The 18th Airborne Corps Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Episode 37: We Do Not 'Heavy Breathe' In The 82nd Airborne Division: A Discussion with General Chris Donahue Jun 07, 2021

Show notes

Episode 37 of the 18th Airborne Corps Podcast features Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. Donahue talks to host Joe Buccino about his priorities for the All American Division, his leadership philosophy, his focus on warfighting, and why the 82nd Airborne Division is “flat, fast, accurate, and lethal.”

Donahue also gets personal, talking about his upbringing, how he earned the nickname “Flatliner” as a captain, and how he developed his leadership style.

Donahue is one of our nation’s premier warfighters. He’s spent most of his career leading Special Operations Forces units. In fact, his service as the 82nd Airborne Division commander is his first assignment in the 82nd.

The discussion with Donahue touches on all the issues facing our Army today: readiness, culture, innovation, soldier suicide, and sexual assault. Every Army leader can find value in this episode.

Episode 36: Pride: Critical Conversation with LGBTQ+ Identities in our Force Jun 02, 2021

Show notes

June is LGBT Pride Month in the United States to commemorate the Stonewall riots, which occurred at the end of June 1969. Across our Army, units and individual Soldiers are celebrating their Pride.

In this conversation about representation, guest host Matt Visser fills in for Joe Buccino, to navigate how placing People First involves creating an organizational culture that welcomes authenticity and the contributions of LGBTQ+ service members.

LGBTQ+ identities within the United States military have had complicated experiences. Episode 36 of the 18th Airborne Corps Podcast mines those experiences for wisdom and truth in a discussion with five openly gay Soldiers.

Within this episode, Captain Nell Robinson, a reserve judge advocate at the United States Army Reserve Command, engages candidly about her experience while serving under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as an enlisted soldier, and the contributing factors that led her to take an eighteen-year break in service before returning to an Army that welcomes her wife.

Wes (last name withheld) is an enlisted combat medic who is awaiting training at the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (USAJFKSWCS). Since joining the Army in 2018, he’s deployed with the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, to Kuwait and Jordan. Throughout the conversation, Wes proves a testament and beneficiary of many positive advancements that our organization has made to welcome queer identities equitably while sharing his unique personal perspective of someone who has always been able to serve openly.

Trevor Barton is a military police officer preparing to assume command of the 21st Military Police Company (Airborne) on Fort Bragg. His experience, as a detachment commander deployed to Bagram, Afghanistan, as an operations officer at multiple echelons, and as an aide-de-camp to then-Brigadier, and now Major-General Donna Martin, has informed his genuine leadership philosophy which incorporates his conviction that a leader should strive to be surrounded by individuals who don’t see every situation the same, and should pull from the diverse backgrounds and perspectives available from the Army’s greatest asset, its Soldiers”.

Nick is a first lieutenant who is in the process of becoming a civil affairs officer. He is also awaiting training with the USAJFKSWCS. After he was commissioned in 2017, he was assigned to 2nd Cavalry Regiment, stationed at Vilseck Germany, where he served within the Regimental Support Squadron as a platoon leader, troop executive officer, and assistant operations officer – plans.

Staff Sergeant Chris Kresback serves as a forward observer with 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division. Chris has deployed to Afghanistan and as part of the Immediate Response Force who mobilized within the 18-hour sequence to Kuwait in 2020.

The XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters releases new episodes of the 18th Airborne Corps Podcast every Tuesday and Thursday. The show offers insight and wisdom for Army leaders from history, current events, or future technology.

Episode 35: Ike vs Ridgway May 31, 2021

Show notes

Episode 35: Ike vs Ridgway At the dawn of the Cold War, two titanic figures fought for the heart and soul of American foreign policy. That story is revealed here in stunning new detail. Episode 35 of the 18th Airborne Corps podcasts discovers a philosophical argument at the heart of the early American Cold War national security policy. In the mid-1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower clashed with his Army Chief of Staff, Matthew B. Ridgway, over the meaning of the atomic bomb and its implications for the world. The resulting argument speaks to the purpose of a standing Army, the value of seizing and holding terrain, and the enduring nature of war. This is a story with great meaning for us today. Host Joe Buccino and co-host Jeremiah Meaney mine the battle between these two great WWII generals for application for today's global security environment.

