War on the Rocks

This week, Loren, Radha, and Erin discuss the North Korean assassination (beware the perfume lady) and take questions from listeners (what is inter-service rivalry anyway?). Kori Schake joins to dissect the defense budget, H.R. McMaster's challenges at the National Security Council, Thucydides, and why she hates Moneyball.

In this special episode, Ryan Evans sat down with Ben Buchanan of the Belfer Center at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and in front of an audience! Ben and Ryan chatted about his new book with Oxford University Press, The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust and Fear Between Nations. There were some great questions from members of the audience. Enjoy!

How has counter-terrorism changed from 9/11 to today over three presidencies? To answer that question, Ryan Evans sat down with two guests with deep perspective on counter-terrorism: Colin Kahl was the national security adviser to Vice President Biden and, earlier in the Obama administration, was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. He is now associate professor in the Se...

In this episode, WOTR's Ryan Evans interviews John Bew about the state of the "special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom as the presidency of Donald Trump unfolds. How is Prime Minister Theresa May trying to manage British relations with the United States? Is Parliament making it easier or harder for her? What does Brexit mean for British power? Will Britain start to m...

This week on Bombshell, we walk through the first week of the Trump administration. Sit down and listen to Radha Iyengar Plumb, Loren DeJonge Schulman, and Erin Simpson discuss America First, cabinet confirmations, Chelsea Manning, Wall of Stars + Hall of Heroes, re-organization of the National Security Council, and the immigration order. Stick around for our favorite podcasts and thoughts on Sher...

Just an hour before Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, Ryan Evans sat down with Richard Haass in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations. Given the momentous changes that seem to be underway, the topic under discussion was fitting: world order. Richard's new book - A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order - seeks to explai...

Welcome to Bombshell.  This new bi-weekly series, brought to you by War on the Rocks, is hosted by three of your favorite Washington insiders who will dissect today's foreign policy crises and tomorrow's security challenges.  Our hosts — Loren DeJonge Schulman, Radha Iyengar Plumb, and Erin Simpson — will talk military strategy, White House mayhem, and the best cocktails known to (wo)man. In this...

If you follow international affairs, it often feels like you can't go to a lecture or read an article without being told that the world's economic and military center of gravity is shifting from West to East. Michael Auslin takes a different view in his new book, The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World's Most Dynamic Region (Yale University Press, 2017). We sat do...

One thing is clear about President-elect Donald Trump: He is skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community. With the aid of a bottle of bourbon, War on the Rocks assembled a top-notch group of experts to talk about what Trump means for the intelligence community. Our guests in this episode included Carmen Medina - a 32-year veteran of the CIA; David Priess - author of The President's Book of Secret...

In this episode of the War on the Rocks podcast, editor-in-chief Ryan Evans sat down with Michael S. Neiberg, author of the new book, The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America. Neiberg, an accomplished historian who holds the Chair of War Studies at the U.S. Army War College, covered a range of topics, starting with America and World War I,  the Treaty of Versailles, World Wa...

Revelations over emails are going to be roiling this election season to the very end. This is, in no small part, due to a series of targeted hacks and leaks that cyber-security experts and the U.S. intelligence community have attributed to Russia. In this episode, we address this unprecedented Russian-directed information operations campaign targeting the U.S. presidential election and, indeed, th...

In an "around the world" edition of our podcast series, Ryan Evans convened a top-notch group to discuss everything from Cuba to the Middle East to Russia to deterrence to China to personnel issues along with a whole range of big issues for the first 100 days of the next administration. Tune in to listen to Elbridge Colby (CNAS), Radha Iyengar (RAND), Will McCants (Brookings), and Bill Rosenau (CN...

In the latest episode of our podcast, editor-in-chief Ryan Evans sat down with Gen. Jim Mattis and Kori Schake of the Hoover Institution to talk about civil-military relations, the subject of their new book Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military. This is the first major study of civil-military relations in years. The conversation also turned to strategy, with Mattis observing that W...

