The Paveway bomb, invented by Texas Instruments in the 1970s, was the first truly precise munition.  It revolutionized America’s air campaign in Vietnam and allowed whole new kinds of “limited” U.S. wars in Libya, Iraq, Serbia, and beyond. 

But Paveway’s true legacy was psychological: it seduced generations of U.S. leaders into believing that tactical precision creates strategic victories with few costs. 

Transcript

Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors

Jon Bateman: The U.S. Air Force went from missing 90% of its targets to hitting 90% of those targets.

Jeff E. Stern: That you could be in a plane 20,000- 30,000 feet away and steer a bomb into a target. The weapon solved a political problem as much as a tactical one, allowing us to engage and fight when we might otherwise not.

Jon Bateman: It's good to have more precise weapons, right? It seems like that's better than the alternative.

Jeff E. Stern: Even a weapon that is as precise as it claims to be is only as precise as the intelligence you have. I think that it is so intoxicating, you know, the idea that we can go around and dispatch bad guys and solve problems with no cost.

Jon Bateman: Would you be willing to advocate against having them in a nation's arsenal?

Jeff Stern, welcome to The World Unpacked!

Jon Bateman: Jeff E. Stern: Thank you, good to be here.

Jon Bateman: You are the author of an absolutely brilliant and novelistic new book about the development of precision guided missions, specifically the American Paveway bomb. You tell a remarkable set of interconnected stories spanning from World War II to the rise of ISIS and how at each step along the way, the necessities of these conflicts have led the creation of more and more precise airdrop bombs, but at the same time, the creation of these new weapons has also shaped those conflicts and the very essence of war. I wanna talk to you about Vietnam, Serbia, Desert Storm, everything that's in your book, but I thought we could just start with where you start the book, which is in Yemen. What were you doing in Yemen and what did you find there that led you on this journey?

Jeff E. Stern: That is actually a really great summary of the book and I wonder if it is sort of an interview here.

Jon Bateman: That's fine, you know, with our brain-addled audience, I'm sure that's probably about as much as some of them want to hear.

Jeff E. Stern: Well, look, this has been great. It's great to meet you. Thanks for having me on and good luck with the rest of your day.

Jon Bateman: No, but seriously though, Jeff, so you are the kind of swashbuckling foreign correspondent that it feels like we don't really have anymore. You've reported from Afghanistan, from hotspots around the world, and you found yourself in Yemen being ferried around this very hot conflict zone. And that was where this idea for the book came from. And I'd love for you to tell that story.

Jeff E. Stern: You know, I guess I sort of like to consider myself like generally aware of what's going on in the world and there was this massive humanitarian crisis happening in Yemen that I was, I didn't, I barely knew about until you know, a year or two in. I was sort of thinking, you know what, why is that? Far away, it's remote, there's not a lot of coverage and people you know they'll learn about it and that's where the idea came from to you know to use the bomb kind of almost literally as a vehicle. So to sort of show some you know, you do machinists putting this thing together in Arizona and follow it being kind of assembled and and shipped to the You know pylons of a strike fighter and then to this village in northern Yemen

Jon Bateman: You tell this remarkably vivid story, if I could just draw you out on this, about finding some shrapnel in a village and in a very intimate encounter you had with the Yemeni man there.

Jeff E. Stern: Yeah, so there was one guy who, at some point, I was sitting on the carpet in someone's house, and he kind of leaned forward and said something to the interpreter. And the interpreter said he wants you to touch his face. And I thought maybe it was a mistranslation or something, but he kind of leaned his head forward and kind of cocked his head. And the interpreter was like, touch his face. And so he pointed my fingers to like under his eye where there were still a couple of pieces of steel from this bomb that were lodged in a slip of skin beneath his eye. And it was, you know, very kind of intimate moment. And also the other thing that struck me was that it had been so hard to get there. You know, I'd had to get visas essentially to two different countries, north and south, and kind of not let the other one know. And travel in disguise through a bunch of different checkpoints and but how difficult it had been for me to get there and how easy it had pin for this bomb to get their uh... And i think that was sort of what crystallizes the idea that maybe the counter to a potential problem created by this weapon which allows that you know it's sort of a tool of disconnection in several different ways obviously it's a it is you know literally breaking bodies so this is allowed us to uh... To engage in conflict from further away. And to make conflict more remote, also in several different ways. I mean, literally kind of remote warfare, but it feels remote. It feels sort of video gaming.

