Breaking Into National Security: USF, AI, and the Path to National Security Careers

What does it take to solve real-world national security challenges under pressure?

In this episode of GNSI’s “At the Boundary” podcast, the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida takes you inside the high-stakes world of strategy competitions, where graduate students prepare to compete in the US Army War College Strategy Competition.

GNSI’s Dr. David Oakley is joined by USF graduate student competitors Yoan Hermida and Dan Woods to explore how future national security leaders bridge theory and practice.

The conversation breaks down how students develop analytical frameworks, strategic thinking, and decision-making skills to address complex global conflicts, from Russia-Ukraine to emerging security threats. You’ll also hear how artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and intelligence technology are shaping the future of warfare and policy.

Beyond the competition, this episode highlights the growing importance of experiential learning in international relations, including the launch of USF’s International Security Experience, undergraduate strategy competitions, and direct engagement with organizations like the CIA and global policy schools.

Whether you’re a student exploring careers in intelligence, a policy professional, or simply interested in global affairs, this episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the next generation is preparing for strategy, diplomacy, and modern security challenges.

Links from the Episode:

• GNSI International Security Experience

• CIA Recruiting and Informational Events Schedule

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GNSI on Linkedin
GNSI on YouTube

At the Boundary  from the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida,  features global and national security issues we’ve found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial, but overall just worth talking about.

A "boundary" is a place, either literal or figurative, where two forces exist in close proximity to each other. Sometimes that boundary is in a state of harmony. More often than not, that boundary has a bit of chaos baked in. The Global and National Security Institute will live on the boundary of security policy and technology and that's where this podcast will focus.

The mission of GNSI is to provide actionable solutions to 21st-century security challenges for decision-makers at the local, state, national and global levels. We hope you enjoy At the Boundary.

Look for our other publications and products on our website publications page.

Transcript

EP 126 - 13 April (EP 126 - Oakley,Hermida,Woods)_mixdown

Fri, Apr 10, 2026 10:09AM • 37:36

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

USF, GNSI, strategy competition, US Army War College, international security, experiential learning, intelligence and technology, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, career fair, CIA recruiting, undergraduate strategy competition, team preparation, analytical framework, international relations.

SPEAKERS

Yoan Hermida, Speaker 1, Jim Cardoso, Dan Woods, Dave Oakley

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. Today on the podcast, we're happy to bring back to the studio Dr David Oakley, the Academic Director here at GNSI. Joining him today will be two of the students who will be representing USF at the 2026 US Army War College strategy competition next month. This competition inspired the USF undergraduate strategy competition, which kicks off this Thursday as part of the first ever GNSI international security experience. Speaking of that, today is setup day for our team as we prepare the Marshall Student Center for the conference. It kicks off tomorrow, but there's still plenty of time to secure your spot. You'll find a link to register in the show notes. There's no cost to attend, but we do ask you to register in advance. This will be the first of its kind event for GNSI and the University of South Florida. Day one tomorrow will be an academic conference run by GNSI staff focused on intelligence and technology. We'll explore advances in artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles, the roles they'll play in intelligence and surveillance and the impact on American society. Our featured keynote will be David Marlow, the former deputy director of operations for the CIA and currently Senior Vice President of Operations for the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, on day two, Wednesday, our future strategist program steps into the spotlight with their own event. FSP is an organization that GNSI created 18 months ago to provide experiential opportunities for USF students towards careers in national security. It's blossomed into a major force on campus, with over 120 members, as you heard last week on the podcast, they'll be 100% responsible for the day two conference shadows and circuits the future of intelligence and tech. They recruited the speakers, organized the panels, and brought in fellow students, both from USF and schools across the country, to play key roles in the panel discussions. We're also working with the USF Center for Career and Professional Development, as well as the USF Office of National scholars to host a series of student success career focused events this week, the Career Fair will happen on Thursday afternoon in the plaza room at the Marshall Student Center. A variety of organizations will be looking to talk with USF students, including the Savannah River National Lab, the Peace Corps and many others. Our partner universities will also be on hand to discuss their postgraduate programs, including Texas A and M's Bush School of Government and Public Service, the Georgetown University Security Studies Program, the University of Texas, LBJ School and King's College London. We're also very excited to host the CIA for a series of recruiting and informational events. Representatives from the agency will be providing information to both students and faculty throughout the week. We'll have a link to the full schedule in the show notes, and of course, Thursday and Friday, we'll be hosting the first ever USF undergraduate strategy competition. 17 teams from universities across the nation and Poland will cap off a big week here at USF. The competition is modeled after the exercise developed for the US, Army War College, but its focus on undergraduate students tackling the national security issues of the modern world is unique. We hope you'll take some time to check out the international security experience this week. On that note, let's get to our featured interview today. We're just a few weeks away from the sixth annual US Army, War College strategy competition for the first time, USF will be sending a graduate student team to this year's competition and genocides. Academic Director Dr Dave Oakley sat down with two of those students who will be repping the green and gold, Joanne, Hermida and Daniel woods. Let's listen in on the conversation.

