SSS 2023-2024
Cohosted with the The Public Interest Fellowship, the Security and Strategy Seminar (SSS) is a graduate-level seminar in Washington, D.C. focused on distinct challenges to the American position in the world with an emphasis on policy and cohort-building. SSS seeks to identify, educate, and launch a vanguard of competition-oriented young professionals into policy-relevant institutions advancing a new era in American strategic thinking. Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, our leaders increasingly realize that our power, position, and principles are under assault from adversaries we had once hoped to transform into friends.
In 2023-2024, SSS will consist of four separate, simultaneous year-long seminars. Three tracks will focus on different strategic challengers to the United States: the People's Republic of China, Vladimir Putin's Russia, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The fourth track will focus on tools needed to compete with these adversaries through studying Defense Strategy and Policy. Taught by leading scholars in the field, each seminar will consist of 15 evening sessions that meet from September to May and will afford participating fellows an opportunity to gain a breadth of knowledge on critical subjects, forge relationships with senior scholars and practitioners, sharpen analytical frameworks through written and oral arguments, and build a cohort with their peers. Although each seminar focuses on a different aspect of the competition, each will address the same framing questions:
What does a new era of strategic competition look like?
Why is such a competition necessary and what are its stakes?
What are our rivals’ objectives and how do their leaders achieve them?
What are our goals and how do we achieve them?
Program Details
Each seminar will meet on the same designated day of the week from 6:00pm-8:30pm. Fellows will be responsible for around 50-75 pages of reading for each session and will be required to write two short essays over the course of the program. All four tracks will convene together for the first and last sessions. Over the course of the program, fellows will also have the opportunity to take part in a crisis simulation, to attend the annual Writing Workshop Conference, and to be published in the SSS journal, Security and Strategy.
ideal candidates
SSS seeks a professionally diverse and first-rate class of highly committed junior to mid-level professionals (25 to 35 years old) already working in policy-relevant institutions. Past and current SSS cohorts have included think-tank analysts and researchers; Congressional staffers; active-duty military officers; and staff members from the Department of State, Department of Defense, White House Council of Economic Advisors, and Department of Homeland Security, among others.
The application window for SSS 2023-2024 is now closed.