Jon Bateman: Let's zoom out a little bit and just establish some background. This is a book about precision bombing and in particular the paveway munition. What is a precision guided bomb? What is the paveway?

Jeff E. Stern: So Paveway is really effectively the first smart bomb, the first usable, effective smart bomb. Meaning a bomb that steers itself to a target. It was not the first attempts to do this. This is, you know, for as long as there's been people trying to fight without having to be right up close and personal. We've tried to sort of steer, you now, projectiles precisely from afar, but it was really the first time But you could be in a plane, you know, 20, 30,000 feet away, then steer a bomb into a target. And the way that Paveway works was with laser guidance. So you use a laser designator, essentially like a flashlight for the bomb. You laser the target, and the bomb has a photon sensor on its nose and is able to sort of correct itself as it flies through the air to go to the target. It was, and for a variety of reasons, how inexpensive it was, how easy to use it was. How kind of simple the engineering was. It was it became very quickly kind of a favorite of. Aviator of air force and aviators and in very quickly kind of revolutionized air war and arguably just war.

Jon Bateman: In the book, you go deep into the technical and scientific development of the paveway concept and of the battles that its developers needed to fight intellectually, bureaucratically, in order to come up with what it seemed like was a crazy idea to have a self-guided bomb. What problem was this bomb created to solve? Why do we need a guided bomb?

Jeff E. Stern: I think on its surface, it's sort of a tactile problem. There was this one particular bridge that was a major thoroughfare for the North Vietnamese trying to get men and material to the south. It was a suspension bridge, it was very narrow, and it was a very well-defended. It was very dangerous to attack. Either you gotta just drop a ton of bombs and hope that some hit, or if you're trying to dive them, you had to get real low and you get very close. And of course, the lower you get, The lower you get, the more anti-aircraft artillery you're coming into range of. But, arguably, the real problem that it was solving was almost a political one. Because at the time, you know, McNamara and some of the others in the administration were very worried about the Vietnam war escalating. So there were, there were fairly restrictive rules of engagement. For example, one of the things that was most threatening to American pilots were mix, where the, you know, Russian made fighter jets. But because there was concern about Russian or Chinese advisors helping work on the bigs, they basically weren't allowed to strike bigs when they were on the ground. So in order to destroy this thing that was causing such a threat, you kind of had to bait them up in the air where they're much more dangerous. There was a similar thing with surface to air missiles where there was concerned about Russian Chinese advisors nearby. And I think you could probably make an argument that had there not been those stricter rules of engagements. Attacking for example this particular bridge would not have been as dangerous and this weapon that allowed you to is almost like the the weapon was a solve the political problem as much as a tactical one i think that's part of the legacy of the weapon is sort of allowing us to to engage and fight when we might otherwise not

Jon Bateman: Before Vietnam, World War II, extraordinary numbers of bombs were dropped with very poor accuracy. So you would just need to spray bombs across a broad area in order to have some hopes of hitting key infrastructure, like a factory or a bridge.

