Can Students Solve Real-World Security Crises? Inside the ISE Global Strategy Competition

In this episode of GNSI’s At the Boundary podcast, GNSI’s Academic Director, Dr. David Oakley, is joined by the U.S. Army War College’s Chair of Executive and Strategic Leadership, Dr. Celestino Perez, to discuss GNSI’s upcoming undergraduate strategy competition during April’s International Security Experience.

Perez, who developed the Army War College strategy competition, worked with Oakley to plan the ISE’s strategy competition for undergraduate students from USF and other universities around the country and globe, most of whom do not have military backgrounds.  Perez and Oakley discuss the merits of this experiential learning exercise in solving strategic problems, as well as Perez’s mantra for strategy competitions: “Strategy is performance.”

They emphasize the importance of teamwork in crafting successful strategies and discuss how classroom environments can foster better strategic thinking among students. During the competition, teams made up of six students each will develop a strategic response based on a prompt, and then each team’s strategy will be judged, and one team will ultimately win the competition. 

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Dr. Celestino Perez, Dave Oakley, Jim Cardoso

Jim Cardoso  00:00

Jim, hello everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of at the boundary, the podcast from the global and national security Institute at the University of South Florida. I'm Jim Cardoso, Senior Director for GNSI, and your host for at the boundary. Joining us on today's episode will be doctors Dave Oakley and Tino Perez. They're the masterminds behind a really exciting, student focused event we'll be hosting in April, the USF undergraduate strategy competition. If you're not familiar with that, you need to be and fortunately, you're about to learn all about it. First, though, we have a couple things to tell you about. GNSI recently published our 2025 annual report on our website. It's a great way to see the tremendous progress our team made last year in our ongoing mission to inform decision makers, prepare the next generation of national security practitioners and enable actionable solutions for 21st Century security challenges. One of the highlights from the report, our journal of strategic security surpassed 2 million downloads, holding on to its position as the number one downloaded journal in the USF portfolio. Since we never rest on yesterday's achievements, JSs has put out a new call for papers seeking submissions for an upcoming special print issue on the evolving landscape of nuclear and conventional deterrence. Submission deadline is September 1, with a publication target date of December 1. You can find additional information on the JSs website that special issue will be an extension of GNSI Tampa summit six, which is less than a month away. Cracks in the lamp, freeing the nuclear Genie, promises to be an incredibly enlightening, maybe slightly disconcerting, but highlighting issues that need insight and clarity, featured speakers include retired General John Highton, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Commander US Strategic Command. Franklin Miller, former Special Assistant to the President and Assistant Secretary of Defense, Ambassador Chris Hill, former ambassador to Korea and Poland and our Executive Director, retired General Frank McKenzie, former commander US Central Command. Beyond these superb experts, we have several other great speakers and hands on events planned for attendees reserve a spot now for the conference, which takes place March 24 to the 25th right here at USF, we'll drop a registration link in the show notes. Finally, be on the lookout this week for our newest conference report. Florida's maritime edge built through leadership. Ready for what's next. It's the follow up report to our first Florida Security Forum, which we hosted in partnership with port Tampa Bay in November. This report is focused on strategic priorities for cyber workforce and autonomous readiness surrounding the critical vulnerabilities of Florida's deep water seaports. All right, it's time for today's featured topic, an upcoming undergraduate strategy competition that will be part of GNSI, first ever international security experience, which we're hosting on April 14 to the 17th. This strategy competition, modeled after a similar competition at the US Army War College, will take place in the last two days of that conference. We have a who's who of university sending teams such as Duke, Texas, A and M The Citadel, University of North Carolina, Georgetown, Arizona state the Polish War studies, university and polish land forces, university and Florida based schools such as Embry Riddle, University of Central Florida and the University of Tampa. There will be 20 teams in all as we prepare students from USF and across the nation to be the next generation of national security leaders. Here to talk about it are Dave Oakley and Tino Perez. Dave is the Academic Director here at GNSI, while Tino is the chair of executive and strategic leadership at the US Army War College and a GNSI non resident Senior fellow, Tino was an invaluable partner in helping us build out the competition. Dave, take it away.

