NatSec Matters

Michael is joined by Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, Senior Director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), who just concluded his seventh trip to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion. Mark delivers an operational update on his work training Ukrainian brigade commanders and assesses the strategic political reshuffle in Kyiv. He compares President Volodymyr Zelensky to a wartime Winston Churchill—brilliant yet fallible—and evaluates the new military leadership under Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi. Finally, Mark draws on his naval expertise to argue why the U.S. Navy must commit to physical escort operations through the Strait of Hormuz to permanently break Iran's economic grip.

Michael is joined by Bojan Pancevski, Chief European Political Correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, to discuss his new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World. Drawing on direct conversations with German law enforcement and the Ukrainian saboteurs, Pancevski reveals how a six-person team used a rented yacht and a $250,000 budget to destroy Europe's primary Russian energy pipeline . Pancevski discusses the fallout of the operation , as well as the broader evolution of Ukrainian hybrid warfare, long-range drone strikes on Russian infrastructure, and the trajectory of the war .

Michael is joined by Dr. Alina Polyakova, President and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, and Peter Rough, Director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia at the Hudson Institute, to discuss how the recent NATO Summit in Ankara landed. The two explore the hidden friction points undercutting transatlantic unity, from software interoperability gaps to trade and digital policy disputes. They also focus on how Ukraine's decentralized, software-driven "operating system" has transformed Russia's immense geographic mass into highly exposed vulnerabilities, and how the sudden passing of Russia hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham is set to reshape Capitol Hill's approach to the war.

Michael speaks with Anthony Vinci, former career intelligence officer and the first Chief Technology Officer of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. They discuss Anthony's new book, "The Fourth Intelligence Revolution: The Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America", which explores how artificial intelligence and intensive competition with China have transformed modern spycraft. Anthony explains his forecast where "machines are going to spy on machines," rendering legacy counterterrorism and Cold War operations obsolete. He warns that adversarial surveillance strategy now directly targets the digital lives of everyday Americans, demanding an urgent re-assessment of how Washington approaches economic espionage to protect national sovereignty.

Special guest host Klon Kitchen, Managing Director for the Global Technology Policy Practice at Beacon Global Strategies, is joined by Dr. Divyansh Kaushik, machine learning expert and BGS Vice President, to analyze the trajectory of frontier artificial intelligence. They explore the rapid shift to reasoning models like Anthropic's Mythos, which autonomously solve complex software problems and uncover deep cybersecurity risks. They also discuss "recursive self-improvement"—the threshold where AI begins autonomously coding and training its own next-generation pipelines—as well as the strategic risks posed by Chinese open-source models and the national security challenge of the world's most advanced scientific labs being privately owned.