Space is more important than ever for the security of the United States, but it’s almost like the Wild West in terms of behavior, a top general said today.

Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, spoke Jan. 24 at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. His talk was titled, “U.S. Strategic Command Perspectives on Deterrence and Assurance.”

Hyten said, “Space is fundamental to every single military operation that occurs on the planet today.” He added that “there is no such thing as a war in space,” because it would affect all realms of human existence, due to the satellite systems. Hyten advocates “strategic deterrence” and “norms of behavior” across space as well as land, water and cyberspace.

Otherwise, rivals like China and Russia will only threaten U.S. interests in space and wreak havoc for humanity below, he said. Most of contemporary life depends on systems connected to space.

Hyten also addressed other topics, including recent proposals by some to upgrade the country’s missile defense systems.

“You just don’t snap your fingers and build a state-of-the-art anything overnight,” Hyten said, adding that he has not yet spoken to Trump administration officials about the issue. “We need a powerful military,” but a severe budget crunch makes “reasonable solutions” more likely than expensive and unrealistic ones.

On the upgrade front, Hyten said he favors a long-range strike missile system to replace existing cruise missiles; a better air-to-air missile for the Air Force; and an improved missile defense ground base interceptor.

‘Critically dependent’

From satellites to global-positioning systems (GPS), space has transformed human life – and the military – in the 21st century, Hyten said. In terms of defining "space," the U.S. designates people who travel above an altitude of 50 miles as astronauts.

As the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Hyten oversees the control of U.S. strategic forces, providing options for the president and secretary of defense. In particular, this command is charged with space operations (such as military satellites), information operations (such as information warfare), missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, global strike and strategic deterrence (the U.S. nuclear arsenal), and combating weapons of mass destruction.

Hyten explained that every drone, fighter jet, bomber, ship and soldier is “critically dependent” on space to conduct their own operations. All cell phones use space, and the GPS command systems overall are managed at Strategic Command, he said.

“No soldier has to worry about what’s over the next hill,” he said, describing GPS capabilities, which have fundamentally transformed humanity’s way of life.

Space needs to be available for exploration, he said.

“I watch what goes on in space, and I worry about us destroying that environment for future generations.” He said that too many drifting objects and debris exist – about 22,000 right now. A recent Chinese satellite interception created a couple thousand more debris objects that now circle about the Earth at various altitudes and pose the risk of striking satellites.

“We track every object in space” now, Hyten said, urging “international norms of behavior in space.”

He added, “We have to deter bad behavior on space. We have to deter war in space. It’s bad for everybody. We could trash that forever.”

But now rivals like China and Russia are building weapons to deploy in the lower levels of space. “How do we prevent this? It’s bigger than a space problem,” he said.

Deterring conflict in the cyber, nuclear and space realms is the strategic deterrence goal of the 21st century, Hyten said.

“The best way to prevent war is to be prepared for war,” he said.

Hyten believes the U.S. needs a fundamentally different debate about deterrence. And it all starts with nuclear weapons.

“In my deepest heart, I wish I didn’t have to worry about nuclear weapons,” he said. Hyten described his job as “pretty sobering, it’s not easy.”

But he also noted the mass violence of the world prior to 1945 when the first atomic bomb was used. Roughly 80 million people died from 1939 to 1945 during World War II. Consider that in the 10-plus years of the Vietnam War, 58,000 Americans were killed. That’s equivalent to two days of deaths in WWII, he said.

In a world without nuclear weapons, a rise in conventional warfare would produce great numbers of mass casualties, Hyten said. About war, he said, “Once you see it up close, no human will ever want to experience it.”

Though America has “crazy enemies” right now, in many ways the world is more safe than during WWII, Hyten said. The irony is that nuclear weapons deterrence has kept us from the type of mass killings known in events like WWII. But the U.S. must know how to use its nuclear deterrence effectively.

Looking ahead, Hyten said the U.S. needs to think about space as a potential war environment. An attack in space might not mean a response in space, but on the Earth.

Hyten describes space as the domain that people look up at it and still dream about. “I love to look at the stars,” but said he wants to make sure he’s not looking up at junk orbiting in the atmosphere.

