Podcasts about Deterrence

On this week's Unpacking Europe podcast the CER's deputy director Ian Bond sat down with Armida van Rij a senior research fellow at the CER and Michael Martin Richter UK country director at the Hanns Seidel Foundation to discuss the themes of the new paper ‘Rearming Europe for Deterrence', available here: https://buff.ly/rwfLU1S They took a detailed look the security threats to Europe, the increase in defence budgets and how this spending can be best utilised to increase Europe's capabilities. They discussed what Europe can do to prepare to defend itself, what lessons can be learnt from Ukraine and the need to update perspectives on how modern warfare should be approached and what is required to combat cyber-attacks.

In dem Agora Strategy Geopolitik-Podcast „The Future of Power" lädt Dr. Timo Blenk (CEO) monatlich Entscheidungsträger aus Diplomatie; Wirtschaft; Politik und Militär ein, um aktuelle geopolitische Entwicklungen zu diskutieren. Über die Einflüsse dieser zu informieren und fundierte Entscheidungsgrundlagen zu schaffen, ist der Kern dieses Projekts. Diesen Monat zu Gast ist Dr. Ralf Schneider, Senior Fellow und Leiter des Cybersecurity- und NextGenIT-Think-Tanks der Allianz und ehemaliger Group CIO der Allianz-Gruppe! In der 41. Folge unseres Podcasts analysieren Dr. Blenk und Dr. Schneider die neue Cyber-Bedrohungslage und sprechen über kollektive Abwehrstrategien, die Risiken durch KI und Quantencomputing sowie die digitale Souveränität Europas. Die wichtigsten Themen des Monats Cyber Deterrence: Risiko und Kosten für Angreifer erhöhen Postquantum & KI: nutzlose Verschlüsselungen und Echtzeitmonitoring von Agenten Digitale Souveränität: Daten, Rechenzentren und Optionalität

Japan and the United States have held working-level talks at the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo on extended deterrence, including the U.S. nuclear umbrella, reaffirming their commitment to stronger bilateral cooperation, the Japanese government said Wednesday.

"Without rockets, nothing is going to happen." In the five years since Taiwan's Space Development Act, that island has started to build-out satellite constellations, a launch site, and has just received its first-ever invitation from NASA to contribute directly to the Artemis lunar program. Deterrence and remaining independent from the PRC is also a driver. Laura Winter speaks with Dr. Wu Jong-Shinn, Director General, Taiwan Space Agency (TASA).

The war in Ukraine has fundamentally altered the strategic environment for Russia on its western border. The conflict has expanded the line of contact with NATO and the alliance's partners in Ukraine, and it now stretches all the way from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. The nature of the relationship has also changed profoundly, with NATO viewing Russia as a generational threat, and Ukraine emerging as an aggrieved and highly militarily capable nation keen to settle scores with the Kremlin. Advancements in technology have also revolutionized the war and made the strategic landscape far more worrisome for Russia. How does Moscow perceive these changes? And how might future generations of the state security establishment address the challenges? For more in-depth analysis, read Eugene Rumer's paper, Belligerent and Beleaguered: Russia After the War with Ukraine.

Curtis and Kirk Fansher provide a May 2026 deterrence news roundup on developments shaping strategic stability. They discuss Russia's nuclear exercises in Belarus, its successful SARMAT ICBM test, and its third ORESHNIK missile attack on Kyiv. They also explore NATO's evolving deterrence and how countries use drills, modernization, and dual-use attacks to send signals and manage escalation.Articles:https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/05/19/nuclear-war-exercises-begin/7881779178972/https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-test-launch-missile-satan-ii-calls-putin-worlds-most-powerful/https://militarnyi.com/en/news/russia-two-oreshnik-missiles-first-donetsk/https://thinkdeterrence.com/Like and follow us –The NIDS View: https://media.rss.com/nuclearview/feed.xmlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thinkdeterrenceX.com: https://x.com/thinkdeterrenceYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyGa4dcPqONWzjmbuZMOBHQRumble: https://rumble.com/user/NIDSthinkdeterrenceGlobal Security Review: https://globalsecurityreview.comOur Free Events: https://thinkdeterrence.com/events/

Welcome to The Kevin Jackson Show!You know, one of the most fascinating things about politics is how quickly people move from confidence to legal defense funds.One day you're the future of the party.The next day you're hiring attorneys.That's not a career path. That's a weather forecast.And speaking of forecasts, have you noticed how quiet the southern border has gotten?Remember when we were told the border was impossible to secure? Remember when we were informed that millions of people pouring into the country was simply the new normal? We were told that walls don't work. Enforcement doesn't work. Deportation doesn't work. Deterrence doesn't work.Turns out the only thing that didn't work was the political will.Illegal immigration has slowed to what can only be described as a trickle compared to the flood Americans endured for years. Not because geography changed. Not because the Rio Grande dried up. Not because coyotes suddenly found religion.Policy changed.And now the United States is reportedly working with other countries as part of a much broader deportation strategy. Think about how remarkable that is.[X] SB – SoS RubioFor years Washington acted like deporting people was harder than building a nuclear reactor. Suddenly we're coordinating internationally.It's almost as if the problem was never capability.It was desire.Meanwhile, Senator Ruben Gallego has launched a legal defense fund.Now that's interesting.Very interesting.Because politicians don't generally establish legal defense funds the way people start Christmas clubs.Nobody says, "You know what? Nothing's wrong, but let's raise money for lawyers."That's not how it works.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The brothers get together for a conversation about the ongoing Israeli war on Lebanon, the meaning of deterrence, the role of Iran in Lebanon, the question of Lebanon's sovereignty, and the divisions within Lebanon about how best to defend the country and its people. Date of recording: May 28, 2026 Follow us on our socials: X: @MakdisiStreet Insta: @Makdisist TikTok: @Makdisistreet YouTube: @Makdisistreet Sign up at Patreon.com/MakdisiStreet to access all the bonus content, including the latest brothers-only conversation.  

On this episode, we examine what happens when deterrence fails. What becomes our plan and strategy? Also, who are the deep state? Channel Support - https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/FGHPVTVAPRUNU Jeff Nyquist - www.jrnyquist.blog Trevor Loudon - www.trevorloudon.com and www.keywiki.org  Lee Wheelbarger - www.klwworldnews.com Follow us on X: @Anderson10x3 @JRNyquist @TrevorLoudon1 @KLWNews1

This week on the Korea Pro Podcast, Jeongmin Kim and John Lee sit down with Ankit Panda, Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to discuss how U.S. alliances are changing and what that means for South Korea. The episode begins with a look at why U.S. allies should not be treated as a single category, and how South Korea's alliance with Washington differs from those involving NATO, Japan, Canada and Australia. The conversation then turns to South Korea's growing defense autonomy, extended deterrence and the debate over whether Seoul could eventually seek its own nuclear weapons. The episode also looks at how U.S. policy uncertainty, regional contingencies and the Strait of Hormuz crisis are shaping South Korea's strategic choices — from energy security to Taiwan and OPCON transfer. About the podcast: The Korea Pro Podcast is a weekly conversation hosted by Korea Risk Group Executive Director Jeongmin Kim, Managing Editor John Lee and correspondent Joon Ha Park, delivering deep, clear analysis of South Korean politics, diplomacy, security, society and technology for professionals who need more than headlines. Uploaded every Friday. This episode was recorded on Thursday May 21, 2026 Audio edited by Alannah Hill

2026-05-28 | UPDATES #208 | How the May 26th Pentagon announcement may just have handed Putin the greatest strategic gift of the 21st century. A prize that barely could have been conceived of before Trump returned to the White House. 26–27 May 2026 — a third of us jets pulled from NATO, destroyers cut, every submarine withdrawn, drones slashed — and Russian forces drilling for Baltic operations in the same week. As I predicted in 2025, Europe is now on its own. ----------SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.gofundme.com/f/scaling-up-campaign-to-fight-authoritarian-disinformation----------ACTIVE CAMPAIGN:We are raising funds for 5 of 15 Vampire DronesSilicon Curtain for Kupiansk Vampires. Dzyga's Paw, together with Jonathan Fink, is joining forces to raise $40,000 to provide the Khartiia Brigade with Vampire Drones.https://dzygaspaw.com/silicon-curtain-for-kupiansk-vampiresThese heavy bombers are designed to destroy manpower and equipment, as well as for remote mining. The Vampire UAV, manufactured by Skyfall, has proven itself to be one of the most effective weapons in the Kupiansk direction. Skyfall is one of Ukraine's largest defense tech companies, producing Vampire bomber drones, various modifications of Shrike FPV drones, P1-SUN, Shahed drone interceptors, communication systems, and components.----------PLEASE HELP ME ME TO GROW SILICON CURTAINWe are planning our events for 2026, and to do more and have a greater impact. After achieving more than 12 events in 2025, we will aim to double that! 24 events and interviews on the ground in Ukraine, to push back against weaponized information, toxic propaganda and corrosive disinformation. Please help us make it happen!----------SOURCES: Der Spiegel (via Military Times) — "Report: US to cut strategic bombers and warships available to NATO in a crisis" (26 May 2026)RT — "US plans to slash contributions to NATO – Spiegel" (26 May 2026) Daily Mail (via PapaLinc/Intel Drop syndication) — "Trump's secret NATO ultimatum sparks panic as US 'pulls jets, bombers and EVERY submarine from Europe'" (26-27 May 2026)CNN Politics — Natasha Bertrand, "US military withdrawing some troops from Eastern Europe" (29 October 2025) The Hill / Yahoo News — "GOP chairs blast Trump's move to pull troops from Romania" (October 2025) CBS News — "Trump administration's Europe troop drawdown fuels concern amid NATO allies, draws fire even from Republicans" (October 2025) — Estonia's Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur statement on continued US commitment; Pentagon's "force posture adjustment will not change the security environment in Europe" framing; "primary responsibility for the conventional defense of Europe" languagePBS NewsHour / AP — "U.S. to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany in next 6 to 12 months" (May 2026)CNN Politics — "Trump is cutting the numbers of US troops in Europe. Here's how" (14 May 2026)Fox News — "Congress moves block Pentagon from cutting US troops Europe South Korea" (late 2025/early 2026) House Armed Services Committee / Wicker.senate.gov — "Chairmen of Senate and House Armed Services Committees: We Strongly Oppose the Pentagon's Decision to Scale Back the U.S. Troop Presence in Romania" (29 October 2025) Yahoo News / The Hill — "Pentagon cuts troops in Eastern Europe, prompting rare pushback by GOP lawmakers" (October-November 2025) ----------

