WarTalk: The View from AFRICOM with LTG Brennan

Africa is the literal center of the world’s map and increasingly the center of gravity for ISIS, the manpower source for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the contested geopolitical ground where China builds bases and drops off free weapons. Our first active-duty guest pulls back the curtain on a combatant command that runs on 0.1% of the defense budget. LTG John W. Brennan Jr. is Deputy Commander of U.S. Africa Command and a 30-year career Special Forces officer, with command tours spanning 5th Special Forces Group, the anti-ISIS task force in Syria, and 1st Special Forces Command. He’s joined by ChinaTalk’s Justin, who served under Brennan as a young NCO in the Middle East. We discuss… How AFRICOM runs a counter-VEO away game on 0.1% of the defense budget by working “by, with, and through” partners “Putin’s Purse”: trafficking thousands of Africans onto the Ukrainian front lines under false pretenses The Houthi–al-Shabaab pipeline and the threat triangle around Djibouti’s PRC naval base Building an “alternate DIB in exile”: drone centers of excellence in Morocco, South African artillery, Namibian satellite radios Why Brennan wants to “declare jihad against proprietary data streams” and where AI actually helps a combatant commander decide WarTalk's first Ivorian dance party suno song: https://suno.com/s/1hhJTtwBn2NGR8eT Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(569)

WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes

WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan. We discuss… The Potemkin Pacific — why Paparo has half the planet on his map and nothing to figh...

25 Sep 1h 12min

Julian Gewirtz on Trump-Xi Summit, AI, and Mao Dead Fifty Years Ago!

Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US get...

22 Sep 1h 6min

Can AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy?

Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Ch...

22 Sep 49min

WarTalk: PLA, 2027, Nukes, and the Pivot to Asia Pirouette

In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice i...

19 Sep 1h 17min

ModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier

ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the industry to slow down and Trump called the whole thing a conspi...

15 Sep 1h 8min

WarTalk: 9.11, Death of the Army, So Long Dan Driscoll

In the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Secretary of the Army walked into the White House, told the president the force is breaking, and quit. Days earlier his boss had fired the Chief of Sta...

11 Sep 1h 11min

WarTalk: GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew the fighting to their doorsteps, built for reasons nobody mann...

5 Sep 1h 21min

Cyber Apocalypse, Now? Hugging Face and the Future of Cyber Risk

OpenAI models mid-training broke out of their sandbox, hacked internal infrastructure, and eventually compromised Hugging Face — the first headline-grade AI breakout, and one that safety researchers s...

2 Sep 1h 10min