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War on the Rocks Podcast Transcripts

Ryan Evans · 339 episodes with transcripts

Discussions over drinks with security, defense, and foreign policy insiders and experts. The original War on the Rocks podcast series.

Spoken has transcripts of 339 War on the Rocks episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from September 17, 2026.

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Every War on the Rocks transcript in one script

339 episodes of War on the Rocks have transcripts. Fetch them all as speaker-labeled Markdown in one script — 1 credit each, and re-fetching one you already have is free:

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curl -s -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/podcasts/682478916/episodes \
  | jq -r '.episodes[] | "\(.id) \(.title)"' \
  | while IFS=' ' read -r id title; do
      slug=$(echo "$title" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -cs 'a-z0-9' '-' | sed 's/-*$//')
      [ -f "${id}-${slug}.md" ] && continue
      curl -sf -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
        -o "${id}-${slug}.md" \
        https://spoken.md/transcripts/$id || rm -f "${id}-${slug}.md"
      sleep 0.34
    done

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Latest War on the Rocks transcripts

A Body Blow? The War on Iran and U.S. Military Readiness

September 17, 2026

Ryan Evans (0:10)

What is military readiness actually? And how has it been degraded in the US military's case due to the war against Iran? And what does that mean for US and allied interests in the rest of the world? And these are the questions that we start to grapple with in this episode with Mark Cancian of CSIS. Mark Cancian of…

How do we think about how ready the US military is? We talk about readiness a lot. We mean lots of different things by that. Brad Carson wrote an article first years ago called, The Chicken is Ready to Eat, which would pun on ready means lots of things. Going around the table, how should we think about what…

Mark Cancian (0:55)

Well, you have to start with the question, ready for what? If you're thinking about a conflict with China, you want to bring in a variety of considerations about munitions, for example, and posture.

Something that Cuba, very different set of considerations. Most people think about it in terms of the ability for a unit to execute the missions that it's designed for. And US puts a lot of money into readiness. So on the whole, our forces are at a much higher level of readiness than most nations keep their forces at.

Stacie Pettyjohn (1:31)

I think Mark's exactly right that it is ready for what. Dick Beck's had that great book years ago, decades ago now, on readiness. And you need to think about whether you're considering the material, the people, and then sort of stockpiles of different things that they need along the way. And the big debate up until…

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