If we think about the last era of great power competition, it was the Cold War between the

U.S. and USSR, the vast majority of military engagements in that conflict were small wars.

This bridging the gap effort can help with the base, because it can hopefully get the policymakers off the easy topics, which is tactical stuff, and get them to the harder

topics, which are the strategic level questions, which are much harder to answer.

Hey, welcome back to the Modern War Institute podcast. I'm John Amble, editorial director at

MWI, and this is sort of a bonus episode to give listeners

a preview of a brand new podcast we're launching in collaboration with the Empirical

Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton. It's called the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

It's going to be hosted by an incredible team, and you'll hear two of them today,

Kyle Atwell and Nick Lopez. They have some really fascinating episodes planned,

and they have put together an impressive roster of guests for those episodes, from the military,

academia, and the policy community. That's one of the reasons I'm so excited about this podcast.

Not only does it tackle some really important questions, but it does so in a way that

deliberately seeks to bridge gaps between the

stakeholders in irregular warfare. This is sort of a preview of the first episode. Since it is a

joint project, Kyle and Nick sat down for a conversation with the leaders of the two organizations

involved. Jake Shapiro is the co-director of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project,

and Colonel Pat Howell is the

director of MWI. It is a great conversation, and if you search for the Irregular Warfare

podcast, you can hear a longer version of it. That's episode one, and it's out now. And there

will be a brand new episode released every two weeks. The podcast is available on Apple Podcast,

Stitcher, Spotify, tune in, pretty much anywhere

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