Jeff E. Stern: Firebomb with Dresden, there was no illusion that it was going to be precise, and obviously there was some extremely horrible Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so there was not illusion that that was going be precise. But I wonder sometimes if we weren't allowed, what I think often still is an illusion of precision, you know, how many conflicts that we've engaged and haven't turned out well would we have stayed out of, and one of the little factoids I cite sometimes The second Iraq war, I'm getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, but the second Iraq war, the second Gulf war, it was described as the most precise air war in history. And by proportion of munitions used, I think that's accurate, but statistics vary here. But within something like six months or a year of that conflict, more civilians had died than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. So, you know, the most precise air war was more devastating to civilians than these. Then these attacks that everyone knew were going to be very costly for civilians.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, we're going to jump around to a lot of different wars here. I want to hit briefly on this point about the bridge in Vietnam, because there was this bridge. It was heavily defended. We could not, for the life of us, strike it with conventional weaponry. Eventually, Texas Instruments and others in the military industrial complex came up with this paveway bomb solution. And miraculously, lo and behold, we got the bridge and we got a bunch of other bridges, too, and a bunch of other pieces of infrastructure. As you and I both know, Jeff, we still lost the war. Is there a lesson there in the belief that a wonder weapon that could solve a tactical problem actually holds more of the keys to the war itself than it really does?

Jeff E. Stern: I think there is. I think that it is so intoxicating, you know, the idea that we can go around and dispatch bad guys and solve problems with no cost. That the bomb, I do think, begins to argue for its own use. And there are other, I think there's other kind of phenomena also, like for example, now, you know, these weapons are built by often union laborers with security clearance jobs, which means they can't be outsourced. There's an argument that, for example with the export of these weapons, that if we'll worry about other countries... And the civilian casualties that they might cause, wouldn't we rather be in the room and we have to sell the weapons to be in a room? For some of these things, not necessarily the paveway itself, but there's the whole concept of geographic engineering where certain weapon systems, parts of it are assembled in almost every Senate district which makes it very hard to cancel those contracts. So there are a variety in a way, again, the weapon is as much a as much an effective political tool as it is a tactical or strategic tool.

Jon Bateman: As I was reading your book, you were telling stories about individual people who were using this weapon, affected by this weapon. But also you told stories of high politics, presidents in the Oval Office in the Situation Room contending with whether to strike a country and under what circumstances. By creating more options for presidents to do more in situations where otherwise they might not have had a good option. We are expanding the menu. Of the foreign policy toolkit, right, in ways good and bad. Tell us about that.

Jeff E. Stern: Reagan launched what was effectively the first pre-emptive, what they called pre-emptive strike, pre-Emptivore and this was an attack in Libya in response to a bliddy and bat bombing in Berlin. Was one of the first examples of a pretty significant foreign intervention that was launched almost unilaterally and was so secretive that not only was Congress not notified, but a lot of people within the White House didn't know what was happening. And that was only possible because we had this tool and we had new longer range fighter jets. You didn't need to move, you know, a few battalions into position in order to launch this war. You could, you could sort of do it in Siepre and... I think there are all sorts of, you know, sort of second lie to that power. So I think you're right in terms of expanding the menu, but I think also sort of confining the the decision to strike and making it making it possible that a president, a couple of advisors can make a decision like this and choose not to alert even many allies, you know the the let alone people within their own government. And of course, today, where I think we're seeing Versions of that where you know president makes a decision and we can go, you know bomb Venezuela and capture a capture of leader right

Jon Bateman: Yeah, or the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, for example, probably be the apotheosis of the narrative that you're describing, right? We dropped these massive ordnance penetrators on the Iranian underground bunkers, particularly for the Fordow bunker, where nuclear material is being enriched. These are very, very, very large versions, essentially, of the paveway. These are guided bombs that can steer toward their target. To such an extraordinary level of precision that they were able to hit the exact same spot, like, you know, an air shaft or a ventilation shaft multiple times in a row, in order to dig deeper and deeper and do more and more harm to this facility. As you say, Jeff, this was launched with very little public notice. There was an element of surprise. There was a sense that maybe diplomacy that Trump and Netanyahu were doing kind of created a... A smoke screen to enable this to catch the Iranians unawares. So I don't know if this is a story of the remarkable military success of something like a paveway in its lineage, right, enabling a kind of strike that literally wouldn't have been possible before, or if it's more of a cautionary tale that it's creating more and more unilateral powers in the hands of the president and maybe seducing him to actions that might not solve our problem strategically.