‘Space geek’

Hyten has served in the Air Force for 35 years. He originally wanted to be an astronaut, but his eyesight was too bad. He got a waiver, and graduated Harvard in 1981 with an engineering degree on a ROTC scholarship. He entered the Air Force thinking he would only do four years. But then he had a close-up view of what a young Air Force officer could find in the last frontier of space as satellites and military space science were booming.

“God, I love space,” he said.

In introducing Hyten, Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC, described him as a person of unwavering dedication and profound insights who understands the gravity of situations. “A self-described space geek,” she said.

Hyten lauded CISAC for its research and educational work on national security, and said he enjoyed being around people willing to test out new ideas and discuss potential solutions for vexing problems.

Earlier in the day on campus, Hyten met with William J. Perry, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at CISAC; George Shultz, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; and Condoleezza Rice, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Hoover Institution.

General Hyten was nominated for reassignment to head the U.S. Strategic Command on Sept. 8, 2016. He commanded Air Force Space Command from 2014 to 2016.

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MEDIA CONTACTS

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Improving the U.S.-China relationship is a focus at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

CISAC continued this tradition in co-sponsoring the 8th Sino-U.S. Security Relations and Cooperation Conference in Beijing from Dec. 14-15, 2016. The conference was hosted and co-sponsored by the Foreign Ministry's China Institute of International Studies (CIIS).

Ambassador Su Ge, president of CIIS, attended the conference and delivered an opening remark. FSI’s Thomas Fingar and Teng Jianqun from CIIS chaired the conference.

Fingar said, “Although held at a time of uncertainty about the future of U.S.-China relations, the conference included constructive exchanges on strategic stability, obstacles to cooperation in space, and other sensitive topics.”

He added, “The exchanges were frank and constructive because they built on the foundation of understanding and trust developed through years-long exchanges between CISAC and CIIS. In the next phase, small teams of American and Chinese experts will develop joint blueprints to enhance understanding of issues critical for nuclear stability and space cooperation.”

CISAC co-founder John W. Lewis has been active for many years encouraging and supporting better ties between the U.S. and China. He is an expert on Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations, China's nuclear weapons program, U.S. policy toward Korea and health security issues in northeast Asia.

During this most recent Beijing conference, scholars and security experts from both the U.S. and China held in-depth discussions on topics including cybersecurity, outer space cooperation, maritime dispute management, missile defense, grey zone cooperation, and China-U.S. nuclear issues.

The American attendees included scholars from CISAC (Fingar, Brad Roberts, and Joseph Torigian); Brad Roberts, director, Center for Global Security Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Major General Roger W. Burg, former commander, 20th Air Force; Vice Admiral Michael Connor (retired), U.S. Navy; Lieutenant General Susan J. Helms (retired), U.S. Air Force general and former NASA astronaut; Lieutenant General James M. Kowalski (retired), U.S. Air Force general; Steven M. Benner,chief, Strategy and Campaign Division, U.S. Strategic Command, among others.

The Chinese experts came from a variety of institutions – CIIS, China Academy of Engineering Physics, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force, Rocket Force College, China Defense Science and Technology Information Center, PLA Navy Academy of Military Science, PLA South Command, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Renmin University of China, National Defense University, Tsinghua University, etc. 

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In this new article, Megan Palmer, a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, talks about the different ways that the FBI is collaborating with the biotech community in order to be prepared to respond to an emerging biological threat. One of them is by reaching out to student bioengineers at programs like the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition. The purpose of that event is to demonstrate how synthetic biology can be used to address pressing global issues.

As the article states, whether it’s an accidental outbreak or a biological attack, the FBI seeks to create a culture of trust and transparency with the biotech community. Palmer discussed this topic recently at the Biofabricate conference for synthetic biology and design in New York City.

As Palmer noted, biological attacks are a historical reality. In 1984, cult members poisoned patrons of 10 salad bars in Oregon with salmonella, sickening more than 750 people. And in 2001 shortly after the 9/11 attacks, anthrax spores that were mailed to newsrooms and government offices killed five people. While other incidents may have simply failed, it seems prudent to prepare for future attacks that could be even more deadlier.

