going to see this happen faster and faster the better we get at it.

Mr. Mulchandani:  Yeah, and just to add to what the General pointed out is as a big believer in the sort of scaling curve or the innovation curve, where you end up starting slow and things don’t look like they’re breaking through, and then all of a sudden all the right conditions come through: the algorithms get tuned, the data lines up, the processing power kicks in, and then you end up with these sort of inflection points where these projects sort of get breakthroughs.  

So we’re seeing a very similar pattern here of where, for instance, when the JAIC started these two projects as the initial two projects that the JAIC started, progress was slow and it’s kind of moving along, but we’re now seeing commercial industry getting into certain verticals and areas where there was very slow progress to begin with, but the cycle times that we’re seeing the improvement are shortening dramatically.  And so AI as a market is very hard to characterize.  You can’t talk about it as a single market.  You have to pick literally an algorithm or a vertical by vertical and see where things scale.  And at the JAIC what we’re doing is really focused on areas where there’s a lot of promise, and making initial investments very much like a venture capital firm investing in a market, but then allowing commercial industry to sort of take over or build those solutions out to scale, and then being able to field them becomes a very, very interesting thing to move to.

So both of those markets we’re seeing that very encouraging, and in 2020 we feel that we’re going to get to scale in both of those spaces.

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  And I’ll close that out by saying my experience with Project Maven and where we are today in the JAIC, the reason Maven is now accelerating and about a two-year head start on the JAIC is because of user feedback.  Taking an initial product that is less than high-performing – and acknowledged that way by everybody, by the developers, by the people receiving it – but the feedback from the users and the operators is what is so critical to moving faster and faster and making that feedback part of the development lifecycle so then you have a better algorithm constantly fielded.  That – this idea of user feedback, that’s what we’re learning from our initial projects, and we’re getting better and better at that to the point where we start with that conversation with users on the very front end so that we don’t try to hand something to them a year down the road and they’ve never seen it before.  That is a recipe for disaster.

Mr. Mulchandani:  And these are best practices that we’re pulling from industry, the idea of good – great product management, specifying products up front with great detail, but then the whole DevOps movement that has really kicked into high gear in terms of iterating with the users and small functionality that gets actually pushed out in continuous increments, allows us to get to a level of speed that we didn’t have before.  And there’s a lot of changes going on at the DOD that are supporting this – cloud infrastructure, obviously things like JEDI, DevOps movement and adopting those practices in the way we build software has been – it’s really going to change the game not now but also in the future for the DOD.

Lt. Gen. Shanahan:  As I said, our reason for being out here this week is this is such an important dialogue to have right now within NATO but also with the European Union.  It’s an incredibly important technology.  It will change the character of how our militaries fight in the future.  But we have a long way to go, and starting with sort of a common framework of what’s an ethics-based discussion, what’s a human-centric approach to artificial intelligence – there is so much more in common than there are differences.  We like to focus initially on the areas of commonality and work our way through the differences.  

There are inevitable differences in how we approach everything from data regulation to protecting our data and intellectual property protection.  But this discussion is beginning, but it is just the start of what I think will be years-long, close collaboration and cooperation between NATO and the European Union as we work together on, I think, one of the most important technologies that we’ve seen in a long time.  It is just a technology; it’s an enabling technology.  It’s us – up to us to figure out how really that we use it to make it the most effective and efficient capabilities that we can put into our respective militaries and the rest of our respective governments.  

The American administration is still open to negotiating a new deal with Iran despite imposing fresh sanctions today, a high-ranking US adviser told reporters on Friday.

Brian Hook, U.S. Special Representative for Iran and Senior Policy Advisor to Secretary of State, said, “We announced sanctions on Iran regime officials specifically eight Iranian leaders including Ali Shamkhani, who is the secretary of Supreme National Security Council.

“These eight have acted out Iran’s terror plots and campaigns of mayhem across the region. They are complicit in the recent murders of around 1,500 Iranians protesting their freedom,” Hook said during a telephonic press-briefing from the Brussels regional media hub.

He added, “Today we sanctioned 22 organisations and three vessels. These are vessels that have been operating in the iron, steel, aluminum, and copper sectors of Iran in related activities.”

He, however, said the US was open to negotiating a fresh deal with Iran.

“The US is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it. The President has said he is, again, opening the door to diplomacy. He would like to see a new deal to replace the Iran deal, so that we can resolve our differences with Iran diplomatically and we invite Iran to do the same and to not meet our diplomacy with military force,” Hook said.

Hook said that the US is going to continue to act defensively and commented, “The President exercises his inherent authority to act in self-defence when attacked. We will continue to do that.