Dave Oakley  04:38

Johan and Dan. Thank you for joining us today.

Dan Woods  04:41

Thank you for having us. Thank you.

Dave Oakley  04:43

Yeah, I was hoping each of you could introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your background and what drew you to the strategy competition.

Yoan Hermida  04:51

Sure. So my name is Juan Hermida. I am a doctoral student at USF specializing in Politics and International. Affairs. And my research interests are international security, cyber conflict. Previously, I was in the tech industry, so I worked for about 16 years in the tech industry. I'm also a veteran of the US Army and of the Iraq conflict. As far as what drew me to the competition. So my academic program is heavily theoretical. There have been a few times where actually Dan and I have done tabletop exercises, sort of more practical applications of the theories and the concepts that we had learned, and those are really exciting, really interesting. So this seemed like a perfect, perfect opportunity to sort of bridge that gap from the theoretical into the practical. And yeah, so that's what drew me.

Dave Oakley  06:00

Hey, thanks, Joan, how about you?

Dan Woods  06:01

Dan? Yeah, I'm Dan woods. I am also I'm a master's student here at USF in international affairs with a concentration in security diplomacy, alongside the fact that I am actually a Judy gnsift Honors College staff member, where I work with students on experiential learning opportunities and things like that. So I have an interesting background that I'm coming to an ad. I'm coming at it from, from the view of both a student, but then also someone that works at USF and wants to see it succeed. So I picture my involvement with this as being kind of me, putting my money where my mouth is. You know, my students, I always encouraging them to put themselves out there and to take shots and to find opportunities to practice what they're learning in the classroom outside of the classroom. And I feel like that's that's kind of what this competition is about. It's about the learning that we've done in the programs that we're in, and then using that experience to try to solve real world problems that are that we're all facing.

Dave Oakley  07:07

No thanks. Dan, yeah, I agree. You know, the the the interesting thing I like about a competition like that, it really combines the theory and history that you have in the classroom and then put it to practice. And so that experiential learning, I think, it's very valuable outside the classroom. Yeah, I know you. You guys are two members of a broader team. Can you provide some background on your other team members?

Yoan Hermida  07:29

Yeah, sure. So the the other team members are a mix of basically Dan and I. So it's a mix of other master students, other PhD students that we have taken classes with. It was sort of the idea was to find colleagues, academic colleagues, who we had established a certain level of trust with, who we had seen in action, quote, unquote, in the classroom, who, personally, obviously not speaking for them. Personally, I had been impressed by their sort of strategic thinking, the types of questions they asked in our classroom, in our class environment, and just trying to look for other people with similar interests who were dependable to sort of undertake this months long preparation for the competition?