Enter the FBI's foreay into the biotech community. Collaboartion between the public and private sectors is increasing in this area. As Palmer said, examples exist of iGEM students acting as "white hat biohackers" to help biotech companies detect weaknesses in their systems that  all in collaboration with the FBI, Palmer says. 

“There’s the overall sense that the government has acknowledged that it is not necessarily the center of influence in technological development,” Palmer told the publication. “We’re going to start seeing many more examples of partnerships between the government and the private sector where you wouldn't have necessarily expected them before. People should be willing to give them a chance.” 

To Palmer, the key to the collaboration is open communication. She reports progress with the FBI and biotech community on this front. Palmer herself asks the FBI questions about its involvement and interest in biotech dangers. So far, they have “been willing to have more of those conversations,” she said. The true test will come when the relationship is finally tested by what Palmer describes as a “triggering event,” either a situation where there is reason to believe a biotech has occurred or one in which the FBI is prying a bit too much into the lives of biologists. Palmer said that if the relationship doesn’t withstand this type of challenge, the trust between the FBI and the community would weaken, and communication would break down.

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Stanford students are applying lean start-up techniques to some of the world’s most difficult foreign policy issues.

The fall 2016 quarter class, Hacking for Diplomacy: Tackling Foreign Policy Challenges with the Lean Launchpad, is a first-of-its-kind course for studying statecraft, created as a reflection of the best that Stanford and Silicon Valley offers in the way of pioneering paradigms. Hacking for Diplomacy is co-taught by Joe Felter, a senior researcher at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). It is based on the Lean LaunchPad methodology, created by course designer Steve Blank, a Stanford lecturer and entrepreneur.

The teaching team also includes Jeremy Weinstein, a political science professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute; Zvika Krieger, the U.S. Department of State's Representative to Silicon Valley; and Steve Weinstein, the CEO of MovieLabs.

'Breaking free'

The class is based on cultivating ideas and imagination, breaking free of the traditional “business plan” approach to rolling out new products and solutions. In the case of diplomacy, the lean start-up method is fast and flexible above all. It has three key principles based on concepts such as "mission model canvas," "beneficiary development," and "agile engineering,” according to Felter, also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

“The first principle is accepting that any proposed solution to a problem whether in the commercial world or public sector is initially just a set of untested hypotheses – at best informed guesses – as to what may solve the needs of a customer or beneficiary,” said Felter.

Regarding beneficiary development, he said, experiential learning is central.

“There are no answers to complex challenges ‘inside the building,’ if you will, and students must ‘get out of the building’ to find out –in as intimate detail as possible – the various pains and gains experienced by the various beneficiaries, stakeholders and end users that must be addressed to find viable and deployable solutions to their problems,” Felter said.

The last principle, “agile development,” is based on the view that proposed solutions are generated and constantly updated through a collecting of data and feedback. This in turn, Felter explained, is rapidly tested and new solutions are designed based this iterative process.

Overall, he noted, the core idea is that entrepreneurs are everywhere, and that lean startup principles favor experimentation over elaborate planning, offering a faster way to get a desired product or solution to market.

Real-world instruction

In the class, student teams analyze real-world foreign policy challenges. They then use lean startup principles to find new approaches to seemingly intractable or very complex problems that have bedeviled the foreign policy world. The teams actually work with mentors and officials in the U.S. State Department and other civilian agencies and private companies.

Each week, the teams present their findings (“product”) to a panel of faculty and mentors, who will critique their solutions. The outcomes will range, as they vary from problem to problem. Examples include human rights, food security, refuges and labor recruitment, and mosquito disease threats, among others.

On Oct. 10, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the class. “Brilliant minds are applying technology to world’s toughest problems. Their perspective will inform,” Kerry tweeted after the class.

Kerry’s State Department gave the students seven challenges to address – human trafficking, avoiding space collisions, tracking nuclear devices, and countering violent extremism. The students will explore and analyze these issues through the rest of the quarter.

One student, Kaya Tilev, later asked Kerry what the students should be striving for to make their “solutions” a reality for national policymakers.