Dave Oakley  04:33

Hey, Tino, thank you for joining us today. Oh, thanks for having me. I'm excited. Well, you know, I figured we'd just jump right into it. Get started. You know, the first question I had is, I hope you can tell us how and why the Army War College strategy competition developed.

Dr. Celestino Perez  04:49

Okay, so one of the things that the Army War College does every year is they host a sort of Olympics for middle aged men and women who are attending the. Various senior service colleges, and they called it this Jim Thorpe Sports Day. And they compete in sports like softball, soccer, skeet shooting, et cetera. And I wonder, I began teaching here in 2017 I wondered, why is it that we don't compete at the very thing that we're trying to develop at each of the senior service colleges? This is like the Army War College and Naval War College, etc. And so I had the idea of starting a strategy competition that would occur at the same time as Jim Thorpe sports day, because I knew that the schools could afford to release students to compete, but that our focus would be more intellectual and more hands on application of curricular concepts that the students have been learning all year long. So that's that's the main motivation. Another one is to get educators, administrators, even students, who are going to be leaders at a strategic level once they graduate. I wanted to get these leaders thinking about strategy. What is it? And specifically for the educators, how best can we teach strategy in the classroom so that we get a better outcome on graduation day and even 12345, years later, after graduation. And I think this is important to do, because the first competition was in 2022 in the fall was when we withdrew from Afghanistan. And it was a it was a tragic time of strategic discontent, and I'm putting that mildly, but it was a terrible time for us, policymakers and strategist, it was a terrible time for soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, to go through and so what can we do within the military education community in order to improve our thinking about strategy? I also wanted to have educators question, what are they teaching in the classroom? Teachers want students to be affected by the concepts that they're teaching every day in class. How do they put those concepts into use? And then the third thing is, are there any skills that we see in strategy formulation come up again and again, regardless of what the specific problem is that we're trying to confront, and if educators could take a introspective look at that during these three days of the competition, I think the entire policy making and military community would be better. Thanks.

Dave Oakley  07:57

Tino, I guess the first question I have just curious, are there more injuries in the strategy competition or the soccer competition at Jim Thorpe,

Dr. Celestino Perez  08:07

that's a good one. I think confessions go up and, you know, counselors and therapists visits go up. Actually, it's funny that some of the teams have tried to compete in both the sports and then come back to the strategy competition. I hear that at a couple of the top schools in PME that the leadership said that's not going to happen anymore, where we don't want to lose this competition, we're going to put our best foot forward. So now the students are going in fully focused on nothing else but the strategy competition under orders. So I think that that's a that's a good thing. So it sounds like

Dave Oakley  08:46

it's really driven that competitive spirit, and really in an area that, you know, it's just not, you know, the weekend athletes out there, it's what they're going to be doing professionally, as strategists, as developing, you know, plans, as operating. And I guess that gets into my second point. And you were talking about the importance of actually, you know, doing strategy, and you have what I think is a really cool mantra, that the strategy is performance. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that mantra, and then, how does it tie to the competition?