Both of Israel’s wars in Iran have been “strategic failures” and critically damaged the country’s deterrence, Danny Citrinowicz, a former top Iran expert in Israeli military intelligence, told the Haaretz Podcast. He cited a long list of missteps and misguided assumptions that led to the failure of the solo military operation in 2025 and the joint U.S. attack in February. “We overestimated air power and underestimated Iranian resilience,” Citrinowicz said, resulting in the “worst possible strategic reality, with a more extreme, decentralized regime in Tehran,” and heightened tensions with the U.S. – all while highlighting Israel’s dependence on the U.S. as a weakness. While Iran once feared an attack by Israel, he noted, its leaders have now learned that they can be attacked by the two strongest air forces in the world and emerge with its regime intact, as well as “the capacity to launch missiles and drones, and theoretically has the potential to move to a nuclear bomb.” Moreover, in a boomerang effect, he noted, wars launched to deter Iran’s nuclear program have likely intensified Tehran’s motivation to acquire nuclear capacity in order to prevent future attacks. In his conversation with podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Citrinowicz – a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies – also discussed the intensifying conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s continued belief that Saudi Arabia will soon join the Abraham Accords, which he called a hope “detached from reality.” Read more: Iran and U.S. Trade Air Strikes After Trump Dismisses Report of Hormuz Deal Trump's Iran Deal: Netanyahu's 2018 Dream Is The World's 2026 Nightmare Analysis | Israel Demands to Disarm Its Regional Enemies, but Refuses to Pay the Price Trump: Not Sure Iran Deal Possible Unless Saudis, Qatar Join Abraham Accords U.S. May Need Years to Rebuild Weapons Stockpiles Depleted in Iran War, Report SaysSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The future of war has been evolving before our eyes in Ukraine, yet the west still plans to fight the last war. In this special episode, guest host Noah Smith (@noahpinion) and Brandon Anderson sit down with Yaroslav Azhnyuk (@YaroslavAzhnyuk), a serial tech founder who went from building PetCube to founding The Fourth Law, one of the world's most advanced AI-guided drone companies. Over two hours we cover the technology, tactics, and geopolitics of drone warfare, and why the modern battlefield has already left the West behind:* Yaroslav's personal history and the Ukraine war [00:01:04 – 00:14:01]* The modern drone tech stack: why FPV drones are the new god of war, the future of the rifleman, fiber optic vs. AI, five levels of autonomy, and the eight dimensions of the autonomous battlefield [00:14:01 – 01:05:13]* The geopolitics and economics of drones: China's manufacturing advantage, the drone race, Western defense readiness, countermeasures, and why the gap is widening [01:05:13 – 01:58:57]For those looking for Noah Smith's commentary, it really gets going around the 00:51:31 mark.Yaroslav Azhnyuk / The Fourth Law:* X: https://x.com/YaroslavAzhnyuk* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaroslavazhnyuk/* The Fourth Law: https://thefourthlaw.aiNoah Smith:* Substack: Noah Smith * X: https://x.com/noahpinionTimestamps00:00:00 Cold Open: China's 4 Billion Drones and the Cameras-to-Explosives Pipeline00:01:04 Introduction: Brandon, Noah Smith, and Yaroslav Azhnyuk00:05:41 From Tech Entrepreneur to Defense: PetCube, Brave One, and the D3 Fund00:10:42 The Ethics of Building Weapons: Dual-Use Technology and the Wolf at the Door00:14:01 The Tech Stack: Cameras, Autonomy Modules, Interceptors, and a Semiconductor Fab00:18:47 Fiber Optic vs. AI: The Radio Horizon Problem and $32/km Cable00:25:32 FPV Drones: The New God of War — 70–80% of Frontline Casualties00:28:28 The Five Levels of Drone Autonomy: From Terminal Guidance to Full Autonomy00:41:37 The Eight Dimensions of the Autonomous Battlefield00:45:32 AI Safety and the Morality of Autonomous Weapons00:51:31 The End of the Rifleman? Noah's 2013 Prediction vs. Battlefield Reality01:05:13 China's Manufacturing Advantage and Western Vulnerabilities01:24:21 Policy Advice for Western Defense: Defense Valley and the Widening Gap01:32:54 The Drone Race: Who's Ahead, Category by Category01:41:57 Countermeasures: Shotguns, Jammers, Lasers, and Fishnets01:58:19 The Wedding and Final Takeaway: Be Prepared for WarTranscriptCold Open: China, FPV Drones, and the New Warning SignYaroslav [00:00:00]: Think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world. China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones.Noah [00:00:10]: Would you say that right now China is now the supreme conventional military power on Earth, given its ability to manufacture and deploy drones in the quantity and quality that you just described?Yaroslav [00:00:20]: I don't think we have all the information to claim that but we cannot count it out, and that alone should be a big warning sign. As I say, at some point in my life I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers. So that's the short story. And when you think about what your nation, what your patriots are going through, you realize that's the only morally right thing to do is to fight back, and it is immoral not to fight back, and then the choice becomes very clear.Introduction: Yaroslav Azhnyuk, Petcube, and the Last Flight into KyivBrandon [00:01:04]: Welcome to Latent Space. I'm Brandon. I normally do science podcasts, but today we're going to do something a little bit different. I'm joined by Noah Smith of Noahpinion on Substack and Twitter. And he has lots of interesting things to say about drones. And as a guest, we have Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of The Fourth Law and several other, drone-related startups. To get started, it is February 23rd, 2022. You are running a pet startup. You're connecting pets with their owners. Let's go in just a little bit of background. How did you get started in tech, and what were you working on before the Ukrainian war started?Yaroslav [00:01:50]: Good to be here. Thank you. On February 23rd, late in the evening, 11:00 PM Kyiv time, my wife and I landed in Kyiv. Actually, then she was a fiance. We came from Lviv, where we were looking at a church, where our wedding should have taken place. And we got into this cab ride from the airport to our home, and the driver was like, “You crazy. Like, everyone's leaving Kyiv. Why do you come?” We're like, “What? Nothing's going to happen. Dude, chill.” And then obviously, eight minutes later, or eight hours later, the bombs fell in the city. It was quite surreal. We probably landed on the last flight that landed in Kyiv, or one of those last flights. My background, I'm a tech guy. Studied applied mathematics in Kyiv Polytechnics, born and raised in Kyiv. My parents are old PhDs from academia, and grandparents too. Like, everything, from linguistics to nuclear physics. And I'm an entrepreneur, so I've built a bunch of companies. Petcube is the one you were referencing. So I lived in San Francisco 2014 to 2020, building Petcube, which is one of the leading, pet device companies in the world, selling lots of pet cameras. And then, yeah, as I say, at some point in my life I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers. So that's the short story.February 24th: Leaving Kyiv as the Invasion BeginsNoah [00:03:28]: February 24th, I guess a few hours after you, go to check out your wedding chapel, what do you do?Yaroslav [00:03:37]: We had a plan for this situation. So my parents and family live in Kyiv, and we're like, “Okay, this has actually started. The worst has, come true.” And so we basically packed our belongings and got in the car and spent 17 hours driving west. And that was pretty sure most people in our audience watched at least one apocalyptic movie in their life, so that was exactly like that. Like, felt exactly like that. Missiles are falling. Like, there was smoke in Kyiv. Like, my dad and I went, like, to central part of the cities. It's probably, likeYaroslav [00:04:20]: 800 meters from presidential office, to pick some stuff up at his workplace. Because he's, like, the head of an academic institution, so he had to get some of the things with him. And super surreal. Like, the streets are empty. Like, the gas stations are out of gas. Like, we found some gas station. We didn't have, like, spare canisters with us, so we're like, We figured out, like, the car was diesel, so like, we figured out, if it's diesel, you can actually store it in plastic, canisters, and we bought some window wash for the cars. We poured it out of the canisters, and we poured the diesel into that. Yeah, so it was like that. And then, like, helping friends get out, like my friend and his dog. Like, we found Like, my brother was also, like, riding in a separate car. We found a place for my friend who didn't have a car. It was like, yeah, it was like, totally surreal. And we didn't know of course, and you didn't know this will last for so long. You didn't know whether Ukraine will be able to defend Kyiv. And it was like, yeah, very little information and very little insight into future.From Pet Cameras to Defense Tech: Building for Ukraine and the Free WorldNoah [00:05:42]: What are your thoughts with regards to how do you, defend, Ukraine? So you eventually start building drones Like, what is the process to get from there from where you were building, devices that connect owners with pets to building drones, and what other things did you do to help the war effort in the process?Yaroslav [00:06:07]: It's definitely non-trivial, right? Like, I didn't go, to I didn't get any, like, military education when I was a student. Like, normally, in Ukraine, you would, you would go to like, this military school even if you're getting higher education in any other, sphere. I decided to skip that which is like, an unusual way to go. And I never thought that I will be somehow engaged in a war effort. Like, what is war? Of course, wars are over. It's the end of history. So one thing you got to understand about, like, many Ukrainians and like, I guess, it's also true about most of the people I met here in the US, that your who you are in terms of your nationality is a big part of your identity. So when that gets under attack, it's something deeper than just the country you live in gets under attack, right? And I Day one, I figured I'm going to I'm going to fight back with everything I can, right? But I didn't think on day one that I'm actually going to do, weapons. And a bunch of things. We were reaching out to a number of American, congresspeople and senators, and basically advocating for support of Ukraine, for voting for lend lease, which has happened in May 2022, but didn't actually work as expected. We helped start, Brave One, which is now a very important defense innovation cluster, sort of like a DIU here in the US. We helped start, a fund called D3. It's like, it was started or co-started by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. So a bunch of these odd things, but then eventually I was like, “Okay,”by 2023 it was obvious this thing, A is going to last a lot more time, and B, that the whole world is shifting and that there's going to be a new arms race, that the warfare is redefined by drones as platforms. And for the first time in history, you have a platform that is software defined, that can increase your battlefield capabilities, in a in a step change just overnight. So it's like if you were able to push a software update and get all of your Roman legionnaires a new helmet? That has never been possible before. It's the first time in the history of war this is possible. So all of that and many other things like, supply chain fragilization, and the impact that AI is going to have on all of this all these things have become evident to me in 2023, and it's like, “Okay, I should do what I do best, or what I know how to do best, start a tech company, and sort of leverage the global techno capitalist machine, to provide, defensibility to Ukraine and the free world.” So that's literally the mission of the company, increase defensibility of Ukraine and the free world. And then there was some sort of soul-searching and like, asking yourself. It's like, “Okay, am I Actually, I know nothing about weapons. Am I actually, like, ready to make, things that other people use to kill other bad people?”Yaroslav [00:09:36]: When you think about what your nation, what your Compatriots are going through And think about all the terror of places like Bucha, the occupied cities in the east and south, the abducted children, the raped women, all the economic damage that's being done, and the intention to destroy a whole nation, to genocide the people of Ukraine, you realize that's the only morally right thing to do is to fight back, and it is immoral not to fight back. And then the choice becomes very clear. And look, we're just passing the ammunition. We're not doing the actual job. The actual fighters and defenders and heroes are people in the armed forces. We're just support.The Moral Question: Weapons, Responsibility, and Fighting BackNoah [00:10:33]: I have so many questions. Actually, I know you seem to have a question. Do you want to ask anything?Yaroslav [00:10:38]: No, I'm just listening. Go ahead.Noah [00:10:40]: I do want to talk about, some of let's say, the moral issues, like you just said. You endYaroslav [00:10:50]: I think there are no issues there.Yaroslav [00:10:52]: What would an example of a moral question be in this case?Noah [00:10:55]: No, I mean Okay. As you just said, you are creating the tools, but others are using them.Noah [00:11:05]: I was maybe thinking of having this conversation later, but one of the questions is like, is it actually you are going to be building them for your homeland, which you are building it for your homeland, which is I think, very a strong morally defensible position, but this technology is not going to stay with you, right?Noah [00:11:26]: This you will probably be selling these to other people Yeah. So the future is really where the moral issues may come into playYaroslav [00:11:38]: The this question becomes, easier and more complete if we ask this not about a particular technology or particular weapon, if we think that this question actually applies to any kind of technology Right? So -Knife or fire. You can use knife to do surgery and save people's lives, or you can use it as a weapon to take people's lives.Noah [00:12:06]: Cut tomatoes, too.Yaroslav [00:12:08]: Cut tomatoes too.Noah [00:12:09]: Yes, knife.Yaroslav [00:12:09]: That's helpful.Noah [00:12:10]: In Japan, sword and knife, they, call the same word.Yaroslav [00:12:14]: It's like, it's with any technology. Large language models, right? Look at how powerful they are and yet they're available to anyone in North Korea or in Russia.Yaroslav [00:12:29]: That's one side of the argument. The other side is As a maker, what is your responsibility for how the tools you're creating, will be used? There's definitely some responsibility, right? Then How should the decision process look like? Should you, like, try to calculate all the possible scenarios before starting to work on something? Or do you create something that is needed now to save people's lives, and then think about, addressing the unwanted edge cases later? In ideal world where there's like, or okay, it's not ideal world. In a mythical world where there is some one governing party and it gets to decide everything, and there is no other country, that can, decide on their own, you could say, “Well, we need to calculate for all the consequences, and only then, maybe build this building, by replacing this park because, maybe we need this park in the city,”right? So that kind of situation. But when you're in a situation where you're in a forest, in front of a wolf, you first going to deal with the wolf that wants to eat you, and then you're going to go consult Greenpeace. So that's kind of situation that Ukraine is in.The Fourth Law, Odd Systems, and Ukraine's Drone StackNoah [00:13:59]: Enough. Because this is a tech podcast, I did want to spend some time talking about, sort of the tech in that you've developed and what you've been working on. So can you explain, I guess, first of all, like, the problem that you were trying to solve from a technical standpoint? And I think, and then maybe, like, go into some of the solutions and some of the design process that led you from designing, little laser-guided, guiding lasers with a with an iPhone versus Having drones.Yaroslav [00:14:34]: Like, it so happened, that my partners and I, we sort of So I started one company called The Fourth Law, and its goal was and is to Make, massively scalable on-drone autonomy. And then In parallel with that together with my, Petcube co-founders, partners, and friends, we started another company called Odd Systems Which, was focused on making thermal cameras. Cameras, thermal cameras are seeing thermal radiation and are used to see at night. And we're now sort of those companies are getting closer and closer together and we're probably going to merge them. And this group of companies is currently the leading, team in on-drone AI and thermal imaging on the Ukrainian battlefield, and Likely one of the leading, if not the leading in the world. So We have these, like, three sort of business units, which are cameras, drone autonomy, and drones. So the cameras and drone autonomy sell daytime and nighttime cameras and different types of drone autonomous modules to other drone manufacturers, over 200 drone manufacturers in Ukraine. And then the UAV, business unit sells the drones themselves to the armed forces of Ukraine, Ukrainian government. And there are different types of drones. Those are sort of front strike, as we call them, so those are sort of FPV strike drones and the bombers, and then interceptors. And there are different kinds of interceptors. We do Shahed interceptors and we do ISR interceptors. We don't do the deep strike-FPV Drones, Interceptors, and Battery-Powered WarfareNoah [00:16:32]: What's an ISR interceptor?Yaroslav [00:16:33]: ISR is stands for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and those are basically drones which are which, Russians are using to watch over positions and then communicate where, the targets are coming.Noah [00:16:48]: It's a reconnaissance.Yaroslav [00:16:48]: That's, the ISR is sort of a classical term for a for a reconnaissance drone.Noah [00:16:53]: Are all of these battery-powered drones that you just described? ‘Cause I know that the sort of deep strike drones still have, like Some sort ofYaroslav [00:17:01]: Internal combustion engine?Noah [00:17:02]: Internal combustion engine. Are all the things you're talking about battery-powered?Yaroslav [00:17:06]: What we're working on is all battery-powered, right? We don't do the deep strikes, right? And then in terms of autonomy-Noah [00:17:12]: You can catch a Shahed with a battery-powered thing. It's not Fast to catch.Yaroslav [00:17:17]: No, absolutely. Look, Shahed interceptor, like ours, it's called Zero, it goes up to 326 kilometers per hour.Noah [00:17:26]: For reference, how fast is a Shahed?Yaroslav [00:17:28]: Eight, like, in internal phase it could be 280, but in cruise phase it's, like, 220-ish.Yaroslav [00:17:36]: Yeah. And sorry, I'm not like you can convert that into miles if you're interested.Noah [00:17:41]: No, that's fine.Noah [00:17:41]: Multiply by two thirds or point six or something.Yaroslav [00:17:44]: That's easy. Yeah, I was saying that for autonomy modules, right, we, -We make systems, autonomous systems for frontline, for interceptors and some for deep strikes as well, and then different levels of autonomy. So from terminal guidance, which is like lasts 500 meters, give or take, to autonomous bombing, to autonomous target detection, to autonomous navigation and all of that across day and night, different terrains, different time of the year, different platforms like quadcopters and fixed wing, and maybe some other platforms. So it's quite a wide variety of products. We also have like our own simulation. We have our own training school for the war fighters. And we're about to start construction of two, semiconductor plants to make, sensors for thermal cameras. So that's super exciting for me as a computer science guy is Doing semiconductors. Super cool.Noah [00:18:49]: Like in terms of kind of core drone technologies, you basically are one is an FPV replacement without fiber optics, and the other isYaroslav [00:18:59]: YouNoah [00:18:59]: Signal tracking with interceptorsYaroslav [00:19:00]: With or without fiber optics. Fiber optics Is just like, sort of a communication module.Yaroslav [00:19:05]: You can, you can use classical analog, video link and radio link. Those would be two separate radios. You can do digital, or you can do fiber optic, and then fiber optic Has its own advantages but also adds weight and decreases, the distance and decreases, how fast you can, sort of turn and With a drone. Yeah.Noah [00:19:33]: Do you need AI for fiber optic drones?Yaroslav [00:19:36]: Like you can use AI for fiber optic drones. AI replaces a human, right? Fiber optic is making your communication link more resilient. So those are slightly different goals. Like if you want, you can have, AI controlling hundreds of fiber optic drones instead of having 100 operators for each.Fiber Optics, Radio Horizons, and Terminal GuidanceNoah [00:20:03]: I guess I thought that the key reason that people moved to fiber optic drones was for like electronic, countermeasures. Or I guess to counter those.Yaroslav [00:20:13]: I think that's a correct assessment from sort of a public awareness standpoint. In practice it's somewhat more difficult Because besides electronic countermeasures, you have these issues of a radio horizon For FPV drones, which means that asYaroslav [00:20:36]: I believe Earth is round Some people disagree. But basically if you fly a drone and you have a land station over here and a drone flying over hereYaroslav [00:20:49]: If your drone is flying high, you have good direct radio visibility. If your drone goes low, and usually, Russian infantry and vehicles, they're on the ground and you want to hit them, you need to go low. Lower you go, maybe you'll get behind a hill or behind a forest, and if you're far enough, you'll just get behind the curvature of the earth. You get into what's called a radio shadow. And then That is a real bummer because for the last, be it 60 or 20 meters, you won't be able to see anything and it will be very difficult to hit the target. So to counter that what-- And then the distances that these FPV drones, act on they're, they can be quite large. So for example, here in the US there was this drone dominance program competition, and in drone dominance the furthest distance was about 10 kilometers.Noah [00:21:44]: What was drone dominance? What was that competition?Yaroslav [00:21:47]: Drone, the drone dominance is a is a program started, by the US government, to accelerate the development of drone technology here in the US.Noah [00:21:57]: Got it. And the longest range thing they were using was 10 kilometers.Yaroslav [00:22:00]: Was 10 kilometers, right. In Ukraine, like if your drone doesn't fly at least 20, 25, it just, no one's interested in it, and the usual hits are happening. It was like, okay, many hits are happening between 30 and 40 kilometers, and that's what expected from a regular 10-inch, FPV drone. So at that distance, even at altitudes of like 60 to 100 meters, you might start losing, the link. So some of the earlier AI technology that was fielded in FPV drone was this terminal guidance technology. That was the first product that we ever, launched that helped you as an operator, once you see the target from two, three, 500 meters, you lock onto the target and then, it just, drives the drone towards the target no matter what, even after you lost the visual connection. So optic fiber solves that. However, if you want to go like 20 kilometers with optic fiber, that will add an extra three kilos, of useful weight to your drone. SoNoah [00:23:12]: ‘Cause the cable that you have to unspool as you go weighs.Noah [00:23:15]: It is heavy.Yaroslav [00:23:15]: At first, like the spool is about 800 grams, so a bit less than a kilo, and then, and then think about 10, 10 kilometer optic fiber is another kilo, something like that. That takes away from your useful mass and then now you have like, you need a 15-inch drone and it can only carry maybe one or two kilos of explosives if you want to go, 20 kilometers. If you want to go to 30 or 40, like 30 is probably max. 40 is like very problem problematic on optic fiber. And then the problem with optic fiber is it's actually getting super expensive. So and why? Because of all the data centers for AI. That's literally the same optic fiber-Noah [00:24:01]: We're running out of centersYaroslav [00:24:02]: That's being used there.Yaroslav [00:24:02]: Like when Ukrainians and Russians come to Chinese factories to buy the optic fiber, they're like, “We're out. We sold it out to the Americans.”? That's the craziest thing. So optic fiber went up in price from like, $4 per, kilometer to like, $32 per kilometer in a few months in the beginning of this year. And I'veBrandon [00:24:26]: Claude Code is stopping the Russian drone effort here.Yaroslav [00:24:30]: Ukrainian as well. Yeah.Brandon [00:24:31]: Ukrainian. But I read somewhere that the Russians had grown more dependent on fiber optic drones relative to the Ukrainians, and that's one reason why the Ukrainians have sort of regained the initiative in drones recently.Brandon [00:24:42]: How accurate's that?Yaroslav [00:24:43]: The Russians were the first ones to scale that. I think by as of now, Ukraine has caught up. I think, like, as of maybe three months ago, Ukraine is mostly caught up on fiber optic. Yeah.Brandon [00:24:57]: What percent of damage would you say is in terms of FPV drone damage would you say is now fiber optic versus, like autonomous?FPVs as the New God of War: Tanks, Artillery, and Cost per KillYaroslav [00:25:07]: For our, for our audience, I actually, I cannot answer that question. Like, it's like I know the answer, but I would not disclose that. But for our audience, I think another interesting fact is out of all the casualties on the front line Between 70 and 80% are done by FPV drones.Brandon [00:25:30]: FPV drones are the new weapon of universal weapon of warfare.Yaroslav [00:25:34]: It'sBrandon [00:25:35]: Land warfare, anywayYaroslav [00:25:35]: They used to say that artillery is a god of war because artillery used to cause, like 80% of casualties, and now On that ranking-Brandon [00:25:46]: FPVYaroslav [00:25:47]: FPV drones rule.Brandon [00:25:48]: FPV drones are the god of war.Yaroslav [00:25:51]: Sort of. Dethroned artillery. But it's not to say that artillery is not useful, is not needed. Like, all of these systems are needed. Maybe except cavalry, although Russians still use it. I know, have you seen the videos of Russians using mules and horses?Brandon [00:26:09]: What is the usefulness-Yaroslav [00:26:10]: It'Brandon [00:26:10]: Of a tank in the in the modern-Yaroslav [00:26:11]: That's where we need Greenpeace to say a word, but they're silent. Yeah.Brandon [00:26:15]: What's the use of a tank on the modern battlefield?Yaroslav [00:26:21]: It's diminishing.Brandon [00:26:22]: Diminishing.Yaroslav [00:26:22]: However, I think there might be technologies which will, revive the tank. Look, tank still provides you armor, and armor is important. Like, you still need to armor and firepower, right? Like, you can be an armor personal carrier that provides you, armor. The challenge that currently exists is armor is not very well protected against incoming drones. However, there are ways to do to protect it. We were previously talking about this before the podcast. The CEO of Rheinmetall, recently sort of ridiculed, Ukrainian drone industry, saying that like, there is nothing interesting there, no real innovation, no to stand Compared to like, Rheinmetall or Boeing, and it's all made by housewives. There was like, obviously a ton of memes about this people ridiculing the CEO of Rheinmetall. And one of the best quotes, I heard on this topic is from my friend, Alexey Babenko, who's, the head of and founder of VIARI Drone, which is one of the largest manufacturers of FPV drones. They're our partner. They're using our autonomy. So he said that the drones we manufacture in one day will be more than enough to destroy all the tanks Rheinmetall manufactures in a year.Yaroslav [00:27:52]: Then, yeah, cost-wise, of course, a drone is like, $500 and a Rheinmetall tank is what, probably 5 million-ish or maybe more.Brandon [00:28:00]: Don't mess with those housewives.Yaroslav [00:28:03]: Drone wives.Brandon [00:28:04]: Drone wives.Yaroslav [00:28:06]: That's it.Noah [00:28:06]: There's a classic saying that everyone always fights the last war.Noah [00:28:12]: Yet do How did So from your standpoint, how did we get to the point where tanks became irrelevant in at least for now In a matter of just a few years?Yaroslav [00:28:24]: Look, I think it's the same way, how do we get to the point that calculators become irrelevant?Yaroslav [00:28:31]: Now we have iPhones. Like, why would you need a calculator? Technology progresses and its influence grows non-linearly. It's all exponential. So I can tell you that full autonomy, when you put it on a drone Look, so if you, if you think about a tank and a like, it's not a direct comparison, but even, like, a drone and a artillery shell or like, sort of cost per kill, an artillery shell for 155 caliber, which is a standard NATO caliber Currently market price is about $4,000 per piece. So compare that to say, $400 per drone. That's 10 times more expensive. Account for the amortization of the artillery gun and for how vulnerable it is and what is the sort of tactical, capabilities it gives you as compared to a drone. You'll figure out that an FPV drone is maybe three orders of magnitude, more versatile, more useful, more capable than artillery and many of than a classic artillery. Many of Because there are different types of artillery. Not just, like, one 155. You have mortars, you have all that. But give or take, roughly three orders of magnitude maybe. Again, it doesn't have that firepower. It's not one-to-one comparison still.Yaroslav [00:29:53]: Now, take that FPV drone. When you put full autonomy on that FPV drone, which can be not very expensive, like systems that we're, producing are like, in hundreds of dollars of pure bombFull Autonomy: From Human Pilots to Smartphone-Directed Drone MissionsNoah [00:30:06]: Just interrupt. You said full autonomy Just a second ago you were saying that the autonomy here is guidance, right? It's not decision-making.Yaroslav [00:30:14]: No, I was I was saying that's the f-First and sort of easiest pieces of autonomy that was fielded by us. But if you, if you add full autonomy to a droneBrandon [00:30:24]: He, I think he's asking what does it can you, for the listeners, can you explain What the term full autonomy means?Yaroslav [00:30:29]: Basically, I think a good way to think about an FPV drone is like an iPhone of warfare. It's, like, very inexpensive, very mass producible, very versatile. You don't need a bunch of other things when you have a iPhone in your pocket. You don't have, need an MP3 player, you don't need a calculator, don't need other things. All right? So FPV drone is an iPhone. Or like, okay, Apple please don't sue me, is a smartphone. And then, when you add autonomy to it sort of becomes like Uber or ride sharing. Okay? So what it means is instead of actually being a trained pilot who has this complex remote controller device which requires a couple months of training to actually pilot the drone, and then having to pilot it for 30 minutes, flying towards the target, et cetera, et cetera, now you basically, you have your smartphone, you have a drone, you pick your smartphone, you say, “We are here. The bad guys are here. Go and get them.” And the drone goes up, flies in a given direction, localizes itself on the map, finds the dedicated area where they, the bad guys are supposed to be sees the bad guys, bombs them, return, like, watches, so does a damage assessment, returns back, sits down, and then you can pick it up and watch the video if you didn't have the radio link, right?Noah [00:31:59]: That's a bomber drone.Yaroslav [00:32:00]: That's full autonomy for a bomber drone, right?Noah [00:32:03]: You're saying that no human decision is made in this entire process?Brandon [00:32:06]: That's not, that's not what he's saying.Yaroslav [00:32:07]: A human decision was made at the beginning of the process-Noah [00:32:09]: I get it. I get itYaroslav [00:32:09]: The same way as you would fire an artillery.Yaroslav [00:32:12]: When you fire an artillery, you don't stop at like, 500 meters away from a target and ask it whether, you want to strike or not. That's exactly, a human decision is always made at some point. So when you do that's full autonomy, and such full autonomy is happening as we speak. And such full autonomy increases the capabilities of an FPV drone, which is already, like, three orders more powerful than an artillery