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School of War
Learn what war teaches

This podcast seeks to learn what war teaches. There has been a steady decline in the study of military history and its associated theoretical discipline, strategy.This podcast seeks to fill that gap through in-depth interviews on military and diplomatic history. Our guests have included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, and former China Select Committee chairman Mike Gallagher. We discuss the battlefield commanders, diplomats, strategists, policymakers, and statesmen who have had to make wartime decisions in the ancient and modern eras. The subject of an episode may be an historical battle, campaign, or conflict; the conduct of policy in the course of a major international incident; the work of a famous strategist; the nature of a famous weapon; or the legacy of an important military commander or political leader.  


Aaron MacLean is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. He has worked as a foreign policy advisor and legislative director to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and spent seven years in the U.S. Marine Corps.


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Nadia Schadlow, former Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy and senior fellow at Hudson Institute, joins the show to breakdown what strategic depth is and why it remains relevant today.
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Roya Hakakian, author of Assassins of the Turquoise Palace and A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious, joins the show to discuss the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, and how these events have shaped the world.
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Frank Gavin, Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University SAIS and author of ⁠Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy⁠, joins the show to discuss the promise and perils of using history to guide today’s statecraft.
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Michael Pack, President and CEO of Palladium Pictures LLC and director of ⁠The Last 600 Meters: The Battles of Najaf and Fallujah⁠, joins the show to discuss his remarkable documentary of the Iraq war and the Marines and battles that it portrays.
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Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies, King's College London and ⁠No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One⁠,  joins the show to discuss how the British Empire maintained the balance in Europe between the fall of Napoleon to the summer of 1914.
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