Defense Writers Group
18 September 2025
Moderator: Good morning, everyone. It’s 11 o’clock. I’m sure some other people will be showing up a bit later. As you all know, working with reporters is herding cats, and that’s said as a veteran cat myself.
Thank you all so much for joining us today for what I know is going to be a very important conversation about a very important topic.
The ground rules as always, this is on the record. You may record for accuracy in quotes, but there’s no rebroadcast of audio or video.
Our two speakers, as you know, are Ylber Bajraktari, Vice President for Policy at the Special Competitive Studies Project; and James Ryseff, Director for Defense at SCSP. And as always, heartfelt thanks to Tara Rigler who’s a collaborator and partner on organizing these important discussions of SCSP reports.
Gentlemen, while I normally ask the first question, given the complexity and detail I’ll ask the two of you to give us a few minutes of your top line overview, and then we’ll go to questions around the table. So over to you both.
Mr. Bajraktari: Great. Thank you so much, Thom. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us. Thom, always a pleasure to partner with you. Thanks for everything you did in your years of reporting and obviously now at GW. Thanks to those on-line for everything you do every