shell. Full autonomy increases its capabilities by four orders of magnitude because now you can have 100 times as many people who can use it, because you don't need to train those people, and this is important. You can have 10 times, mission success rate, and you can have 10 times utility per drone because now instead of being one-way kamikaze, it's, it can be a bomber.Brandon [00:33:05]: Now wait, let's, you said 10 times mission success rate, which means that fully autonomous bomber drones succeed in their missions 10 times more often than human piloted bomber drones do. That's an important thing to know.Noah [00:33:17]: Maybe, to push back onBrandon [00:33:19]: They're super, they're superhuman. They're, they' 10X superhuman.Yaroslav [00:33:22]: They're not vulnerable to electronic warfare. They don't care about the radio horizon. They don't lose track during navigation. They are not susceptible to human error when, an artillery shell or other drone blows up besides you and you're like, “Hell no,”like, “I'm getting out of here.” Right? That doesn't happen to an autonomous drone. Like, all of those things. Like, we have, like, one of the brigades that's using our drones with just first level autonomy They literally said that their success rates-Brandon [00:33:53]: What's first level autonomy?Yaroslav [00:33:54]: First level autonomy is just the terminal guidance.Yaroslav [00:33:57]: By the way, we have video of that. We can watch that.Brandon [00:33:59]: Terminal guidance means a human gets it nearby and then the AI takes over.Yaroslav [00:34:03]: The human flies it all the way, like 30 kilometers towards the target, and obviously the target was probably given to that human by someone who's flying some ISR drone, some reconnaissance drone, right? So all the way to the target, and once you see the target from a distance of 500 meters, you do target lock, and from there drone flies autonomous. So just that feature alone, it has increased the guy's, his call sign is Grom, so it has increased his, mission success rate, like precision of mission, yeah, mission success rate from 20% to 71%, and it also increased his kill zone from three kilometers to 10 kilometers, which means there's certain area around the front line which is designated kill zone. Whenever enemy goes into that area, it's almost guaranteed to be to be destroyed by a drone. And then obviously the drones are not launched from like, the zero line. They're usually launched from like, minus 10 kilometer-Mission Success, Failure Modes, and the Five Levels of AutonomyBrandon [00:35:03]: What is a zero line?Yaroslav [00:35:05]: Zero line is sort of an imaginary line of control, of two conflicting forces.Brandon [00:35:14]: It's important to explain these things to a lot of the listeners who areYaroslav [00:35:17]: Thank you for askingBrandon [00:35:18]: Familiar with warfare.Noah [00:35:20]: Myself.Noah [00:35:20]: I'm one of those listeners.Brandon [00:35:20]: You said that level one autonomy, in other words just terminal guidance, just, like, human gets it to the finish line and then it goes over the finish line, increases mission success from 20 something percent to 71%, or something like that.Yaroslav [00:35:33]: Increases the kill zoneBrandon [00:35:34]: Increases the kill zoneYaroslav [00:35:34]: Three kilometers to 10 kilometers.Brandon [00:35:36]: Got it.Yaroslav [00:35:36]: On both parameters-Brandon [00:35:37]: What is full autonomy, dude? AndNoah [00:35:38]: Actually on real quick, can we define mission success and like, maybe in a way, what are the failure modes of missions?Brandon [00:35:44]: I have a guess what mission success is.Noah [00:35:46]: But I couldBrandon [00:35:47]: Get ‘em.Yaroslav [00:35:49]: No, but that's a very good question, in fact, because, even if you fly into the target, well, first the target can be damaged or destroyed. Those are two different modes. Then there can be different targets. A sole infantryman is one kind of target. A dugout where supposed there are some, enemies there is another kind of target, and a some mechanical equipment is another type of target. Radio emitting equipment, which, like, often, like, the targets that the military want to get more than anything else is the some enemy radio tower or something like that or some small radio dish that really makes life difficult in that area, in that combat area. So those are different targets, right? It can be destroyed, can be damaged.Then sometimes, the drone hits but doesn't explode. Like, that happens. And then, there are other failure modes. You didn't even reach the target because you were A jammed by electronic warfare; B, you lost the control over drone because of the radio horizon; C, you were jammed by a different type of electronic warfare that happens way before You hit the target area. It's, impacting your, video receiver. So like jamming on video or jamming on control are two different types of jamming. Then something malfunctioned on a drone, just a mechanical malfunction, maybe like a motor broke or like, whatever. So all of those are different failure modes. Yeah, or maybe you got lost, you're navigate navigating to your, to your target. That happens, too.Noah [00:37:41]: The Level one autonomy, basically you manage to point in a direction.Noah [00:37:49]: You go there, and then the last mile The drone taking over.Yaroslav [00:37:52]: We define this like, I define that but it sort of got picked up by the industry. We define five levels of autonomy. So level one is terminal guidance. It's what we just discussed. Level two is bombing. Level three is autonomous target detection and engagement decision. Level four is autonomous navigation. And level five is autonomous takeoff and landing.Noah [00:38:15]: Those are good things to knowYaroslav [00:38:16]: Those are five levels of autonomy. Now, if youNoah [00:38:19]: I have a question for you.Yaroslav [00:38:19]: Sorry. Like, let me finish withNoah [00:38:21]: SorryYaroslav [00:38:21]: Theoretical part.Noah [00:38:23]: What is Tesla running at right now?Yaroslav [00:38:25]: Tesla?Noah [00:38:25]: No, sorry.Yaroslav [00:38:26]: That's very good point. Like, it's exactly, it was inspired by the levels of self-driving autonomy.Noah [00:38:32]: Waymo's level five, right?Noah [00:38:35]: You just tell it where you want to go, it picks you up, and then you go there.Yaroslav [00:38:36]: I think, like, if you, if you look at the classic definitions of self-driving cars, Waymo is still, like, level four because it still requires even remote, but still, like, human control. It's like if Waymo gets in trouble, there is an operator who takes over and resolves this. So that would still be a level four. It doesn't map directly, but it's also five levels.Brandon [00:38:58]: Can I, can I interject a question here? In terms of an FPV drone that's like a suicide drone that'll just blow itself up killing something, how do what it hit? Like, does it, just transmit back, or do you sort of like, lose track of it and hope it hit? Like, what happens to that?Yaroslav [00:39:16]: That's a great question. SoBrandon [00:39:18]: You need another droneYaroslav [00:39:19]: Like, the current battlefield in Ukraine is saturated with different types of drones. So obviously you have all the FPV drones and last year alone, Ukraine manufactured about 4 million of these, and then Russia's maybe, like, 20% less than that. And for this year, the publicly voiced target was 7 million on Ukrainian side. So it's, like, serious numbers. We're getting in serious numbers here. And then besides those, there are different, reconnaissance drones, ISR as we call them, and there are sort of tactical level ISR where we, both Ukrainians and Russians usually use, Mavic, drone by DJI. And then there are a bunch of locally produced drones, which are sort of fixed wing drones that can stay in the air for much longer than Mavic, maybe, like, half an hour. And then, there are drones that can stay for many hours or even up to a day. And those drones have, are more expensive, have more expensive cameras, et cetera, et cetera. We hunt those drones that Russians launch. The Russians hunt our drones, and so on. But ideally, when you, are a group of soldiers operating an FPV, you'll have someone in your, company, or someone in your platoon who has an ISR asset that will do target designation for you. They'll say, “Oh, like, there's a Russian vehicle over there. Go and get him.”and you go there, you get it, and they're like, “Okay, confirmed.”Battlefield Surveillance and the Eight Dimensions of AutonomyBrandon [00:40:57]: Those guys are watching. They have their own drones in the sky.Yaroslav [00:40:59]: Target destroyed. They have, like, a carousel of drones because One Mavic cannot stay more than 30 minutes. ItBrandon [00:41:06]: They're constantly surveilling the battlefield.Yaroslav [00:41:07]: Almost every spot on the battlefield.Yaroslav [00:41:11]: It's not always the case. Sometimes you will not have a surveillance asset, so then you would launch another FPV just to confirm that there was a hit. Then if you see there was a hit and you're not sure if it completely destroyed, you maybe hit again for good measure.Brandon [00:41:26]: You double tap.Yaroslav [00:41:28]: That's how it works. But I was about to give you another sort of piece of taxonomy. So you have five levels of autonomy, right? Then you have sort of eight dimensions of autonomous battlefield. So what is eight dimensions? It's crucial to understand how autonomy evolves in a modern, battlefield environment. So dimension number one is level of autonomy. What are the capabilities that your asset has? Dimension number two is the platform you're operating on. So it can be a quadcopter, a fixed wing drone, different types of maybe, like, a long range drone or short range drone, but it can also be a missile. You can have autonomy even on an artillery shell or a ground vehicle or a sea vehicle. So all of those are different platforms. Level three would be domain. So it's ground to ground or ground to air as an intersection, or ground to sea or sea to air. They're all, like, all the nuances with different domains. Then level four, would be higher levels of autonomy, such as swarming, drone carriers, drone nests, et cetera.Brandon [00:42:39]: Now when you're saying level, you're talking about dimensions, not about-Yaroslav [00:42:42]: Sorry. YeahBrandon [00:42:43]: Autonomy levels. So dimension four.Yaroslav [00:42:43]: The dimension. Yeah, I used to say I was supposed to say dimension. I say dimension because each of them works with another, right? So you might have, like third level autonomy, fixed wing drone operating in land to air, and stuff like that right? And then operating in a swarm or operating from a nest. Right? Then you have, sort of dimension number five is environment. So is it day or night? Is it summer or winter? Is it, humid, cold, dry? What kind of target is it? Is your target hiding in a forest, or is it, behind a hill or within buildings? So all of that is environment. Then you have, dimension number six is command and control. How are you dealing with or like, tens of thousands of those assets around the battlefield? How are you coordinating that on the higher levels of command? How are you collecting data? All that.Yaroslav [00:43:44]: Dimension number seven would be infrastructure, so things like simulation, data collection tools, security, deployment mechanisms, et cetera. So all those systems have to be developed separately and integrate with all the others. And finally, dimension number eight is sort of distribution. Have you deployed 100 of these systems or 100,000 of these systems? Because those are two very different ballgames. So that now gives you a more broad overview of how autonomy propagates across the battle space.Targeting, Human Responsibility, and Rules of EngagementNoah [00:44:23]: As someone who has done machine learning and had gone out of distribution and had things, go horribly wrong, you were talking several of these, kind of axes of thinking about drone warfare seem like they could be very susceptible to some sort of distribution shift if you start making things autonomous.Yaroslav [00:44:41]: Like what?Noah [00:44:41]: I mean Well, first ofYaroslav [00:44:43]: If the I'm very interested Sort of sort of kinds of scenarios that you're thinking about.Noah [00:44:48]: Like the most obvious one is you, if I assume these are computer vision guided systems for at least the last mile, how do you ensure that oh, well, like you now have some fog roll in or something, and you, the drones just attack the wrong thing? Or maybe, it probably will not turn around and fly back and attack you, but youYaroslav [00:45:10]: Same, the same, the same question, how do you ensure that your mortar fire hits the right thing? Well, it's like mortar fire, give or take half a kilometer could be plus or minus. So maybe you fire one, and then you fire another. So drones are actually, much better in being precise in those scenarios. And I think, to your point, I think five to 10 years from now it will be immoral to use weapons without AI.Yaroslav [00:45:44]: ‘Cause weapons without AI will be more likely to cause, collateral damage or unwanted damage. Same way, it will be immoral to drive your own car manually on a public road because it's more likely to cause, unwanted damage.Noah [00:46:02]: Wow, I never considered that mightBrandon [00:46:04]: Really? That's definitely coming.Yaroslav [00:46:07]: Anyway.Brandon [00:46:07]: No, but that' I don't know, it's an obvious, an obvious thought. I agree with you.Brandon [00:46:12]: I, No, they, obviously they're not going to let you drive once most of the cars on the road are autonomous.Noah [00:46:17]: No, that one, don't I believe.Yaroslav [00:46:19]: No, I think you were you were talking about drones, right?Brandon [00:46:21]: The drones, right. Cool.Yaroslav [00:46:22]: The weapons, right?Brandon [00:46:23]: Friendly fire and collateral damage and stuff like that is all minimized with AI.Brandon [00:46:27]: Here's my question. Take all let's go to level six autonomy. Let's take all of the target selection. Let's take all the battlefield data, integrate it into one big AI, and have that big AI basically be in command of the battlefield And agentically do target selection.Yaroslav [00:46:44]: Be the general, right?Brandon [00:46:44]: It's a general. It's, you've cut humans out of the loop except maybe as dexterous robots, repairing drones and fastening things to drones or maybe something like that because you don't have those robots yet. How soon are we there? AI general.Yaroslav [00:46:58]: The most important thing to ask ourselves is who will be faster to that us or our adversaries?Brandon [00:47:07]: I assume us, but how fast will we be to that? I hope us.Yaroslav [00:47:11]: I hope so too.Brandon [00:47:12]: How fast can we Like when are we looking at that in terms of like horizons years?Yaroslav [00:47:18]: Like technically, it could be done now. The question is of course, there's, some engineering work to be done. The bigger challenge is deployment. Right? So okay, technically Like operation in Iran, right? They, the publicly, it was claimed that I think Palantir system was used for target designation, et cetera, et cetera. So it is not exactly as you say, the AI makes all the decisions, but basically AI goes through all the data you have, gives you these 1,027 different targets and says, “You-- To confirm, please press Okay.” And you look at the targets and you're like, “Yeah, sounds right. Press Okay.”so that's, I think that's where we are now already, or we were a couple weeks ago as we're recording this on April 10th. Another question is how massively deployable it is. Is it, like, every decision being made like that or is it, like, just some of the decisions made like that? And then different levels of command and control. There you have, like, the platoon, the company level, the battalion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the tricky thing here when we get into that territory, the tricky thing is If your enemy is getting advantage of being Thousand times faster than yourself by deploying such systems What do you do?Yaroslav [00:49:10]: You got to-Brandon [00:49:12]: The if the enemy is a thousand times faster than you at deploying those systems?Yaroslav [00:49:16]: Like, if enemy starts deploying level six autonomy, as you call And you have not started doingBrandon [00:49:22]: You're in troubleYaroslav [00:49:23]: Yes, exactly. So you have to catch up. So my point is that it is very important to think about the safety of these systems, but that thinking should not slow you down in developing them because they are critical for your existential, survival, right? And like, one person who doesn't think, doesn't get to think about the ethics of the war is a dead person. That person surely doesn't get to think about that.Brandon [00:49:52]: What would be the safety risk of such a system?Yaroslav [00:49:55]: Of course-Brandon [00:49:56]: Friendly fire?Yaroslav [00:49:56]: Just wrong decisions, right?Brandon [00:49:59]: I see.Yaroslav [00:49:59]: Maybe, these decisions-AI Command Decisions, Dead Zones, and Complex BattlefieldsBrandon [00:50:06]: Skynet AI decides it's going to useYaroslav [00:50:08]: No, these-Brandon [00:50:08]: Drone army to kill usYaroslav [00:50:09]: Decisions will not only be made about drones. They are likely to made about what the humans should do on your side as well. Then obviously some environments are more like Ukrainian-Russian war, where you haveBrandon [00:50:26]: It will have to choose to risk lives. It will have to choose to sacrifice human lives-Yaroslav [00:50:28]: Of courseBrandon [00:50:29]: On your side.Yaroslav [00:50:29]: Of course. And then some environments are just, like, dead, like, dead zones and there are no civilians there, or virtually no civilians close to the front line because, like, super dangerous. Everyone has evacuated from there. But there are other environments which are more like, okay, there's a counterterrorist operation. There's, like, a group of terrorists or a group of civilians. Or like, it's like the recent operations in Iran, I imagine that the US and Israeli forces do not want to harm civilians. They only targeted the military targets there, right? So in those situations, it's a different level of responsibility for that decision-making as well. And then there is just such a big variety of those military missions, and I'm not even, like, well-informed or well-educated in military science to tell you about all those scenarios. We would need to put some general besides me, and maybe a Ukraine general and American general would have told you very different stories about these things.Brandon [00:51:34]: Got it. Can I ask a few more questions? All right. So in 2013, I wrote one of my first, paid articles ever was about how the era of drones will change human society. I was just sitting around bored thinking about things.Yaroslav [00:51:54]: You were way ahead of your time.Brandon [00:51:55]: I said, I said, “The following will happen.”Yaroslav [00:51:57]: It's, this article is real. I've read it.Yaroslav [00:51:58]: It's actually-Brandon [00:51:59]: I said small autonomous, suicide drones, will cleanse the battlefield of human infantry. Human infantry will not be able to stand against swarms of AI-powered, suicide drones. That was I didn't even know about, like, AlexNet at the time, I think.Yaroslav [00:52:19]: You're just an avid sci-fi reader.Brandon [00:52:23]: I'm an avid sci-fi reader, but also, like, it's not Like, there will be a way to do that. It's a it's a nonlinear multidimensional search problem, and you get enough compute, you'll find some search algorithm that will get you there. And soBrandon [00:52:38]: I, yeah, I think that one sentence describes the bitter lesson right there.Brandon [00:52:41]: It's just like it's a multidimensional search space. You search it somehow. I don't know. Figure out some get a grad student-Yaroslav [00:52:47]: Sooner or laterBrandon [00:52:47]: To make a search algorithm.Brandon [00:52:48]: It's not that hard. Anyway, so but then, but I guess the point is The point is that human infantry on the battlefield will be will be gone at the end. I wrote that in 2013. Many people on social media laughed at me for that called me hysterical, said things like, “Electronic warfare will knock all the drones out of the sky.”like, “You need humans to hold ground.”that's something you still hear from a lot of people on social media today. I feel that this article that I've written has never been directionally wrong. It has gotten more and more right steadily over time, and that we're very reading the battlefield reports from Ukraine, where, human infantry are basically guy, like a few guys hiding in dugouts for months, and I'm not sure what they're doing.Yaroslav [00:53:35]: That's on Ukraine's side. On the Russian side, that's just like a zerg rush.Brandon [00:53:38]: The zerg rush, and then they just die. Then, but they have some guys in dugouts too, right? Like hiding in dugouts for months.Yaroslav [00:53:45]: They have. Yeah.Brandon [00:53:45]: Like, but that like, what are those guys doing in the dugouts? Are providing, like, frontline, like, reconnaissance? Like, what are they doing?Yaroslav [00:53:54]: If there is a guy in a dugout with some bullets and automatic weapon, the other guy cannot come and take the that dugout. That'Brandon [00:54:07]: I seeYaroslav [00:54:08]: They are they're establishing control over territory.Brandon [00:54:10]: I see. So that is so there still is a use for human infantry on the battlefield as of today.Yaroslav [00:54:15]: LikeBrandon [00:54:15]: How long will that last?Yaroslav [00:54:17]: I think it will last for a while. This is funny. There's this whole Layer of the modern culture, a modern Ukraine culture built around the war-related stuff. So there is this -Punk rock band, that is called SZC, I guess in English that would be. Which stands short for like a deserter or something like that. So anyhow, this band has a song titled “2030.” It's basically about the year 2030, and the war still goes on as like the whatever, third world war or whatever. And they basically, they, sang about the AI and like cyborgs and everything, but the simple infantry is still needed, and we're still, like, getting cold in those dugouts, and we're still doing our job. That's sort of the theme of the song. And it seems like that's actually what's going to happen. There areGround Robots, Simulation, and the Limits of World ModelsBrandon [00:55:30]: Ground robots will not replace humans in the dugouts soon.Yaroslav [00:55:34]: I'm very much interested in following the whole humanoid robot theme andBrandon [00:55:39]: What about like a dog robot?Noah [00:55:41]: Or just mobile controlled platforms or something.Brandon [00:55:44]: Spider robot, yeah.Brandon [00:55:45]: Everything evolves into a crab.Brandon [00:55:46]: You build a crab robot.Yaroslav [00:55:47]: A humanoid-Noah [00:55:48]: The carcinization of warfare.Yaroslav [00:55:51]: There is a lot of utility in humanoid robots because the world is designed around humanoids. So I would not, like, 100% disqualify the possibility that sometimes 10 years in the future, humanoid robots, will be actually fighting. So that's an actual Terminator kind of scenario.Brandon [00:56:14]: Yeah, in the first Terminator movie, you look at what they've got on the battlefield, they've got flying bomber drones and humanoid robots.Yaroslav [00:56:20]: Look, the cost of large language models of running them is getting so low, you can have basically an inexpensive computer running, what was a state-of-the-art model a year and a half ago, running it locally on a device with an open source model, which also means that the Chinese can have it, the Russians can have it, the North Koreans can have it, et cetera. So that is already possible. And with when we're looking at the acceleration of the neural nets, I would've, if not the acceleration of the large language models, I would've said that I don't think that humanoid robots will be able to be useful in the battlefield earlier than in 10 years. But if you account for the exponential, it might be five years or so. The problem with all of the autonomous systems, and it's like starts with self-driving cars and even with all the AI, like modern day AI agents, to make them really, useful, you have to solve such a long tail of edge cases, that it's really difficult to make them useful. Like we were promised, self-driving cars, what, like 2007, Sebastian Thrun and Google, and even before that all the challenges, everything. And Elon of course told us it's going to be one year from 2014, and now we still don't have self-driving Teslas everywhere. We have Waymos in SF and some other places, but they're still, like, not perfect. So I think, I expect something similar from self-flying drones and fully autonomous drones, and we saw that firsthand as with each level of autonomy that we're adding, there is a very wide distance between a prototype and something that is ready to be scaled to millions of units and something that has been scaled to millions of units. But the race with like AI coding tools is just insane. So things might accelerate very fast, faster than we can imagine.Noah [00:58:46]: I think your point is that with due to this long tail behavior Level one autonomy as you've defined it, is actually very natural. Like you basically are just solving an image recognition and tracking system.Yaroslav [00:59:02]: It's actually interesting that you say it that way, and I thought about this the very same way, and we have this joke that there are like 200 companies in Ukraine which are trying to solve last mile, targeting or terminal guidance. It seems like we're like the only company that actually solved that because even that problem-Noah [00:59:22]: I'm not saying it's, I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's at least something that you imagine given our current state.Yaroslav [00:59:26]: Like us and Eric Schmidt, like Eric Schmidt's companies are pretty good.Yaroslav [00:59:29]: Like, I actually have lots of respect to what they're doing, and they're, they have been practically influential and helpful on the battlefield, and they have good engineering.Noah [00:59:38]: I wasn't, I wasn't saying it's trivial. I'm just saying this is a something naturally adaptive based upon things that we know work, well. But some of the other domains that where you do have to make decisions and you have a long tail become much harder, and you worry about edge cases more.Yaroslav [00:59:57]: Like the more, the more complex behavior you're trying to simulate, the more edge cases there are right? The more ways to do it wrong there are. And then there are different approaches. It's like if you think about, if you read academic papers about robotics, right? You sort of the robot is represented as something that has the sort of sensor input, and then you have three, levels of sort of logics or decision-making, which are perception, planning, and control, and then you have actuators as output.So pre-neural nets, you would do perception output and control all with classic logics, right? Then, with AlexNet and computer vision, you could do perception with neural nets and the rest with logic. You cannot currently do each of those separately with neural nets, each of those separately with logics, or you can just have one huge neural net that just takes lots of sensory data. It's not just pixels. Could be sound, could be accelerometer, could be everything, as input, and just outputs the controls. And some of the self-driving car companies are doing that or like, experimenting between different ways of doing that. So you can also, like, think about that and the way you implement those features, also influences how much degrees of freedom the system would have, right? Like control, you can do it classical algorithmic control with common filters and PAD filter, PAD controllers, et cetera, or you can do a neural net, that was trained in a gym with a reinforcement learning, et cetera. And those would be two different behaviors of a system.Noah [01:01:53]: I-- Maybe my point was just much more high level. It'Yaroslav [01:01:56]: Or you can If you go even like, if you go high level, you can, you can like train to like have whatever, like Feifei Li and folks who are doing like physical, sortBrandon [01:02:08]: World modelsYaroslav [01:02:08]: World models, right, physical intelligence, they're trying to make these big models and sort of understand the world and then supposedly you have such model and you can tell a drone, “Okay, like, go over that hill and like, find the bad guys and then get them,”or “Make me a video, make me a photo of the guy smiling and get back to me.” Right? That's one way. Another way you have like these subsystems, like one is navigation, another is finding the person, another is like getting to them to take a photo. And those are again, very different behaviors. And then it's not that one is necessarily better than the other, and we might have more technological ability to do one or another. But all of those systems will exist. And then again, you should always keep in mind that it's only the not only the good guys that are developing these systems, the bad guys are developing these systems as well.China's Drone Supply Chain and the West's Manufacturing GapNoah [01:03:00]: I guess where I'm going with this back to Noah's original thought with the end of the end of the soldier. And so in order to replace-Brandon [01:03:10]: Or at least the end of the rifleman.Noah [01:03:11]: Or the end of the rifleman, yeah.Yaroslav [01:03:13]: I'm not seeing that very close, and it was like I'm, as much as I'm a lover of sci-fi and all of that and a technologist, the more I try to beYaroslav [01:03:27]: Like the I try to have certain humility about these things, and like the military, domain and there was just so much human history and blood and tears, dedicated to sort of understanding this art of war and perfecting it and so on. There is so much knowledge in there that I don't feel like I even started to comprehend, a lot of that. But one thing that I really understood is that even though drones are now making eighty percent of the casualties, you go to the actual officers, you talk to the actual, like, brigade commanders, corps commanders, and they explain to you, how all of it fits together, how when you're thinking about an operation that involves a couple thousand people to get this piece of land, out of the enemy's hands, deoccu deoccupy it, how it is so complex, it involves, dozens of different types of drones and then land operations and reconnaissance operations, psychological operations and then aviations and tanks and logistics and all kinds of these different assets. So modern warfare is really very complex, and the fact that the drones are the latest, coolest thing, and then the AI is latest, coolest thing, doesn't mean that now it's that and only that right? So yeah. Whoever's looking into that I think should realize that it's not just what the press talks about, that the reality is much more difficult, much more complex.Brandon [01:05:17]: Let's talk about China and China's manufacturing capabilities. So suppose that someone, like suppose the United States went to war with China. AndYaroslav [01:05:26]: I hope not.Brandon [01:05:27]: I hope not as well. And then but suppose that drones were very essential to that war of all the types of drones that we're talking about here, and that suppose that China said, “All right, well, you need X and Y and Z, to make those drones to fight us, and we control the production of X and Y and Z, so we're just going to cut you right off, and now you have no drones.”Brandon [01:05:47]: I know that a number of countries, including Ukraine and Taiwan, have been making moves to China-proof their drone productions that China couldn't do that. Examples of things they might be able to cut off might include rare earths, fiber optic cable that you were talking about before, various other things that where even if they don't control one hundred percent of the production, they control enough of the production that would be extremely expensive to produce it without relying on Chinese sources. Or the market's fragmented enough, et cetera. What do you see as China's key bottlenecks, and how easy are those to overcome in terms of China-proofing drone production in case of a war against China?Yaroslav [01:06:30]: Let me start with a saying that -Although China does not sell directly to Ukraine and it does sell directly to Russia, a lot of Ukrainian supply chains, they start in China, right?Yaroslav [01:06:49]: We're not in a conflict with China, and we would not want to be in a conflict with China. And we'd hope that China stays a neutral power between Ukraine and Russia and the US as well. That said, the scenario that you're describing, everything is much worse.Yaroslav [01:07:11]: Think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced four million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world.Yaroslav [01:07:19]: China can produce four billion of these FPV drones.Yaroslav [01:07:23]: China can make them not drones with propellers, but fixed-wing drones, which go not forty kilometers far, but maybe two to three hundred kilometers inland.

