The death of Special Forces soldier Mark Leshikar remains a mystery nearly four years later. Leshikar was fatally shot in March 2018 by Army Delta Force member William J. Lavigne.
While the Military Matters podcast team is in pre-production for Season 5, the podcast is revisiting past episodes that made an impact or were especially important. First up is the Season 2 premiere, “What happened to Vanessa Guillén?”
The end of the Afghanistan War and the rise of China dominated the fourth season of Military Matters. In this season wrap-up episode, co-hosts Rod Rodriguez and Jack Murphy revisit these stories.
This week on Military Matters, co-host Jack Murphy interviews Michael “Mick” Mulroy, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East and retired CIA paramilitary operations officer and Marine.
This week, Military Matters talks with former Special Forces Lt. Col. Scott Mann about the veterans with Task Force Pineapple who helped save more than 1,000 people in Afghanistan, all on the phone from their kitchens, cars and living rooms.
On this episode of Military Matters, co-hosts Rod Rodriguez and Jack Murphy talk to two of the veterans who helped save Afghan allies, and the issues that arose along the way with the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans.
This week on the Fast Take, Jack Murphy and co-host Rod Rodriguez offer more insight into great power competition between the U.S. and China and the U.S. and Russia, moving beyond SOF’s mission and into the military as a whole.
Following up on Military Matters’ three-part series on the rise of China, co-host Jack Murphy takes a look at how great power competition will affect the missions of Special Operations Forces in this week’s episode.
With Halloween fast approaching, cohosts Rod Rodriguez and Jack Murphy are back with more ghost stories in this Fast Take episode, including a couple of their own.
People love good ghost stories, especially around Halloween. The military has some spine-tingling supernatural tales, from ghostly ships traversing the seas to the wandering spirits of soldiers walking long-forgotten battlefields.
In this Fast Take episode of Military Matters, hosts Rod Rodriguez and Jack Murphy discuss the previous episode, an interview with Dr. Eric Kurlander about the Nazi fascination with the occult. Could the desire to live in a fantasy world happen again, but this time here in the USA?
In this episode of Military Matters, cohost Jack Murphy talks with Dr. Eric Kurlander, author of "Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich," about the Nazi obsession with the occult and how Hitler convinced a country to abandon science for the allure of mysticism.
In this Fast Take episode of Military Matters, cohosts Rod Rodriguez and Jack Murphy revisit their three-part series about a hypothetical future war with China, taking into account the history of past U.S. wars — especially the just-concluded, 20-year Afghanistan War.
Military Matters’ previous episodes on the growing threat from China examined the country’s rise as a global leader and its efforts at espionage against the United States. In the third and final episode of the series, co-host Jack Murphy and guest Roger Cliff take a look at the worst-case scenario: war.
In this Fast Take episode, host Rod Rodriguez talks with Daniel, a U.S. Special Forces service member and intelligence professional who was working in Afghanistan and was recently evacuated. Daniel, whose name and voice were changed to protect his safety and to avoid retribution, shared his thoughts about why Afghanistan fell the way it did, the chaos at the U.S. embassy in Kabul and what he thinks will happen next.
With the Afghanistan War drawing to a close, Military Matters co-host Jack Murphy examines one of the conflict’s most controversial episodes: the closing days of the Battle of Kunduz in 2015 and the U.S. airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital that killed at least 42 people.
This Fast Take addresses the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, as well as last week’s episode, which shed light on misconceptions about China’s intelligence operations.
