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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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Geoff Ball, U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer, staff director for the Naval Academy’s Leadership Education and Development Division and Executive Editor of ⁠The Connecting File⁠, joins the show to discuss the radical changes and surprising continuities in how America’s grunts will fight.
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David Shedd, former Acting Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of ⁠The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets⁠, joins the show to discuss Chinese spy craft.
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Walter Russell Mead, Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Florida's Hamilton Center and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, joins the show to discuss foreign policy in the Age of Trump.
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Seth Jones, president of the Defense and Security Department and Harold Brown Chair at CSIS, joins the show to talk about how America has resurrected its defense industrial base in the past and why it should be doing so now.
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Michael Lurie, CEO and President of Rafael USA, joins the show to explain how High Energy Lasers and Iron Beam will change missile & air defense, not to mention warfare itself, forever.
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