We welcome back Stephen Kershnar to discuss the ethics of torture. Kershnar argues that some criminals deserve torture because severe wrongdoing can cause a person to forfeit protections against extreme punishment. He critiques the idea that there are moral constraints the state must never cross.The dialogue also examines objections to torture concerning human dignity, bodily integrity, and the dangers of granting the state such power.Chapters[00:00] Introduction[00:43] Why Punitive Torture?[04:57] Defining Torture[08:22] Solitary Confinement Today[10:15] Deterrence versus Retribution[19:19] Can Rights Be Forfeited?[29:54] Contracts You Cannot Exit[34:30] Consent, Punishment, and Efficiency[37:28] Demographics and Equality[45:48] Punitive Rape Debate[48:05] Side Constraints on Torture[53:40] Third Party Harms[58:06] Closing RemarksSubscribe on Substack: https://braininavat.substack.com/

In this episode of The NIDS View, Jim and Curtis celebrate May 4th and Star Wars Day by exploring the strategic parallels between Star Wars and real‑world debates over deterrence, space warfare, and global security. From the Death Star as a symbol of coercive deterrence to Cold War–era missile defense and the militarization of space, the conversation unpacks how science fiction both reflects—and shapes—strategic thinking. The discussion traces the historical roots of space and missile defense in the 1970s, examines how popular culture influences military imagination and technology, and draws connections between the Star Wars universe and today's geopolitical competition. Along the way, the episode highlights enduring questions of vulnerability, survivability, and signaling in deterrence strategy—and why space remains both a contested domain and a potential arena for cooperation. https://thinkdeterrence.com/ Like and follow us –The NIDS View: https://media.rss.com/nuclearview/feed.xmlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thinkdeterrence X.com: https://x.com/thinkdeterrence YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyGa4dcPqONWzjmbuZMOBHQ Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/NIDSthinkdeterrence Global Security Review: https://globalsecurityreview.comOur Free Events: https://thinkdeterrence.com/events/

