ChinaTalk

Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Chief AI Officer at Accenture Federal Services.

We’re going to talk about what the national security community needs — beyond just API access to wonderful models — in order to really change how it does its mission.

Our conversation covers:

Why the U-2 spy plane offers a surprisingly useful lesson for AI: The hardest part of adopting transformative technology isn’t building it, but redesigning the institutions, workflows, incentives, and decision-making systems around it.

The government’s need to manufacture its own “forcing functions”: How carrots, sticks, budget cuts, and a willingness to create winners and losers could help bureaucracies move faster.

Giving the troops the tools and getting out of the way: Why Berntsen thinks the U.S. military’s greatest AI advantage may come from empowering service members to experiment, improvise, and “figure it out.”

Will AI eventually negotiate with AI? We debate whether models can move beyond advising diplomats and executives to actually conducting negotiations.

Plus, cyber challenges, a chat app for government, and book recs.

Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.
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In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career.

Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Now a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he joins Jordan and WarTalk's Tony Stark, Justin McIntosh, and Bryan Clark.

We discuss…

Why 2027 is not a go date — the three "strategic capabilities" the PLA pulled forward from its 2035 goals, and why a capability milestone says nothing about intent

What the Iran war taught Beijing — day-one decapitation and the heaviest firepower campaign in decades still didn't deliver the political outcome, and PLA journals noticed

The purges are what they look like — Occam's razor on PLA corruption, "fake combat capabilities," and why joint fires fail when artillery support runs on connections

The nuclear shield — early-warning counterstrike, low-yield options, and why a thousand more US warheads would buy less deterrence than a thousand more boats

Beijing's Japan fixation — the Chinese nuclear strategy text with a chapter on every nuclear state, plus Japan

Inside vs. outside — what you can know about the PLA without a clearance, the mirror-imaging trap, and the pitch to undergrads who read Chinese

Plus: the PLA's corruption tip line, Polymarket odds on the next purge, and where an escaped POW should beg for food.
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ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the industry to slow down and Trump called the whole thing a conspiracy.

Why the Hugging Face hack broke through where years of extinction talk didn’t, and how Bernie, Tucker, and Rogan ended up on the same side

What “pacing” even means: Nathan’s case that nobody can measure the frontier, and why it still beats “pause”

Who gets Slack access: METR’s monopoly on trust, CAISI’s $10 million, jury duty for AI researchers, and why nothing survives without legislation

Will China slow down too? Zhipu and Moonshot turning the crank, military secrets leaking into Claude through proxy routers, and the MSS waking up

The Sacks clap-back: whether product liability does the job, and what an eighteen-month pause costs in cancer cures and vibe-coding projects

Send in Demis! plus Lu Xun as the antidote to Chongqing TikToks, and what DeepSeek’s Chinese name owes to Qu Yuan

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In the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Secretary of the Army walked into the White House, told the president the force is breaking, and quit. Days earlier his boss had fired the Chief of Staff, disbanded the Army's only drone battalion, and cashiered Chris Donahue — the last man out of Kabul.

Bryan Clark, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan for a hosts-only edition marking a quarter-century of the Global War on Terror.

We discuss…

Twenty-five years on the treadmill — how Rumsfeld's transformation agenda collided with GWOT budgets to produce LCS, FCS, and the F-35, and why a rotational, casualty-averse force forgot how to accept risk

Driscoll walks — the OSD meddling behind the exit, why Congress won't confirm anyone Hegseth nominates, and a Pentagon run by acting officials through 2029

The meritocracy of meritocracies — what firing Donahue tells every field-grade officer weighing the exit, the auto-promoted NCO corps nobody talks about, and why the Ranger tab discourse is real

Budget Steve takes the fall — Feinberg blamed for a munitions shortage created by fighting Iran with the stealthiest, priciest weapons in the inventory, plus NIH biodefense money quietly rerouted to the Pentagon

Lying to Putin with AI — ISW's report on Russian commanders faking battlefield progress, and what generative deception does to OSINT and soldiers' feeds

The Houthis have Claude Code — Anthropic's threat report, Yemeni drone guidance software, and DeepSeek routing PLA subcontractors' queries to Claude through a transfer station

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Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew the fighting to their doorsteps, built for reasons nobody manning them could explain. Wesley Morgan spent a decade finding out why.

Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, winner of the 2022 Colby Award. He first embedded in the Pech as a college student in 2010 and later covered the Pentagon for Politico.

We discuss…

How a timber dispute became the Korengal — one Green Beret team refused the bait, the next took it, and Big Taliban followed

The three tribes of the war in the east — conventional forces, Green Berets, and the JSOC task force, each fighting its own war in the same valleys

Ten thousand beanie babies and record artillery expenditure — how measures of performance swallowed measures of effectiveness

Black Hawk Down, Ghost Recon, and the making of multicam — how Crye sold the camouflage of the elite through video games because it couldn't advertise its Delta contract

The death of the embed — Rumsfeld overruling Colin Powell, the 2013 shutdown, and why influencers in the briefing r4om beat reporters in the field

Whether the Army learned anything at all — disbanding the Asymmetric Warfare Group, rebuilding short-range air defense from zero, and Ukraine as the excuse to never say "Afghanistan" again

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