Dr. Celestino Perez  09:20

That's great. So I'll tell a little story here. And one of the common ways that we teach in military education, and I'm speaking from my experience at Fort Leavenworth, with the commando General Staff College, where you and I met and as well as the US Army War College, or I'm teaching and remained teaching today, is that there's this concept of Socratic dialog is the principal mode of education, and in this model, students sit at a table having read their homework the night before, and the teacher is trying to cultivate a dialog that is. Equally shared among the students, and were they able to reflect upon their readings? And then this constitutes, I would say, 90% of the students, educational experience. But the problem I saw was that we are a practitioner school, right? We're actually teaching persons how to do strategy. And so my thought has been that the central experience should include lectures. Should include seminar discussion or Socratic dialog, but the main experience should be students working in groups, confronting real world problems, doing the necessary research, applying the concepts to those problems and coming up with solutions, and that the more often they can do those exercises, the better off they'll be. So if I think that Socratic dialog is not the proper way to approach education at least 90% of the time, I think that the alternative is something called experiential or problem based learning. And the model I've come up with is this mantra of strategy is performance. So strategy is obviously an academic discipline. There are great thinkers in strategy that our students read at all of our different programs, but ultimately we're reading them to become better strategists. So let's say that we think the strategy is the alignment of ends, Ways and Means. There's other ways to think about strategy, but that's one of them. Well, you're only going to get better at it by applying and aligning ends, Ways and Means over and over again to real world problems. So the strategy is performance mantra captures some skills that I think arise in every problem solving or strategy formulation venture, and I'll just go over them quickly, and then we'll move on. But one of them is this idea of causal literacy that every policy strategy, plan and operations order is nothing more than a statement that's causal in nature. If we do X with our troops, our relationships, our resources, our time, good things are going to happen on the other side. So that's one part of causal literacy. The other part is that we simply don't deal with a military component. Even as military professionals, you also have to be aware of Alliance politics, multinational politics, the policy making process, the politics and the military systems of our adversary and our allies. So all these things come together that causes the question this idea of complex causality. So it's not just simple XY causality we're dealing with, but it's complexity. Another part of strategy is performance. Is this idea of normative reasoning, if we think about ends, Ways and Means a strategy, the ways and the means are instrumental or causal in nature. We have these means, for example, military or diplomatic. If we arrange them in certain ways, we can achieve the objective, but the objective or the ends in our strategies are always normative in nature. We select those based on our priorities and our values. Our ends and strategies are always evaluated in terms of better or worse, good or bad, just or unjust, evil or good, and that's how we proceed. So students need to tackle those kinds of questions in a different way than they tackle causal questions. And then the last ones here are pretty simple. The third one would be consensus building, whether it's gaining consensus for your ideas in a small group or in the interagency environment or across various multinational headquarters. It takes skill to take your strategy, your hard work and to try to win and gain acceptance at these various venues. Fourth skill is strategic assessment, which is actually weighing the pros and cons of alternative strategies. That's a whole skill that takes quite a bit of time to master, and then finally, to do any of these. The fifth skill is research, which I think, for the practitioner, is simply another name for perspective taking. How many people can we talk to? How many people can we read who can shed light on the problem that we're trying to confront in this strategic exercise? So I'll stop there.

Dave Oakley  14:40

You know, on the research side, I think back to my own education journey. And then, you know, I was going through most of my graduate education when I was a strategist, and I was amazed with how the classroom experience the individual skills I was nurturing, you know, through stuff like doing literature reviews or just, you know, the skills of being able to go. Go through a lot of information and identify that key, how much has served me well as a strategist, you know. And then, you know, and then the ability to bring it into a group setting in a collaborative way to, you know, frame a common appreciation what's going on. And as you said, have those kind of discursive interactions. And then, you know, come up with kind of a common framing, common understanding. It's back to your strategy as performance. You know, it's a group it's a group work. It's a group project.

Dr. Celestino Perez  15:31

Absolutely, my approach has been to make students feel in their minds and in their guts how difficult doing strategic work is and the first couple of times they try to actually craft a strategy, understanding the complexity of the environment, it's very difficult for them. It's like going to the gym and doing 100 push ups, 100 pull ups, a two mile run and then repeating it for three hours. It's just very difficult work, and I think that it's appropriate in military education and policy schools to put students in those positions as often as possible.

Dave Oakley  16:11

Now, now moving for the motivation behind, behind the strategy competition, the nuts and bolts of it. Can you provide a broad overview of the competition itself?