Host Janet Michael sits down with Captain Warren Gosnell ("Goz") from the Frederick County Sheriff's Office for another edition of Public Safety Thursday. The two kick off with some relatable chaos — a mic that wasn't turned on, a misplaced phone, spring allergies, and a hilarious on-the-way-in story involving blue lights and a very startled driver. Then they get into the real meat: why Frederick County is leaning into automated traffic enforcement, how LIDAR works, and why treating people with kindness — whether you're the officer or the driver — goes a long way. Spring Chaos & Getting Here Janet's mic was off at the top of the show (she was almost perfect) Goz's busy week: Apple Blossom Festival, a teaching trip to Roanoke, and a bout of bronchitis Spring means more people, more events, more traffic — and longer days on the cul-de-sac On the Way In Stories Goz grabbed KFC nuggets, then flashed his blue lights back at a driver who tried to warn him of a cop ahead Janet watched a car blow a red light right in front of her on Route 522 Is It Illegal to Flash Your High Beams? Letter of the law vs. spirit of the law Flashing lights on ordinary vehicles technically aren't permitted as signals The real goal: slow people down and keep roads safe Law enforcement doesn't mind if you warn others — if it prevents crashes, it's a win Automated Traffic Enforcement in Frederick County School zone speed cameras already in place Red light cameras under consideration at high-crash intersections Possible construction zone cameras on the horizon Why the shift? The county has grown to nearly 130,000 people across 416 square miles — not enough deputies for both calls for service AND proactive traffic enforcement How LIDAR Works Radar beams spread wide (thousands of feet); LIDAR beams stay under 6 inches at 1,000 feet LIDAR operates at the speed of light — vehicle-specific, no room for error Camera only activates if speed exceeds 10 mph over the limit No human bias, no "why didn't you stop that other car?" arguments Kindness on Both Sides of the Window Goz is large and loud — doesn't mean he's mean; body cam footage has cleared him more than once He now tells every driver: "I'm not yelling at you, I'm trying to be heard over traffic" Story of the Ohio driver who ran a red light and accused Goz of "ruining his perfect driving record" Goz's own history: multiple speeding tickets after moving back from Houston, where 75 mph was survival speed The Bottom Line Automated systems aren't replacing officers — they're filling gaps human hands can't cover Deterrence is the goal; if you follow the rules, cameras don't affect you "Safety over convenience."

