The #BruteCast

This episode features a return guest to the #BruteCast, and if you joined us last summer for our wargaming panel, you’ve seen some of his work. Dr. Andrew Reddie is an assistant professor of practice at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information and senior engineer at Sandia National Laboratories where he works on projects related to cybersecurity, nuclear weapons policy, warga...

This episode introduces the last of our new cadre of #TeamKrulak Non-Resident Fellows, Capt Walker Mills, USMC. Capt Mills is a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer serving as an exchange officer in Cartagena, Colombia and is the 2021 Military Fellow with Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, and a Non-Resident WSD-Handa Fellow at Pacific Forum. He has published over 50 essays in articles in outlet...

In this episode, we were thrilled to bring you the newest of the new cadre of #TeamKrulak Non-Resident Fellows - Dr. James Holmes, who is both a new Fellow, but a #BruteCast alumnus, having joined the show back in March for a panel event focusing on the South China Sea. He is a professor of strategy, the inaugural holder of the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy, and a two-time visiting profes...

In this special episode of the #BruteCast, Dr. Amin Tarzi, director of Middle East Studies at the Krulak Center and Marine Corps University, provides background, context, and key analyses of the Islamic State - Khurasan Province (ISKP), the terrorist group responsible for the recent bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of 13 American Servicem...

In this episode, we are excited to welcome another member of the newest cadre of #TeamKrulak Non-Resident Fellows. We were joined from down under by Group Captain Jo Brick. Group Captain Brick is a Legal Officer in the Australian Air Force. She has served from the tactical to strategic levels of the Australian Defence Force, and has deployed on a number of domestic and international operations, in...

This episode features one of our new slate of #TeamKrulak Non-Resident Fellows, Col Sönke Marahrens. Colonel Marahrens is the Head of the Research Department "Strategy and Armed Forces" at the German Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies (GIDS) in Hamburg. The GIDS is a cooperation between the Bundeswehr Command and Staff College and the Helmut Schmidt University to promote public discourse...

#TeamKrulak is excited to invite you to our first panel event of the Academic Year 2022 webcasting season! To discuss the research and conclusions of the project on Civil Wars, Violence, and International Responses by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,  we are proud to present Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Professor Stephen Krasner, Professor Steven Heydemann, and Dr. Michele Barry. &nb...

How do Marines - how do leaders of all kinds - make the right decisions in technology-enhanced warfare? Historically, people were trained on how to reliably react in highly predictable and reoccurring conditions. However, in the Digital Age, the past will no longer be a good predictor of the future. Technology will have the ability to continuously create new ways of doing – reacting at a speed fas...

In this episode, we take a look at mission set that has generated increased discussion with our renewed emphasis on competition and operations in INDO-PACOM region. Amphibious aircraft and seaplanes - once a staple of American naval aviation arms - are getting reexamined as a way to transport large amounts of cargo over long distances, to areas that do not necessarily have improved airfields. To t...

This episode is very timely, and ties into several of our previous episodes where our guests have looked at the different challenges and problems of regaining the strategic initiative in the South China Sea and INDOPACOM region overall. One of those challenges is how to compete, and compete advantageously, below the threshold of armed conflict; for a military organization, it’s equally challenging...

Olivia Garard, former Marine captain and prolific author, joins the #BruteCast on its 1-year anniversary to talk about her newly released book from Marine Corps University Press, An Annotated Guide to Tactics: Carl von Clausewitz’s “Theory of the Combat.” This little-known work by the Prussian military theorist should seem familiar to Marines because it houses the common tenets on which the Corps'...

It is increasingly clear that the lack of a coherent and consistent lens through which to understand Islamic State’s (ISIS) transnational enterprise is undermining how scholars and practitioners alike are interpreting the significance of the group’s global agenda.  This lecture, based on Dr. Whiteside's current research and a recent co-authored study published by the Hudson Institute, attempt...

