Michael Vlahos
Dr. Michael Vlahos, on Senior Staff at the National Security Analysis Dept. of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), has expertise in history, anthropology, national security, and foreign policy. In the 1980s at the US State Dept. and APL, he pioneered new thinking about world change, developing scenarios that correctly prefigured the collapse of the Soviet Union. His recent work has led to an analytic model to examine war and culture, focusing on how military societies adapt both to broad cultural change and to new scenarios driven by an enemy. Michael has worked with anthropologists and Islamic studies specialists to develop a culture-area concept to aid understanding and operational response to the changing Muslim World. This concept is developed in his 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.”