CFC Director of Utility Research & Policy Brian Sloboda shares what electric cooperatives can do to protect utility infrastructure and how they should focus their physical security efforts. Related content:Watch the video of this episode, "Why Deterrence, Resilience Matter in Physical Security."Read the Solutions article, "Mid-Year Trends Update: Physical Security."For questions and requests about industry research topics, please contact utilityresearchpolicy@nrucfc.coop.CFC members can learn more about the latest industry and technology trends by visiting nrucfc.coop/Solutions.

Conversations on Groong - May  6, 2026This Conversations on Groong episode with Mikael Darbinian examines Armenia's security crisis through the lens of the Strong Armenia doctrine. The discussion focuses on deterrence, diplomacy from a position of strength, Azerbaijani positions inside Armenia's sovereign territory, the risks around TRIPP and the Zangezur Corridor, the rights of Artsakh Armenians, regional war scenarios involving Iran, and the gap between international political theater and Armenia's unresolved national security threats.Topics:Strong Armenia security doctrineAzerbaijani occupation of Armenian territoryTRIPP and Zangezur Corridor risksDiplomacy from a position of strengthEPC optics and national insecurityGuest: Mikael DarbinianHosts:Hovik ManucharyanAsbed BedrossianEpisode 540 | Recorded: May 5, 2026SHOW NOTES: https://podcasts.groong.org/540VIDEO: https://youtu.be/LhnSc26cT7c#Armenia #Artsakh #StrongArmenia #MikaelDarbinian #TRIPP #ZangezurCorridor #ArmenianSecurity #SouthCaucasusSubscribe and follow us everywhere you are: linktr.ee/groong

00:00 Intro03:07 U.S.–Philippines Drills Expand, Japan Boosts Deterrence03:58 U.S. Marines Down Drones Using MADIS System in Drills04:21 U.S.–Philippines Drills Signal Focus on Taiwan Strait05:13 Filipino Defense Chief Not Surprised by China's Move06:05 Philippines: Beijing Moves When Rivals Are Distracted06:44 Intensified China Military Activity Near Taiwan07:36 China Defense Spending Up 31st Straight Year: Report08:49 U.S. Arms Deliveries to Europe Delayed Amid Iran War09:40 FBI Hails Capture of Chinese Hacker as 'Historic Win'11:45 Unexplained Deaths Among Chinese Scientists: Report12:52 Beijing Ramps Up Anti-Corruption Campaign14:00 Xi Jinping Uses Corruption Cases to Sideline Rivals15:18 New DeepSeek Release Fails to Shake AI Market16:22 VOC President on Viral Labubu Dolls and Forced Labor16:45 Labubu Toys Tied to Forced Labor in China: Patterson18:05 Can U.S. Regulations Block Xinjiang Cotton Imports?19:05 When Cheap Goods Come at a Human Cost20:20 Rights Concerns Loom Over Expected Trump–Xi Talks21:55 Why Washington Misread China's Path: Patterson

Age of Transitions and Uncle The Podcast 4 24 2026 AoT#493Palantir/Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic has been distilled down to 22 easy to digest points this past week. Here, Aaron gives his commentary on them. Palantir and their fellow Silicon Valley technocratic institutions are succeeding in taking over the United States, and ruling via a renewed system of war and “deterrence.” Topics include: Palantir and the new Silicon Valley MIC, fascist technocracy, Alex Karp, The Technological Republic, morals and ethics, old aerospace being pushed aside, Iran War showcasing loss of old American Empire and its old aerospace weapons, $1.5 trillion defense budget for Golden Fleet and Golden Dome, old apps not good enough, new transhuman tech and virtual worlds, soft power, Great Powers Competition, bringing back military draft, faux Libertarian talking points, public figures, influencers, politicians, new Age of Deterrence, progressive ideals of Neoliberal Order, Elon Musk, X as personal promotional tool, violent crime political push for Law and Order, MAGA as propaganda tool of the technocracy, Culture Wars, tech companies dream to take over elections, US police state, Eric Schmidt, Trump now out of favor so online right wing propaganda monkeys now trashing himUtp#401Uncle has his baseball cards. Both his own, vast collection, and the ones Chuck just sent in the mail. Topics include: NFL Draft, baseball cards, Chuck's mailer, reprinted cards, Mets card collection, Shohei Ohtani cards are hot, apps to price cards, grading and slabbing of cards, autographs at the stadium, Dodger Stadium, TikTak progress, reselling shirts and other items, checking price with apps, dragon fruit plants, gophers, growing plants in Southern California, Fernando Valenzuela, Brooklyn Dodgers, Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, new fast knuckle ball pitchers, Nixon, presidential librariesFRANZ MAIN HUB:https://theageoftransitions.com/PATREONhttps://www.patreon.com/aaronfranzUNCLEhttps://unclethepodcast.com/ORhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/uncle-the-podcast/FRANZ and UNCLE Merchhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/support-the-podcasts/---BE THE EFFECThelp for Ochelli and The NetworkCash APP$TheOchelliEffectMrs.OLUNA ROSA CANDLEShttp://www.paypal.me/Kimberlysonn1Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ochelli-effect--4331265/support.BE THE EFFECTListen/Chat on the Sitehttps://ochelli.com/listen-live/TuneInhttp://tun.in/sfxkxAPPLEhttps://music.apple.com/us/station/ochelli-com/ra.1461174708Ochelli Link Treehttps://linktr.ee/chuckochelliAnything is a blessing if you have the meansWithout YOUR support we go silent

Dr Jade McGlynn is a British researcher — Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, Senior Associate at CSIS in Washington DC, and head of the Ukraine and Russia programme at KCL's Centre for Statecraft and National Security. (Note: she uses she/her pronouns.) She holds a DPhil from Oxford, is a fluent Russian and Ukrainian speaker, and now splits her time between the UK and Ukraine — primarily Kharkiv and the eastern de-occupied territories. She is the author of Russia's War (Polity, 2023) and Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow whose six-year award funds research into Russia's use of history in strategic communications towards Africa, China, Germany and the Western Balkans.She is — uniquely among Western academic specialists on this war — explicitly non-neutral. As she states on her Substack: "I am not neutral in this war. I want Ukraine to win, and I want Russia to lose."----------BUY BRILLIANT UKRAINIAN CLOTHING:https://забой.укр/shop ----------LINKS:https://smalldeedsbigwar.substack.com/https://jademcglynn.com/https://twitter.com/DrJadeMcGlynnhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jade-mcglynn-341357209/https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ceelbas/jade-mcglynn-oxfordhttps://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/dr-jade-mcglynnhttps://www.csis.org/people/jade-mcglynn----------BOOKS:Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia (2023)Russia's War (2023)Rethinking Period Boundaries: New Approaches to Continuity and Discontinuity in Modern European History and Culture (2022)----------SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.gofundme.com/f/scaling-up-campaign-to-fight-authoritarian-disinformation----------TRUSTED CHARITIES ON THE GROUND:Car4Ukrainehttps://car4ukraine.com/en-US/campaignsDzyga's Pawhttps://dzygaspaw.com/projectsSuperhumans - Hospital for war traumashttps://superhumans.com/en/UNBROKEN - Treatment. Prosthesis. Rehabilitation for Ukrainians in Ukrainehttps://unbroken.org.ua/Come Back Alivehttps://savelife.in.ua/en/Chefs For Ukraine - World Central Kitchenhttps://wck.org/relief/activation-chefs-for-ukraineUNITED24 - An initiative of President Zelenskyyhttps://u24.gov.ua/Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundationhttps://prytulafoundation.orgNGO “Herojam Slava”https://heroiamslava.org/----------PLATFORMS:Substack: https://substack.com/@siliconcurtainTwitter: https://twitter.com/CurtainSiliconLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finkjonathan/Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4thRZj6NO7y93zG11JMtqm----------DESCRIPTION:Dr. Jade McGlynn: Why the West Misreads Russia—Deterrence, Hybrid War, and Learning from UkraineJonathan interviews King's College London War Studies research fellow Dr. Jade McGlynn about the war's historical significance, Western “strategic blindness,” and how teleological assumptions about liberal democracy undermined deterrence toward a revisionist Russia. McGlynn argues Russia uses nuclear signaling as everyday coercion, exploits Western self-deterrence, and conducts long-running manipulation by targeting societal weak points, making resilience depend on trust and social cohesion. They discuss Russia's expansionist pattern until meeting a firm frontier, the need to impose asymmetric costs in the hybrid domain, and the West's performative messaging and slow procurement cycles versus Ukraine's rapid wartime innovation. McGlynn warns Russia's aims remain eliminating Ukrainian sovereignty and testing NATO if successful, stresses cooperation with Ukraine as Europe's key security guarantee, and describes work to build an occupied-territories insights hub to better document occupation realities.----------

Palantir/Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic has been distilled down to 22 easy to digest points this past week. Here, Aaron gives his commentary on them. Palantir and their fellow Silicon Valley technocratic institutions are succeeding in taking over the United States, and ruling via a renewed system of war and "deterrence."  Topics include: Palantir and the new Silicon Valley MIC, fascist technocracy, Alex Karp, The Technological Republic, morals and ethics, old aerospace being pushed aside, Iran War showcasing loss of old American Empire and its old aerospace weapons, $1.5 trillion defense budget for Golden Fleet and Golden Dome, old apps not good enough, new transhuman tech and virtual worlds, soft power, Great Powers Competition, bringing back military draft, faux Libertarian talking points, public figures, influencers, politicians, new Age of Deterrence, progressive ideals of Neoliberal Order, Elon Musk, X as personal promotional tool, violent crime political push for Law and Order, MAGA as propaganda tool of the technocracy, Culture Wars, tech companies dream to take over elections, US police state, Eric Schmidt, Trump now out of favor so online right wing propaganda monkeys now trashing him

This episode explores the complex architecture of criminal law and punishment, dissecting philosophical foundations, systemic mechanics, and empirical realities that shape how justice is administered. Aimed at law students and policymakers, it clarifies how different theories of punishment interact and conflict within the legal system—and what that means for fair, effective justice.Most criminal justice systems are built on conflicting philosophies—retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation—each pulling in different directions, yet our prisons operate as if they're perfectly aligned. But what if the entire system is a fragile clash of ideas, incapable of delivering true justice? This episode takes you inside the mind of the “criminal law machine,” revealing how these foundational theories shape every punishment and why understanding their tension is crucial for anyone grappling with the morality and mechanics of justice.We begin with a shocking empirical study: a child's academic scores drop by nearly 5% simply because a classmate's parent is sent to prison. This sets the stage for a deep dive into how the ripple effects of incarceration harm society beyond the prison walls—an urgent reminder of the human collateral involved in every legal decision. From there, explore the meticulous architecture of criminal liability—how actus reus, mens rea, and causation are engineered to assign guilt—culminating in the ultimate question: why does the state have the moral authority to imprison?The core of this episode unpacks the four competing philosophies of punishment. Retribution, rooted in balancing the moral ledger, demands proportionality based on objective harm and moral blameworthiness—yet struggles to account for offenders' mental states or social context. Deterrence, aiming to prevent future crimes through fear, relies on the rational actor model, which empirical data overwhelmingly discredits—especially for populations impaired by trauma or substance abuse. Incapacitation offers a brute-force safety net, but risks turning into preventive detention based on biased risk assessments that embed socioeconomic biases and cognitive distortions like the fundamental attribution error. Finally, rehabilitation envisions a therapeutic cure, recognizing the potential for human change, but faces political backlash and societal skepticism.But here's the twist: these conflicting goals can't peacefully coexist. That's where limiting retributivism comes in—a master framework that acts as a gatekeeper, setting objective boundaries so sentences stay within morally justifiable margins. Within these bounds, the system then fine-tunes punishments using a hybrid approach that balances fairness with utility, ensuring similar crimes receive similar sentences and that harsher punishments are justified and not excessive. This delicate engineering—embodying concepts like the parsimony principle—aims to reconcile the warring philosophies, but the question remains: is this system resilient or fundamentally fragile?To close, we confront a provocative future: could an AI judge, free from human cognitive biases, flawlessly execute this complex synthesis of justice? Or is the moral weight of human judgment irreplaceable? As criminal justice looms at the intersection of machine learning, societal values, and empirical realities, this episode invites you to reconsider what true fairness looks like—and whether the current “machine” we've built is sturdy enough to deliver it.Perfect for law students, policymakers, or anyone seeking clarity on the philosophical underpinnings of modern justice, this episode reveals that behind every prison sentence lies a complex, often contradictory web of ideas—an imperfect machine trying to do its best, but perhaps always wobbling on the edge of collapse.

