Brian L. Steed is a retired US Army lieutenant colonel with more than thirty two years of civilian and uniformed experience in artillery, armor, cavalry (reconnaissance and security), international engagement, and professional military education. He is a practitioner, student, and writer of military theory, Middle East culture, and history.
Brian's current assignment as a civilian is also his last U.S. Army assignment; he is an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College where he was the 2018 military educator of the year. He is also a senior fellow at Narrative Strategies. As an Army officer, he was a Middle East foreign area officer, which included eight and a half consecutive years living and working in the Middle East, to include assignments in the Levant (Jordan and Israel), Mesopotamia (Iraq), and the Arabian Peninsula (United Arab Emirates).
He is currently writing On Narrative War which is hoped to be the definitive work on the subject (slight reference to Count Rugen from The Princess Bride) and published in early 2025.
Since returning from Iraq in March 2015, Brian has been an internationally acclaimed and much sought-after speaker on several topics including understanding violent non-state actors (ISIS, al-Qaeda, Taliban, etc.) in their cultural and historical context, narrative war, and a theory of cross-cultural competency that he describes in his book titled Bees and Spiders: Applied Cultural Awareness and the Art of Cross-Cultural Influence.