W.i.S.E. Consultants, LLC provides highly intelligent, highly educated and trained, tech-and-teaming hyper-enabled, responsible seasoned leader-operator personnel to governments (national and international) and non/other-than-governmental entities to help them solve their transition(ing) challenges and opportunities, as well as critical issues in support of national defense and homeland security. We provide equal skills and capabilities to industry and to the non-profit communities—we provide change leadership advisory and support services experience, from battlefields to boardrooms. We have unmatched expertise in anticipatory & prospective-focused, Compound Security Competition (CsC)-tailored, strategic foresighting analysis (SFA)-enabled education, leader preparation, and leader development.W.i.S.E., LLC. is a specialized company providing horizontally integrated “3D” (development-diplomacy-defense) solutions to overmatch todays and tomorrow’s compound security competition (CsC) “all markets” challenges, and in ways that enable equally overmatching, ahead of herd pursuit and exploit strategies for capturing the opportunities that ride the dangerous winds of crises. Our Services provide a customer with a complete “fly-in, fly-away” capability and capacity to ideate and create, design and deploy, employ and empower, real, practical and relevant – at “speed of need” – integrated whole-of-“everything” solutions, led by transformation leaders.

Gainful Solutions combines deep experience in international diplomacy and global business operations to deliver comprehensive, customized solutions for governments and the private sector. We craft strategies, develop action plans, and work with partners to implement them in order to address related economic, political, image building, and security issues.

Useful Fiction works at the intersection of strategic narrative, foresight and change management, helping organizations to identify and better tell their key “stories.”Having collaborated with organizations that range from the US military and Hollywood production companies to the world’s leading tech firms, we pioneered a new methodology to envision, innovate, and communicate. Known as Useful Fiction™ or FICINT™ (Fictional Intelligence), it melds nonfiction research with the power of narrative to reach target audiences with greater effect. Our creative and analytical visualizations and leader training events have been featured in media like The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Wired and lauded by figures who range from the heads of military services and government agencies to the world’s most successful investors.

Professor of the Practice of Political and Policy Science & Geostrategy, at Arizona State University (ASU), with the School of Politics & Global Studies. Also serve as a Senior Future Security Fellow with ASU's Future Security Initiative (FSI) and the think tank, New America.

My body of research and works as a 20 year practicing soldier-SCHOLAR, by others’ accounts, have been successful in contributing to the disciplines of political science and policy science in numerous ways. My book, Thinking Beyond War, and the research preceding it was seminal to the arguments, debates, and eventual policy reforms relating to the United States’ (mis?) adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan during the first decade of the 2000s; the book was so influential that the publishers, reflecting the demands from the academic and professional policy communities at the time, requested publication a substantially updated second edition, which released in 2013. My edited volume (with Dr. James F. Forest) on the Politics of Defense, and my more recent co-edited manuscripts - Thinking beyond Boundaries: Transnational Challenges to U.S. Foreign Policy, and, American Grand Strategy and the Future of U.S. Landpower - provide substantial insights on political science and military forces in different national and international context. These books, combined with a multitude of book chapters and articles, reflect substantial impact on the field of political science… and have provided me great opportunities over the years to serve as a speaker and commentator for the media, for groups, and for colleges and universities. One particular article, “Rage Against the Machines,” has become one of the most influential and often cited articles relating to the study and practice of “Type III Wars,” as well as for pioneering of improved methods of quantitative study of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During my 30 years of active public service life, I have had numerous opportunity to bring “scholarship-to-bear” on some defining real world problems—perhaps most notably regarding the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most recently (currently), “4+1” (i.e., Russia, China, N. Korea, China, and Violent Extremism) challenges. From 2002 through 2007-8, I was at the center of the maelstrom surrounding questions of strategic and operational effectiveness, legal justness, and moral-ethical rightness regarding America’s war in, of, for, and “with” and “against” the State of Iraq. My work, first as a formal researcher of the initial “march up country” actions of the war, and later as a practicing chief of plans fighting the war, had a direct and lasting effect on the prosecution of these wars, up to present time. My book, "Thinking Beyond War became an exceptional examination of the historical, cultural, structural, and strategic underpinnings of the failure of the Bush administration to understand what victory in Iraq would look like (failings also plaguing the Obama and Trump administrations) and to fashion a viable plan to achieve it. The works offered a penetrating analysis of US war making and its shortfalls since World War II, becoming one of the earliest – if not the first - reminders that peace requires much more than operational military triumph and takes years to achieve even in the best of scenarios. In the summer of 2009 when US Forces-Afghanistan were struggling to implement a new strategy for the surge I was selected to serve as a strategic advisor and integrated civ-mil planner to GEN Stanley McChrystal and the ISAF combined-joint planning staff in support of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM (OEF) in 2009. Additionally, I served as chief of plans for the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and resident strategist to the commanding general, David Petraeus, Mosul, Iraq during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM-1 (OIF, 2003-04).

The Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) prepares SOF professionals to address strategic and operational challenges, arming them with the ability to think through problems with knowledge, insight, and foresight.

Worked as principle strategic advisor to the Commanding General, U.S. Central Command, and Led a crack team of by-name selected soldier-scholar talents responsible for providing the commander and his C-level executive staff leaders with advice and planning assistance on all matter relating to greater Middle East/Central Region campaign planning. Working in one of the most challenging combatant commands, I played a leading role in the Command’s overall efforts relating to three major named operational campaigns, Operation ENDURING FREEDOM/FREEDOM’S SENTINEL (Afghanistan), INHERENT RESOLVE (counter-ISIL in the greater Levant), and SPARTAN SHIELD (counter-Iranian Threat Network) and numerous related supporting operations, to include U.S. Central Command’s 2013 Operation NIMBLE WARNING (anti- and counter- CBW by the Assad Regime in Syria), several CENTCOM-Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)-directed raids and hostage rescue efforts (2013-2016), as well as United States Central Command’s support for the Operation RESTORATION OF HOPE Gulf Cooperative Council Coalition in Yemen, among others.

Colonel, U.S. Army, and Professor of Political Science. Director of American Politics, Policy, and Strategy (APPS), Department of Social Sciences, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, where I was responsible for all facets of curriculum development, assessment, teaching, scholarship, faculty and student development, and service-outreach relating to the Academy's core academic program on American Government, U.S. Politics, and American national and global security studies and strategic affairs.Over 20 years of teaching experience at the undergraduate and graduate college and university level. I have held visiting professor appointments at Yale University (Jackson Institute for Global Affairs), George Washington University (Elliott School for International Affairs), Cornell University (Cornell Peace Studies Program, now the Reppy Institute), and the National War College (West Point Fellow), research professorship at Princeton University (Princeton Institute for International Research) as well as adjunct professorships at Columbia University and George Washington University.I was also the founding architect and director of the West Point Grand Strategy Program (The Johnson Program).