The Ataturk Cultural Center in Istanbul was closed down during the Gezi Park protests in 2013. This former symbol of Turkey's revered founding father is today adorned with large photos of its current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who successfully defeated an attempted military coup d'etat on Friday evening and Saturday morning. Some of you might have chimed into yesterday's live Google Hangout ...

What big think books on strategy in history should you add to you shelf this summer? Our editor-in-chief, Ryan Evans, sat down with two authors of two of his favorite books this year. First, he spoke to Hal Brands, author of the new book Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order (Cornell). Hal has just taken up a professorship at the Kissinger Center a...

Is Barack Obama's foreign policy "failing at nearly every turn," as Speaker Paul Ryan and many other Republicans contend? Or has the president actually crafted a wiser, more effective approach to America's place in the world that sets this country up for success? Derek Chollet, a six-year veteran of the Obama administration, takes the latter view in his new book, The Long Game: How Obama Defied Wa...

We're going to try something a little different with this episode of the podcast, and I think you're going to like it. If you listened to our last episode, you know our focus was on the Munich Security Conference – a major annual event that hosts heads of state, ministers of foreign affairs and defense, thought leaders, and, this year, whisky-swilling editors like me. In this episode, the focus is...

The Munich Security Conference brings together leaders from all around the world to discuss defense, foreign policy, and strategy - the bread and butter of War on the Rocks. It has been called the Davos of international security. Our editor-in-chief, Ryan Evans, was privileged to join the U.S congressional delegation to this year's conference. While he was there, he interviewed a number of key lea...

We have a two-parter for you in this episode. First, WOTR's Ryan Evans spoke with Steve Blank of Silicon Valley fame about his new course, "Hacking Defense." The class just launched at Stanford, but Steve has plans to proliferate it around the country. Will this course help change the way we approach national defense? Next, Ryan sat down with Basam Ridha Al Hussaini. Basam works for Iraqi Prime Mi...

The relationship between journalists and the U.S. military is simultaneously intimate and distant.  In the last several decades and the last two in particular, many things have changed in the way that journalists cover the military, but perhaps not as many as you think. Three defense and national security journalists of different generations joined Ryan Evans of War on the Rocks to talk about how...

WOTR's Ryan Evans sat down with Colin Kahl, the National Security Advisor to Vice Present Joe Biden, to talk about the mess of the Middle East and what the Obama administration is doing about it. From Iran to the Gulf states to Syria to Iraq to Turkey and beyond, Kahl explains how the White House views the problems and opportunities there. He also discusses what it's like to be in a presidential a...

We are trying something a little new with our podcast series. Segments! And music! In the first segment of our new podcast, Ryan Evans sits down with Claude Berube to talk about his new novel, Syren's Song. Ryan then joins Gen. Bob Scales to talk about his recent trip to Europe where he looked at the ability of U.S. and European forces to fight Russia in the event of a war. Gen. Scales expands on...

How will the U.S. military stay competitive? This is about far more than platforms, bombs, and guns. It is fundamentally about people. And with archaic personnel systems plaguing the armed forces and the Department of Defense, our talented young men and women are being drawn away into the private sector in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter sat down with WOTR's Ryan...

In histories of the Second World War, the Vatican has not fared well. Pope Pius XII has been condemned as "Hitler's Pope" and the Church castigated for not doing enough to avert war and save the victims of the Third Reich. Enter Mark Riebling's new book, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler. After years of painstaking research in the Vatican's archives, Riebling has a different an...

What's going on around the world? For our latest podcast, WOTR editor-in-chief Ryan Evans was joined by a great group to talk about Russia and its intervention in Syria, the Middle East more broadly, America's approach to foreign policy, the refugee crisis in Europe, the international economy, and Congress.  Our guests were Justin Johnson of the Heritage Foundation, Denise Natali of the National D...