2018 Speakers

Watch Now What changes are likely in military technology over the next 20 years? This question is fascinating on its own terms.

Watch Now The Trump Administration has made some noticeable and important changes in Middle East policy – withdrawing from the JCPOA, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.

Watch Now The growth of data science, both in terms of the availability of massive data sources as well as powerful computational methods for analyzing them, opens up new possibilities for scientific advancement.

Watch Now Two thousand seventeen was a very bad year for North Korea–U.S. relations as the two appeared headed toward military conflict.

Watch Now US deterrence policy should rest upon a solid empirical foundation regarding risk propensity and the effect of shifting risk disposition on deterrence signaling.

Watch Now This lecture will be a geostrategic survey of the Russian Federation looking at this vast nation from a Eurasian perspective. It will touch domestically and externally on Russia's contemporary challenges and actions taking a long view into the next generation.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) followed a deliberate process of analyzing the current and projected security environment, determining the roles nuclear weapons play in U.S. security, formulating a strategy for fulfilling those roles, and planning a suite of capabilities that is commensurate with the strategy.

Watch Now Many U.S. nuclear command-and-control assets are dual use, that is, they facilitate nonnuclear operations as well. In a conventional conflict, therefore, China or Russia would have an incentive to attack these assets for the purpose of reducing the effectiveness of U.S. nonnuclear operations.

Watch Now Global trends in travel, trade, terrorism, and technology are increasing the risk of a deliberate or accidental high-consequence biological event.

The U.S. nuclear waste management program is stymied on multiple fronts – from the disposal of the high-level and transuranic wastes of defense programs, to the spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants, and even, the disposition of fissile material from dismantled nuclear weapons.

Watch Now On May 8, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran Deal, and announced the re-imposition of all U.S. nuclear-related sanctions against Iran.

Since taking the lead role for the CWMD mission from STRATCOM in 2017, SOCOM has reexamined a wide range of possible activities, from dissuading proliferator intent to interdicting proliferation networks, to the use of military force.

Watch Now Journalists, the general public, government officials, and researchers alike are often compelled by the spectacular, the charismatic, and the unusual, while taking for granted the unremarkable. Attending to the extraordinary over the mundane is a widespread cultural cognitive phenomenon.

Watch Now Russian nuclear doctrine has received much recent attention in government and academia. Some of this work draws parallels between Russia's current strategy and NATO strategy during the Cold War. Constrained by limited data, the literature on the character of Russian nuclear strategy remains ambiguous.

Watch Now On the one-hundred-year anniversary of the 1918 Great Influenza Pandemic, it is instructive to look back to understand the impact of high consequence emerging infectious diseases. Today, we are witnessing the rise of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, and as we look forward, we need to understand why they are occurring with alarming frequency and how these high consequence infectious diseases are impacting global security.

Watch Now The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) has renewed historical debates within European states about deterrence versus disarmament. However, in many states there exists a taboo around discussing nuclear deterrence, resulting in an imbalanced debate dominated by the anti-nuclear movement. The TPNW and this taboo have implications for American deterrence and assurance policies, implementation of the Nuclear Posture Review, and NATO nuclear doctrine.

Watch Now The NATO Summit in Brussels on 11 and 12 July 2018 will be an opportunity for the United States and its Allies to take stock of their accomplishments and take additional steps to bolster NATO deterrence and defense.

The intensive political-military struggles between the Trump Administration and North Korea over the past sixteen months are expected to culminate in a first-ever meeting between the leaders of the United States and the DPRK in Singapore on June 12.

Watch Now Russian security doctrine holds that U.S. strategy toward Russia is centered on a multi-dimensional effort to constrain, encircle, weaken, and coerce Russia, preventing it from securing its interests abroad and weakening it from within.

Global Internet access expanded rapidly since the Internet's invention, going from 14 million users in 1993 to over 3.8 billion today. Yet access expanded without a commensurate understanding of the Internet's security and political risks. Today criminal groups and nation-states use cyberspace operations to threaten national and economic security, from attacks on the Bangladesh Central Bank to Russia's operations against the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Watch Now Moeed Yusuf's new book Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments: US. Crisis Management in South Asia examines crises between regional nuclear powers. Today's regional nuclear context is fundamentally different: unlike the superpowers, regional nuclear states involved in a crisis must contend with the preferences of other strong states.

Watch Now The rise of China and other great powers raises important questions about the persistence and stability of the 'liberal international order'. Status and the Challenge of Rising Powers provides a new perspective on these questions by offering a novel theory of revisionist challenges to international order.

Watch Now Gill will present early findings from a US DOD-supported research project focusing on the newly-established People's Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) and Strategic Support Force (PLASSF).

Gill will present early findings from a US DOD-supported research project focusing on the newly-established People's Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) and Strategic Support Force (PLASSF).

Watch Now There is a fundamental mismatch between the speed of scientific discovery and technological innovation and existing governmental approaches to the oversight of emerging technologies. This presentation will discuss more agile and comprehensive frameworks for the national and international governance of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.

Watch Now Advances in autonomous robotics, cyber weapons, and space enable militaries to combat the most serious threats to international peace and security with more precision — putting fewer soldiers in harm's way to advance US national security goals. Nevertheless, the rapid development of these new technologies puts militaries and civilian leaders in uncharted territory.

Watch Now Deterring strategic attack on the United States, and its allies and partners, has been a central goal of U.S. national security strategy since at least the advent of the nuclear age. Of particular importance are capabilities relating to cyberspace, outer space, missile defense, long-range strike, and a range of AI-related areas including autonomous systems and big data analytics.

Could offensive cyber operations provide strategic value? If so, how and under what conditions?

Watch Now History records only one peaceful transition of hegemonic power: the passage from British to American dominance of the international order. What made that transition uniquely cooperative and nonviolent? Does it offer lessons to guide policy as the United States faces its own challengers to the order it has enforced since the 1940s?