Dr. Aaron O'Connell will discuss his forthcoming edited volume, Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan. In it, he argues that the single most important factor affecting the Afghanistan War was pervasive cultural friction:  incompatible assumptions and habits of mind both within the NATO coalition and between the westerners and the Afghans.  Problems of culture derailed nearly every field of endeavor in the war:  decision-making in Washington, conventional operations, training the Afghan army and police, reconstruction and development work, rule-of-law development, and Special Forces operations. Because of the ideas Americans took to war with them, the results were goals unmoored from reality, massive over-spending, thousands of lives lost, and very little else. He will conclude with a critique of the field of military history and offer directions for future research.

Dr. Aaron B. O’Connell is a historian, a musician, an author and a Marine.  He holds a PhD in history and a master’s degree in American Studies from Yale University. He has served as a strategic analyst for the Commandant of the Marine Corps, a Special Assistant to General David H. Petraeus in Afghanistan, a Special Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as the Senior Defense Official and Defense Attache to the U.S. Embassy in South Sudan. He is the author of Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps. From 2008-2016 he was associate professor of history at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and he now serves as the Director of Defense Policy and Strategy on the National Security Council.