Defense One Radio

This week on the program: • It's a new year, and we have a new defense secretary — an acting one anyway, for now. Parts of the U.S. government are shut down over the border wall President Trump promised in his election campaign. • The bottom line up front: This does not appear to be a time of order or coherence in the White House. There are lots of posts filled by folks in acting roles, including the Pentagon’s top job. • We'll go over the new SecDef (beginning at the 2:43 mark), the shutdown (15:36), and more with Executive Editor Kevin Baron, Tech Editor Patrick Tucker, Global Business Editor Marcus Weisgerber, and Government Executive's Eric Katz. // Music by Terry Devine-King via AudioNetwork.com.

For the first time ever in 2018, a president of the United States spoke face to face with the leader of North Korea. Yet six months later, the Korean peninsula remains one of the world’s three most dangerous flash points. • On this, our final episode of the year, we’re going to revisit what we learned about the two Koreas, President Trump and the future of the peninsula. We’ll be joined by about a half-dozen guests, including Melissa Hanham, Joshua Pollack, Joe Cirincione, Uri Friedman and Jeffrey Lewis. // Music by Paul Mottram and Terry Devine-King via AudioNetwork.com

President Trump stunned many across the world this week when he declared ISIS had been defeated. Now he wants America’s roughly 2,000 troops out of northeastern Syria, where they’ve been fighting alongside local Arab and mostly Kurdish forces since October 2015. It’s a demand that wasn’t necessarily without warning. And it’s a decision so controversial Defense Secretary Jim Mattis became the first defense secretary in U.S. history to resign in protest of a sitting U.S. president’s policies. • Today we’re going to revisit some of our most memorable Syrian forecasts from more than a half-dozen of our guests this year, including Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Heiko Wimmen, Charles Lister, Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, Gen. Joseph Votel, Mara Karlin, Jason Warner and Hassan Hassan. // Music by Paul Mottram and Terry Devine-King via AudioNetwork.com

This week on the program: • President Trump abruptly reversed course and now wants $750 billion for the U.S. military in fiscal year 2020 — a sudden $50 billion increase over his old plans. We’ll ask why the change might have happened, and what’s $50 billion really in the big picture? Global Business Editor Marcus Weisgerber posed those questions and more to Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (beginning at the 2:25 mark). • Then (22:10) we’ll mark the birthday of a very special organization that turned 382 years old this week. Angry Staff Officer joined us to celebrate with some history, an interesting new project he’s working on for NCOs, and why he likes Star Wars movies so darn much. • And we’ll end (35:25)with a short chat on the U.S. Air Force’s Kessel Run program with former enlisted man and current civilian supercoder Adam Furtado. *** • Read CSIS's series "Bad Ideas in National Security" here https://defense360.csis.org/series/bad-ideas/ • Find Angry Staff Officer's NCO Club online here https://angrystaffofficer.com/category/the-nco-club/ • And read more about the Kessel Run project online here https://kesselrun.af.mil/

This week on the program: • The true origins of the Islamic State terrorist group. Hassan Hassan, a Syrian-born scholar of the Middle East, recently found a 93-page document from ISIS chronicling the jihadi landscape of pre-9/11 Iraq. New details show that the man originally thought to have created ISIS — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — was not at all the group’s creator. Hassan tells us all about a man named Abu Ali al-Anbari and this new, revised history of al-Qaeda in Iraq. • Then in our second half, we’ll consider the United States’ global war on terror now 17 years after 2001, what seemed to work, some things that didn’t, and where it could be headed in the years to come. *** Qs for Hassan Hassan: 1. [2:07] Can you remind our listeners who we all believed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to have been before you wrote your article? 2. [4:05] How did you come across this revelatory new information about Abu Ali al-Anbari? 3. [6:19] Why didn't you buy Zarqawi as the driving force others believed him to be? 4. [12:19] The “ideological contours” of al-Qaeda, as you called it — you write that these were in place in Iraq before Zarqawi entered the scene. Can you tell us a bit about why those things preceded Zarqawi? 5. [16:50] So what, if anything, does this change about how nations resist al-Qaeda and off-shoots like ISIS moving forward? 6. [18:00] What does all this suggest about the future of ISIS? 7. [22:05] Have you considered re-writing any portions of your 2015 book, “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror?” 8. [23:56] U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie — President Trump’s new nominee to lead U.S. Central Command — told lawmakers this week that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is "a very scared man running for his life in the desert." Is that your impression as well? 9. [25:48] How did Abu Ali al-Anbari get on the U.S. military's radar? 10. [26:24] What are your thoughts when you consider how long America has been openly at war with al-Qaeda — and offshoots of al-Qaeda? 11. [33:47] Is there anybody out there that you’ve seen who appears to be doing productive work or who is on the right track when trying to address the roots causes of extremism today? 12. [39:49] Has the U.S. overstayed its welcome in the Middle East? 13. [43:48] There's a tolerance developing in eastern Syria and parts of the Middle East where sectarianism had dominated in recent years?

