Research & Wargaming at The Center for Naval Warfare Studies

Dr. Jackson served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia (2017-2019), overseeing all strategy, security cooperation, budget oversight, and contingency planning. He also served as the senior DOD representative to the U.S.-Taliban peace talks. From 2006-2017, he was a Professor in the Strategy Department and later Director of the Advanced Strategist Program. He also taught strategy and counterinsurgency at MIT and Columbia. In 2011, he deployed to Afghanistan as Executive Officer for Policy Planning for the Deputy Chief of Staff, Operations USFOR-A. Before entering academia, he worked in private sector financial trading and power development.

Jonathan R. Hunt is an assistant professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department and a core faculty member in the Strategic Deterrence Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. He was an assistant professor of strategy at the U.S. Air War College and a lecturer in global history at the University of Southampton. He is the author of “The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam” (Stanford University Press, 2022) and edited (with Simon Miles) “The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Cornell University Press, 2021). He has written for The Atlantic, the Washington Post, War on the Rocks, and Foreign Policy.