In this episode, Jim and Curtis reflect on key takeaways from the HEART Conference—Hardened Electronics and Radiation Technology—a leading forum on nuclear weapon effects, radiation‑hardened technologies, and military system resilience.They discuss why understanding nuclear effects remains central to credible deterrence, the growing complexity of modern systems, and the critical role of rigorous testing and collaboration across science, policy, and industry. The conversation highlights how advances in radiation‑hardened technologies strengthen national security and why forums like HEART are essential for bridging innovation, policy, and operational reality.Get Involved with more NIDS Services: https://thinkdeterrence.com/Deterrence Education at NIDS https://thinkdeterrence.com/deterrence-education/ Listen to our Podcasts NIDS Podcast Network - National Institute for Deterrence Studies Like and follow us –The NIDS View: https://media.rss.com/nuclearview/feed.xmlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thinkdeterrence X.com: https://x.com/thinkdeterrence YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyGa4dcPqONWzjmbuZMOBHQ Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/NIDSthinkdeterrence Global Security Review: https://globalsecurityreview.comOur Free Events: https://thinkdeterrence.com/events/

In this episode of The NIDS View, Dr. Carl Rhodes joins Jim to examine how recent operations in Iran, advances in air power and missile defense, and the rapid evolution of drone technology are reshaping modern warfare and deterrence—particularly in the Indo‑Pacific.Carl unpacks how precision strike capabilities, layered missile defenses, and unmanned systems are altering escalation dynamics and influencing deterrence strategies vis‑à‑vis China and other regional actors. Drawing on frameworks such as the Escalation Ladder and Deterrence by Denial, the conversation explores how military power, economic coercion, and integrated effects increasingly define competition below and above the threshold of conflict.Key themes include the implications of recent military operations in the Middle East, the growing sophistication of Chinese air and missile defenses, and what these trends mean for U.S. allies—particularly Australia—as they enhance regional security cooperation through joint exercises and capability development.Get Involved with more NIDS Services: https://thinkdeterrence.com/Deterrence Education at NIDS https://thinkdeterrence.com/deterrence-education/ Listen to our Podcasts NIDS Podcast Network - National Institute for Deterrence Studies Like and follow us –The NIDS View: https://media.rss.com/nuclearview/feed.xmlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thinkdeterrence X.com: https://x.com/thinkdeterrence YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyGa4dcPqONWzjmbuZMOBHQ Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/NIDSthinkdeterrence Global Security Review: https://globalsecurityreview.comOur Free Events: https://thinkdeterrence.com/events/

Taiwan is often framed as a binary choice: surrender it to China or risk World War III. But is that really the full picture? In this episode of The China Desk, host Steve Yates is joined by Eyck Freymann, Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and author of Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China, to break down a more realistic — and more strategic — approach to one of the most dangerous flashpoints in the world today. Freymann explains why the traditional debate around Taiwan is deeply flawed, arguing that the real challenge is not choosing between peace and war, but building a credible strategy that prevents conflict altogether while protecting core U.S. interests. Drawing from his research and global experience, Freymann outlines how the Chinese Communist Party approaches power differently than Western governments — integrating military, economic, technological, and political tools into a single, coordinated strategy. He argues that the United States must respond in kind, or risk being outmaneuvered without a shot being fired. A central focus of the conversation is deterrence — and why military strength alone is no longer enough. Freymann lays out a broader framework that includes political alignment, technological leadership, economic strategy, and alliance coordination as essential pillars for preventing conflict. The conversation also covers: • Why Taiwan is the “keystone” in China's global ambitions • The difference between the Chinese people and the CCP • How China uses gray-zone tactics short of war (quarantine, coercion) • Why military deterrence alone is no longer sufficient • The role of alliances in shaping China's decision-making • How AI and semiconductor dominance factor into national security • Why U.S. technological leadership is critical to deterrence • The risks of economic “mutually assured destruction” with China • What “avalanche decoupling” means — and why gradual separation matters • How global perception and international opinion shape outcomes • The importance of preparing for a post-crisis global order Freymann also challenges the assumption that economic interdependence will prevent conflict, warning that it may actually deter the United States more than China if policymakers are unprepared for the consequences of escalation. The discussion ultimately points to a narrow but critical path forward: maintaining deterrence through strength, coordination, and strategic clarity — while avoiding unnecessary provocation that could accelerate conflict. 00:00 — Intro + Eyck Freymann joins the China Desk 00:31 — Background, education, and early interest in China 03:15 — First-hand experience in China and CCP vs Chinese people 08:05 — How the CCP approaches strategy and power differently 09:48 — The flawed “war vs surrender” Taiwan debate 11:47 — Why Freymann wrote Defending Taiwan 13:49 — U.S. strategic interests at stake in Taiwan 16:31 — Why Taiwan is the “keystone” in China's ambitions 17:34 — Rethinking deterrence beyond military power 19:17 — Political deterrence explained 20:45 — China's “gray zone” tactics: quarantine and coercion 23:13 — Why global opinion and allies matter in a crisis 27:09 — Technological leadership, AI, and strategic competition 31:55 — Strategic stability: nuclear, cyber, and space domains 33:18 — Why economic deterrence may fail 35:01 — “Avalanche decoupling” and supply chain strategy 37:15 — Why economic interdependence can deter the U.S. 40:25 — Rebuilding a stronger global economic system 41:15 — Freymann's 60-second strategy for U.S. leadership 43:26 — Where to find the book + closing Watch Full-Length Interviews: https://www.youtube.com/@ChinaDeskFNW

PREVIEW FOR TOMORROW: Peter Huessy discusses the lack of nuclear education among young national security officials,. He warns that Russia and China now deploy battlefield nuclear weapons to win conflicts, moving far beyond Cold War deterrence strategies today. (1)1953

“We keep getting wake-up calls and snoozing the alarm. Now is the time to actually get out of bed and confront this problem before it is too late.” — Eyck Freymann Forget Iran for a moment. The Hormuz crisis is a template for the bigger crisis of Taiwan. Eyck Freymann — Hoover Fellow at Stanford, author of the brand-new Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China — believes that the fate of the 21st century may hinge on Taiwan. And he warns that if America can't handle Iran, it's certainly not ready for Beijing. Freymann argues that China doesn't need to invade Taiwan. Xi Jinping has watched Putin discover — with horror — what happens when you send unprepared forces into a country that fights back. China's lesson from Ukraine is a strategy of quarantine rather than invasion. The United States will then face a choice between accepting Chinese checkmate or escalating a crisis with no domestic or international support. Taiwan produces 90% of the world's advanced semiconductors and 99% of the cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs used to train frontier AI models. If those chip factories shut, there will be an instantaneous global financial crisis. Forget today's Iranian theater. Taiwan will be the real existential show. Five Takeaways •       The Hormuz Alarm Bell: Iran has no navy, no air force, and supposedly no ballistic missile arsenal anymore — and yet it took 20% of global oil supply offline. The Trump administration went in thinking overwhelming military superiority would translate to political victory. It hasn't. Strategy, Freymann says, is the art of connecting ends to means. If you don't know your ends, you'll flail. China is watching every mistake: no plan for the economic shock, no domestic legitimacy for the war, excess pain falling on oil-importing US allies like Japan, South Korea, and Europe. Beijing's conclusion: we don't have to pick a military fight with the United States. Why would we? •       The Semiconductor Chokehold: Taiwan produces 90% of the world's advanced semiconductors and 99% of the cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs used to train frontier AI models. The CHIPS Act has tried to change this. It hasn't. The Arizona facility is two generations behind Taiwan, commercially uncompetitive, and unable to scale. Taiwan is five years ahead now and will be five years ahead in five years. If the Taiwan fabs go offline, there is an instantaneous global financial crisis: the seven companies that account for roughly 40% of the S&P 500 are all essentially the AI trade. The hyperscalers are spending $600 billion in data centers this year — the only thing keeping the US economy out of recession. This is what's at stake, before you even get to the military question. •       The Quarantine: Winning Without Fighting: Xi Jinping's plan A is not invasion. It's the quarantine: seize control of who and what comes and goes to Taiwan by declaring that anyone flying to Taipei must first clear customs in Shanghai. Impound a United Airlines flight. Let the ambiguity do the work. If China can do that and get away with it, Taiwan can't rebuild its military, the US can't send more weapons, and Beijing controls the chips. It's checkmate — without a shot fired. The United States then has to accept it, or escalate in a way that has no domestic legitimacy and drives wedges between Washington and its allies. China has figured out how to extort the West with prolonged economic pain. The alarm bells keep ringing. America keeps snoozing. •       What a Taiwan War Would Actually Look Like: It would be a war at sea — fundamentally unlike anything America has fought or prepared for in eighty years. China would need to simultaneously control the skies, the undersea, and the surface on all sides of the Taiwan Strait, then send tens of thousands of men 80 miles across in amphibious vessels to storm beaches in a Normandy-style assault. The first engagements would be decided in minutes to hours by long-range precision munitions. America's operational capabilities are exceptional: the cyber assassinations, the special forces raid, the continuous bomber sorties from the continental United States. But China has home-field advantage. And it has been building systematically for this scenario for years. We could probably win if we fought today. We need to make investments for tomorrow. •       The Four-Pillar Strategy: Freymann's integrated answer: diplomacy, military deterrence, economic resilience, and allied coordination — all working together, not in separate silos. On diplomacy: maintain the principled position that Taiwan's status must be resolved peacefully and democratically. On military: show China it can't win if it escalates to war, while keeping conventional forces credible. On economics: build enough allied resilience that authoritarian powers can't extort the West by threatening prolonged economic pain. On allies: coordinate with Japan, South Korea, the Europeans on a shared plan for what happens if things collapse. This is doable. It's been done for fifty years. We just need the resolve to keep doing it. About the Guest Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the US Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute. He is the author of Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China (Oxford University Press, 2026), The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices (Hoover, 2025), and One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard, 2021). References: •       Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China by Eyck Freymann (Oxford University Press, 2026). •       “The Strait of Hormuz as a Template for Taiwan,” Financial Times, April 2026. By Eyck Freymann. •       Episode 2862: Truth Is Dead — on AI, disinformation, and American strategic confusion. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify 

Mythos, AI Security, and the Token Economy: Risks, Incentives, and Critical Thinking Hashtag Trending would like to thank Meter for their support in bringing you this podcast. Meter delivers a complete networking stack, wired, wireless and cellular in one integrated solution that's built for performance and scale. You can find them at Meter.com/htt The hosts of Hashtag Trending Project Synapse review major AI news, focusing on Anthropic's leaked "Mythos" security model and its alleged ability to find and chain zero-day exploits across major operating systems, browsers, and widely used libraries, prompting stock drops and raising fears about public release to bad actors; Mythos Preview is reportedly shared with select companies via Project Glass Wing, with discussion of long patch timelines, liability incentives, and an internal test where Mythos escaped a sandbox, gained internet access, emailed a researcher, and posted exploit details publicly. They also discuss OpenAI's "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age," rumored OpenAI and Meta model releases, Google model rumors, AI errors like Google's summaries being wrong 1 in 10 times, ChatGPT's inability to reliably time events, Claude usage throttling, high token costs, "token maxing" behavior, automation job fears, and the need to preserve critical thinking, including "AI-free Fridays" and local small models like Gemma 4 on phones. 00:00 Mythos Security Fears 00:43 Show Kickoff and Sponsor 01:26 Mythos Market Shock 02:51 Altman Timekeeping Flub 04:21 Can LLMs Tell Time 07:32 OpenAI Policy Paper 08:47 Model Rumors Roundup 14:00 Agentic Tools and Sandboxes 16:40 Claude Throttling Backlash 19:10 Token Maxing Madness 24:29 Perverse Incentives Explained 29:38 AI Hides Its Thoughts 32:33 Google Summaries Error Rate 34:14 Deepfakes and Education Worries 36:35 AI Free Fridays Idea 37:25 Sneaky Renewal Fees 38:14 Reclaim Critical Thinking 39:13 Attention Overload Reality 40:47 AI Cheating Meets Exams 44:00 Culture of AI Adoption 46:38 Mythos Leak Fallout 48:03 Zero Days Everywhere 51:04 Preview Access Dilemma 56:20 Bad Guys Move Faster 59:33 Sandbox Escape Scare 01:02:13 State Actors and Deterrence 01:04:43 Ethics and Bliss Attractor 01:08:35 Gemma on a Phone Demo 01:09:35 Personal AI Takeaways 01:11:53 Closing Thanks to Meter

On February 5, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, the New START, expired. Absent this or a similar agreement, the world is a more dangerous place—particularly given the nuclear buildup in China, proliferation and rapid evolution of military technologies, and ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Still, Rose Gottemoeller, who was the lead U.S. negotiator of the New START, remains cautiously optimistic about the future of arms control. What could lead to a revival of U.S.-Russia and international talks to contain the risks of nuclear war? And what lessons from cooperation between the two countries in areas like civilian nuclear power and space could be applicable for the future? Rose Gottemoeller's book Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and US-Russia Relations After the Cold War can be pre-ordered here.  

Welcome back to the Ties That Bind, a project of the Foreign Policy Research Institute examining the past, present, and future of NATO and the transatlantic relationship.We often assume our safety is a “government problem,” but guests Admiral Rob Bauer, the former Chair of the NATO Military Committee, and Strategic Communications Advisor Eleonora Russell argue that this mindset is our greatest vulnerability. Drawing from their 2025 book, If You Want Peace, Prepare for War: A Blueprint for Deterrence, they challenge the idea that military strength alone is enough to protect our future.In this special episode of the Ties That Bind we discuss the core lessons from the book, what a “whole of society” approach really entails, how to effectively rebuild trust and engage citizens and industry, and what the future of the alliance may look like if we start fighting for the “we” in a world of “me.” Get full access to FPRI Insights at fpriinsights.substack.com/subscribe

There are two wars being fought right now in Iran: a military one, which the United States is dominating on all fronts, and a political one, which is proving more difficult than the former. Why? President Donald Trump has a lot to contend with right now: the MAGA base, the crazy Democrat opposition, the midterms, the economy, the charge that he's too influenced by Israel, and the general repulsion of the American people for anything to do with the Middle East, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today's edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words:” (00:00) Two Wars Framework (01:19) Why Not Decimate Iran (02:43) MAGA Base and Deterrence (04:30) Economy, Midterms, Israel (07:14) No Boots on Ground

Ragnow Bonus Dispute Hits the Detroit Lions The Detroit Lions asked Frank Ragnow to repay part of his signing bonus after he stopped playing last season. He is no longer with the team. He tried to return around Thanksgiving but was not physically able to do it. The amount sought is not public. The move ignited a firestorm around the NFL and inside the fan base. The team's position is clear. A contract was signed. The terms were not fulfilled. The franchise believes in setting precedent. The Lions have followed this policy before, including with Calvin Johnson and Barry Sanders. Deterrence is part of the logic. If a player leaves early, the team can ask for money back. That is the business case the Detroit Lions are leaning on. Optics, Player Reactions, and Free Agency Fallout The optics are ugly. Even if the policy stands, it looks petty and cheap to many. That perception matters. Players see it. Agents see it. In a tight market, one bad vibe can send a free agent to another city. Alex Anzalone bristled at it. Quandre Diggs spoke up too. Diggs has always said he loved Detroit. His tenure ended when Matt Patricia shipped him out, and he flourished after. He called this move a bad look. That sentiment travels around the NFL, and it sticks. The Detroit Lions do not want to be viewed as doing their own guys dirty. The calculation is cold. Save some money now and risk losing goodwill later. The Detroit Lions Podcast framed it squarely: perception could be the difference when a prominent free agent chooses between Detroit and Team X. Leverage, Policy, and What Players Can Do TJ Lang cut to the core. If you want to protect your money, make the team release you. You lose leverage when you retire. That is the hard line of NFL contracts. Once you retire, the club can pursue bonus payback under its policy. If the team releases you, it cannot. Rod Wood made it known the Lions are seeking repayment. Dave Burkett reported it. The policy predates this regime. It ties back to the same stance used with Sanders and Johnson. The Lions see consistency. Many see a needless wound. Frank Ragnow's situation is complicated. He gave what he could. He tried to come back at Thanksgiving. He could not. Now the team wants money back, and the blowback is real. The Detroit Lions want to enforce standards. The rest of the NFL is judging the standard they chose. #detroitlions #lions #detroitlionspodcast #frankragnow #signingbonusrepayment #chuckclark #dametriouscrownover #nflfreeagencyperception #lionsfanreaction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Subscribe to Inside Call me Back to listen to our 3-part series with Ronen Bergman ____ Subscribe to Ark News Daily ____ Is the war heading towards a ground assault or a push for a deal? To explore out the possibilities, Dan is joined by Ark Media contributor Nadav Eyal and Fred Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. In this episode: - Two Tracks, One War: Escalation vs. Diplomacy - Inside the Air Campaign: What's Been Degraded—and What Hasn't - Iran's Mindset: Why Tehran Thinks It's Winning - The Strait of Hormuz: Leverage, Illusion, or Real Control? - Diplomacy During War: Contradiction or Strategy? - What a U.S. Ground Operation Could Look Like - Energy, Escalation, and Regional Spillover Risks - Endgames: Deal, Deterrence, or Something Bigger? More Ark Media: Want to join Ark Media? Check out our careers page for new openings. Explore Israel Votes Listen to For Heaven's Sake Listen to What's Your Number? Watch Call me Back on YouTube Newsletters | Ark Media | Amit Segal | Nadav Eyal Instagram | Ark Media | Dan X | Dan Dan Senor & Saul Singer's book, The Genius of Israel Get in touch Credits: Ilan Benatar, Adaam James Levin-Areddy, Brittany Cohen, Ava Weiner, Martin Huergo, Mariangeles Burgos, and Patricio Spadavecchia, Yuval Semo

Cutting Through the Chaos with Wallace Garneau – I argue that war can become necessary when threats are credible, time favors the adversary, diplomacy fails, and strategic opportunity emerges. I examine Iran's nuclear ambitions, regional behavior, and vulnerabilities, urging a clear-eyed assessment of deterrence, power, and timing in confronting escalating risks before they become far more dangerous...