Episode 34: A Terrible Secret May 30, 2021

Show notes

On this Memorial Day 2021 we’re releasing a special episode of the 18th Airborne Corps podcast. This is a shorter episode, 10-minutes long, focused on the ideas behind Memorial Day.

Episode 34 features no guests, but rather a central theme: the awful price a select few pay for democratic self-rule. We hope you will listen and share this thoughtful episode.

We normally release new episodes of the podcast every Tuesday and Thursday and will continue to do so. However, we’re releasing this episode on Monday, May 31, to coincide with Memorial Day.

The 18th Airborne Corps Podcast offers insight and wisdom for Army leaders from history, current events, or future technology. Every episode covers a full, single concept. Please subscribe to the program on whichever platform you get your podcasts.

Episode 33: The Cold War with Dr. John Lewis Gaddis May 26, 2021

Show notes

Yale history professor John Lewis Gaddis is considered the Dean of Cold War Historians. He’s best known for his 2018 book “On Grand Strategy,” which the Wall Street Journal argued “should be read by every American leader or would-be leader.” He’s also written the definitive biography on George F. Kennan, the architect of the American Cold War strategy.

Dr. Gaddis joined the 18th Airborne Corps podcast to talk about the philosophical underpinnings of the Cold War, the vision behind the Iron curtain, and why Ronald Reagan is an underrated president. He also defines and described grand strategy and who army leaders should think about and develop it.

This is an important podcast episode for any leader working in national security. Dr. Gaddis offers a lot of wisdom about geopolitics, about the world outside our borders, and about the ideas that shape national security strategy.

The XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters releases new episodes of the 18th Airborne Corps podcast every Tuesday and Thursday. The show offers insight and wisdom for Army leaders from history, current events, or future technology.

Episode 32: The Kent State Shooting May 24, 2021

Show notes

Fifty-one years ago this month, the war in Vietnam came home to the United States. On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds over thirteen seconds on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. Thirteen bodies fell to the ground; four of them died. At that moment, a largely complacent anti-war movement was electrified. The students had been protesting America's movement of ground troops into neighboring Cambodia during the Vietnam War. President Richard Nixon had hoped to settle the war by turning the fight over to America’s allies in South Vietnam and cutting a deal with the enemies in Hanoi. But as the feckless South Vietnamese regime crumbled, and the protest movement gathered steam, Nixon was forced to delay negotiations. The Kent State shooting remains one of the most misunderstood moments in that war. In subsequent years, Kent State, much like the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the release of the Pentagon Papers, became a cultural event unto itself. Like these moments, the Kent State shooting has become the subject of mythology and misunderstanding, its meaning shifting over time. On this riveting episode of the 18th Airborne Corps podcast, host Joe Buccino, alongside guest host Pete Nguyen, dives deep into the truth and myth of Kent State. This is an episode for anyone interested in the Vietnam War, in the antiwar movement, or in this pivotal moment in recent American history.

Episode 31: Hamburger Hill May 19, 2021

Show notes

Military planners referred to the 3,000-foot tall highland in the rugged, jungle-shrouded A Sầu Valley as “Hill 937.” North Vietnamese Army fighters called it “The Mountain of the Crouching Beast.” American Soldiers would come to call it Hamburger Hill. For 10 days, from 10 to 20 May, 1969, the cursed piece of rock would torture, confound, and aggrieve a group of American Soldiers from the 187th Infantry Regiment, “Rakassans.”

It was a meat-grinder of a fight, waged by a group of lightly armed GIs against fresh, trained North Vietnamese regulars, against almost impossible terrain, against brutal weather. At the end of the ten-day battle, which saw some of the hardest fighting of the war in the decades since, that fight has come to serve as a metaphor for the Vietnam War itself: a maddening fool’s errand in which Soldiers were sacrificed for a political ploy with no strategic value.

