The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition - The Lawfare Institute

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Ronen Bergman on the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine Sep 29, 2021

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Ronan Bergman is a reporter for the New York Times and the author of the book, “Rise and Kill First,” a history of Israeli targeted killings. Most recently with Farnaz Fassihi, he is the author of a lengthy New York Times investigative report entitled, “The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine,” which is the story of the use of a ground-based robotic machine gun to kill an Iranian nuclear scientist. He joined Benjamin Wittes from Tel-Aviv to talk about the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the operation and the machine through which it was conducted, the larger policy of Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, and the legal bases on which these are done.

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An Election in Germany Sep 28, 2021

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Over the weekend, Germany held elections to see who will succeed Angela Merkel as Germany's chancellor. The results are in, but there's still a lot of coalition building to go. To break it all down, Jacob Schulz sat down with Constanze Stelzenmüller, the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Yascha Mounk, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies, both of whom are experts in German politics. They talked about the election, how to make sense of the results, and what everything means for the bigger picture of European politics, Germany's role in the world and more.

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Benjamin Haddad on Submarine Contracts and French Anger Sep 27, 2021

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France is mad. More specifically, France is mad about Australia reneging on a deal for French submarines and opting to go instead with an American contract. It's all part of AUKUS, a new trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States that was announced two weeks ago. France recalled its ambassador to the U.S. and otherwise expressed dismay at the development.

Jacob Schulz sat down with Benjamin Haddad, the senior director of the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council, who is an expert in European politics and transatlantic relations. They talked through the French reaction, what might have caused it, and what it all means for the future of transatlantic relations and U.S. strategy.

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Lawfare Archive: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon on ‘Ashley's War’ and the Role of Women on the Special Ops Battlefield Sep 26, 2021

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From January 23, 2016: The fourth Hoover Book Soiree, held this week in Hoover's beautiful Washington, D.C. offices, featured Gayle Tzemach Lemmon on her newest book, Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield. At the event, Lemmon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Lawfare’s editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes discussed the growing role of women soldiers in special operations and beyond, examining the story of a cultural support team of women hand-picked from the Army in 2011 to serve in Afghanistan alongside Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. Their conversation dives into how the program developed, the lessons learned in the process, and why its success may provide critical insights for future force integration. Former Marine and current Lawfare contributor Zoe Bedell, who served in a similar capacity in Afghanistan, joined them on the panel to discuss her own experiences.

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Lawfare Archive: Shivshankar Menon on India's Role in the World Sep 25, 2021

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From October 11, 2014: On his recent trip to the United States, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasized India's desire to take up a greater role on the world stage. With India's renewed ambition, it is increasingly important for policymakers to understand what that role may look like, how it is envisioned from the Indian perspective, and how the country views international developments. Great opportunity exists for improved bilateral relations that bring stability, increased trade, and future defense, intelligence, and counterterrorism cooperation in the region.

This week, Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, former national security adviser and former foreign secretary to the government of India, gave a speech at Brookings entitled, “India’s Role in the World.” In his address, Ambassador Menon discusses the new optimism in U.S.-India bilateral relations on the heels of newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit and how leaders can capitalize on this new momentum. Ambassador Menon also delves into India’s relations with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other countries in the region, its evolving outlook on China, and what role, if any, India can play in countering violent extremism found in groups like transnational terrorist organizations like ISIS and al Qaeda.

Strobe Talbott, president of The Brookings Institution, introduced Ambassador Menon and moderated the discussion.

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The Quad Summit with Lavina Lee, Tanvi Madan and Sheila Smith Sep 24, 2021

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The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, more commonly known as the Quad, brings together the United States, Australia, Japan and India in strategic dialogue on everything from disaster relief, to military readiness, to technology and supply chains. Today, the leaders of those four countries will meet for the first-ever summit, a gathering which would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago.

