In this episode, retired Lt. Col. Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul sit down with retired Command Sgt. Maj. Rory Malloy, a soldier whose 32-year career carried him through every infantry leadership position, from team leader to division command sergeant major, with tours in the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne and 1st Cavalry divisions across three deployments to Iraq.

Malloy goes beyond the slogans to explain what a professional, empowered NCO Corps actually does: running the day-to-day business of the Army, enforcing discipline and standards and balancing the two obligations at the heart of the NCO creed: accomplishing the mission and caring for the soldier. He opens up about the officer-NCO relationship, the tension between "mission first" and "people always," and the mentors and hard lessons — a bad 2 a.m. haircut included — that shaped the leader he became.

The conversation looks ahead, too: from large-scale combat operations and stability missions to modernization, drones, AI and the human judgment no algorithm can replace. Drawing on his time as the 21st commandant of the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy and as the first senior enlisted advisor to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, Malloy closes with what he wants every American to understand about the young sergeants entrusted with America's sons and daughters.

Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul are joined by retired Lt. Gen. Dan Bolger—combat veteran, former division commander and author of "Why We Lost"—to tackle the question that has haunted American military strategy ever since Operation Iraqi Freedom: What do you do after you win?

The conversation opens by discussing April 11, 2003, the day the Saddam Hussein regime fell and Task Force 2-7 Infantry was ordered to transition from combat operations to stability operations. Rutter and Paul put listeners on the ground in those first chaotic weeks—the looting, the power vacuum, hospitals overwhelmed, fires burning on every block and a force trained to destroy an enemy now asked to govern neighborhoods it had just fought through. 

Bolger delivers an unflinching assessment of what broke down at the strategic level. When Ambassador Jerry Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi army, hundreds of thousands of soldiers lost their paychecks overnight. Many of them already knew how to fight. The bushwhacking phase, as Bolger puts it, was one they could win.

The deeper failure, though, wasn't any single decision. It was a military culture so focused on tactical excellence that it never fully grappled with the harder strategic question—win the fight, then what? When strategy fails, the load transfers down. All the way to the battalion commander, the platoon leader, the sergeant, the private. What kept things from falling apart in those early weeks wasn't strategic clarity. It was the NCOs.

The episode closes with a warning as relevant today as it was in 2003: The American soldier will get the job done. The obligation for commanders and civilian leaders alike is to be worthy of them: to ask the strategic questions before the first soldier crosses the line of departure and define what victory looks like before committing to winning it.

We dive deep into one of the most critical concepts in modern warfare: the kill chain. Lt. Col. (Ret.) Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul are joined by former S2 intelligence officer Derrick Smits (Able 2) and ex-fire support officer Jason Happe (Able 30) for a raw, unscripted conversation about how Task Force 2-7 sensed, decided and acted its way through 21 days of combat—from the Kuwait border to downtown Baghdad.

The group breaks down how each man fit into the kill chain—Derrick painting the intelligence picture, Jason coordinating fires, Matt delivering mortar fires and Scott making targeting decisions in real time. They share firsthand accounts of the friction points that challenged the system: degraded communications, analog battle tracking, outrunning digital capabilities and a battlefield that morphed from open desert warfare to street-by-street urban fighting almost overnight.

From the first real engagement at Al Samawah—where clearance of fires went from five minutes to about 30 seconds—to the fight at Saddam International Airport and the fight along Highway 8, this episode is a ground-level account of what happens when doctrine meets chaos.

How would each man approach the kill chain differently today, 23 years later? Their answers are a warning as much as a lesson—trust the training, know your commander's intent and never let technology replace the fundamentals.

In the second installment of "Steel in the City," Lt. Col. (Ret.) Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul welcome a special guest: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Jimmy Lee, former commander of the only tank company team in Task Force 2-7 Infantry during Operation Iraqi Freedom. A decorated combat veteran, Lee brings a first-hand perspective on what it meant to lead a company team through the streets of Baghdad in March and April 2003.

Lee puts you in the turret for the march to Baghdad: the training that built his combined-arms team before the fight, the one-page op order he used to invade a country, the night four tanks got stuck outside Objective Hannah while the division pushed north without them and the letter he wrote to a soldier's mother while still in combat.

