Jacquelyn Schneider signed her Air Force ROTC contract on Sept. 10, 2001 – one day prior to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
She was all set to become a freshman at Columbia University in New York, studying politics and the economy. The ROTC scholarship was to cover the Ivy League tuition.
“I thought I would spend four years traipsing through Europe – doing what you did during the 1990s Air Force,” Schneider remembers.
Instead, the Texas native’s life took a different path – with six rewarding years in uniform as an intelligence officer and Northeast Asia expert, just as military concerns in both China and North Korea were on the rise.
She only left active duty in 2011 because of the demands of family, including her husband’s Air Force F-16 flying career.
Now, after graduate degrees and seven years in the reserves, drilling at U.S. Cyber Command, Schneider focuses on cyber warfare and unmanned technology.
Her scholarly work boils down to her interest in puzzles, she said.
“I’m still fundamentally interested in political questions: Why do states go to war? When do they go to war? Who wins? And the duration and intensity of conflict,” Schneider said. “Those questions are separate from technology.”
She added cyber and unmanned systems to her focus about five years ago because they began to be billed as game changers in the field of war.
“I came to it with the questions of ‘Do they? And, in what ways?’”
Because of her background in political psychology, she looks at how these technologies affect the human dimension of decision-making.
Her first book, co-written with the University of Denver’s Julia Macdonald, digs into where the Pentagon’s focus on unmanned technology comes from.
The co-authors plan to put forth a theory of how to make the best use of unmanned technologies in U.S. weapons systems. They hope to finish the manuscript this year.
But their research has already led to some fierce debate in academic and military circles.
Schneider’s joint article in Foreign Affairs, “Why Troops Don’t Trust Drones,” relied on their interviews and surveys of hundreds of military personnel whose job is to call in air strikes and coordinate air support. It concluded that these troops prefer manned over unmanned aircraft, especially if there is a high risk of friendly fire.
That prompted a swirl of written debate, including an opposing opinion piece in War on the Rocks and a follow-on rebuttal by Schneider and Macdonald.
A $1 million Defense Department Minerva grant awarded last year to Schneider and her colleagues on the project – who include Michael Horowitz at the University of Pennsylvania and Allan Dafoe at Oxford University – has continued and expanded their research on autonomous platforms from a social-science perspective.
In her current role as a U.S. Cyber Command reservist, Schneider works in a unit that conducts outreach to technology experts in industry and academia. Called Points of Partnership, the program’s intent is to make sure Cyber Command keeps an innovative edge.
Asked what drew her to New England, Schneider said one attraction was the college’s war-gaming function, which is an excellent fit with her military experience.
She also finds authenticity in working for the organization, the Defense Department, whose policies she studies as an academic.
“I love feeling like I am directly supporting the U.S. government. I am here doing research that matters to decisions that are made within the government,” Schneider said.
“There are few places that allow you the intellectual freedom I have here and that ability to influence policy.”
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