You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs.

My name's Ryan Evans, founder of War on the Rocks. I'm sitting here with two phenomenal experts,

and I'll let them introduce themselves. We're here to talk about the Israeli-Iranian confrontation and the still ongoing exchange of strikes.

Hi, I'm Nicole Gryevsky. I'm a fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment,

and I work on Russia-Iran relations and also Iran's missile force and nuclear program.

My name is Rachel Brandenberg.

I'm the Washington Managing Director and Senior Fellow at the Israel Policy Forum.

I've been working on Middle East regional politics and geopolitics for most of the past couple decades.

Real quick, before we jump into this conversation, I want to tell you about Cogs of War,

our newest podcast in Vertical, which is focused on defense technology and

industry. It's produced in partnership with our friends at Booz Allen Hamilton. Listen to this

awesome trailer and subscribe to Cogs of War on your podcast app of choice.

I was told last year previously that we should not use return on investment because that is not a realistic concept within the government.

There's no actual return on investment. And it hurt my soul.

We have very clear objectives in mind.

We want to tie software to warfighter outcomes. These aren't science experiments. And it's on us to make it convincing in a way that's not sort of like condescending, but make the argument meet

people where they are about what problems they're trying to solve. We have made strategic pronouncements that we have been utterly enabled a resource.

So there's a massive divorce between the strategy and policy wings of, I would argue, both parties

and the ability to effectively resource those strategies and policies.

And now back to the conversation.

So we're recording this on Tuesday morning, and things will change by the time this comes out

probably sometime either Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning.

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