Dr. Celestino Perez  16:22

Yes, so the competition always begins on a Thursday morning. It's in late April, but a Thursday morning, all the students and we'll gather in a an auditorium. The students are divided into six person teams from the various programs, which we'll talk about a little bit later. And I read them. I give them some introductory material, but the main reason they're there is to receive a prompt. And the prompt is is confronting some real world crisis as the US faces today. There to use open source or unclassified information, it's simply what do we do? Craft a policy and strategy, or Ukraine, Russia war. Or craft a policy and strategy, or confronting the PRC and attempting to deter an invasion or a blockade of Taiwan, something like that. And the students work on this strategic problem for one and a half days before the next event occurs. So they have one day to work on it. They can work in it throughout the night, if they wish, and then they have all morning in the middle of the second day on the Friday, they will then conduct two rehearsals that are structured. We call them strategy workshops. And the way these rehearsal rehearsals occur is a team will go into one of the classrooms. In that classroom will be another team from another school, and there'll be two coaches, everyone's from a different school or program, and so here, one student is going to give their presentation, rehearse it. The other, the other team gets to hear them. The two coaches get to provide feedback, and then they do it with the other team. So what you're getting is a beautiful look from any perspective about how various civilian policy schools, some international schools, various senior service colleges and different teachers of strategy, think about strategy, and it's beautiful to see that there are many different views about how strategy is to be done well or properly. And I think that this, this is something beautiful. It's also something, I think, frustrating for the students. I do think there's some commonalities that maybe we can talk about a little bit later. But so the students will do one hour of that rehearsal, and then they'll take a break, and then they'll do it again for another hour with a completely different set of another team and another set of coaches, I think that this is the highlight of the competition. This is where educators, for the first time, in a sustained, rigorous way, get to see how other teams are doing what they teach, and can kind of evaluate and what I hope is learn some, you know, best practices to bring back to their program, whether it's Texas or Rhode Island or, you know, Alabama or wherever it is, in order to improve what we're doing about policy and military education. So after that second day that there's a tournament, Oh, yeah.

Dave Oakley  19:39

Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Dr. Celestino Perez  19:42

No So and then the third day is actually the tournament where in their teams will brief their strategy to judges. And the judges, there's several of them representing academia, the policy community, the military community, and then cross. Crossover communities, they will evaluate the students and decide which ones are the best, so that on on Saturday, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, two teams will remain on the stage in the auditorium inside root Hall where the army Ward college is, and they'll compete to decide who the winner is going

Dave Oakley  20:23

to be. I think it's great. And I've had the privilege of participating on these competitions. What I really liked about your approach, and you touched on a little bit ago, is, although you give some guidance to the judges, you also appreciate that not every judge views strategy the same. They prioritize different aspects of strategy. And so you give them that flexibility, which I think is important for the student, because, you know, their their commanders, their policymakers, are not all going to think the same, nor are they going to have a checklist of, you know, a rubric for them to to to grade strategy in the real world.

Dr. Celestino Perez  21:00

Well, you've stated my idea exactly about why I don't mandate a rubric. This is, it's a real world. You're not going to receive a rubric before you go into a big briefing. But this is really frustrating to many programs to include their faculty members, to include some students. So as a sort of moderate approach to this. What I did is I compromised and said, Okay, I'll craft a rubric, but it's only a suggestion in case the judges want to use it. But you can imagine that these judges have written books about strategy, or they've been teaching strategy for decades, or they practice strategy at the highest level for several years, so they already have an idea, and they don't agree with each other, although I think there are commonalities among them. And I hope over time, we're going to be able to draw those out in a systematic way and share them with everyone

Dave Oakley  21:55

you know. And I think it's also you know, in that the flexibility, the way you don't require, you know, hey, we're going to make the teams use PowerPoint to present the way you give the flexibility for the teams to communicate their understanding and their strategy the way that they see fit. I think that's also powerful.

Dr. Celestino Perez  22:16

Oh, yes. Root Hall, which is the heart of the army Ward College's resident program, is in its third year of existence. It's beautiful, building, lots of glass, lots of sunlight shining through, lots of collaboration spaces. But there is everything there to use PowerPoint, to project it, but I gently try to discourage it. Several, several teams will use PowerPoint. What I try to do is encourage a sharpening of the actual message of the communication, and you don't need any slides for that. Some students will use a portable whiteboards that they'll do some of the work on and take it from classroom to classroom. Or they'll use what we call a placemat with some of the key concepts on a sheet of paper, put it in front of the judge and brief that way. So it's also a good education in different ways to brief.