Dan Woods  08:25

Yeah, and I yeah, I would echo everything that Yohan just said. I'm really happy with the team that we have. I think we're all incredible thinkers in different ways. For example, we have Megan corn and Savannah Havard, who have actually co authored a book the anxious state, which came out in partnership with USF professionally, or Steven Neely. So we've got some smart people on our team. We have Christoph Wisniewski, who's studying Applied Linguistics, so he's kind of our he's the one that gets into the weeds about which should we use this word or that word, which ends up being pretty important at times in a competition like this? But yeah, he's great. And then we have Alex Eiler, who's another full time USF staff member like myself. He's over in USF world, and he's also studying international affairs with a concentration in security and diplomacy.

Dave Oakley  09:19

Sounds like a really high power, diverse team. Yeah, you know, from my experience in the military, working on operational planning team and seeing competitions like this in the past, that a diverse team that brings a lot of different viewpoints is very valuable. You know, I'm curious is, I know you guys have been been working hard, preparing for this competition. What have you guys been doing to prepare for it? I would

Yoan Hermida  09:44

say Dan and I spent along with with you, Dr, I believe we spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out maybe not the best approach, but an acceptable approach that would work for the team. So what that entailed was, in the beginning of January, trying to find an analytical framework that we could, through repetition, leverage to apply to different cases within the space of two hours. So the two hour thing, the reason I mentioned that is because we meet once a week, two hours. So we needed a this analytical framework that could be could be iterative, and that would allow us to examine these cases in depth, but also sort of from a perspective that each team member could accommodate with, right? So nothing too abstract that would leave us in the dust, quote, unquote, right? But something that was practical, that could be, you know, repeated. So our preparation is basically we, we look at different scenarios. We try to do a few a month. I think the initial approach was a little bit over ambitious, where we had imagined that we would be able to tackle these case cases one a week. So right now, we've backed off a little bit, and we take, we take a case, we run it through the framework, meet once a week for two hours, and then just try to progress through it from the from the analysis perspective to developing an action plan to, you know, looking at the weaknesses of our action plan, etc. So that's been our approach. Dan, I'm sure you'll have, you'll have some more to add.

Dan Woods  11:45

Yeah, no, that was, that was a good overview. I think really, what I would add is that, like we were talking about before, we have a lot of extremely smart people on our team that are very capable and very opinionated. And so I think one of the things that is difficult about anytime you have a bunch of different people and get everybody in the room is their different experiences, interests, backgrounds, you know, ideology, whatever the case may be, you got to get somewhere where everybody is working together. And I feel like that is really one of the things that we've done very quickly as a team, is we've even put in place ways to resolve disputes. So if, like yolan and I are, you know, can't get on the same page about how to handle a certain situation, we have a system that we put in place to quickly find a resolution and then go with it. So I think, I think building the framework of not just how you're how you're reacting to a situation, but how, how your system is even going to work internally, is really important, and I do feel like that is something that we've done a good job of kind of gelling, maybe a bit of luck there, and just that the personalities all gel but I think also a little bit to all of our planning, and that we're thinking of these things ahead of time, or at least as many things as we can that we might run into. Yeah, you know,

Dave Oakley  13:04

from my experience, one of the most difficult time in collaborative work is just to get started. And I think having a framework to move from that everyone knows how to get started. You know, especially in something like this, where you have, you don't, you know when you when you start thinking about it, you really don't have much time to really frame a very complex, complex, difficult problem and then identify policy outcomes you want to go for, and then come up with a strategy. And so it's really, you know, you think two, three days seems like a long time, but once you get started, it's really difficult. One of the things I've seen in the past that has been very, very difficult for practitioners, is they get that balance between having a framework somewhere to get initiated, like we discussed, and not being beholden to a process to where you just kind of check in the blocks. How have you guys worked through that? I guess you know, even before that, have you guys found that an issue? And if so, how have you worked through that.

