Capt Casey LaMar, USMC, & Dr. Leah Windsor, “Signaling Strategy"

#TeamKrulak is proud to present one of the crown jewels of both our Krulak Scholars program and Non-Resident Fellow outreach. Capt Casey Lamar, USMC, and Dr. Leah Windsor first started collaborating on a research project while Capt Lamar attended Expeditionary Warfare School in AY20-21. That project went from a research paper to a presentation that has been highlighted in academic conferences, most recently at the 2022 U.S. Strategic Command Deterrence and Academic Alliance Conference. We were excited to learn more about their work in this #BruteCast! 

Capt Lamar and Dr. Windsor examined the style and substance of linguistic similarity between the U.S. and host countries for troops. They looked at the relationship between troop drawdowns, base closures, and significant policy shifts alongside stylistic (syntactic/semantic) similarity. Cold War: dissimilarity. Post-Cold War (1990-2010): similarity. Post-post-Cold War (2011-present): massive dissimilarity. They also modeled the content similarity of language between the U.S. and other countries in the world. The goal of this research is to use this data to help explain countries' alignment with the U.S., and the ebbs and flows of closeness and differences regarding the presence of U.S. troops. 

Dr. Leah Windsor is an Associate Professor in the Department of English (Applied Linguistics) and the Institute for Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis where she directs the Languages Across Cultures lab. She is PI on an NSF grant studying multimodal communication. Her book with Dr. Kerry F. Crawford, The PhD Parenthood Trap, is available with Georgetown University Press. She serves on the Editorial Board of International Studies Quarterly and International Studies Perspectives. She is also a 2020-2021 Non-Resident Fellow for the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare at Marine Corps University. 

Captain Casey LaMar is an Intelligence Officer currently serving with 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit. He graduated from George Washington University, where he studied International Affairs and Arabic. He was previously published in the Journal of International Negotiation and Small Wars Journal. When not writing, and spending time with his wife, daughter, and their two Australian Shepherds in Southern California. 

The slides from this presentation are available as an attachment on the episode page hosted on our website here: https://unum.nsin.us/kcic/customObject/viewCustomObject/5f323f055e40

Intro/outro music is "Epic" from BenSound.com (https://www.bensound.com)

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