Kerry said, “Well, you’re doing it. You’re in it. You’re in the program. And I have absolute confidence if you come up with a viable solution it is going to be implemented, adopted, and institutionalized.”

Zvika Krieger, the state department official, told the students that Kerry was impressed with them and the class.

“He (Kerry) brought up our class in all of his meetings that day, including at a lunch with the CEOs/founders of Google, Airbnb, and Lyft; in a podcast interview with Wired magazine, and in remarks at the Internet Association's conference,” Krieger wrote in an email to them.

Global flashpoints are proliferating around the globe – the Syrian War, conflict and civil wars across the Middle East and in parts of Africa; the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction by states and non-state groups; the most significant flow of refugees since World War II; North Korea nuclear testing; Russian adventurism on its borders; China’s forays into the South China Sea; and a changing climate.

In other words, there is no shortage of thorny problems for young minds to solve as they embark on their careers.

‘Hungry to apply their energy’

Jeremy Weinstein, the political science professor, described the students as “hungry to apply their energy and talents to real-world problems, and to use hands-on experiences as a way of accelerating their learning.”

The class taps into that motivation by bringing together data scientists, engineers, and social scientist, he noted. In the end, the idea is for students to learn how to “innovate inside government.”

Weinstein is optimistic that this class – and a stronger connection between the State Department and Stanford’s technical and policy expertise – can drive more innovation inside government.

“Technology can play a critical role in addressing many of today’s foreign policy challenges, and this class is one new way for senior U.S. officials to tap into the passion, creativity and talent of Silicon Valley,” he said.

Hacking for defense

Last year, Felter and Blank also led a Hacking for Defense class based on the same lean start-up principles. Hacking for Diplomacy is co-listed as both an International Policy Studies and a Management Science and Engineering course – it counts for international relations and political science majors as well.

Blank, a consulting associate professor in engineering, told the Stanford News Service in a recent story that he seeks to cultivate in students a passion for giving back to society and their world.

“We’re going to create a network of entrepreneurial students who understand the diplomatic, policy and national security problems facing the country and get them engaged in partnership with islands of innovation in the Department of State,” said Blank, who also wrote about the new hacking for Diplomacy course in the Huffington Post.

“Teams must take these products out to the real world and ask potential users for feedback,” he noted.

CISAC nuclear scientist Siegfried S. Hecker earlier this year released a book, Doomed to Cooperate, about how American and Russian scientists joined forces to avert some of the greatest post-Cold War nuclear dangers. Physics Today and Arms Control Today recently ran reviews on the work. Below is a Nov. 1 article that Hecker wrote on this subject for Russia Matters:

By Siegfried S. Hecker

Jeff Decker knows what war can do to a person. He lived it for four deployments, as an Army special operations squad leader in Iraq and Afghanistan who twice earned the Army Commendation Medal for valorous conduct in combat.

Decker, who now serves as a research assistant in Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation under Joe Felter, is the founder of March on Veteran, an organization that supports veterans suffering from mental health issues, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. March on Veteran is a free, online program available to any former member of the military.

Decker joined CISAC in September, about a year after he launched March on Veteran. Felter, a special forces veteran, is a senior research scholar who studies counterinsurgencies, terrorism and political violence for CISAC.

Decker, after his military service, struggled with the transition to civilian life due to the anger, anxiety, chronic pain, and sleeplessness that PTSD caused. On top of this, he did not have access to a Veteran Affairs treatment facility. That’s when the native of Buffalo, N.Y. turned to self-educating himself on mental health treatments available to veterans.

“When I studied for my doctorate in Australia, I cobbled together a mental health program to help myself. Now I’m sharing that and making those resources available to other veterans with the same needs,” said Decker, who earned his doctorate in international relations from Bond University, where he wrote his dissertation “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Private Military Contractors.”

So far, about 83 veterans have begun March on Veteran’s pilot program, which is a web-based and self-directed study. Decker handles almost all of the human contact. He is currently expanding the program to incorporate the veteran-to-veteran peer element with the help of other veteran volunteers.