Yoan Hermida  14:03

Yeah. So I think initially, initially, our framework had a lot of moving pieces to it. We We even developed, we developed a system to sort of categorize and label our action items. And I think as as we have run through additional cases, we have found that some of that stuff is not as helpful. It's, it's it's quite it's quite involved. To go through every single line item that you know, let's say somebody on the team proposes a particular phase of an action plan or a particular tactic to employ, it can be quite time consuming to apply that that labeling system that we developed, so I think organically, even without, without having too much discussion about it, we have. Over time, kept the things from the original framework that we have found to work as we analyze the cases, and dropped the things from the framework that put too much of a burden on on our analysis process and our development of strategies to tackle the case.

Dan Woods  15:19

Yeah, I think that a main part of what we're doing is just trying to get repetition in so that we we get more comfortable in those scenarios and can turn around our process faster, so that we have more time to do the research on the on the important things that we really want to, really want to focus in on. Because we're taking whatever the topic will be, we're going to take a very large topic, and we're going to have to have to distill it down to a 15 minute presentation, and that means you've got to leave a lot of stuff, including a lot of things that are probably important on the cutting room floor, and really focus on on just what is the most crucial issue to address and getting the result that you want. And so I think that's a lot of what we've been doing, but that that's hard, right? You just take as an example, you, you know, the Ukraine, Russia conflict. Okay, solve it. How do you where do you start? What's the first thing you do? I mean that even just that, taking that scenario alone, you start to see how daunting the task can, task can be. So I'm assuming, between all the teams that are presenting, whatever the the issue is that we're addressing, we're going to see very different types of solutions to the problem. And really, you know, we just want to come up with one that is coherent, you know, that that that represents us and and the university well. And I'd be lying if we I said we didn't want to win. So, you know, we want to learn. We want to we want to grow personally, but we also we would love to win.

Dave Oakley  16:47

You know, one of the things that I really love about the army, war, college competition, and some that something that we're emulating in our own competition next week, the undergraduate strategy competition, is that the teams don't know what the what the topic is, until the competition begins. And so curious how the team is preparing. I know all of you are very thoughtful individuals who are engaged in contemporary events and international relations, international affairs, but there's a lot out there to kind of focus on so how have you guys prepared, keeping track of what's going on globally, trying to guess and estimate what the what the scenario might be.

Dan Woods  17:36

I think sitting here on April 7, 2026 you know, the world is changing on an hourly basis, not even daily. As we come we'll start a, you know, a scenario one week, we'll get halfway through it, and by the time we sit down the next week to go over it, everything that has already changed from what we we saw. So, so it is, it is. It's difficult to kind of focus on one thing. And you can't, you know, we have natural experts. You know, Johan is our expert in Cuba, Latin America. Alex is, you know, knows a lot about about Russia. Christophe is, knows about Poland and the EU and then Megan and Savannah are, know about domestic politics that we can use a lot in the US specifically, but other countries as well. So we have kind of a wide net. I mean, I'd be lying if I said we don't, sometimes try to guess what we think the prompt will be, but, but I think we're just trying to prepare as much as we can, you know, looking at the issues that are affecting the world right now and trying to be prepared for any question that we might get during the competition.

Yoan Hermida  18:49

Yeah, so I think we walk a fine line between trying to guess what the scenario will be and just having a broad preparation that will serve us, regardless of what the scenario ends up ends up being. So part of it is one of the early recommendations I had for the team, for example, like not that I not that I want to be a Foreign Service Officer. But one of the things that you read about, one of the recommendation suggestions for the Foreign Service exam is to read the Economist. The Economist is very sort of broad based. It gives you current events without forcing you to react to like the daily aspect of it. It's more of a weekly summary with some analysis, obviously from a particular position. So I find that very helpful, just to keep an overall track of what's going on in the world. But then again, you know, that's just like one slice of the preparation, reading, drawing. Drawing from our courses, right and reading broadly is, I think, sort of the best strategy to try to not so much focus on what the case may be, but have a general overview of how strategists have handled other cases right now, I'm reading McNamara's initial you know, after 25 years, McNamara left government, and he published a book on what went wrong in Vietnam. So I'm trying to gain some lessons from the things that he's saying about the strategic mistakes, the questions that were asked, the questions that weren't asked, you know, from a case that is now more than 50 years old in Vietnam, right? So, yeah, that's that has been sort of our approach academically, drawing from, from coursework, from some, some of these theories, but also trying to keep an eye, sort of an eye on, on the theory and the history, and another eye on what's going on in the real world.