“We continue to urge the Iranian regime to de-escalate, as other countries have, and to take the diplomatic offering that has been presented time and again by the United States, by Japan, by France, by so many countries around the world.”

Hook said, “The Iran nuclear deal, which is not only silent on ICBMs, weakened missile non-proliferation standards by ending the prohibition on Iran’s ballistic missile testing. And Iran took advantage of it.

“The Iran nuclear deal incentivised countries to look the other way on Iran’s non-nuclear threats to peace and security. It’s very important for nations around the understand that Iran’s missile programme needs to be countered. And we cannot allow the ballistic missile testing and the missile proliferation, which puts countries in the region at risk,” he added.

Hook added that if one took a look at the Iranian ‘corridor of control’, they have been proliferating missiles from Beirut to Sana’a.

“This is the Iranian Crescent that they have been trying to build. Much of those gains came during the time of the Iran nuclear deal and we are reversing the gains the regime has made under the deal and the pressure that we have put in place has no historic precedent.”

Below is a full rush transcript of the press conference by Brian Hook, the U.S. Special Representative for Iran and Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of State.

Question: President Trump said he wanted a greater role for NATO in the Middle East. What specifically is the United States seeking? And what consensus-building efforts are underway to convince the UK, Germany, France, Russia, and China of the U.S. plan for dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions? He also asks what additional powerful sanctions will the U.S. impose on Iran?

Mr. Hook: The President yesterday spoke about NATO at length, and so I don’t have much to say beyond that. The President thinks that NATO should be expanded, and it should include the Middle East. And what we’re dealing with in the case – and it’s – this is an international problem. And so he does think that the scope of NATO should be increased.

And on Monday, at the beginning of this week, I addressed all of NATO and explained the defensive actions that we have taken to confront Iranian aggression, to defend ourselves against attacks, and to restore deterrence. And in the last couple of weeks, you have seen the President authorize defensive military strikes in Iraq and Syria. We managed the attack on our embassy in Baghdad by Iranian and other terrorists. And then you also had the elimination of Qasem Soleimani, also a defensive strike to prevent him from attacking hundreds of Americans – potentially hundreds of Americans in a large-scale attack.

So I would refer you — the President did speak at length about NATO yesterday, and I refer you to those remarks.

Question: Does the U.S. have any plans for using Cyprus as an operation base, not just for humanitarian reasons?

Mr. Hook: In terms of operations, it sounds like a DoD question, and not a diplomatic question, so I would refer you to DoD for an answer on that.

Moderator: Thanks for that answer. Our next question comes from Thomas Nehls with ARD Radio in Germany.

Question: I’m old enough to remember talks about a nuclear-free weapons zone in the Middle East. But then suddenly in the late ‘90s, it stopped. Is there any chance to get back to that issue, including the nuclear weapons being stationed in Israel, maybe even Pakistan and India. But that’s not the Middle East. So to that – asking about that issue, and if I may add, why isn’t it at all that populations should be more afraid of the non-existing nuclear weapons in Iran rather than of the existing nuclear weapons in Israel?

Mr. Hook: I don’t have any comment on anybody else’s policy on nonproliferation. I can only explain our policy on it. The Islamic Republic of Iran is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, and they are in the most volatile region in the world. Iran can never acquire a nuclear weapon. It would be catastrophic for the Middle East.

And if you think we have problems now keeping a lid on the region, imagine the Islamic Republic with a nuclear weapon. And so I’m not aware of anybody in the world that thinks it’s a good idea for Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And so your question about the nonexistent nuclear weapon, I think doesn’t fully appreciate the – this regime’s history of wanting to become a nuclear weapons state. And if anybody who has studied it would recognize this is not something that we can be glib about and to dismiss it as not a big deal.

The Israelis liberated a half a ton of materials from an armed warehouse in Tehran, and these are materials that demonstrate that the regime has kept the owner’s manual on how to build a nuclear weapon. And now that we’re outside of the Iran Nuclear Deal we’re in a much better position to deny Iran a nuclear weapon.

But it also allows us to then really forcibly respond to Iran’s regional aggression, and that’s what we’ve done with our sanctions. We have – this regime is facing its worst financial crisis and its worst political unrest in its 40-year history. And so the regime has very bad options right now. They are in a state of panicked aggression. And so we’re just in a much different place now. We’re very pleased with our policy which is the right nonproliferation policy to make the Middle East free of, the sort of the nuclear threats, that countries like Iran presents.

