U.S. vs. Israel on endgame / Battlefield tech / Wartime censorship
Sources & Methods
NPR
4.9 • 919 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Host Mary Louise Kelly is joined this week by Pentagon Correspondent Tom Bowman, and Tel Aviv-based International Correspondent Daniel Estrin. They discuss how drone and satellite technology is coming into play in the war in Iran, the limited communication from U.S. and Israeli militaries about the war's progress and the divergent goals of the two countries.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The senior Israeli military official I spoke with said, they are working under the assumption that every day is their last and that Trump may wake up tomorrow and say, time's up. |
| 0:13.9 | President Trump says there's practically nothing left to target in Iran. Are the U.S. and Israel winning the war? Or is the White House looking |
| 0:23.2 | for an off-ramp? This is Sources and Methods from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. If you are |
| 0:31.1 | new here, welcome. Our name, sources, and methods is a term you may know from the intelligence |
| 0:36.9 | world. It speaks to how we know |
| 0:39.1 | what we know. And you'll hear us walk through that each Thursday as I discuss the week's biggest |
| 0:44.4 | national security stories with NPR reporters working their sources here in Washington and around the |
| 0:51.3 | world. This week, I am here in the newsroom, along with NPR |
| 0:54.7 | Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Howdy, Tom? Good to be with you. And out in the world, |
| 1:00.5 | NPR international correspondent, Daniel Estrin, he's in Tel Aviv. Hey there, Daniel. Hey, |
| 1:05.0 | Mayor Louise. So let me note, we are taping this at 5 p.m. Your Time, Thursday, Daniel, 11 a.m. for Tom and me here on the East Coast. |
| 1:14.6 | Daniel, have you slept at all in the coming up on two weeks since this war began? |
| 1:19.6 | I've had some rough nights for sure. The other night, I think I was woken up three times by missile |
| 1:25.3 | alerts and booms, but I consider myself lucky. I sleep in a fortified |
| 1:29.2 | safe room. I know people who have gotten a lot less sleep than I have. They have had to get |
| 1:35.8 | out of their bed or walk down to the basement shelter in the middle of the night multiple times. |
| 1:41.0 | Some people sleeping on the floor of a bunker in Israel, nothing compared to the, you know, |
| 1:46.6 | 800,000 or so people in Lebanon who have left their homes, many of them sleeping in stadiums |
| 1:51.0 | or on the streets. |
| 1:51.6 | Not to mention the many people in Iran who have been displaced or endangered by everything |
| 1:56.8 | happening here. |
| 1:57.5 | Okay, so we're going to get in a second into the big questions this war is |
... |
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