Jeff E. Stern: First of all, even a weapon that is as precise as it claims to be is only as precise as the intelligence you have. And so, often we're doing these interventions at a place where we may not have a lot of intelligence on the ground. An example of the Second Gulf War, until a year or so before that intervention, we had almost literally no intelligence apparatus on the ground in Iraq. There wasn't even a functioning embassy, so we couldn't have people under diplomatic cover. And one of the stories in the book is about how that covert operation was essentially stood up from nothing. Because there was an awareness that even though we're about to launch this extremely precise air war, we don't know where anything is. And I think that that probably applies also to kind of after action. You know, you can use high power cameras and recon photography and satellite photography, but if you don't have very good intelligence on the ground, you know, I don't that we I don't know that we know now exactly how much damage was done to the nuclear program in Fort Hill Bunker. You know, it was really impressive. These bombs seem to do exactly what they were intended to do. You know the pilots who flew from St. Louis or whatever, you know, everything was sort of went smoothly, but we still don't exactly know what the blowback is going to be.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, the book also made me think about Israel's air campaign in Gaza after October 7th. I don't know precisely what weapons they're using there. I think there's probably a lot of guided munitions being used in that conflict. Certainly the Israeli government's position is that they strike targets precisely based on specific intelligence they have. And so, whenever there's a controversial strike... The Israeli government and the IDF will always point to some specific intelligence that they have. And so their narrative is they are striking in Gaza very precisely. And yet, anyone can look at satellite photos and realize the end result of all of this is a virtual leveling of the Gaza territory, an almost complete destruction of nearly all civilian infrastructure there, some super majority of homes, schools, power plants and the like. And so in some level, you can have the most precise weapon in the world, but if you scale up its use to such an extraordinary degree... The destruction could be just as much or even greater than it was before.

Jeff E. Stern: I think that's true. I think if you have a weapon also that's inexpensive enough, that not only can you use it without pinching pennies, but you could practice with it so everyone's comfortable using it. I think there's another thing that we're getting to now, which is, especially as it moves towards remote war, but even just being armed with something like a paveway or another precision weapon. It is possible to devolve the decision to strike so far down the chain of command that you're now you have what they call dynamic targeting, which like effectively is a pilot can kind of be like, oh, there's a fleeting target. I need to, I need to hit it. Um, and I think, I think there's this move towards Especially as we start so just as a as a sort of colorful example, you know as we move towards having You know reapers and predators armed not only with with precision weapons super effectively supercomputers that are now collapsed in the kill chain down to, you know, a few seconds, not making a target for engagement, evaluating it striking, you know, doing recon. And our Defense Department has this director that says something to the effect of there will always be a meaningful level of human engagement in any decision to strike. That's not verbatim. But it's, it's something like that, that I think, to any non lawyer, or maybe even to wears us a little bit like what does that mean exactly? But you can imagine, you know, an 18 year old private in a, in a air conditioned trail or a Creech Air Force base or something and every single system is saying, okay, we're ready to strike. This is a terrorist or this is a terrorists, you know, haven or something, bombs ready. All you got to do is say no, if you don't want to, it's just an immense amount of pressure to, to not get in the way. And I imagine that plays out in places like, you know, the IDF and, and the, and Gaza where You know, all it takes is an intelligence report saying this thing is a, you know, is a Hamas headquarters or something. And there's just a lot of pressure to not get in the way of it.

Jon Bateman: We're foregrounding some of the problems and critiques with guided bombs, over-sales, the over-selling of what they can offer, the temptation, the seduction that they represent. I don't want to just skip over the tremendous military advancement that they that they represent as well. I think at one point in the book you say about Vietnam that the U.S. Air Force went from missing 90% of its targets to... Hitting 90% of those targets. There are certainly stories in the book about remarkable tactical successes. I wonder if maybe Serbia counts as one in your mind. And if so, you could just explain what the paveway and other guided weapons were able to accomplish at a tactical and operational level there that maybe we otherwise could not have pulled off.