Dave Oakley  23:06

It sounds like the key is that it's not about building product, making product. It's about communicating, understanding and communicating the strategy you mentioned earlier. You said Texas, you mentioned a couple other locations. I know that most of the war colleges participate in this. Can you talk about some of the other universities who have been part of this competition? Yeah.

Dr. Celestino Perez  23:31

So every year since this inception, and we have the fifth one coming up in April, the fifth competition, we've had a Col de guerre play, and Nicole de guerre in Paris, France has a very active English program run by a faculty member named Emily claret, and she does a lot through debate and other presentation modes to teach the French students how to improve their English within the context of national security, military affairs. So that's one of the schools, and it's just a great to have such a great partner. We've also had the Australian War College compete twice. We've had a Bundeswehr, Bundeswehr University, which is a sort of military school in Germany. Younger students. We've also had several US policy schools. So the university at Texas Clement Center has been participating from the beginning in every competition. We've had New York University Global Affairs, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. We've had Fletcher School at Tufts University participate. We've had George Washington University participate. So what we're trying to do is bring the civilian who are going to be the future policymakers, setting policy aims, approving strategies. Giving orders essentially to the graduates of the senior service Colleges of the military schools. My hope is that this unequal dialog that Elliot Cohen mentioned between policymakers and military leaders is more robust, more rigorous, more two way, especially when talking about the employment of military force in an actual operation. And I think getting the students who are the civilian students, who are experts more so in the policy and civilian aspects of strategy to meet the military students who are more comfortable with moving ships and airplanes and, you know, infantry around on an app, putting it together so they can learn about each other in sustained ways over the course of a three day period.

Dave Oakley  25:57

Yeah, it sounds like, you know, I think, as you know, we're sending a team from USF down to the competition this year. We're very excited about it. And when the conversation, conversations I had with with the team, because, you know, you look at the war colleges here, here are military professionals. Many of them have spent 18 to 20 years in the military. They've been involved in a lot of planning, right? And so they know strategy. They know planning pretty well, most of them right. And there's this little bit of maybe nervousness that you're going up against some experienced practitioners. But I was there a couple years ago, and I watched the University of Texas team with what looked like a bunch of young graduate students win the competition. And it seems to me that there's this value brought by a different perspective into the competition that might not, you know, reside all the time with the military practitioners, because they're just, you know, so used to their community, so used to their upbringing in the military, and the way that they frame problems and think about problems that, you know, there's this freshness brought from civilian institutions.

Dr. Celestino Perez  27:09

Oh, absolutely. I think that in the military, we get accustomed to a certain way of speaking. When someone's going to present a formal briefing, we expect them to look and to act a certain way. And the real world isn't like that. The policymakers have no hair regulations for you know, they can use as many filler words as they want. And really, that's not the essence of strategy formulation. That's the ideas and the causal story behind it, the priorities that you're trying to realize, and that's what really matters. So anything that breaks away these stereotypes going both ways, that creates anything that creates better understanding between the civilian and the military communities, I think is a good thing. I do want to talk about University of Texas and Columbia really quickly, because I think that there's two anecdotes that highlight what I think is the essence of the competition. So the University of Texas Clements Center at a naval US Navy pilot who was a fellow there for that year. And what she did is she had voluntary weekly sessions about strategy at the beginning of the academic year, say August, that were sustained all the way until the competition in April, and that year, the University of Texas Clement center won the competition. Now it's hard to win the competition, and there's all sorts of contingency at play. The judges sort of change. You know, they're not the same judges for every single screening process. But I thought that that was that there was some correlation there, and and those students were really excited about strategy. They've been talking about it, practicing it for a long time. I think that's a really good approach, having gone through the competition twice at that time, and Texas had said, you know, we're not really successful yet. What can we do to change things up? Steve Biddle is a professor at Columbia University SIPA, and he teaches strategic assessment in a course called Foundations of international security policy, and two years ago, his team didn't advance to the to the next round. And so I was closing up all the classrooms making sure everything was put away at the end of the day. On Saturday, I was dead tired. I was the only one in the building, I thought. And then I come up on this quarter classroom, and there's Steve Biddle. I looked through the window, there's C Biddle, where there's six students there who had competed, and they'd been there, I'm going to say two hours at that point, just going over, hey, here's, here's some things that you did well, but here's some things that. You could have improved upon. And I thought that that was beautiful. Like West Point competed for the first time last year an undergraduate program. And I know that the faculty member said is they loved, hey, we're gonna be better next year. We're gonna we're gonna focus on this. And I think that's the spirit of the competition that think contra distinction to other anecdotes that speak to pride. I cannot believe we did. It advanced. The judges must be rigged, and the strategy competition is a miss in some way. Yeah, I think that those students who are open to learning, those faculty members who are open to learning, get the most out of it. This is such a rare occasion that this should be seen as an opportunity by educators, administrators and students, not as a period of like, you know, being upset about the results