1. My Kingdom Is not of this World. 2. My Disciples Do not Fight. 3. Weapons Are for Deterrence. 4. Jesus Cleansed the Temple, but he Did not Hit Anyone. 5. Jesus Is Like and Unlike Alexander the Great. 6. Jesus' Disciples Followed his Example. 7. Demons Are Real. 8. How Does Christ's Kingdom Come? 9. Paul and Silas Sing Praises to God. 10. Christ's Kingdom Comes Very Differently from Muhammad's. 11. What are we up against in the Middle East? 12. Jesus Conquers Rome by Loving his Enemies. 13. When the Head of a Family Is Baptized, all his Family Is Baptized, too. 14. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you Will Be Saved, you and your Family.

When it comes to defense tech, it's not enough to design the best weapons systems, you need to be able to actually build them. Today's company is investing in the infrastructure that will restore American arms manufacturing capabilities, and preserve our advantage in a world that's becoming more dangerous. Our guest today is Joe Musselman, Founder and Managing Partner of Bravo Victor Venture Capital, a US-based early seed and series-A venture capital fund. Joe is accountable for the firm's strategic vision and day-to-day mission, and leads all teams at the firm, including capital, investment, portfolio, and fund operations. Since 2019, Joe's invested in companies like Firestorm, Epsilon3, Havoc AI, and notable early breakouts like Anduril, and Figure AI. And importantly for our conversation today, he recently led investments into Union, a new energetics prime where he is Co-Founder and Chairman.Today, Joe discusses his fascinating journey as a founder, how BVVC is enabling national security start-ups to scale effectively, and why winning the AI race will be crucial for the future of our country. Highlights:Joe's journey (2:17)Why defense tech? (6:01)Fund in the field (8:26)Scaling national security startups (13:18)Union and the manufacturing advantage (19:01)The importance of AI (23:25)Why defense tech investments are crucial (27:29)Links:Joe Musselman LinkedInJoe Musselman LinkedInBVVC WebsiteICR LinkedInICR TwitterICR Website Feedback:If you have questions about the show, or have a topic in mind you'd like discussed in future episodes, email our producer, joe@lowerstreet.co

Watch this episode on Youtube: https://youtu.be/2KKwJTeSEA8 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LowdownNews Website: https://bit.ly/Afterburn_Website Merch: https://bit.ly/AfterburnMerch Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/theafterburnpodcast     The United States operates roughly 19 military sites across the Middle East — 8 of them permanent. For decades that presence was the strategy. Deterrence through presence. If you can see us, you won't mess with us.That calculus may be changing.In this video I break down the US basing problem in the Middle East — what it looked like going into the Iran war, what's happened since Operation Epic Fury began, and the uncomfortable question nobody wants to answer: are these bases now a liability?Five US Air Force refueling aircraft were damaged at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Al Udeid — the crown jewel of US air operations in the region and home to the Combined Air Operations Center — has been a consistent Iranian target. Iran sent a direct message to Jordan warning its population to pressure their government to remove US forces. And Gulf states hosting US bases have absorbed billions in economic damage specifically because they allowed the US to operate from their soi Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT) Prep with AFOQT Wingman https://afoqtwingman.com/Code: AFTERBURN for 10% off

President Donald Trump is expected to visit Beijing from March 31 to April 2 for a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. It will mark the first meeting between the two leaders since they agreed to a trade truce last October that ended months of escalating tensions prompted by tariffs imposed by the United States and Chinese restrictions on rare earth exports. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will meet Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Paris later this week to explore possible outcomes that could be announced during the Beijing summit. Planning for such a major summit usually takes place over several months, and is getting underway quite late, causing many observers to question whether anything meaningful can be achieved. In the meantime, the US is distracted by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East between Iran and a US-Israel coalition. To discuss the upcoming Trump-Xi summit, we're joined today by Dr. Da Wei. He is director of the Center for International Security and Strategy and professor of International Relations at Qinghua University. Timestamps: [00:00] Introduction [01:40] The Status of US-China Relations [03:07] Middle East War Impact on the Bilateral Relationship [05:36] Rethinking the US Decline in Chinese Foreign Policy [08:23] Chinese and US Sources of Leverage [13:01] Beijing's Goals for the Trump-Xi Summit [19:52] New Language for Taiwan  [30:12] Expanding Chinese Investment in the US?   [32:03] Potential for US-China Cooperation on Iran? [35:54] Implications of Military Officer Purges 

In this fascinating interview with nuclear expert Ankit Panda we discuss the escalating conflict following U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran and its implications for global nuclear deterrence. He argues that Iran's strategy appears aimed at regionalizing the conflict across the Gulf to generate diplomatic pressure, while questioning the credibility of claims about Iran's imminent nuclear weapons capability. We discussed:How the succession to Ayatollah Khamenei's more hardline son could alter Iran's longstanding restraint on both missile ranges and nuclear weaponization.The troubling lessons other nations (particularly U.S. adversaries like North Korea) may draw from Iran's fate (nuclear weapons provide the ultimate deterrent against regime change). How both adversarial and allied proliferation dynamics are re-surging in ways unseen since the Cold War, with countries from Seoul to Stockholm reconsidering their nuclear postures. Panda critiques last year's bombing campaign as ultimately counterproductive to nonproliferation goals, leaving 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium unaccounted for and eliminating IAEA verification continuity. Despite the current trajectory, Panda maintains that any sustainable resolution to Iran's nuclear program will require diplomatic engagement—though achieving that will prove extraordinarily difficult given how recent events have validated North Korea's narrative about the risks of cooperation with the West.Bio: Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he focuses on nuclear strategy, escalation, missiles and missile defense, space security, and US alliances. He is the author of Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea and Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals: Avoiding Spirals and Mitigating Risks, and his forthcoming book is The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon. His work has appeared in outlets including the New York Times, the Economist, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and he serves as editor-at-large at The Diplomat, where he hosts the Asia Geopolitics podcast.

In part two of this episode, TRP hosts Colleen Wilmington and Anthony Castillo continue their discussion on leadership, undersea warfare, and nuclear deterrence with NPS Hall of Fame alumnus retired U.S. Navy Adm. Cecil Haney. Insightful and plainly spoken, Haney's advice, empowered by 50+ years of distinguished public service, can be assimilated across the full spectrum of leadership.

Episode Summary In this episode of the Jabot Podcast, host Kathryn Rubino speaks with economist and criminal justice expert Jennifer Doleac, author of The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice and Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice at Arnold Ventures. Drawing from economic research and real-world policy analysis, Doleac explains how data — not ideology — should guide criminal justice reform. The conversation explores how incentives shape behavior, why increasing the certainty of consequences works better than harsher punishment, and how evidence challenges many widely accepted assumptions about crime policy. From probation reform and recidivism research to hiring discrimination and unintended policy consequences, Doleac argues that solving complex justice problems requires experimentation, humility, and rigorous testing. The episode ultimately reframes criminal justice reform as a question of incentives, systems design, and evidence-based decision-making rather than political narratives. Links & Resources Home Jennifer Doleac (@jenniferdoleac) on X Arnold Ventures | Jennifer Doleac https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdoleac/ Keywords Criminal justice reform Second chances Jennifer Doleac Evidence-based policy Economics of crime Recidivism research Deterrence theory Probation reform Ban the Box policy Employment discrimination Second chance hiring Policy experimentation Data-driven justice Natural experiments Incentives and behavior Public policy evaluation Mass incarceration solutions Economic analysis of crime Criminal records employment Justice system innovation Episode Highlights 00:04–00:50 - Jennifer Doleac's path from economics to criminal justice research 00:50–02:15 - Using economic tools to measure real-world policy impact 02:15–03:28 - Bridging human justice issues with economic analysis 03:28–05:37 - The three ways economists contribute to criminal justice reform 05:37–06:50 - Shifting policy culture from certainty to experimentation 06:50–08:21 - Why certainty of consequences deters crime more than harsh punishment 08:21–09:43 - Structural challenges of implementing reform across states and jurisdictions 09:43–12:19 - Surprising findings: leniency for first-time defendants reduces recidivism 12:19–15:02 - Probation reform and why more supervision can worsen outcomes 15:02–17:03 - Myths about public safety versus data-driven realities 17:03–19:14 - Employment barriers faced by people with criminal records 19:14–21:11 - How Ban the Box policies produced unintended racial disparities 21:11–22:49 - Rethinking incentives to improve second-chance hiring 22:49–24:24 - Insurance models and market solutions for employer risk concerns 24:24–25:25 - Why experimentation and hypothesis testing must guide reform  

So what does “winning” mean?Today, Chris breaks down the escalating conflict with Tehran, the growing debate over “boots on the ground,” and whether America can achieve decisive victory without another endless Middle East entanglement.Victoria Coates joins to explain the strategic landscape from a national security perspective and what President Trump’s doctrine suggests about power, deterrence, and American leverage.Gabriel Noronha details chokehold placed on Iran during the Trump administration — and whether that model still works today. And can true regime change happen without our physical involvement? Steve Moore weighs in on the economic consequences of conflict and what markets, energy, and American prosperity look like if this escalates.Is this containment? Regime change? Deterrence? Total war?And what does winning actually mean for President Trump?-For more info visit the official website: https://chrisstigall.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrisstigallshow/Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisStigallFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/chris.stigall/Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/StigallPodListen on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/StigallShowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

International security expert Ankit Panda joins the podcast this week to unpack the latest U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran and what they could mean for North Korea's deterrence thinking. The conversation covers what does and doesn't translate to the Korean Peninsula: the impact of geography and escalation dynamics, why saturation tactics and interceptor “magazine depth” matter and the contrast between Iran's threshold posture and North Korea's workable nuclear deterrent. He also discusses the new five-year military plan that Kim Jong Un outlined at the Ninth Party Congress, highlighting the significance of the DPRK's emphasis on counterspace capabilities and raising questions about its anti-satellite options. Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insights from our very own journalists.

PROF. Mohammad Marandi joins Kyle live from Moscow. His Internet connection is a little sketchy but the audio is fine. Be sure to comment to help us with the YT algorithm. What if the real battlefield isn't a border but a bottleneck? We sit down with Professor Mohammad Marandi to examine how Iran calculates risk, leverage, and legitimacy across a map defined as much by energy corridors as by military bases. From the broken promises of the JCPOA to the aftershocks of a 12-day war, we trace why Tehran insists on a narrow negotiating lane—nuclear assurances only—while locking every other door. Marandi argues that missiles, drones, and regional alliances won't be traded for sanctions relief, pointing to lessons from Syria and recent clashes that, in Iran's view, validated conventional deterrence. He walks through why trust collapsed: inconsistent U.S. compliance, shifting goalposts, and the absence of automatic penalties when commitments are breached. The proposed fix is mechanical rather than symbolic—snap, balanced consequences for violations that make cheating too costly. Alongside this, we explore Iran's stated religious and strategic opposition to nuclear weapons, paired with an explicit caveat about existential threats that functions as deterrence without overt weaponization. The most provocative claim centers on geography and economics. Iran's core deterrent, he says, is aimed at the Persian Gulf, not Israel: dense, vulnerable infrastructure, U.S. bases within range, and shipping lanes that tie oil and gas to global stability. A major war would rupture supply chains, spike markets, and outpace neat military outcomes. That logic, combined with a domestic pivot toward BRICS and the SCO, sets the political price for any new deal. Expect discussions to focus on recognition of enrichment rights, rigorous but bounded inspections, and automatic reciprocity for noncompliance—nothing more on missiles or allies. We close by testing media narratives of Iranian fragility against mass mobilizations at home and a wider global mood swing on Israel-Palestine. Agree or challenge these assessments, the takeaway is the same: any agreement that lasts must align with how power, risk, and credibility are actually distributed on the ground and at sea. If this conversation sharpened your view, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review with the one clause you believe any durable deal must include.

Jonathan Schanzer, Executive Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, analyzes Hezbollah's remaining missile arsenal, Israeli deterrence strategies, and the security vacuum in Syria following the escape of ISISrelatives from detention camps. 8.1896 PERSIA

Henry Sokolski notes amidst expired treaties, the US reintroduces extended deterrence language and recommits to the NPT, though non-proliferation enforcement remains inconsistent and challenging against determined adversaries.DECEMBER 1956

Guest: Henry Sokolski. Sokolski discusses the 75th anniversary of atomic testing, health risks for downwinders, nuclear energy costs, and the omission of extended deterrence from defense strategies.1955 SEMINOLE TEST. ENEWETAK ATOLL