Jeff E. Stern: I am sympathetic to the argument that is sort of a platonic ideal of precision, a precision strike that, you know, you use it to get people to the negotiating table by striking, you know, infrastructure, military infrastructure, maybe even, you know, civilian infrastructure, which is which is something that we did then to in order to sort of create political pressure, for example, in Slobodan, you know, we have a winter coming if we knock out, you know, oil facilities, then he's going to be under pressure to negotiate so that heat gets from bag on. I think both arguments can carry water. But if we're going to do it, that might be an example of the way to do it right. You know, to have it be finite. To have a sort of clear diplomatic goal. And it's something that I think we kind of don't see as much later on, again, going to Second Gulf War, where there really just wasn't, there wasn't really a plan for what to do after the initial air campaign. Um, I think that and probably partially because of the legacy both from Vulcans and maybe even from the first Gulf War that these tools are so precise and so effective that they're just going to do the job for us.

Jon Bateman: Air power has such a unique role in America's kind of strategic culture and even in our pop culture around war, right? One of your chapters is called Shock and Awe, a term from the Iraq War days, and it exemplifies this notion that a splendid set of airstrikes on Iraq, on Venezuela, on Serbia, wherever, I'll just be blunt about it. It's visceral, it's satisfying. It's kind of America at its strongest, most capable, most impressive. It terrifies countries like Russia and China. And yet then the question of course arises of what then? Do you need forces on the ground? I'll say, President Trump seems to be almost pushing this to the limit in Venezuela right now. He had a series of precision strikes and special forces operations to neutralize and capture President Maduro. And now without any boots on the ground, he is attempting to use gunboat diplomacy to run Venezuela by continuing to threaten them with the implicit possibility of future precision strikes on their leadership in order to basically turn them into a puppet state. I mean, is this the kind of end game for theorists of precision war, does this work? Or does this also expose the limits and the need ultimately for conventional land power and other tools of national power in order to truly project force in a foreign land?

Jeff E. Stern: My mind goes to the intervention in Libya post-2011. And of course, there's always a danger of reasoning analogically and trying to learn from the last war. But as Trump sort of goes about his Dunro doctrine. The Dunro Doctrine, yes. I keep going back to 2011 in Libya where to probably drastically oversimplify, there was a sense that we need to protect, you know, rebels and protesters and intervene with air power to kind of disable the Gaddafi regime. And for a minute, it went really well. But you know for example, we would drive regime forces back from a position and then it would wait a little bit and come back and take it. And eventually there's a recognition that as good as power is, actually. We're sort of creating a need for boots on the ground, um, variety of reasons, NATO countries can do that. And one of the things that ended up happening was, um. A lot of Libyan emigres, especially in England and Manchester in particular ended up traveling to Libya to fight, um and British government made that easy effectively, but you ended up having a lot of really young inexperienced people being really traumatized by what they saw. And of course, there was some blowback there, too, and Libya became the safe haven for ISIS. And there were people who came back who were traumatized, who were radicalized. So to me, that's sort of the cautionary tale of the sort of gunboat or gunship diplomacy that it's. It's you can't control territory on the ground just by air power. You know, at least that that seems to be the lesson. And that's what I worry about in some place like Venezuela.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, I mean, maybe you could sum it up as, it's easier to break a country than to remake it. So you can use bombs to break. You might need troops and a true physical presence and governance capacity to remake. Of course, in the second Iraq War, we tried both, and that still didn't work. So that should just give us pause on even the most ambitious uses of American military power. One thing that a precision weapon can do is it can execute a decapitation strike. And so again, I'll be kind of pulling you forward a little bit from the book into the contemporary world. When Israel assassinated the heads of Hezbollah and Hamas within the last couple of years, I honestly didn't expect it to work as well as it had. I expected those groups to have a residual command and control capacity and to be able to respond with overwhelming force in terms of rockets and missiles that they had prepared. It actually seems as though Israel pulled off a real military gambit in killing Nasrallah and others where they were able to so cripple a political and military command structure and create confusion and fear in the enemy. That there really was not an overwhelming rocket and missile response. And Israel has kind of humiliated its enemies in those cases. Now, again, the story hasn't been written about what will happen in Gaza and whether any of that will read down to Israel or the regions or America's benefit. It's hard to see how it could. But it does seem like leaders like Trump and Netanyahu are pushing the envelope to see, well, What can we do with a precision strike? And one of the things we can do is we can just kill the leader of a country.