Dave Oakley  30:50

when I get guests back to this spirit. You know, the main focus is not coming home with the trophy, it's coming home with developing those relationships. You know, being more thoughtful, being a better strategist, and really learning from it. And with that, I wanted to shift a little bit you've actually been instrumental in helping us here at USF and GNSI develop our own strategy competition that's geared towards undergraduates. And so wanted to thank you, first and foremost for that, for helping us develop that concept.

Dr. Celestino Perez  31:25

Super exciting. And it's really an honor that you started this competition after witnessing one of them at the Army War College. But I think that this kind of exercise at the undergraduate level is super important. I know at West Point they have something like, you know, the Model UN which is, you know, in many different places. West Point has hosts something called the Student Council in United States affairs, which many undergraduate students, you know, really love, and the faculty members as well. But, but the strategy competition is going to force, you know, the undergraduates. It that you're going to host to think through problems in preparation for professional work, but also in preparation for simple citizenship in a liberal democracy. And so, you know, today in the world, in the news we're talking about, you know, Venezuela is a big strategic concern. We're talking about Iran is a big strategic concern. And to have graduates of our universities and colleges who have gone through this kind of experience, and you have some great schools, I'm really amazed at the school that you've been able to pull together for this thinking about these questions. Well, when they become 2324 25 years old, they're going to be great citizens and educators, you know, in their own way, in their own communities and networks about talking through the big questions of peace and war and alliances. So I applaud you for that. You should listen with those schools, by the way.

Dave Oakley  33:00

Now we feel very fortunate, number one, to have you as a senior non resident fellow, helping us develop the concept and you know, the build the field that they come to, and very appreciative of the universities who have signed up to be part of our inaugural strategy competition in April. So very excited. Actually, just got the trophies and the medals and the coins in the other day. And so there's you can't see them because, you know, we're on a podcast, but they're sitting here in the in the office. And so I'll share them with you in a little bit. But, but, you know, it gets me thinking back to the point on the strategy is performance, and looking back on my experience, both as a as a student within professional military education programs, and then as a professor in professional military education programs. And I always kind of saw this, this the spectrum that where the ideal spot was somewhere in the middle, right, and so on one side you had where we got so focused on Process and procedures, and we it was more about the end product than it was about like nurturing certain attributes within the individuals. Or, how do you actually work as a collective group to bring all that knowledge to help you know, come up with a common framing, a common appreciation, or, on the far right, it was excellent, excellent individual in the classroom, the Socratic method that you talked about, very, very great experience. And although in those cases, the individual left the classroom, I think intellectually better off, I never got the feeling that we did we I should say we didn't always do the best job giving them some help, and how do I actually apply that knowledge in a group work setting, as a member of an operational planning team, like you would say, in the military, or part of strategy development? And to me, these experiential education opportunities, these strategy competitions, are the ideal way you do that. So you know you have. Students sitting in a classroom getting good, you know, you know, intellectual nurturing throughout throughout the year, and then you bring them into these competitions and let them demonstrate that and sharpen it as a member of a team, and really reflecting how, if they go into the national security space, they're really going to work and they're really going to share their intellect. It's not a, you know, something you do alone. It's not an individual activity. It's a team group. It's strategy by, you know, is performance.

