In the spring of 2003, journalist Caroline Glick (call sign "Scoop 6") embedded with Task Force 2-7 Infantry. She covered all 21 days of the attack from Kuwait to Baghdad, living the fight alongside the soldiers she wrote about.

Twenty-three years later, she rejoins Scott Rutter and Matt Paul to revisit that campaign and the battlefield that runs alongside every firefight: information. They trace how war and the telling of it have changed — from satellite phones and embedded reporters to smartphones and drones — and discuss how an Army can connect to the majority of Americans who don't know anyone in uniform.

Glick reflects on the day she phoned in a live report from Baghdad International Airport only to have her anchor insist she couldn't be there because Baghdad Bob had just declared there were no Americans in the city and why she believes human storytelling matters in an AI age.

In this episode, retired Lt. Col. Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul sit down with retired Command Sgt. Maj. Rory Malloy, a soldier whose 32-year career carried him through every infantry leadership position, from team leader to division command sergeant major, with tours in the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne and 1st Cavalry divisions across three deployments to Iraq.

Malloy goes beyond the slogans to explain what a professional, empowered noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps actually does: running the day-to-day business of the Army, enforcing discipline and standards and balancing the two obligations at the heart of the NCO creed: accomplishing the mission and caring for the soldier. He opens up about the officer-NCO relationship, the tension between "mission first" and "people always," and the mentors and hard lessons — a bad 2 a.m. haircut included — that shaped the leader he became.

The conversation looks ahead, too: from large-scale combat operations and stability missions to modernization, drones, AI and the human judgment no algorithm can replace. Drawing on his time as the 21st commandant of the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy and as the first senior enlisted advisor to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, Malloy closes with what he wants every American to understand about the young sergeants entrusted with America's sons and daughters.

Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul are joined by retired Lt. Gen. Dan Bolger—combat veteran, former division commander and author of "Why We Lost"—to tackle the question that has haunted American military strategy ever since Operation Iraqi Freedom: What do you do after you win?

The conversation opens by discussing April 11, 2003, the day the Saddam Hussein regime fell and Task Force 2-7 Infantry was ordered to transition from combat operations to stability operations. Rutter and Paul put listeners on the ground in those first chaotic weeks—the looting, the power vacuum, hospitals overwhelmed, fires burning on every block and a force trained to destroy an enemy now asked to govern neighborhoods it had just fought through.

Bolger delivers an unflinching assessment of what broke down at the strategic level. When Ambassador Jerry Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi army, hundreds of thousands of soldiers lost their paychecks overnight. Many of them already knew how to fight. The bushwhacking phase, as Bolger puts it, was one they could win.

The deeper failure, though, wasn't any single decision. It was a military culture so focused on tactical excellence that it never fully grappled with the harder strategic question—win the fight, then what? When strategy fails, the load transfers down. All the way to the battalion commander, the platoon leader, the sergeant, the private. What kept things from falling apart in those early weeks wasn't strategic clarity. It was the NCOs.

The episode closes with a warning as relevant today as it was in 2003: The American soldier will get the job done. The obligation for commanders and civilian leaders alike is to be worthy of them: to ask the strategic questions before the first soldier crosses the line of departure and define what victory looks like before committing to winning it.