Jeff E. Stern: One of the things that is a little bit awkward for you people who are sort of trying to sound a cautionary tale about Uh, you know unilateral unilateral precision airstrike is there are examples of this, you know, arguably working that um, you could argue that the drone campaign against al-qaeda and isis Kind of working in a similar way. One of your explanations there is that you go after the leaders If you do so effectively, then people are kind of afraid to become leaders. Uh, and I remember thinking that in the immediate aftermath to October 7th, that, you know, the, the perhaps the best path forward here is to, is to be very precise, go after the leaders so that people don't really want to be rather than what I think ended up happening against simplification. It is that it was almost like the leaders were the only ones who had the good bunkers, you know that they were the ones who were safe. So you almost end up driving more people into wanting to be leaders. So You know, arguably there is a way to use Britishism's right to create a disincentive by, you know, trying to, in a very discreet kind of tactical way, take out leadership. And that does seem to have worked before. And arguably that's what happened with Hezbollah.

Jon Bateman: Just sticking with Israel. What a lot of people who advocated a kind of middle path for Israel to take after October 7th, they thought some military response was warranted, but not the wholesale slaughter and destruction of the Gaza Strip like we've seen through air power. And so an alternative that was always available is a much more substantial Israel ground campaign in which you would place Israeli troops at risk, but in return, you would be able to actually look around you, evaluate situations, see the human element from six feet above. Rely on small arms instead of these large bombs, probably create a lot less destruction and chaos depending on how such a campaign would be conducted. It reminds me very much of the Vietnam tale you were telling in the book about how bombing and precision bombing is a way for leaders to avoid the dilemma of placing their troops at risk. And in return, that risk is kind of pushed onto the enemy militarily, and in some cases, civilian casualties.

Jeff E. Stern: Arguably, there's also a bit of a cathartic effect. You know, you you feel like you have to do something here's a way to launch strikes nurse and If you're if you're launching a massive air campaign, you're not gonna have a lot of Journalists on the ground who are showing what it's like on the round But I think that's right. I mean, I think they began it creates a it creates the thing you can do It creates almost a gravitational pull to do that because if the decision had been We were going to send troops in or we're going to, you know, do a massive carpet bombing campaign. There's all we have are unguided dump dumb bombs. It's a it's a very different calculus. But again, arguably, the outcome is is kind of the same.

Jon Bateman: You tell the story about the UK executing a retaliatory counterterrorism strike against ISIS, and someone wrote on the bomb. What was it? It was.

Jeff E. Stern: With love from Manchester, with heart from Manchester.

Jon Bateman: Thank you. Probably people have been writing on bombs for as long as we've had them. But now you can broadcast that message on social media, and it speaks directly to that cathartic quality that you're talking about. Whether that message is from high command or just somebody on the ground who wanted to put it out there, there's a kind of pleasure of vengeance that someone can feel in saying, just like you open the book with the story from Yemen, this metal is coming from here and going to there, and there's nothing you can do about it, and it's signed with love.

Jeff E. Stern: We don't know where that bomb ended up. I mean, we know it was on a sortie that was going after ISIS targets, but did it land on some horrible ISIS leader or did it landed on a wedding party? But we have the picture of it before it took off. I think that's sort of an illustration of it is kind of clean and clinical and almost nice on the ground. But the thing is always exploding somewhere and it's pretty safe bet that it's going to be a little bit messier than it looks when it's, you know, in a well lit picture On the pylon of a fighter jet on the tarmac, but you know about to take off