Dave Oakley  21:05

Now, you know one of the things about the competition? You know, beyond the competition, I know everyone, every team wants to go and win, wants to, wants to bring home the trophy and the, you know, the title. But if you look at the some of the other competitors, it's a really cool kind of diverse group of individuals. So, you know, you have the war college students who are individuals who, you know, have spent 1820, years in the military that are competing represented at war colleges. You also have civilian University graduate students from all over the United States. And then, and then you have a mixture of both that are coming from overseas competing, and so with that in mind, what, what are you guys most excited or the, you know, the many things or the few things that you guys are most excited about with the competition?

Yoan Hermida  21:52

Yeah, I'm excited to see how, how other teams have approached this, because we have an idea of how we should approach this thing, obviously, that's, you know, very partial. It seems to be working for us. But I'm excited for the rubber to meet the road and actually find out

Jim Cardoso  22:12

whether our

Yoan Hermida  22:14

preparation, not that, not whether our preparation, has been sufficient. Because ultimately, I think part of the joy of this competition is participating in the process, right, regardless of the outcome. Obviously, like Dan said, We would like to place highly in in the competition. But ultimately, it's, it's about the process. It's about coming, coming together as a team and yeah, seeing how, whether the framework will be successful, seeing how other teams approach the question there's, there's an interesting aspect of the competition which two teams present, sort of like, you know, sequentially, not concurrently, but sequentially, and just seeing how they, they approach the case in the same room, and, you know, determining, hey, this, this is interesting, or, you know, we could have done this potentially a little bit better. And also, like you said, this is a very broad based, international base of competitors, so I'm sure these, these people, will bring quite varying approaches to the competition. So yeah, that's also going to be very interesting.

Dan Woods  23:32

Yeah. I mean, I would echo again everything Yohan said, but I would also just say too, like, even among that process of seeing how everybody else addressed the issue is also why they chose to address it that way. Like you said, there'll be more civilian based teams, like we're a civilian based team, and more that come from a military background. So just seeing why people naturally gravitated towards a certain process, I think will be really interesting. And then just the judges themselves and faculty and staff involved at the war college getting a chance to meet everybody there. And quite honestly, I think just, you know, the world is a is a very tenuous place right now. So I think it'll be, it'll be kind of inspiring just to be in a room with a bunch of people who who want to solve the problems of tomorrow, today.

Dave Oakley  24:21

So, you know, I with the diversity of people you're talking about there for, you know, diversity from backgrounds, both you know, some scholars, some practitioners, practitioners from, you know, military, diplomacy, intelligence, always find it interesting when you when you see them, Judge, you know, there's not one right approach to strategy or, you know, everyone looks at strategy slightly different, and so that's something I always find interesting, you know, I know, you know, as we mentioned before, we're doing a strategy competition now, and, you know, developing the rubric and stuff for that competition, you know, I think it's just a human nature that you want to have precise like, what is expected. Um. Sure. And so sometimes it can be frustrating, because, you know, there's Everyone views strategy differently. And so one judge might value one thing, and another judge might value, you know, something else, and they'll score you based on their values. And although it can be frustrating, the thing I find interesting about it, and is, it's the real world, right? It's, it's everyone has different viewpoints. And so, you know, I think it's, it's, it's exciting. You know, we talked a little bit in the introduction about how this experiential education experience fits with your classroom stuff and or your classroom experience, and how they're complementary. Was hoping you could, you know, delve a little deeper into that, and maybe not even from, you know, how is it? How does it fit with the classroom experience, but maybe how it fits with your future professional goals, you know? How does this, you know, you know, fit with an interest of what you want to do after you're done with the graduate programs.