Question: can you explain to us exactly how it is the sanctions that you announced on the eight Iranian officials add to the prior sanctions that are already on some of them? For example, Shamkhani has already been sanctioned, so what is additional as a result of today’s action under 13876 ? Secondly, can you explain to us exactly what is additional in today’s sanctions on the metals industries, which at least steel and iron and I think also aluminum had previously been sanctioned?

Mr. Hook: The United States has many different authorities. Some of them come from Congress. Some of them derive from executive orders issued by the President. There are many different angles that we can take on this. Some may involve the nuclear dimension piece. Some may involve terrorism. Some may involve cyber, human rights abuses, missile counter-proliferation. We have a range of authorities.

We do not miss any opportunity to use these authorities when we can. And so you have seen this phenomenon of people being sanctioned more than once. It’s because we’re using different authorities that cover different threats, and that allows us to have a wraparound effect on these various individuals.

It’s also really important for us to go after Iran’s shock troops, the Basij, which have been murdering Iranians who have been fighting for their freedom and, in fact, would just like a normal government – a more representative government.

So when we do this it has a substantive effect, but it also signals to the Iranian people that we stand with them and their demands for a more representative government.

Question: Do you believe that Iran has actually concluded its retaliation? Or is there a risk that they might come back using their proxies?

Mr. Hook: Well, Iran has said – I think Foreign Minister Zarif, I think he used the word concluded. I don’t have the words in front of me. But it would seem that Iran has concluded its response in retaliation for the killing of Qasem Soleimani. That’s a question for Iran. I’m not speaking for them.

But we hope that Iran starts making better decisions and does not continue to pursue its aggressive and expansionist foreign policy either directly or through its proxies.

On September 11th of 2018, the White House issued a statement which was a new policy for the United States that we don’t make a distinction between the Iranian regime and its proxies. And Iran, the regime, will be held accountable for the attacks of its proxies. And you saw that after an American was killed by Kata’ib Hizballah on December 27th that the President then responded and struck command centers of Kata’ib Hizballah in Iraq and Syria. We’re going to continue to do that to act defensively. The President exercises his inherent authority to act in self-defense when attacked. He will continue to do that. But we continue to urge the Iranian regime to de-escalate, as other countries have, and to take the diplomatic off-ramp that has been presented time and again by the United States, by Japan, by France, by so many countries around the world.

Question: Firstly, Brian in your opening you mentioned that twenty-two entities and three vessels have been sanctioned. But the notice we received from the Treasury only mentioned twenty entities and one vessel. Can you explain the discrepancy there?

And then secondly, on the President’s assertion that Iran was targeting a U.S. embassy, you’ve said you’ve seen all the U.S. intel that led up to that point. That was the first we had heard about that. Can you explain where that threat came from and a little more about the nature of it?

Mr. Hook: So on the first question, I will defer to the Treasury official statement. And if there’s a variance of one or two on either side, please defer to Treasury on that.

On the—Qasem Soleimani was traveling in the region, and the IRGC confirmed it publicly – he was traveling in the region for the purpose of organizing attacks. And we have said that Qasem Soleimani was targeting diplomatic facilities and he was also targeting American service members. So he was looking at diplomats and he was looking at service members. Not the first time because he had orchestrated the attacks – repeated attacks on Iraqi military bases that were hosting American and coalition forces.

So this wasn’t the first time that he has done this. They have been – he has been organizing proxies in Iraq for some time. When we had him in the region planning imminent attacks against American – against American people and against American interests, the President then took decisive action.

If we had not taken that action and hundreds of people had died, you would be asking me now why didn’t we do more to prevent Qasem Soleimani from killing so many people. And so given his record, he was very effective and he was very lethal. And for those who have studied his 21-year history, he was Iran’s indispensable man because he was the glue that held together the proxy forces in the gray zone.

And so he has – himself is responsible for the murders of over 600 Americans. And when a man of that lethality and skill is in the region plotting attacks, and our intelligence was solid on this, the risks of doing nothing were much greater than the risks of eliminating him.

And it was the right decision. I was in Los Angeles the first part of this week. It’s the largest – Los Angeles is home to the largest Iranian diaspora in the world, and we received enormous support for the President’s foreign policy and for his decision to take Qasem Soleimani off the battlefield.

Question: Could you tell us, Bulgaria – Bulgaria is in the range of Iran’s missiles. Is there a real threat for the countries in our region? Is first. And secondly, can you please say more specific what is expected from the members of the area, such as Bulgaria, after the Trump statement? And of course, what is – in your opinion, what is the potential damage that the Iraqi people can endure in this – crucial situation now?