Jon Bateman: Where is this all going? In the book, you describe a progression of paveway one, paveway two, three, four, and then the advent along the way of more sophisticated and accurate cruise missiles and other weapons at each stage becoming more precise, responding to countermeasures that are arising, being able to be flexibly used in a variety of different tactical situations. It seems like maybe the advent of drones as a natural progression of the story of precision munition, where now you can almost fly the bomb, right? If you think about it as like a kamikaze drone, a quadcopter in Ukraine, which are being manufactured by the millions. It's essentially a flying bomb now that can hover in midair, send footage, but real time back to the operator, stop, start, go up and down, blow up, not blow up. Weigh a few pounds. Very precise and mass produced. Do you see that as part of the lineage that you're describing? And if so, what's the next step and the step after that? And is there some kind of endpoint where war becomes maximally precise at a tactical level? And what would that look like in me?

Jeff E. Stern: Where we're going is, I guess I would argue, fewer breaks on the decision to engage. So again, having someone sitting in safety and seeing the enemy as a black and white infrared readout that looks like a video game. From there to having a drone that is capable of making the decision on its own to strike. And even if this directive Um, you know, this defense department kind of wooly language directive is hell. I think the effect will still be more and more strides because the the human is put in a position kind of only of Stopping the whole process, you know, it's not it's a human reading and intelligence report deciding that looks let's go find this terrorist. It's the system telling the person Ready to go the thing is you know is locked and loaded. That's a terrorist. That is a bad guy Whatever we're about to engage Just click the no button And you've got this whole kind of impressive technological military apparatus that's all sort of canted towards action. And you're expecting some, you know, probably pretty young airmen or something to say, no, no. I'm not I'm comfortable with that as that margin for error shrinks. And, you, know, now we're talking about drones and precision precision weapons. We're not talking about for now about drones armed with nukes, but still the the the time that you have to make a decision. And not to strike, and the pressure to strike are both, the time is decreasing and the pressures increasing. That does frighten me a little bit, to say nothing of hypersonics and the idea of hypersonics armed with nuclear weapons which then shrinks the time even more. We're sort of in a bit of a dangerous place because it is so easy to strike and the corollary to that is it's so hard not to.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, maybe put another way, precision weapons were created to solve a physics problem of how do you get munitions onto a target in space and time. What we're left with is the intellectual problem of what are we trying to hit and why and where is it? And that problem is not only not solved, but maybe getting worse than ever because for manufacturing so many of these weapons. AI and autonomy is now the new technology that's arising to supposedly solve that intellectual problem, to solve the targeting challenge, the intelligence challenge, the decision-making challenge that you described. I'm not so sure about that, but that is essentially where, as we're squeezing the balloon, that's where the challenge seems to be headed.

Jeff E. Stern: When again, I mean, I think the other problem precision weapons were invented to solve was the political one was essentially to compensate for the restraints and so perhaps in a way it's natural that where we're going is weapons that are, you know, as good as they are hitting precise targets. They're even better at making the restrains irrelevant. And, you know, you could imagine... Striking Gaddafi in the 80s required moving a few battalions into Algeria or something. There would be a lot of thinking and research and considering before doing that. And we're in the position now of, you don't need to do that. And so that often happens, you know, too late, it happens after the fact. Now where we do just remove this leader, we just destroy this infrastructure. We could do it essentially a few minutes after we decided to do it. And now in the position of having broken the thing. And trying to figure out how to fix it or if to fix it in a way that I don't think we would have been in those positions if we didn't have these capabilities because there would have such a bigger operation and shift in men and materials that was required that you would have just had to solve the political problems before you pull the trigger.

Jon Bateman: I'd love to close by asking you kind of the ultimate question here, which is, should these weapons exist? And would you be willing to advocate against having them in a nation's arsenal? And just to kind of put the point more finely, you know, the book is a humane book. It's a beautiful book in how you tell the story of specific individuals, some of whom have been harmed by this weapon, some have been benefited or maybe their lives We're saved by this weapon but But I understand that the humane values that you're coming from, that we're worried about the seduction of war and the mechanization of war, the dehumanization of world, I share all those same sympathies. At the same time, I do struggle with the idea that it's good to have more precise weapons, right? It seems like that's better than the alternative of having lots and lots of imprecise weapons. It does maybe create new kind of political and psychological challenges. But maybe it's just our job to face up to those and not blame the weapon. What do you think? I mean, should we actually not have precision bombs or do we need to just live with them and wrestle with the problem?

