NatSec Tech

What if space became a parking lot for munitions? Michael Hochberg, founder and president of Periplous LLC, joins the show to make the case for pre-positioning military supplies in low Earth orbit. Drawing on his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, he argues that reusable heavy-lift rockets like SpaceX’s Starship could let the U.S. deorbit munitions, drones, and other cargo anywhere on the globe within minutes to a couple of hours, without relying on foreign bases that host nations may close off at a critical moment.
The conversation covers how the idea compares in cost and speed to bombers, ballistic missiles, and Tomahawks; the engineering of reentry and precision targeting; the vulnerability of orbital assets to anti-satellite weapons and the risk of Kessler syndrome; why Hochberg is skeptical that the Outer Space Treaty or any future agreement with China will be enforced; and what it means to place so much strategic capability in the hands of a private company and its founder.

NatSec Tech is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

AI's growth depends on data centers, but communities are increasingly pushing back over their land use, electricity and water demands, and noise. Host Jeanne Meserve is joined by Dr. Griffiths, chancellor of Dakota State University, and Stephen Tims, president of Thermo Bond Solutions, to look at how government, industry, and academia are tackling these problems. They discuss smaller, distributed, and rural data centers, more efficient chips and cooling, the future of nuclear power, and the race with China for power and compute. They also cover underwater and space-based options, and why transparency with local communities may be the key to winning public trust.

NatSec Tech is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

In this episode of NatSec Tech, Jeanne sits down with Dr. Nina Kottler, practicing radiologist and Chief Medical AI Officer at Mosaic Clinical Technologies, at the recent AI+ Health Summit. They discuss why AI hasn't yet transformed radiology despite the hype, how vision-language foundation models are changing that, and what it means for radiologists to shift from dictating reports to supervising them. Kottler also explains how AI could predict cancer years before a human can see it, and where data access, FDA rules, and a fee-for-service payment system stand in the way.

NatSec Tech is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

In this episode of NatSec Tech, Jeanne sits down with Dr. Charity Dean, founder and CEO of PHC Global and former public health officer for the State of California. They discuss why Dean calls COVID "a dry run," why she left government to build an AI-powered bio-threat intelligence platform, and how agentic AI and large language models are simultaneously lowering the bar for bad actors to engineer novel pathogens and giving defenders powerful new tools to detect and counter them.
The conversation ranges from the mechanics of early-warning biosurveillance and rapid medical countermeasures, to the private sector's growing role as an alternative to institutions like the WHO and CDC, to the erosion of public trust that Dean says now shapes how corporate America, not just government, will respond to the next outbreak. She closes with a candid look at the ongoing U.S. measles outbreak and a hopeful case for what AI-enabled biodefense can achieve if the country invests in it in time.

NatSec Tech is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

As the U.S. marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, host Jeanne sits down with Dr. Philip Zelikow, executive director of the original 9/11 Commission and now the Botha-Chan Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. They explore whether America is truly safer today, how terrorist threats have evolved from centralized sanctuaries to online radicalization, and why conflicts in Gaza and Iran may not drive terrorism the way many assume.
The conversation ranges widely — from the fate of key 9/11 Commission reforms like the DNI and NCTC, to the politicization of U.S. intelligence agencies, to Zelikow's stark warning that biotech and pandemic preparedness represent the most dangerous, most neglected threat on the horizon. A candid, wide-ranging look at what's changed since 2001 — and what hasn't.

NatSec Tech is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.