We’re releasing this episode 52 years to the day that the Battle for Hamburger Hill ended. This is a longer episode, more than an hour and a half, and in it we describe the point of Hamburger Hill, the American strategy behind the fight for it, and the way that fight played it. In this episode, you’ll hear from some of the men who fought there, some of whom never truly left Hill 937. You’ll also hear from Dr. Erik Villard, a historian who’s studied the battle, the terrain, and the North Vietnamese defenders. This is truly an enlightening, gutting, and inspiring program, one that honors the Rakassans who fought and died there.

Episode 30: Gen. Christopher Cavoli, Commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, on Defender 21 May 17, 2021

Show notes

General Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, might be the Army’s busiest Soldier at the moment. He commands all Army troops on two continents and is leading one of the service’s largest Europe-based military exercises in decades. Despite all that, he took time to call into Fort Bragg from his Wiesbaden, Germany headquarters.

General Cavoli and host Joe Buccino talk about that enormous exercise, Defender 21, the future of V Corps, which was reactivated last year on Fort Knox, Kentucky but will command forces in Europe, and the consolidation of U.S. Army Europe and U.S. Army Africa. Chris also describes his Cold War childhood Würzburg, West Germany and his long, distinguished career.

Episode 29: 1983: The World’s Most Dangerous Year May 13, 2021

Show notes

Episode 29 of the 18th Airborne Corps Podcast tells the wildest story many have never fully hears. A series of otherwise unrelated events culminated to make 1983 the most dangerous year the world has ever known, with the United States and the Soviet Union even closer to war than during the much more well-known events of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. A sequence of accidents (to include the tragic shoot-down of a Korean airliner by the Soviet Union) and misunderstandings (i.e. the Soviet belief that a NATO command post exercise was a massing for a strike onto the Soviet Union), put both Soviet and American nuclear forces on high alert.

Host Joe Buccino is joined by the Washington Post’s Nate Jones, who worked with the US government to declassify many of the documents related to this period. Nate unspools this bizarre, terrifying story with details many have never heard before.

Episode 28: Evaluating Global Threats with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists May 10, 2021

Show notes

For the past 76 years, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a Chicago-based non-profit of the world's leading scientific researchers, has been thinking deeply about existential threats to mankind. In 1947, the group established the Doomsday Clock, a metaphor for threats to humanity from unchecked scientific and technical advances. Maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ever since, the Doomsday Clock serves as a symbol for the likelihood of man-made catastrophe. On Episode 28, Dr. Rachel Bronson, President and CEO of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, talks about the new threats the world faces on the back end of COVID-19. Dr. Bronson has dedicated her life to understanding global risk and here she describes the possibility of a new pandemic, the increased threat of climate change, and the possibility of nuclear warfare. This is an enlightening if not exactly reassuring episode. It's one to which every national security leader should pay heed. We live in a world of emerging threats, and understanding how to process the risk imposed by those threats is critical to strategic decision-making. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has reset the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock 24 times since its debut in 1947, most recently in 2020 when we moved it from two minutes to midnight to 100 seconds to midnight. Dr. Bronson explains why the clock remains at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it's ever been to midnight.

Dr. Rachel Bronson oversees the publishing programs, management of the Doomsday Clock, and a growing set of activities around nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies. Before joining the Bulletin, Bronson served as the vice president of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She also taught “Global Energy” as an adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, and The Chicago Tribune. She has appeared as a commentator on numerous radio and television outlets, including National Public Radio, CNN, al Jazeera, the Yomiuri Shimbun, “PBS NewsHour,” “The Charlie Rose Show,” and “The Daily Show.” Bronson has served as a consultant to NBC News and testified before the congressional Task Force on Anti-Terrorism and Proliferation Financing, Congress’s Joint Economic Committee, and the 9/11 Commission.

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