About Brian

Brian L. Steed is a retired US Army lieutenant colonel with more than thirty-seven 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 is a senior fellow at Narrative Strategies.  He also serves as a professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College where he was the 2018 military educator of the year. 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).

Brian has written and edited numerous books, articles, and papers on military theory, military history, and cultural awareness. His most recent work, published in June 2025 is Narrative War: The Philosophy of Social Conflict which is hoped to be the definitive work on the subject (slight reference to Count Rugen from The Princess Bride).  His previous book was co-edited with his wife, Sheri Steed, and titled Voices of the Afghanistan War: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life (Voices of an Era).

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.