War on the Rocks

Ryan dropped in on Michael P. Dempsey late last week in New York City. He is a career intelligence official who served as the acting director of national intelligence. From 2014-2017, he served as the deputy director of national intelligence and President Barack Obama's primary intelligence briefer. After decades of work in the intelligence community, Dempsey is taking a year out of government at the Council on Foreign Relations. And for the first time in years, he is allowed to speak his mind freely (for the most part) about all sorts of things. Naturally, we had to have him on the War on the Rocks podcast. In this episode, Dempsey starts with the story of his career, from his work as a Latin America analyst all the way up to finalizing the President's Daily Brief and, yes, briefing it to the president of the United States. He also walks us through how to understand negotiations in North Korea as well as the ever-worsening civil war in Syria.

A special dispatch from France: On Friday, April 13, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France launched punitive strikes on Syria following the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons. Managing Editor Usha Sahay spoke with Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research and an expert on French defense policy, about France's perspective on the conflict in Syria, Emmanuel Macron's views on military intervention, and the falling out between France and the United States after the aborted strikes in the summer of 2013. Read Bruno's new paper on the subject, co-authored with Jeffrey Lewis, "Beyond the Red Line: The United States, France, and Chemical Weapons in the Syrian War, 2013-2018." https://www.frstrategie.org/en/publications/recherches-et-documents/beyond-the-red-line-the-united-states-france-and-chemical-weapons-in-the-syrian-war-2013-2018-06-2018

This is Horns of a Dilemma, the podcast partner to that journal, which features the thinkers and leaders resident at the various institutions of the University of Texas and those who stop in to share their wisdom. On the latest episode of Horns of a Dilemma, we have Amy Zegart, who was hosted at the University of Texas as a part of the Strauss Center's Brumley Speaker Series. You should know who Amy is already, but if you don't she is co-director of the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. To call this a talk about cybersecurity would be accurate, but it wouldn't do this wide-ranging and fascinating episode justice.

Why are so many people at odds over low-yield nuclear weapons? Well, it turns out, this debate touches on a megaton of interesting questions, including how Russia sees its own nuclear arsenal, how it envisions nuclear strategy, how the Kremlin understands the deterrence, and how we might prevent a nuclear war. So if you care about any of those things, you might want to listen in on this fierce debate between Frank Miller - a long-suffering veteran of the Pentagon and nuclear strategy, Dr. Olga Oliker of CSIS and a longtime observer and scholar of Russian nuclear and military doctrine, and Vipin Narang - a professor at MIT and, most importantly, a War on the Rocks senior editor. Co-hosts Ryan Evans and Usha Sahay did their best to moderate this high-yield debate about low-yield nukes. Get ready for the fallout.

In the second episode of our new podcast series, "Horns of a Dilemma," William Inboden interviews Mark Updegrove, president and chief Executive of the LBJ Foundation, and author of the new book The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush (Harper 2017). This new book draws on interviews with both Bush presidents to explore their formative experiences as well as their perspectives on public service, America's role in the world, Donald Trump, and the transmutation of the Republican Party that has transfixed the United States and turned its politics upside-down.

This is the first episode of "Horns of a Dilemma," a new series brought to you by the Texas National Security Review, featuring the leaders and thinkers based at the University of Texas or who stop in to share their wisdom. Fittingly, we are kicking this off with a conversation on leadership, mostly in the national security context. This session is moderated by William Inboden, the director of the Clements Center. The guests are all based at the University of Texas: Adm. (ret.) Bill McRaven, former CIA Director John Brennan, former NSA Director Adm. (ret.) Bobby Inman, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro. Have a listen and don't forget to subscribe to this new show's feed!

Does the future of warfare demand the U.S. military change its standards for everything from fitness to personal appearance? This question opened up a major debate in the electronic pages of War on the Rocks. So Ryan Evans invited the participants in that debate -- Jacqueline Schneider, Mark Cancian, and Crispin Burke -- to join him on the show and work out everything from why military standards exist to what the wars of the future will look like, along with the warriors who fight them.

In our latest episode, Usha Sahay and Ryan Evans were joined by Thomas Rid, Michael Sulmeyer, and a mystery guest (ok, ok, it's Corinna Fehst) to talk about cyber-security, election meddling, reports about U.S. intel agencies buying back pilfered hacking tools, going dark, legislatures as the vulnerable soft cyber underbelly of democracies, and the different threats posed by Russia and China. Also, "Password1" is not a good password according to our guests. So you should probably change that.

Two key strategy documents released by the Trump administration signal the United States is finally gearing up for a new era of great power competition. And China is the most daunting competitor on the horizon. Is this the right move? Is the president on board? Are America's allies up for it? What would a war of choice in North Korea do to a Sino-American competition? How can and should America compete politically, economically, and militarily? Was it naive to expect China to become a responsible stakeholder to begin with? To answer these questions and more, Kelly Magsamen of the Center for American Progress and Ely Ratner of the Council on Foreign Relations sat down with Ryan at WOTR HQ with the aid of three kinds of whisk(e)y. Both Kelly and Ely drew on their experiences in the Obama administration, in which they both served in senior capacities.

How did President Barack Obama leave America's strategic position when he left office? How is President Donald Trump doing so far? What is the role of the historian in sorting through these questions? Hal Brands and Francis Gavin — both of the Kissinger Center at SAIS — join Ryan Evans to debate these questions and many more over beers and through the lens of Hal's new book, American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump.