Notre Dame International Security Center

In this episode of ‘Students Talk Security’, Dr. Farr, the leading expert in the interconnection between international religious freedom, human rights, and United States National Security will discuss his work on the implications rights internationally have on defense and security domestically. His work has led to not only scholarship and legislative and State Department action, but to the creation of the Religious Freedom Institute, the leading scholarly institution on global religious freedom. Dr. Farr and I will be discussing this argument for increased emphasis on religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy, its implications within policy itself, and its usage in current issues of national security.

Interviewee: Dr. Thomas Farr

Interviewer: Maura Brennan

Matt Duss is a congressional staffer and has worked with Senator Bernie Sanders since 2017. Previously he was the President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and a national security and international policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.

Recorded: March 29, 2022

This episode will cover how the Senate can influence foreign policy in the face of new threats and increasing executive power, and what an NSA for a Senator sees as the biggest future threats to American security and power.

Interviewer: Christopher Libero

Interviewee: Thomas Mancinelli

In this episode of Outside the Box, Mike and Jim engage LtGen Gregory Newbold, former Director of Operations (J-3) for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a hard-hitting and wide-ranging discussion of proposed modernization of the U.S. Marine Corps in the XXIst Century, the role of the U.S. Congress in shaping the development of the armed forces, the legitimate avenues of military dissent, and how to grow a more effective general officer corps for the U.S. military in the years to come.

Recorded: March 14, 2022

Major Jeremy Grunert is an officer in the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps. In this capacity, he has served as a military prosecutor and legal advisor at assignments in Afghanistan, Qatar, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Major Grunert is currently assigned to the United States Air Force Academy, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law. He instructs the Academy’s core “Law for Air Force Officers” course and is the course director for the Academy’s new “Space Law” course. Major Grunert is also the Chief of Research for the Academy’s Law, Technology, and Warfare Research Cell; in this capacity, he hosts a monthly webinar series on the subject of space law. Finally, Major Grunert has published a number of journal articles and commentaries in publications such as War on the Rocks, the Air Force Law Review, the Journal of Drone Law & Policy, and the Pepperdine Law Review.

Recorded: March 1, 2022

Šumit Ganguly is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and holds the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is a specialist on the international and comparative politics of South Asia. His most recent book (edited with M. Chris Mason) is The Future of US-India Security Cooperation (Manchester University Press, 2021).

In 2014 Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger published his book Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghan Wars. Seven years before the fall of Kabul, he had already foreseen the chaotic end of that campaign in the Global War on Terrorism. Bolger says there is much blame to go around but focuses his fire on his profession and colleagues: the senior leadership of the U.S. military. In this episode, General Bolger joins Jim and Mike to discuss why we lost and what we need to do to win our wars in the future.

Bear F. Braumoeller is Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University and the holder of the Baronov and Timashev Chair in Data Analytics. He conducts research in the areas of international relations, political methodology, and complexity and human behavior. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and he held faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Harvard University before moving to Ohio State.

His present work focuses on the decline-of-war thesis, the relationship between international order and international conflict, and causal inference based on observational data. He currently co-directs the Computational Social Science community of practice under the Translational Data Analytics Institute at Ohio State. For more information, visit the Computational Social Science CoP page at TDAI.

The episode considers the future of counterterrorism in the context of a Taliban controlled Afghanistan. Beginning with a discussion of how the Taliban was able to regain control so swiftly, the podcast draws on the counterterrorism knowledge and expertise of the FBI’s Former Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Mike McGarrity to explore how the landscapes of counterterrorism and counterintelligence have shifted.

Interviewer: Nick Carter

Interviewee: Mike McGarrity

Official Title: Former Assistant Director for Counterterrorism at the FBI

Biography:

Mike McGarrity served as the FBI’s Assistant Director for Counterterrorism, managing the Bureau’s global counterterrorism operation for two years between 2018 and 2019. Mr. McGarrity’s 23 year tenure with the FBI began when he joined the New York field office in 1996, where he investigated violent gangs, drug organizations, and international money laundering networks. In 2003, he moved to the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, where he participated in numerous international terrorism investigations.

Over the next decade and a half, Mr. McGarrity served in a number of critical leadership positions at the Bureau. He was the FBI’s Supervisory Special Agent at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, the deputy on-scene commander in Afghanistan, the Assistant Section Chief for the Counterterrorism Division of the International Terrorism Operations Section, the Director of Counterterrorism at the White House’s National Security Council, and the FBI’s legal attaché in Swizterland. In 2015, he became the first director of the U.S. Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell, a complex multi-agency task-force dedicated to recovering American hostages abducted abroad. He has been recognized by the President and Director of the FBI Christopher Wray for his work.

Mr. McGarrity holds a J.D. and a B.A. in economics from The Catholic University of America. He is a graduate of the Government Senior Executive Program in National Security at the Harvard Kennedy School and Northwestern Kellog’s Navigating Strategic Change Program. He is currently a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Working Group and the International Association of Chiefs of Police Committee on Counterterrorism. He’s worked in the private sector since 2020.

Jayita Sarkar is an Assistant Professor at Boston University Pardee School of Global Studies, where she teaches diplomatic and political history. Her research has been published in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Cold War History, International History Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, Nonproliferation Review, and elsewhere. Her first book, Ploughshares & Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, forthcoming, 2022) examines the first forty years of India's nuclear program through the prisms of geopolitics and technopolitics.

Recorded: Nov 16, 2021 | Speaker: Jayita Sarkar