Yoan Hermida  26:02

You Yeah, so I'm, I'm interested in going into academia, however tenuous that goal may be, in the current environment, for a political science PhD, but I think, I think this experience will will help me, will help me realize that the things we read about and write about in academic journals, I was lucky enough to have a peer reviewed piece published recently, those things aren't simply abstract academic exercises. Sometimes the things that we that we write, they matter, and they matter a lot. We have been, you know, recently in the news, a particular strain of international relations theory has has been in vogue. So I spent three years studying, studying that. And, you know, I have, like everyone else, my own, my own opinions and, you know, positions and realizing that, for that strain, for example, it's made the jump into real world events, and it's being quoted in the news, etc. You know, these things are, again, not simply academic exercises that that we do up in an ivory tower. Sometimes they have real world implications that are life and death. And I know that's a little bit somber, but keeping that in mind as an academic and participating bridging that gap between theory, or I should say, as a potential academic, bridging that you have between theory and in practice helps me is serves as a reminder, maybe in my future writings And in the things I say, hopefully in the classroom and in on panels, etc, that you know, to be careful, to be careful and to consider carefully some of the the theories and and positions that I'm assuming as An academic.

Dan Woods  28:21

For me, I think I would say that I really enjoy working with with college students in general. So I will first and foremost look at how I can bring this back to the Honors College, which luckily does give me a lot of leeway to do certain programs and things like that that may be tangentially related or directly related, to national security. But I think, I think just another, just, again, very broad. But, you know, in the in the international relations realm, a lot of people have said, since the fall of the Soviet Union, you know, there hasn't been a lot, a lot for the academics to do. You know, we obviously had the wars in the early 2000s but it feels like this is a time where we really are going to need a lot of IR experts. And so I, I feel lucky to be around a lot of the professionals like Yolande and everybody else on our team that will go on to have an impact, large or small, on the IR space. And I want to take what I learned here and be able to do that with students at the current Honors College and maybe future students as well, in a classroom.

Dave Oakley  29:32

So, no, it's, you know, Johan, you mentioned something, I think you used the term bridging the gap, and it reminded me of the American University has the project bridging the gap, that looks to bring together, you know, scholars and practitioners to have a better appreciation understanding. And I think you guys are both right. I mean, that's exactly to me. You know, for me, something like this does you know both, from the standpoint of it teaches practitioners to look. To scholarship, to look to theory, to look to history, to look to research, you know, from people who have spent, you know, their professional careers trying to better understand the nuance of these issues, right, and to bring that into their their strategy development, right, their planning. You know, I, you know, I remember going through graduate program in one of the most valuable things for me was actually learning how to do a literature review or historiography, right? Because it taught me how to do research, how to determine, what was it, you know, a useful, you know resource, and what was a questionable one. And I thought to myself as a planner at the time that, you know, that is a that is a capability that is valuable to me as a planner. How do I go out there find information to provide context and understanding before I actually plan and, you know, start to assign resources to solve a problem. And then, you know, from the other side, from the academic side, you know, it a better appreciation of what the practitioner is going through in the stresses and the pressures and the environment they work. And I think it's valuable, if you're going to, you know, be assessing and trying to understand, you know, whether it's the international system or whether it's institutions within that system, I think it's both valuable, and that's why I think it's really cool about this, because you'll be, you know, everyone that's in this is competition. Is currently a scholar, you know, but some come from, you know, more of a scholarly bent, and is looking to go into that profession. And others are taking a break from being a practitioner to spend a year as a scholar. And so I think it'll

Speaker 1  31:48

be very, very cool the you know, before we close this out,

Dave Oakley  31:53

you know, I just just like to get your final thoughts on this experience you're getting ready to do in a couple weeks. And then also, I know both of you guys, I think the ratio team is going to stop over at the international security experience in this strategy undergraduate, USF undergraduate strategy competition, specifically next week. And so what do you hope to gain from that, observing that in preparation for going off to Carlisle in two weeks.

