Show overview
Cogs of War launched in 2025 and has put out 32 episodes in the time since. That works out to roughly 20 hours of audio in total. Releases follow a fortnightly cadence.
Episodes typically run thirty-five to sixty minutes — most land between 31 min and 45 min — though episode length varies meaningfully from one episode to the next. None of the episodes are flagged explicit by the publisher. It is catalogued as a EN-US-language Technology show.
The show is actively publishing — the most recent episode landed 2 days ago, with 20 episodes already out so far this year. Published by War on the Rocks Media.
From the publisher
A new show and vertical focused on defense tech and the defense industrial base, created and produced by WAR ON THE ROCKS and supported by BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON.
Latest Episodes
View all 32 episodesThe Record Budgets and Missing Suppliers Shaping America's Munitions Ramp
The Pentagon-Silicon Complex and the Rise of the Neo-Primes
Lessons for Pentagon Procurement from the Special Operations Enterprise
Ground Robots Are Arriving on the Front Lines
Collective Defense in an Era of Tokens and Data Links
The Big Bet on the Emerging Space Economy
The Quantum Stack and the Countdown to Q-Day
Contested Logistics and the "Last Unmanned Mile"
A Conversation with the Pentagon's Chief Buyer, Under Secretary Michael P. Duffey
Rebuilding America's Critical Minerals Base
The Pentagon's Sprint to Get Tech Out of the Lab and to the Warfighter
AI Agents and the Unseen Work of War
The Lawmakers Fighting to Modernize the Pentagon
Synthetic Biology, Drones, and AI: The Risks of Dual-Use Technologies
Meet the New Host of Cogs of War
Why Booz Allen is Partnering With One of the World's Most Important VC Firms
The Future Soldier Loadout: Smarter Gear or Dead Weight?
The tech soldiers carry will shape their performance in combat, missions, and their safety and health. If you care about any of those things, you will love this episode. The next generation of American soldiers will operate with systems that blur the line between human and machine, but that future is still being worked out in real time. In this episode, three former servicemembers turned industry leaders look ahead to how frontline capabilities may evolve over the next decade and what will constrain them.
Countering Drones and the Pace of Modern War
This episode is about far more than countering drones. It is about how America prepares for and fights its wars. With three leaders from three companies at the forefront of counter-drone solutions (AeroVironment, Epirus, and Hidden Level), the conversation explores how America and its enemies are adapting, how the U.S. military is and isn't keeping pace, the problems with how America buys things, and more. This episode also features a rant from Ryan about companies that exaggerate the value they are providing to Ukraine. The idea for this episode precedes the latest war with Iran, but the fight in the Middle East makes this conversation so much more urgent.
Agentic AI and the Pentagon's Integration Challenge
Agentic AI is quickly moving from demo to deployment inside the Department of Defense. But what does it actually mean to give AI "agency" — and what does it take to make those systems work on real military networks? In this episode, Ryan sits down with Ben Van Roo, co-founder and CEO of Legion Intelligence, Jags Kandasamy, co-founder and CEO of Latent AI, and Aaron Brown, co-founder and CEO of Lumbra AI, to discuss why the real challenge is not just building smart models but getting AI agents to run on military networks and inside operational workflows. They cover deploying agents in denied environments, compressing models for the edge, orchestrating them across stovepiped systems, and the Pentagon's struggle to scale and buy these tools fast enough to matter.
SkyFoundry and the Future of American Drone Production at Scale
China and Russia are churning out millions of drones while the United States has little capacity to build them at scale. Rep. Pat Harrigan of North Carolina introduced the SkyFoundry Act to change this, and it got rolled into the latest National Defense Authorization Act. This law authorizes a government-run facility capable of producing one million small drones annually, cutting China out of our supply chains and ending years of procurement delays. It's a truly new way for the government to work with multiple industry partners. Harrigan joined Ryan to discuss how SkyFoundry is supposed to work, the tradeoffs of a government-run production facility, how vendors would plug into the system, and the failures in military strategy and production that brought us here.