Jeff E. Stern: That is, I think, a very good and hard question, which I am maybe gonna dodge slightly and answer in a slightly different way. That's all right.

Jon Bateman: Go ahead and answer then I'll tell you whether it's alright or not.

Jeff E. Stern: Okay, okay, okay. Um, I think one thing that, uh, one way that my mind changed a little bit, or at least my preconceived notions changed, is that, you know, there's this sort of, I think, stereotype of, you, know, the, the greedy defense, uh you know defense company executive in C-suite who doesn't care about killing people or even wants to, um, I've certainly not met every single inventor of weapons or even all the people who worked on this weapon, but I'm pretty comfortable asserting that almost everyone involved was primarily motivated by saving people rather than hurting people, you know, by the danger that airmen in Vietnam were in and giving them a tool that can help them stay safe. And I think that I probably have some confirmation bias here, but you know, there's There's that famous quote from the Manhattan Project where Niels Bohr goes to the Oppenheimer and says, is big enough, and Oppenheimers says to end the war, and Niels-Bohr says to and all war. And there's similar sentiments in Alfred Nobel's correspondence that my dynamite, my factories might create something that is so horrible that countries will lay down their armies. And I think that I would assert that that is often more the motivation people were inventing weapons or inventing anything. Than destruction and it's in some ways a neat psychological trick like I can make myself feel better building a tool of destruction because I'm saying it's a You have a few made this but I think that was to me partially where the cautionary tale is because because no one wants to think it's something that they are creating this is going to hurt people or is primarily going to hurt people but it is how we end up with these things that are really hurt way more people than the hell are you going to push.

Jon Bateman: I'll let you get away with that. I mean, here's my reaction to that. The inventors of weapons, they're often, and I've met people in the defense industrial base. I'm a former card-carrying member of the defense industrial complex myself. I was part of the US war machine in the industrial intelligence world. Everyone is there for their own reasons. Almost all of them are patriotic and believers in what they're doing. And for some, it's saving the guy in the foxhole next to you. For others, it's a belief in just broadly America's role and purpose in the world, whether or not you like whatever war we happen to be fighting. There could be a naivete in that. These people don't have a monopoly on wisdom or the ability to assess what they're doing. I guess at the end of the day, it seems to me like we all need to sit in judgment as citizens and voters of how these weapons are used and the resources used to deploy and develop them. What do you think of that?

Jeff E. Stern: I've loved that you brought that up because it's part of the very precious way we thought about arranging the book, which is not, you know, let's start to show you all these horrible things this bomb does, but actually, you start with Joe Kennedy during World War II on a very dangerous brave mission to try to destroy a Nazi vengeance weapon and arguably save London. You know as far as acts of war go, there's probably no more noble you know, no more noble cause, or kind of morally unambivalent cause, and he died because the technology wasn't good enough. The way the way we put the book together is is trying to get the reader to almost want the thing to be invented because you know the reader kind of sees that the costs from not having it. By the time you see some of the really ugly things that it's capable of doing, you're sort of complicit. You're not really able to say, man, I hate those villains and whatever defense company, you've wanted this thing to exist. And so I think you're exactly right. Ultimately, it is on us.

Jon Bateman: That's a devious writing technique. And now I'm thinking back and seeing the fingerprints of it. I just want to close by recommending people go out and read this book. It is so riveting in the storytelling and making come alive these matters of life and death across decades and continents that have changed the character, the nature of war. Jeff, you've got a remarkable ability to tell these human and global stories. You could have any opinion about precision munitions and read this book and learn a great, great deal from it. So thanks for coming on the podcast and congratulations on the book.

Jeff E. Stern: Thank you so much, this has been great and I really appreciate your, uh, compliments.

Jon Bateman: My pleasure.