Mr. Hook: Well, what we have – let me start with Iraq. The Secretary did talk about Iraq today in his press conference – Secretary Mnuchin. So I would have you take a look at that.

Bulgaria, I don’t have anything specific to say about that. The Iranian regime has the largest missile inventory of any country in the Middle East, and they have been proliferating missiles and testing ballistic missiles for some time.

I have been saying for over a year and a half that the international community’s failure to get serious about Iran’s missile proliferation has been accumulating risk of a regional war. And the Iran Nuclear Deal, which is not only silent on ICBMs, weakened missile nonproliferation standards by ending the prohibition on Iran’s ballistic missile testing, and Iran took advantage of it. And the Iran Nuclear Deal incentivized countries to look the other way on Iran’s nonnuclear threats to peace and security.

And so it’s very important for nations around the world to understand that Iran’s missile program needs to be countered. And we cannot allow the ballistic missile testing and the missile proliferation, which puts countries in the region at risk.

I don’t have anything specific to say about Bulgaria, but we have seen – if you look at this Iranian corridor of control that they are trying to create, they have been proliferating missiles from Beirut to Sanaa. And this is the Iranian crescent that they have been trying to build. And we are – much of those gains came under – during the time of the Iran Nuclear Deal, and we are reversing – we are endeavoring to reverse the gains that the regime has made under the deal.

And the pressure that we have put in place has no historic precedent. The President and his national security Cabinet are very pleased with the strategy that we have been running now for almost three years, and we’re going to continue executing against that strategy.

Question: Ukrainian passenger plane crash in Iran and reports about it. Iran says reports that missile downed Ukrainian passenger plane is a big lie. American media has reported that Iran accidently shot down the plane. So what is the evidence that proves they brought ?

Mr. Hook: Today the Secretary of State said that it is likely that an Iranian missile is the cause of the crash of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS-752. The State Department extends our deepest condolences to the families and the friends of the 176 passengers and crew who were killed in that tragic crash.

It is a tragedy. We hope the investigation is going to fully explain how this occurred. Secretary Mnuchin did make an announcement at the press conference I would refer you to. I would have you quote him and not me on this because I don’t – I want to be precise – I want him to be precise about it – that the United States would be granting exemptions to any individuals or entities needed to help facilitate the investigation. And I don’t have any further information to provide at this time on that.

We are in contact with our aviation partners. I did see that Lufthansa has canceled flights – all flights in and out of Iran. And so we’re in touch with – we’re monitoring developments related to the investigation.

We certainly hope that the regime does not do anything to hamper the investigation. This needs to be open, transparent, and comprehensive.

On 6 January 2020, the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach officially welcomed Vice-Admiral Louise Dedichen as NATO Military Representative for Norway, and as the first woman to serve on the Committee.

Appointed in June 2019, Vice-Admiral Dedichen takes over from Vice Admiral Ketil Olsen as the NATO Military Representative for Norway. Welcoming the Admiral, the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee highlighted the historical significance of the appointment. “NATO and its Allies recognise the importance of a more gender-balanced military. Across the Alliance, we are seeing an upward trend and more women are being appointed to decision-making positions. More women in national high-level positions translates into more women in NATO military high-level positions. It is important to strengthen women’s voices everywhere – from our meetings to our missions”, emphasized Air Chief Marshal Peach.

Thanking the Chairman, Vice-Admiral Dedichen highlighted the great honour of being appointed to the NATO military committee. “It is essential in a large and powerful organisation like NATO to see the big picture. The world situation is not identical to everyone and so increasing the number of woman at NATO makes the Alliance stronger and better prepared to deal with the security challenges it faces”, she added.

Vice-Admiral Dedichen was also the first woman appointed Vice-Admiral and Commodore in the Norwegian Navy. For the last 12 years, she has been serving as the Commandant for the Norwegian Defence University College. Prior to this, she held a variety of positions such as Head of Section for Logistics, Public Relations Officer, Contract Negotiator and Teacher in Economics. This is not Vice-Admiral first foray into the NATO environment, from 1995–1998, she was the aide-de-camp to the then NATO Military Representative for Norway. 

Since its creation in October 1949, the Military Committee has been the most senior military authority in NATO and the essential link between the political decision-making process and the military structure. It is the primary source of consensus-based advice to the North Atlantic Council on military policy and strategy, and recommends measures considered necessary for the defence of the NATO area and the implementation of decisions regarding military operations. 

With each new accession, the Military Committee as grown to include representatives from each new nation. Today, all 29 Allied Nations have an equal voice at the table. The Republic of North Macedonia is also represented but under an observer status until its official accession.