To understand what led up to this point and what could develop from it, David Priess sat down with three experts who look at the Quad from different perspectives. Lavina Lee is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Last year, she was appointed by the Australian minister of defense as director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute Council. Tanvi Madan is a senior fellow at and director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution, and she focuses in particular on India's foreign and security policies. And Sheila Smith is a senior fellow for Asia Pacific studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a renowned expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy.

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Inside the Facebook Files Sep 23, 2021

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Today, we’re bringing you another episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem. We’ll be talking about “The Facebook Files”—a series of stories by the Wall Street Journal about Facebook’s failures to mitigate harms on its platform. There’s a lot of critical reporting about Facebook out there, but what makes the Journal’s series different is that it’s based on documents from within the company itself—memos from Facebook researchers, identifying problems based on hard data, proposing solutions that Facebook leadership then fails or refuses to implement and contradicts in public statements. One memo literally says, “We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly.”

To discuss the Journal’s reporting, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jeff Horwitz, a technology reporter at the paper who obtained the leaked documents and led the team reporting the Facebook Files. What was it like working on the series? What's his response to Facebook's pushback? And why is there so much discontent within the company?

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What's Up at Congress with Quinta Jurecic and Molly Reynolds Sep 22, 2021

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Congress, which has been on recess for the month of August, has a lot on its plate. The January 6 committee is starting to receive information, and it has gone into stealth mode. If Congress doesn't get its act together, the government is going to shut down and we're going to default on the federal debt. And there's actually been some oversight hearings recently. We decided to check in on it all with Molly Reynolds and Quinta Jurecic, both of the Brookings Institution and both senior editors at Lawfare. They joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about what Congress has been doing, what's coming down the pike and if we are headed toward disaster.

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Milley, Trump and Civil-Military Relations with Peter Feaver, Kori Schake and Alexander Vindman Sep 21, 2021

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A new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa contains reporting about several controversial actions by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley in late 2000 and early 2021, regarding conversations with his Chinese counterparts, his discussion with senior military officers about following standard nuclear procedures (if need be), and reaching out to others like the CIA and NSA directors to remind them to watch everything closely. Were each of these reported actions proper for a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and why? And what about all of this coming out in books?

To talk through it all, David Priess sat down with an A-team on civil-military relations. Peter Feaver is a civil-military relations expert at Duke University and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. He served in National Security Council staff positions in both the Bill Clinton and the George W. Bush administrations. Kori Schake is the director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute who has worked in the Joint Staff J5, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the National Security Council’s staff, as well as the State Department's policy planning staff during Bush 43’s administration. She has also researched and written extensively on civil-military relations. And Alex Vindman is Lawfare’s Pritzker Military Fellow and a visiting fellow at Perry World House. His government experience includes multiple U.S. Army assignments, time inside the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in the National Security Council staff.

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Seth Stoughton on the Shooting of Ashli Babbitt Sep 20, 2021

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On January 6, a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the Electoral College vote. As lawmakers were being evacuated by Capitol police, Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran, tried to climb through a shattered window in a barricaded door. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd shot Babbitt as she was climbing through the window and Babbitt died later that day. In the polarized debate over January 6, the death of Ashli Babbitt has become a focal point and one of unusual political valence. Many on the right view her as a martyred hero and the police officer that shot her as an example of excessive force. Those on the left, who have traditionally been outspoken about police killings, have largely stayed quiet. To the extent they've commented, it's been to emphasize the unique circumstances of the Capitol insurrection as justification for the use of lethal force. The Department of Justice, having reviewed the incident, determined that there was insufficient evidence to charge Officer Byrd with violating Babbitt's civil rights, although DOJ did not conclude one way or the other, whether the shooting was justified under the Fourth Amendment.

To work through the legal issues around the shooting of Ashli Babbitt, Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Seth Stoughton, associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina and the coauthor of a recent Lawfare post on the shooting. Stoughton is a nationally recognized expert on police use of force. A former police officer himself, he was a key witness for the murder prosecution of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd. Alan spoke with Stoughton about the murky factual records surrounding the Babbitt shooting, the complex constitutional and statutory issues that it raises and what its political effects say about the broader prospects for police reform.

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