Dan Woods  32:22

Yeah, I would be lying if I said I'm not going to bring a notebook and and take some pointers from the undergraduate teams as well and see what, what I think they do well and what, what they struggle with, just for our own notes. But I, I mean, again, overall, I think this is, this is the fact that USF is hosting an undergraduate undergraduate strategy competition is is amazing. I mean, that's something that's never happened before. I'm super excited. There's a lot of universities that are going to be here so so genuinely, I'm excited to see how the undergraduates attack the the the situation that they have to address. And again, it's just about even, even from my professional side, working for USF, it's about the networking and the collaboration and being able to make connections both with the students from the other universities, but also also any faculty or staff that are traveling with them. Again, we're I think the world is a dangerous place and and we need to rely on our future generations to solve these issues, and the best way to do that is to is to get practical experience and theoretical experience and combine them like you were talking about,

Yoan Hermida  33:32

yeah, absolutely, to echo some of what, what Dan was saying, in addition to, you know, exercising some of that bull's pride and trying to help out the USF teams as they as they progress through the competition. I was looking forward to not only seeing how the USF teams progress, but also sort of the the end result, the last basically the the final showdown and and see what makes that winning team successful, taking some notes and hopefully taking that along to our own, our own competition at the Army War College. So yeah. In addition to that, I do want to give a shout out to the rest of our team, because we all have a lot of things going on. And the team, Savannah, Megan, Alex, Chris Dan, of course, they have been sort of amazing in being consistent, showing up every Friday at 12:30pm and going through through the competition preparation. So, yeah, sorry, I hijacked the question a little bit there, Dr Oakley, but I needed to. I felt I needed to shout out to the rest of the team as well.

Dave Oakley  34:51

No, no, perfect. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Dan,

Dan Woods  34:55

I would just echo what Johan said about our team, but also about Johan, I think you know, we were from the. Beginning, we said, you know, we're a team. There's no There's no leader, but I think you want just naturally, his leadership skills and whatnot has really, I think the entire team has looked up to him for for for a bit of that, and he's filled the role really well.

Dave Oakley  35:14

Now, I tell you, I'm excited to see you guys in action and Carlyle. I'm excited for you guys to experience Carlyle and the you know, the collaboration amongst the team, but also, you know, meeting the other teams and the camaraderie, I think that will be, you know, throughout the competition. And so with that, thank you very much for joining us. Look forward to seeing you both again next week at the international security experience and the USF undergraduate strategy competition can't wait

Yoan Hermida  35:43

see you then thanks dr Oakley, for the opportunity to talk about the competition and yeah, thanks for the opportunity to participate in this the Army War College.

Jim Cardoso  35:56

Special thanks to our guest today, Dr Dave Oakley, Academic Director here at GNSI, along with USF graduate students, Joanne Hermida and Daniel woods, they're part of a USF team that will be competing in the US, Army, war, college strategy competition next month, next week, on the podcast, we're going to flex our history muscles a bit and talk with author Gregory Layton from his home in Eastern Europe. We'll be discussing his book, ideology and holy landscape in the Baltic crusades. This book examines how the military orders and the ideology of crusading gave rise to a new sacred landscape in the medieval Baltic region, an outpost of Latin Christianity. You don't want to miss that episode or any other episode, be sure to like and subscribe to at the boundary on your favorite podcast platform. And we thank you for sharing some time with us today. You can find GNSI on YouTube, LinkedIn and X. Be sure to follow like and subscribe. Tell your friends and colleagues as well, and you should definitely check out our monthly newsletter. All this is on our website, usf.edu/gnsi,

Jim Cardoso  37:02

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.