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March on Veteran is, as Decker calls it, “support for veterans by veterans.” It is a recovery program personalized to one’s particular needs and is provided by people who have lived experience. It is not affiliated with any government organization like the VA or Department of Defense to maintain the veteran’s confidentiality. Veterans can access the program or sign-up to meet other veterans online.

“This program focuses on trying to help veterans reach their personal goals instead of focusing on ‘fixing’ them,” Decker said. “We are all about improving veteran quality of life, and a big part of that is connecting with other veterans.”

With Felter, Decker will be mostly working on his Hacking for Defense class project, which uses startup methodology to innovate and find solutions for critical challenges facing America’s defense and intelligence agencies.

Before arriving on campus, Decker conducted national security and international affairs research as a RAND Corporation summer associate for two summers in Washington, D.C.

Hurtling through space at nearly five miles per second, astronaut and Stanford alumna Kate Rubins, PhD, peered at her home planet some 220 miles below and picked up a microphone.

Back on Earth, in a packed lecture hall in Stanford Medicine’s Li Ka Shing Center last Thursday, an audience eagerly awaited an afternoon Q&A with Rubins, one of three astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station.

Soon Rubins’ smiling face filled two video screens and moderator David Relman, co-director for Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, kicked off the event. Relman is  a professor of medicine and of microbiology & immunology and Rubins’ former thesis co-advisor (along with Pat Brown, MD, PhD, now CEO of Impossible Foods).

Since this was no ordinary conversation, Relman explained how we’d talk with Rubins via the feed connecting the ISS to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas to Stanford Medicine.

“Here’s the plan for the next 30 minutes while Kate travels about a third of the way around our planet,” Relman said. “I’ll provide a brief background of Kate’s work and then I’ll open this up to questions. Remember, we can see and hear Kate, but she can only hear you.”

“Kate spent a significant fraction of her graduate career in a spacesuit,” Relman began. “She studied smallpox and Ebola (which required the ‘spacesuit’) and developed the first model of smallpox.”

After receiving a doctorate in cancer biology from Stanford in 2006, Kate became a Whitehead Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT (in 2008) NASA issued a call for applications for the astronaut program, and Rubins told Relman of her childhood dream to travel into space. “She asked if I would provide a letter of recommendation,” Relman said. “It was one of the easiest letters I’ve ever written.”

In 2009, NASA selected Rubins from thousands of applicants and she began training. “Scientists are trained to fly and pilots are trained to be scientists,” Rubins said. On July 6, 2016, she became the 60th woman in space, and has conducted two spacewalks since then. Here is a sampling of Thursday’s Q&A.

Relman: What are the most important questions in the life sciences that you and NASA seek to answer at ISS?

ISS has been orbiting Earth for [nearly] 16 years. When it was first launched it was clean. Then we put humans and all of their microbes in it. I think we are going to be able to look at that [DNA] in a new way with some of the sequencing technologies we’ve just demonstrated.

The second thing I’m incredibly fascinated by is fluids. I’m in freefall… that does fascinating things to fluids… All of biology is related to fluids so I think [investigating] what’s going on in everything from a microliter up to a human being is incredibly fascinating. We’ve just started to scratch the surface of this.

Question from the audience: What do you think are the biological challenges of colonization on Mars?

I think we are moving towards living on Mars. The Space Station is an example of one of our first steps towards that goal. We have environmental life support onboard that recycles 90 percent of our water. … We take our coffee in the morning and we turn it into tomorrow’s coffee, as we often say up here. … We do the same thing with air … we are making our own atmosphere up here. It’s a giant experiment about how you can take a completely closed module, put humans in it and do all the things they need to survive.

Relman: Looking back at your days at Stanford and graduate school, is there something you think helped prepare you for what you are doing now?

Getting the chance to be at Stanford, to do work there, to train under you and Pat and all of the associated mentors, friends and colleagues there taught me to be a scientist. I put this to use every day. It’s pretty fun to be a scientist in space, but it’s also incredibly fun to be a scientist on earth.

“Thank you for everything,” Relman said. “Signing off from Earth!”

Rubins grinned and flipped upside down saying, “I’m going to sign off upside down, because I can.”

Holly MacCormick wrote this story for Scope, a Stanford Medicine publication.