Lawfare Daily: ‘The Warhead’ with Jeffery Stern
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
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Summary
Loren Voss, Senior Editor at Lawfare, sits down with Jeffrey Stern to discuss his new book "The Warhead: The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare."
They talk about the development of the Paveway bomb and the importance of precision weapons to modern warfare. Stern grapples with their complicated effects on warfare, both adding precision to warfare that can reduce civilian casualties but also distancing the human element from killing, allowing force to be used more frequently. They discuss the impact of limited war on implementation of the War Powers Resolution and congressional oversight, and the necessity of understanding that weapons are just one part of a complicated kill chain.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Eric Columbus. I'm a senior editor at Lawfare. You may know me from my coverage of litigation involving the Trump administration on this very podcast feed. At Lawfare, we know that the law is just too important to be left only to lawyers. |
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| 0:58.9 | Thanks so much for listening, and now it's back to the show. |
| 1:07.5 | So we're sort of like barreling towards this, towards this situation where the entire system is saying strike, and the one person who may be on the loop or whatever, whatever that person's engagement actually is, there's not that much time to be like, now, wait a minute. Where is this intelligence coming from? It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Lauren |
| 1:32.6 | Voss, senior editor at Lawfare, with Jeffrey Stern, author of the book The Warhead. |
| 1:38.0 | We have to come up with a way to defend against these weapons that we've sort of inspired |
| 1:42.9 | because generally speaking, they're becoming way more inexpensive, and there is not a, you know, asymmetrical cost savings in the weapons we use to shoot them down and protect ourselves. Yet, at least. |
| 1:58.3 | Today we're talking about Jeff's new book, The Warhead, The Quest to Build the Perfect |
| 2:02.5 | Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare. |
| 2:05.2 | Let's jump right in with what warhead are you talking about in this book, and why is it |
| 2:09.9 | important to modern warfare? |
| 2:11.9 | Yeah, so the warhead talk about this book is a specific weapon called Paveway. |
| 2:16.9 | It was the first laser-guided |
| 2:18.2 | bomb and arguably kind of the first smart bomb, the first guided weapon, at least the first one that |
| 2:23.2 | was sort of widely usable and effective. So the book uses it both to tell the story of the invention |
| 2:29.4 | of this specific weapon and also using this weapon as sort of an avatar for the onset of precision guided kind of |
| 2:35.6 | long range modern warfare and uses the weapon also because it is a tool of disconnection, |
... |
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