Dr. Celestino Perez  35:32

Now, that's wonderful, and you touched upon something that I think is really important here. I do think that to become proficient at strategy as an individual or a group, you need to practice it over and over again. And this is the same with any skilled practice, like hitting a golf ball, a tennis ball, playing chess, you just have to do it over and over before you gain any kind of proficiency. But the other element is, I'm not advocating for simply training in the classroom. There is training in the classroom. Skill development is training. So I don't separate sharply between education and training. Education entail skill for me, but it also entails an attentiveness to what scholars are researching and publishing on. And this came home for me when I came back a long time ago from Iraq, and it was a surge deployment, but I discovered, and I was, I was a new PhD student at the time as well. I had defended a dissertation during mid tour leave, but I came back from that deployment of 15 months, and I discovered a whole bunch of literature written by civilian scholars staff. Is Kali vas, one of them, they were talking about the importance of local dynamics, and how local dynamics in a civil war vary from place to place. And I was, there's, there were a whole nother series of scholarship and I said, Where was this in the train up for our units? Where is the spirit of this work in the counter insurgency manual that everybody was reading or reading drops of at the time? And so I think it's really important, even when thinking about the People's Republic of China or Russia or Venezuela or anything else, to think about what strategy is, what Alliance politics is, what the policy making process is, how does technology affect campaigning at the operational level, or how does geography affect the military operation? And we have concepts, theoretical concepts for each of these things, but you don't really know them until you wrestle with them in application. And I heard this expression that MIT uses their motto, mans at manos. Manos, which is mind and hand, where you need the theory the mind. But what they're really interested in is the application through the hands. And so crafting a strategy, building a strategy, designing approaches to solving problems, should be the core of education and the pinnacle of it, not simply what you get in a lecture.

Dave Oakley  38:15

Tina, I could, I could talk about, you know, the theories of educating practitioners with you for hours, and in fact, we've done it often, but I know we're getting ready to run at time, but I wanted to thank you for being here with us today, sharing the background on the army, war, college strategy competition, and then also for being part of our inaugural competition that's going to be on the 15th and 16th of April, I'm sorry, the 16th and 17th of April this year. And so very excited to welcome you here in Tampa, and very excited for you to experience a strategy competition with us. And so thank you for supporting our effort down here in Florida.

Dr. Celestino Perez  38:59

Well, thanks for letting me be a part of what's going to happen in Tampa here. Pretty here pretty soon. So it's going to be a wonderful experience, I think, for everyone, and I'm just grateful to be a part of it. So thank you,

Dave Oakley  39:09

and I can also promise you there will be no snow thanks, because

Dr. Celestino Perez  39:13

we're done with it here.

Dave Oakley  39:15

Hey, Tino, thank you for joining us today.

Jim Cardoso  39:22

Special, thanks to our guests today, doctors Dave Oakley and Tino Perez as they preview the upcoming USF undergraduate strategy competition, which will be part of the GNSI international security experience in April. Next week, on the podcast, our special guest will be author and researcher, Dr Louise tumchuix, she's a research fellow at the Center for war Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. Last year, she received the French Navy's Admiral castex prize for her work and writing on maritime economic security. If you don't want to miss that episode or any other episode, be sure to. Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for sharing some time with us today. You can find GNSI on YouTube, LinkedIn, NX. Be sure to follow like and subscribe. Tell your friends and colleagues as well. I also encourage you to sign up for a monthly newsletter to keep up with all our research and activities. All this is on our website, usf.edu/gnsi,

Jim Cardoso  40:30

that's going to wrap up this episode of at the boundary. Each new episode will feature global and national security issues we found to be insightful, intriguing, maybe controversial, but overall, just worth talking about. I'm Jim Cardoso, and we'll see you at the boundary. You.