You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans and in this episode I put two specialists on the Russian military into conversation with two generalists to help us understand what the expert community got right and wrong about

Russian military power in advance of Moscow's recent invasion of Ukraine.

This is one of those episodes that was packed with so many interesting pieces and threads

that we could have kept recording for much more than an hour,

ranges so broadly and so deeply as well. I hope you find this episode as fascinating to listen to as it was for me to host,

and I'll let my guests introduce themselves.

Hi, I'm Darramazzico, Senior Policy Researcher at the Rain Corporation.

Hi, I'm Chris Doherty, Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

John Genteel, Senior Historian at the Center for a New American Security. John Genteel, senior historian at the Rand Corporation.

Mike Hoffman, Director of our Studies Program at the CNA.

I'd actually like to start with Chris, because Chris was intimately involved in the creation of the last national defense strategy

which will soon be replaced by a new one.

But it gamed out for obvious reasons the threat of a war with Russia and how did you go about as

someone in the Pentagon making these assessments that you needed to help generate

that strategy working with others of course.

That's a great question. We would take, I would call it a multidisciplinary strategy including a mixture of

war gaming, intelligence assessments, computer modeling and

simulation, both at a campaign level but also at a variety of lower mission

levels and we'd work that all the way up into what we would call an aggregate assessment.

And we would do it, you know, it was very scenario specific, right?

So we're not just looking at, you know, US versus Russia in the ether, we're looking at very specific challenges between the United States and Russia.

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