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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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Host Aaron MacLean pays tribute to his father, World War Two and Vietnam Veteran Angus MacLean. This memorial originally ran in the publication Engelsberg Ideas. 
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Edward Luce, U.S. national editor and columnist at the Financial Times and author of ⁠Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet⁠,joins the show to discuss one of the most interesting characters of the Cold War, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
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Oren Cass, founder and chief economist of American Compass and author of the article ⁠A Grand Strategy of Reciprocity⁠ for Foreign Affairs, joins the show to discuss how the United States should think about the current strategic moment.
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Alexander Mikaberidze, Professor of History at LSU Shreveport and contributor to ⁠An Unavoidable Evil: Siege Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (From Reason to Revolution 1721-1815)⁠,  joins the show to discuss the siege of Brăila and the lessons of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1806-1812.
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Joshua S. Treviño, Chief Transformation Officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and senior advisor at the America First Policy Institute, joins the show to discuss the Trump administration’s military strikes on seaborne cartel traffic and its strategy in the Western Hemisphere.
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