Show Notes
In the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Secretary of the Army walked into the White House, told the president the force is breaking, and quit. Days earlier his boss had fired the Chief of Staff, disbanded the Army's only drone battalion, and cashiered Chris Donahue — the last man out of Kabul.
Bryan Clark, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan for a hosts-only edition marking a quarter-century of the Global War on Terror.
We discuss…
Twenty-five years on the treadmill — how Rumsfeld's transformation agenda collided with GWOT budgets to produce LCS, FCS, and the F-35, and why a rotational, casualty-averse force forgot how to accept risk
Driscoll walks — the OSD meddling behind the exit, why Congress won't confirm anyone Hegseth nominates, and a Pentagon run by acting officials through 2029
The meritocracy of meritocracies — what firing Donahue tells every field-grade officer weighing the exit, the auto-promoted NCO corps nobody talks about, and why the Ranger tab discourse is real
Budget Steve takes the fall — Feinberg blamed for a munitions shortage created by fighting Iran with the stealthiest, priciest weapons in the inventory, plus NIH biodefense money quietly rerouted to the Pentagon
Lying to Putin with AI — ISW's report on Russian commanders faking battlefield progress, and what generative deception does to OSINT and soldiers' feeds
The Houthis have Claude Code — Anthropic's threat report, Yemeni drone guidance software, and DeepSeek routing PLA subcontractors' queries to Claude through a transfer station
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Nick Brown is a co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new think tank spun out of IFP, that looks at long-term technology challenges and opportunities facing the US. Nick was a physics major, spent a while as a software engineer in and around government, and had an arc as an aspiring concert violinist. But we’re here to talk about what is in pole position for my paper of the year: his master class on what would happen if the US cut off DUV exports to China: DUV Immersion Lithography: The Foundation of US AI Compute Advantage. Co-hosting is ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria.We discuss:
He was recently promoted to DIU’s acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Co-hosting are Brian Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a retired submariner, and Justin McIntosh, a twenty-year retired Green Beret who served in the 1st and 5th Groups, who now works in defense tech and writes a Substack called Mind of Things.
Richard Bian is the head of product operations for Ant Ling, the foundational LLM at Ant. If you don’t know Ant, they most famously make Alipay, which makes your money and your world run when you’re in China and sometimes beyond. Richard is a former software engineer at Microsoft and Square, and he previously served as head of open source at Ant, where he scaled the open source initiative into a dedicated team. He’s lived and worked in Singapore, Canada, the US, and China, and he loves to build products.
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I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things.