How Will The Wars of the Future be Fought? A Conversation at SXSW

In 2012, Ashton Carter, then the deputy secretary of defense, created a secret unit inside the Pentagon called the Strategic Capabilities Office. Its existence was classified and no one spoke of it publicly. Gradually, details have leaked out; projects have been at least partially explained. And on Monday morning at 11am, at South by Southwest, I'll interview Will Roper, the founder and leader of SCO.

Roper's job is to prepare the United States military for the wars of the near future. He's a former Rhodes Scholar and string theorist who is now working on modifying existing weapons systems and planning new ones. His office was behind the creation of the Army Tactical Missile System, putting the Army back in the business of killing ships. He's also building miniature drone swarms, experimenting with Pokemon-Go like augmented reality that could help soldiers identify real threats, and trying to use big data analysis of public sentiment to help the American military identify surprising areas of risk around the world. He's surely working on dozens of other projects that he can't talk about. Part of the point of SCO is to be able to surprise an adversary on the battlefield.

My plan is to ask Roper about what he's built and why he's building it. But I also hope to ask him about the ethics of future warfare. It has been said that autonomous weaponry—killing machines that can operate without humans—will change conflict more than nuclear weaponry. Ashton Carter, who I interviewed for Wired several weeks ago, insists that there will always be humans involved when the American military makes decisions about life and death. But will that be true of other countries, or groups, that learn from the technology America builds?

"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb," said Robert Oppenheimer, a man who wished he could undo what might have been his greatest achievement. What can be built is one interesting question. But so is what shouldn't be built.

I've spoken briefly with Roper before and he's both brilliant and thoughtful. Here are details about the event on Monday. I will also embed a video here after it becomes available.