Nearly every news alert in 2025 has raised questions, some old, some new, about the law and national security.

And now you get the chance to ask Lawfare directly. It's time for our annual Ask Us Anything Mailbag podcast, an opportunity for you to ask Lawfare this year's most burning questions.

You can submit your question by leaving a voicemail at 202-643-8474. Or by sending a recording of

yourself asking your question to Ask Us Anything Lawfare at gmail.com by December 16th.

There's this question also about how do you stop commercial companies that are producing this material from getting into the hands of adversary state or potentially even non-state actors?

I think it's going to be very difficult to police that, especially when you're talking about

countries and companies across the globe.

It's the Lawfare podcast.

I'm Daniel Biman, the foreign policy editor of Lawfare.

And I'm speaking today with Seth Jones, who is the president of the Defense and Security Department of the Center for Strategic

and International Studies.

And I think that's the problem that we have generally seen right now is in the last few decades,

certainly since the end of the Cold War, presidents have not wanted to spend political

capital trying to break the log jams in acquisitions and contracting.

Today we're talking about the SESNEW book, The American Edge, which is about the defense

industrial base of the United States,

China, Russia, and other great powers.

Let me ask what I actually think is a fairly hard question, which is what is the defense

industrial base?

How would you define it and where do you think it begins and ends?

Dan, I would define the industrial base, the defense industrial base, as the ecosystem of government agencies, not just the Department of Defense, but also the Department of State Commerce and others.

The legislative branch that deals with defense, so the Armed Services Committees, the Appropriations and others,

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