Michael Vlahos is part of the National Security Assessment team of the National Security Analysis Department (NSAD) at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

 Dr. Vlahos has broad knowledge and professional expertise in History, Anthropology, National Security Studies, and Foreign Policy. At both the US State Department and at JHUAPL in the 1980s, he pioneered new approaches to thinking about world change, including innovative futures’ gaming and scenario development that correctly prefigured the coming apart of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s he worked directly with Congressman Newt Gingrich to imagine creative and different ways to bring needed new national policies the emerging world of the Internet. His teaching and research at Johns Hopkins SAIS, continuing since at APL, has led to the development of a broad analytic model for examining war and culture, with a primary focus on how military societies adapt, both to broader change within their own national cultures, and to the cultural dimension of new operational environments driven by new enemies. After 2001 this work has taken on a special urgency, and Dr. Vlahos has worked with anthropologists and Islamic Studies specialists to develop a culture-area concept to help the Defense World better understand and respond operationally to the changing environment of the Muslim World. This concept is developed in his two recent monographs, Terror’s Mask: Insurgency Within Islam (2002), and Culture’s Mask: War and Change After Iraq (2004), and his paper: Two Enemies: Non-State Actors and Change in the Muslim World.

 Dr. Vlahos earned his doctorate in history and strategic studies from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University University, and is a 1973 graduate of Yale College.  In addition to eight books and monographs, several published by the US Government and John Hopkins, Dr. Vlahos has published four score articles, appearing in, among others, Foreign Affairs, Washington Quarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Policy, National Review, and Rolling Stone. He has received best essay awards from the Naval Institute Proceedings, the Marine Corps Gazette, the Naval War College Review, and the Applied Physics Laboratory Technical Digest. He was Director of the State Department’s Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs from 1988-1991, and Director of Security Studies at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies from 1981-1988.