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

My name is Aaron Stein.

I recently sat down with Kimberly Jackson, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense

for Force Readiness and General David Berger to talk about

Force Readiness. We recorded this podcast last week, but it is coming out the day that General Berger

hands over the reins as commandant to the Marine Corps. We wish him well and now

onto the show. Hello and welcome the War on the Rocks podcast. It's good to have

you both on the show. Great thanks for having us. Yeah thank you so much. The reason I

wanted to have this

podcast is to talk about your article, Readiness Redefined. Now what? So for a

longtime listeners of this show, the first question is always scripted, which is

when you sat down to write this article.

Why do you want to do it?

Probably two parts and then I'll turn it over and see what the DASD said.

But first, as a natural follow-on to the article that General Brown and I initially wrote and the work that's happened in between.

So it was a way of capturing progress made since that article and what we saw out in front of us.

And the why now, the timing of it, article and what we saw out in front of us.

And the why now, the timing of it?

Because I think we sense their urgency

to describe readiness in a different way

because of the pacing threat that's moving pretty quickly and we have to we can't wait 10 years to in other words to redefine it.

We have to get to a better framework sooner than that because of the speed at which the threats are moving,

...