KGH Capability Statement
Michael Vlahos
Strategic Advisor
- Michael Vlahos has built a career developing and teaching frameworks of strategic net assessment: As a senior government executive, full-bore analyst, and teacher of strategy and policy.
- As director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs, US Department of State, Vlahos launched a full-bore study on world change, including hundreds of games, conferences, and seminars about what was happening globally from 1988-91. The Center's work on global net assessment went well beyond what Government sanctioned, and faced razor-sensitive issues head-on, forecasting the coming apart of the Soviet Union, and transformations in Europe and China.
- A wide-ranging analyst after 9-11, writing for the larger national security community, and serving in the Defense Science Board, he made over 250 presentations to Defense audiences between 2002 and 2007. His initial judgment at the end of 2001 was that dynamics within the Muslim world were less about "terrorism" and more about Islam's resistance and renewal, which was heading to eventual revolutions. It was, and remains, all about collective identity. That judgment has held up.
- A teacher of strategy since 1981, he has taught over 40 academic semesters at the graduate level, including four Ph.D. courses at the Centro Estudios Superiores Navales in Mexico City. In each of his classes, historical case studies are used to illuminate challenges and choices we face today. These case studies can be shaped for cultural context, so at CESNAV, for example, seminar analysis drilled down on the specific challenges that Mexico faces as a nation.
- Net assessment is both the hardest and the most important part of strategic planning, and understanding world dynamics — what is going on holistically — is the first step to all net assessment — global and local. Vlahos' Johns Hopkins University course, Ashen Truths: Tracking and Bounding World Crisis, makes worst-case global dynamics a thought-stressing net assessment learning tool — a tool to hone any strategic planning enterprise.
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Vlahos is a graduate of Yale College, with an MALD and PhD from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University. He is a Vietnam-era veteran and has served in three US Government departments: Navy, State, and CIA. He is a life member of the American Society of Naval Engineers.