Dr. Nina Kollars & Prof. Benjamin Schechter - "Coffee Theft, Power Grids, and JADC2: It's All Cyber Shenanigans"

This episode continues our recent wargaming theme, and hones in on one of the most challenging topics to effectively wargame: cyber operations. To help us better understand how we can the realms of cyber and wargaming to work with each other, we were excited to welcome two faculty members from the Naval War College. Our first guest was Professor Benjamin Schechter, who is an instructor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department and a founding faculty member of the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute. His research interests include cyber, wargaming and political psychology. His recent work has focused on experimental wargaming and methods for cyber wargaming. Prior to joining the U.S. Naval War College, he was a research specialist supporting the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Our second guest was Dr. Nina Kollars, who first and foremost, at least in our book, is one of our Krulak Center Non-Resident Fellows. Dr. Kollars is an associate professor in the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute. She holds a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in political science and an M.A. from GWU in international relations. Along with being one of our Non-Resident Fellows, Dr. Kollars is also a senior adjunct scholar at Center for a New American Security; an executive board member of Cyber Conflict Studies Association; and an editorial board member for Texas National Security Review. She publishes on cybersecurity, hackers and military innovation. She presented her own hacker project at DefCon27, "Confessions of a Nespresso Money Mule." She will soon publish “Trustworthy Deviants: White Hat Hackers and Security.”

Foundational content for this episode came from a joint report our guests published earlier this year: Pathologies of Obfuscation: Nobody understands cyber operations or wargaming

Our guests also referenced the 2019 dissertation by Andreas Haggman: Cyber Wargaming: Finding, Designing, and Playing Wargames for Cyber Security Education. Finally, the offered the east coast hacker conference ShmooCon as a resource for further information on this topic.

Intro/outro music is "Evolution" from BenSound.com (https://www.bensound.com)

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