Welcome
My book, On Order, Authority, and Modern Civil-Military Relations, is now available from Bloomsbury Academic!
In it I explore issues of civil-military relations - particularly the soldier's role in society and how the service-member should behave under circumstances of democratic breakdown - from the perspectives of both Augustine (representing a conservative understanding of society) and several democratic theorists, including Locke, Rousseau, and Habermas.
I am a Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College, Newport, RI, teaching courses on international security, foreign policy, strategy, and civil-military relations, and adjunct professor at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs teaching international security policy. I spent the academic year 2013-2014 as an advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combatting Terrorism. I worked specifically on building partner capacity programs and specialized in the EUCOM, CENTCOM, and AFRICOM regions.
Here is my CV
My current book project, Posse: Domestic Use of Federal Forces in the US, explores how the federal military power of the United States has been used domestically for policing purposes, and how that use relates to public opinion, military politicization, military intervention in politics, and US federalism. I am currently compiling a dataset of domestic use of federal forces for policing.
Here is my written statement for the record for the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on the military and mass deportations
Discussing Domestic Policing Deployment and Public Trust in the Military for Lawfare
Discussing domestic policing and the expanded role of the National Guard with Phil Carter, Jessica Blankshain, and Gen (ret.) William Walker at Georgetown
Presenting recent research with Jessica Blankshain and Danielle Lupton on how US Americans think about the domestic use of coercive state force (at MIT) - this research is now published in the APSR
Discussing militarized policing for Political Violence at a Glance.
Here is my written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, from January 2021, and here is the hearing.
Here is my written testimony to the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, from May 2019, and here is the hearing/oral testimony.
I can be reached by e-mail at lpc2133@columbia.edu