This episode features a timely discussion that, as today’s Marine Corps develops its concept of Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations in the context of competing in the Pacific, looks back to our historical roots to a time when the Corps had a similar problem in a similar part of the world. The 1920s saw the U.S. Marine Corps come out of conventional ground operations in France and then out of sm...

The Arctic and Antarctica are well-known Cold War theaters. While these frozen frontiers hosted strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, they also produced legacies of cooperation that have extended through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Indeed, the polar regions continue to host cooperative relations between Washington and Moscow, despite cooler ti...

Col Gerald Acosta is currently the chief for the Director’s Action Group, J3, of the Defense Logistics Agency. In this episode, he presents some of the research he has done on the nexus between China’s One Belt, One Road Initiative, and the Suez Canal. Intro/outro music is "Evolution" from BenSound.com ( https://www.bensound.com ) Follow the Krulak Center: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekru...

In this fourth episode of our "Regaining the Strategic Initiative" series, our esteemed panel examines different aspects of operation energy in support of deterrence in the South China Sea, and elsewhere. Our panelists are:   Erik Limpaecher - Erik leads the Energy Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a Department of Defense Federally Funded R&D Center. His team focuses on contested f...

In this episode, #TeamKrulak is excited to bring back the very first guest we had on the #BruteCast series: Dr. Christopher C. Harmon, the Krulak Center’s Donald Bren Chair of Great Power Competition for Marine Corps University and its Foundation. He is lead author or editor of seven books, and his research into two British archives is reflected in his essay about Churchill called “Vision of Victo...

In this episode, #TeamKrulak was fortunate to host two distinguished guests to talk about the challenges facing the United States and its allies in the South China Sea. Dr. James R. Holmes is a professor of strategy, the inaugural holder of the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy, and a two-time visiting professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College. He has published over 25 b...

In this episode, we're excited to host four contributors to the newly released volume "On Contested Shores: The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare," now available from Marine Corps University Press (MCUP). Co-editors Timothy Heck and B.A. Friedman, and chapter authors Sulakshana Komerath and Ellen Ahlness, discuss the role of naval special warfare in great power compe...

This was a fantastic episode, featuring two guests who talked about the Women's Initiative Team (WIT) project, but more than that, how to do common-sense barrier analysis to remove impediments to full and purposeful service for everyone in uniform. "That's how we've always done it" is not the answer!  Major Alea Nadeem, United States Air Force, is a Congressional Budget and Appropriations Lia...

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Col Art Corbett, USMC (Ret.). Semper fidelis. The Krulak Center was pleased to present the first #BruteCast panel event of 2021, on the South China Sea. The panel was facilitated by Dr. Lesley Wilhelm (office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy – Research, Development, Test & Evaluation). The panel referenced two documents: the Tri-Service M...

You can learn more about this topic from this piece, published by the presenters, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on Ukraine environmental issues in late 2018: https://thebulletin.org/2018/10/war-related-environmental-disaster-in-ukraine/ Intro/outro music is "Evolution" from BenSound.com ( https://www.bensound.com ) Follow the Krulak Center’s activities below: Facebook: https://www.facebook....

Live from New Zealand! This was the first of our #BruteCasts featuring an allied nation Non-Resident Fellow - Sgt Chris Elles of the New Zealand Army (Reserves) discusses "Move, Shoot, Communicate, Innovate: How Might We Enhance Innovation and Innovative Thinking in the Military?"   Chris can be found on Twitter at @InnovatorHB. Intro/outro music is "Evolution" from BenSound.com ( https://www...

Dr. Chris Anzalone is the new Research Assistant Professor at Middle East Studies. Dr. Anzalone studied at George Mason University completing a B.A. double major in History and Religious Studies. He did graduate work at Indiana University, Bloomington, completing an M.A. in Near Eastern studies, and earned his doctorate through McGill University in Islamic Studies with a primary geographical focus...

Mr. Art Corbett is a retired Marine infantry officer with 31 years commissioned service who commanded at every rank and retired in 2009. He is a graduate of the Navy War College, Army War College and the Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting. He currently serves as a concept developer at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab where he develops future operating concepts for the Marine Corps and the...