This week on the program: • Crisis in the Sea of Azov. We’ll talk about the latest in Ukraine-Russia tensions (at the 1:58 mark) with some input from retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of U.S. Army Europe, and Defense One’s Patrick Tucker.   • We’ve got some news on President Trump’s push for a Space Force. Our own Marcus Weisgerber will fill us in on that (11:23). • And we’ll end today (22:43) with a visit to the crossroads of anthropology and nuclear weapons. Martin Pfeiffer, a researcher from the University of New Mexico took a look at the atomic advertising of the 1950s and early 1960s. He’ll tell us a bit about how Americans created meaning around the bomb then and today.

This week on the program: • How does the conflict in Syria end? Ambassador James Jeffrey, the U.S. State Department's Special Representative for Syria Engagement, sat down (at the 1:56 mark) with CNN’s Elise Labott for our 2018 Defense One Summit this Thursday in Washington. We’ll bring you that discussion with the often blunt ambassador. • Then (33:39) we’ll turn to a discussion about conflict, competition and the future of security in Asia. NBC’s Dan DeLuce sat down with Sue Mi Terry of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Georgetown University's Evan Medeiros.

This week on the program: • What would happen if the United States pulled all of its troops out of Afghanistan before reaching a settlement with the Taliban? We ask Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (at the 2:16 mark) and Bill Roggio of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (25:35) that exit question and a lot more. • And we'll end (41:51) with some perspective from Afghanistan. Abdul Habib Hassan is a country advisor to NATO in Kabul. He tells us what gives his family hope for tomorrow. —Music by DeBraun Thomas, Daniel Mohler, Smith Donaldson and Paul Mottram. Find Seth Jones's article here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-strategy-afghanistan-perils-withdrawal

This week on the program: • During a flight over Turkmenistan this week, America’s top commander in the Middle East spoke by phone with Defense One Executive Editor Kevin Baron. Kevin explains (at the 2:07 mark) what Gen. Joseph Votel told him about America’s military involvement in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and more. • Then (30:32) we’ll turn to exosuits and pack robots of the future — many are already available, and they’re only getting better. We’ll hear from Paul Scharre and Lauren Fish about those and other robotic gadgets you just might find on soldiers 20 and 30 years from now. • And we’ll end (49:48) with a conversation on the quieter wars — and sometimes not so quiet ones — going on every day in the chatty spaces of our Facebook and Twitter feeds. P.W. Singer and Emerson Brooking — co-authors of a new book about the weaponization of social media called “LikeWar” — join us to talk about radicalization in America, determining fact from falsehood, and whether we humans are even capable of disagreeing more productively in the months to come. —Read the report coauthored in part by Paul and Lauren over at CNAS, here: https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/emerging-technologies-1

This week on the program: • A suspect in the U.S. pipe-bombing spree appears to have been apprehended in Florida. We’ll dig into the effects (at the 2:21 mark) of that domestic-terrorism-dash-election-disruption story that’s spanned a decent portion of the continental U.S. — from California to New York.  • On the southern U.S. border, the White House is sending 800 more soldiers on top of the 2,100 already there. We'll discuss what can they do there (11:24).  • The U.S. wants to exit a key nuclear weapons treaty with Russia. Tech Editor Patrick Tucker helps us understand what that could mean for U.S. weapon systems (17:16).  • And NATO just began its largest military exercises since the 1980s in Norway. We’ll review what’s going on there and why (27:41).