Lee warns that today's Army has drifted—units avoid urban terrain at combat training centers and COIN-era instincts bleed into large-scale combat training. His prescription: get infantry on the ground, get combined arms into the city, maintain momentum and accept that war is ugly. He closes with a pointed observation that the best mission command he ever saw wasn't on a screen—it was two generals on a Humvee with a paper map asking commanders face-to-face: "What do you see? What do you need?"

The battlefield changes in Episode 3. After two episodes covering the desert drive north and the rapid push toward Baghdad, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul shift their focus to one of warfare's oldest and most brutal proving grounds: the city.

In "Steel in the City," Rutter and Paul take listeners inside the dense, chaotic urban terrain of Iraq—ancient cities with no grid plans, no street logic and millions of civilians caught in the middle. They unpack why fighting in cities has challenged armies for centuries, from ancient Mesopotamia to Stalingrad, Hue and Grozny, and how the lessons of history shaped the way Task Force 2-7 approached Baghdad.

The conversation covers the critical role of combined arms integration—tanks, infantry, engineers, aviation and fires working in tight coordination—and why that synchronization made the difference between grinding stalemate and momentum. They discuss the compression effect of city fighting: how time, distance, visibility and decision-making all collapse at once, pushing soldiers and leaders to their limits. And they reflect honestly on fratricide risk, the fog of operating in 360 degrees, the translation gaps that left PSYOPS broadcasts unintelligible to the locals and the navigational challenges of maneuvering through cities with maps designed for tourists.

Rutter and Paul also set the stage for the Thunder Run, the seizure of Baghdad International Airport and the next chapter of the fight—including an upcoming conversation with Jimmy Lee about what city combat looked like from inside an M1 Abrams tank.

"The Debrief: Stories from Damn Fine Soldiers" is hosted by Lt. Col. (Ret.) Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul, authors of "Damn Fine Soldiers."

Before the Thunder Run. Before the airport fight. Before Baghdad — there was the road north.

In March 2003, Task Force 2-7 Infantry launched one of the fastest armored offensives in modern military history. But speed alone doesn't win wars. Fuel does. Ammunition does. The ability to keep moving when everything around you is breaking down does.

In this episode, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul take you inside the march from Kuwait to Baghdad — the blown timelines, the nine-day defensive pause at Objective Raiders and the brutal calculus of managing bullets and fuel at the edge of operational reach. Then Col. (Ret.) Jesse Delgado joins to break down what casualty care actually looks like in large-scale combat operations: medics treating patients under direct fire and why every soldier in the task force carried an IV bag.

The lesson that runs through all of it: armies don't fail because they lose battles. They fail when they lose momentum.

What you'll hear:

• Why tanks measure fuel in hours, not miles
• How Task Force 2-7 managed ammunition down to the platoon level — without waiting for reports
• The nine days the enemy saw an opportunity and pressed it
• Why point-of-injury air evacuation won't exist in the next large-scale fight
• What the Army stopped doing during two decades of counterinsurgency — and needs to relearn fast

This is Episode 2 of the "21 Days to Baghdad: Lessons in Modern War" podcast series. 

"Damn Fine Soldiers," the book behind the podcast, releases July 7 from Globe Pequot Press. 

Before the first shot was fired, the battle was already being won — or lost — in training.

In this opening episode of "The Debrief," Lt. Col. (Ret.) Scott Rutter and Matt Paul, authors of "Damn Fine Soldiers," go back to the beginning. As commander of Task Force 2-7 Infantry, the legendary "Cottonbalers," Rutter led 900 soldiers on a 21-day advance from Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003. Paul was one of his captains. Together, they're telling the full story for the first time.

Episode 1 of the "21 Days to Baghdad: Lessons in Modern War" series covers everything that came before the fight: rebuilding readiness after the 1990s defense drawdown, grueling live-fire training at Fort Stewart, a pivotal National Training Center rotation just months before deployment and the last-minute fielding of new digital systems in the Kuwaiti desert. They also reflect on what it meant to carry the 200-year legacy of the Cottonbalers into combat.

With wars once again reshaping the global security landscape, the lessons from America's last large-scale combat operation have never been more relevant.

This is a leadership story. 

In this episode:

• How 9/11 transformed a peacetime Army overnight
• Training soldiers and families for the fight ahead
• What the National Training Center really teaches 
• Fielding new technology days before combat
• Why large-scale combat operations demand a fundamentally different Army