DR. BRIAN L. STEED

Brian Steed spent his career at the sharp end of American military power: nearly 29 years in uniform, including deployments to Iraq and a posting embedded directly within the Jordanian Armed Forces. But it was 9/11, and later his role helping plan the Battle of Mosul against ISIS, that convinced him the wars that matter most today aren't won with tanks or artillery. They're won with narrative.

In this talk, Steed unpacks the six central ideas behind narrative war, the strategy and critical questions required to actually understand, conduct, and win it. He draws a sharp distinction from the military's own vocabulary: what defense officials call "cognitive warfare," Steed calls "narrative war," and argues the difference is not semantic but strategic. He'll bring the framework into the present, connecting it to live and recent events, including the Iran conflict and political campaigns, and will make the case that platforms like TikTok function as deliberate instruments of narrative warfare, not neutral technology caught in the crossfire.

For a room full of security and defense professionals fluent in cognitive warfare as a technical or psychological problem, Steed offers something rarer: the view from three decades on the ground, where narrative isn't a battlefield metaphor, but the battlefield itself.