ChinaTalk

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 manning them could explain. Wesley Morgan spent a decade finding out why.

Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, winner of the 2022 Colby Award. He first embedded in the Pech as a college student in 2010 and later covered the Pentagon for Politico.

We discuss…

How a timber dispute became the Korengal — one Green Beret team refused the bait, the next took it, and Big Taliban followed

The three tribes of the war in the east — conventional forces, Green Berets, and the JSOC task force, each fighting its own war in the same valleys

Ten thousand beanie babies and record artillery expenditure — how measures of performance swallowed measures of effectiveness

Black Hawk Down, Ghost Recon, and the making of multicam — how Crye sold the camouflage of the elite through video games because it couldn't advertise its Delta contract

The death of the embed — Rumsfeld overruling Colin Powell, the 2013 shutdown, and why influencers in the briefing r4om beat reporters in the field

Whether the Army learned anything at all — disbanding the Asymmetric Warfare Group, rebuilding short-range air defense from zero, and Ukraine as the excuse to never say "Afghanistan" again

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 saw coming. Is the cyber apocalypse finally on the calendar, or does the industry just need to do its homework?

Joshua Saxe spent his formative years as a DARPA and NSA contractor before four years at Meta, where he founded the company’s frontier cyber capabilities evals team and finished as its AI security tech lead. He recently left to co-found Abundant Security.

We discuss…

What actually happened in the Hugging Face hack, and why AI safety insiders weren’t surprised,

The “grad student lab” security culture inside frontier labs racing sixty hours a week to ship,

Why the cyber Pearl Harbor predicted since the early 2000s never arrived — and whether swarms of hacking agents finally change that,

How nation states will post-train open-weight models like GLM and Kimi into billion-dollar cyber weapons,

Why AI has so far favored defenders, from mass bug-squashing to superhuman network monitoring,

The industrial economics of cybercrime — kill chains, ransomware divisions of labor, and whether AI gives criminals 100x returns.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The USS Abraham Lincoln is coming home after a deployment that stretched past 240 days, and the bill is about to come due: mechanical failures, rations down to the emergency stores, 20,000 unfilled billets at sea, and a maintenance backlog funneling into the one carrier repair yard on each coast. Meanwhile, the White House wants to tear the electromagnetic catapults out of the Ford class and put steam back in.

We're joined by Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, a former submariner and Navy strategist, and Shashank Joshi, who has just handed off the defense brief at The Economist and decamped to Washington, alongside regulars Justin McIntosh and Tony Stark.

We discuss…

Why the fleet breaks: extended deployments, generators failing in the South China Sea, Diego Garcia resupply chains, and 12-hour flight deck shifts that don't end

The reenlistment cliff — what happens when half a carrier's crew hits their decision point right after the worst deployment of their careers

Steam catapults and hydraulic elevators: 35,000 successful EMALS launches, a four-year delay to the next carrier, and 500 sailors added back to a ship designed to need fewer

Whether agentic AI finally gives cyber its strategic moment, or whether dropping a bomb on the power plant remains the cheaper option

The offense-defense balance, and why the drone debate should make us humble about predicting it

The PLA Rocket Force's new corruption tip line — a purge that fixes a force, or one that reveals how deep the rot goes

Chinese components in Ukrainian drones, the Rockchip inside a $400 hugging-face robot, and how much of the Internet of Things you can afford to worry about

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The political economy of AI — things are getting weird, it seems. We have models on the loose, open weights being dropped from the heavenly temple, and data center protests fanning out across the land. There’s a lot of salience in a way that feels really different than it did even six months ago. To discuss, we have the wonderful Anton Leicht, a fellow at Carnegie and author of the excellent Substack Threading the Needle.

Our conversation covers:

Why even a small amount of AI-driven unemployment could upend national politics, especially if agents start replacing junior white-collar workers and breaking the career pipeline,

What policymakers can do to protect workers without calcifying the economy, how to collect better data on AI and labor, and whether to subsidize junior hiring,

The case for funding the AI transition with corporate income taxes instead of token taxes, and why offering the government AI equity or “golden shares” would backfire,

Data center backlash, strategies for winning hearts and minds, and options for friendshoring AI infrastructure,

The political economy of safety — why pausing AI development wouldn’t work, but a coordinated slowdown might,

The coming reckoning between open source and the national security state.

Plus, Kafka on bureaucracy and happenstance, how Anton’s years in esports shaped his career, and why new ideas seem to travel more easily through American policy discourse than European institutions.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Note: This episode was recorded in late 2024. Luckily, there haven't been any US Civil War updates since then, so the episode's content still holds up. Enjoy!

During paternity leave, the new influx of dad energy compelled me to read close to 15 titles on the American Civil War.

The Civil War is a case study in traditional ChinaTalk themes like technological change and organizational design. It is also a uniquely well-documented war, just on the cusp of modernity, with gripping characters and human drama basically wherever you look.

To discuss all things Civil War, ChinaTalk interviewed Jeremy Neufeld, Director of Immigration Policy at IFP and author of an incredibly nerdy Civil War Twitter account, as well as Wayne Hsieh, a professor at the Naval Academy and co-author of A Savage War, an excellent new military history of the Civil War.

We discuss…

How the Civil War played a role in America’s rise to superpower status,

The impact of technological innovation on the war, including the telegraph, the steamship, and the railroad system,

The Confederate invasion of Kentucky and other strategic missteps,

Strategies for mobilizing industry and civil society for warfare,

Differences in institutional culture between the Northern and Southern armies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices