Stephen Biddle is Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, a member of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has served on the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board, on General David Petraeus’ Joint Strategic Assessment Team in Baghdad in 2007, as a Senior Advisor to the Central Command Assessment Team in Washington in 2008-9, as a member of General Stanley McChrystal’s Initial Strategic Assessment Team in Kabul in 2009, and on a variety of other government advisory panels and analytical teams. Biddle lectures regularly at the U.S. Army War College and other military schools, and has presented testimony before congressional committees on issues relating to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; force planning; conventional net assessment; and European arms control.

Julian Barnes is a reporter covering the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The New York Times. He writes about the American intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other spy agencies, as well as broader national and international security issues. His stories seek to break news about what intelligence officials are thinking, and occasionally doing, and to explain the U.S. perspective on security matters. He has written about security issues for more than two decades. For much of that time he covered the military and the Defense Department, working for U.S. News & World Report, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal and reporting about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.