School of Advanced Military Studies

It was not.

After the Ranger Regiment, I actually went back to Fort Leavenworth for SAMS, the School of Advanced Military Studies, where we started campaign planning.

I like to joke it's because I did not train to standard the first time I went to Leavenworth.

The first time I went to Leavenworth, we had a move.

So that would have been 2008 to 2009.

After that, that's when I went to Afghanistan from 9 to 10. i i didn't get to jsoc for a few more years that's a few more years down the line

right on so school of advanced military studies that's a pretty prestigious hard to get into course how are you selected for that

you you interview you apply and uh i'm sort of floundering a bit because it's that as i think about it that was about 20 years ago so i don't have Too many exact memories, but it's an application process.

Well, that's probably like, you know 13 14 year old you know, boys and girls, whatever, sometimes I get school requests to go, would I do anything at their school, which I have done in the past, but I was like, okay, well, I'm a bit busy at the moment, I was just about to, I think, do an interview, just like this one, and I'd have, you know, he jokes at me, he had a tripod in one arm, and I said, look, I'll meet you after the show, and apparently I made this colonel wait six hours.

So he waited six hours to speak to me and asked me would I teach at the School of Advanced Military Studies.

Must have thought you were worth the wait.

Yeah, well apparently he'd sat in some of my seminars I didn't know, watched all my videos, liked the way I talked for some reason, I still think he's mad to this day.

Hello and welcome to the Operational Arch, the podcast bridging the gap between tactics and strategy, and the official podcast of the School of Advanced Military Studies.

In this episode, hosts Major Carlin Vishen and Evelyn Payne sit down with Dr. Brian Steed, historian, retired Army foreign area officer, and author of Narrative War, the Philosophy of Social Conflict, to unpack how narrative shapes conflict in today's operational environment.

I am not arguing that any one philosophy is the only philosophy that exists.

Even though I think narrative war is the dominant philosophy that exists in 2025, obviously you can still see firepower philosophy, you can still see maneuver philosophy, you still see positional philosophy.

And if you don't understand each of the main thoughts associated with those various philosophies when we talk about theory and the thinking associated with war, then you're going to miss as any given war might morph from one opportunity to another.

Welcome to the Operational Arch, the official podcast of the School of Advanced Military Studies.

I'm Major Carlin Vishen, joined by my co-host, Major Evelyn Payne.

Today, we're discussing an underemphasized topic within the operating environment and the information domain, narrative war.

I mean, there's, there's a million different subjects that are in this couple of hundred page book.

And I guess the reason I was talking about it, to be honest with you, is I had attended in 1988 a course that had just started at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, and it was a one-year course called the School of Advanced Military Studies.

And what they did at that course is they took a group of 48 individuals, all majors, and gave them an additional year of staff work doing nothing but dissecting history, theory, military theories, and operations, as well as conducting exercises in a war gaming ap- approach.

So Clausewitz was the centerpiece of this one-year course, and I had just graduated in 1988, I guess it was, before I went to Europe and became a planner at the division headquarters, and it was right before I went down to become the cavalry squadron S-3.

commanding the 61st Fighter Squadron at Luke Air Force Base, and later he was the group commander of the 34th Training Group at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Even today, he's still giving back as a professor of the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

So, Dan, welcome to the podcast.

I'm very happy to be here, Never.