Founder’s Day Is Here! A Salon with Keir Giles

Russia’s war is on everybody, really. Don’t forget to register today for our 1:30 pm PT salon!

***Today’s event is for Founding Members. If you want to upgrade to Founding Member — which is any amount above the full annual membership fee — please do so asap and then email me at bettedangerous@gmail.com so I can send you the registration link. Current Founding Members can access the link below the paywall in this post. In addition, there is still time to secure a regular paid membership at a half-off rate for the year so please consider joining our wonderful pro-democracy community.***

Founding members are invited to today’s event with Keir Giles. This is an opportunity to meet one of the most important people in this fight — Keir wrote the NATO report in 2016 which explained Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics in detail. He was reporting directly from Russian military documents, and that’s when I learned there are no rear areas in an information war — and that the attacks on me in 2018 were very real.

Here is Keir’s fascinating bio:

Keir Giles is a Senior Consulting Fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London. He is also a director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre, a group of subject matter experts in Eurasian security, based in Northamptonshire, UK.

After one of the briefest careers on record in the Royal Air Force, followed by travelling widely in the Soviet Union during his first degree in Russian, Keir Giles co-founded the first company providing Western pilots the opportunity to fly Soviet military aircraft, operating from sites near Moscow and in Crimea. He went on to write for several years as Russia correspondent for a range of military and civilian aviation journals. Other positions held while living in Russia included with Ernst Young working on understanding and explaining the then chaotic and unpredictable Russian commercial law, and a brief attachment to Gorky Film Studios as an actor. While working with the BBC Monitoring Service (BBCM) collecting open source information from Russia for UK government and other customers, he was half of a two-man team setting up the first Monitoring office in the former Soviet Union, in Moscow.

Other periods of duty with BBCM included a detachment to draw up and coordinate the service's strategic response to the emergence of the internet. Meanwhile he continued to specialise in the Russian military and in aviation, leading to a secondment from BBCM to the UK Defence Academy's Conflict Studies Research Centre (CSRC) in 2005.

At the Defence Academy, Keir wrote and advised for UK and international government customers on human factors affecting Russian military, defence and security issues, Russian strategy and doctrine, the Russian view of cyber and information security, and Russia's relations with its immediate neighbours in Northern Europe. After the Defence Academy's Russia-related research programmes were closed down in April 2010, Keir brought key team members into the private sector to re-establish CSRC as an independent provider of research and expertise on Eurasian security issues. Keir now oversees the research and publications programme of the new, independent CSRC, while continuing to write and publish on his own specialist area of Russian approaches to conventional, cyber and information warfare. Keir has been involved with exploitation of the internet for almost three decades, and has combined technical cyber and network training with in-depth study of the Russian approaches to exercise of power to develop analysis of the Russian concept of information warfare, including the subdomain of cyber conflict. He is the author of groundbreaking studies on Russian theory, doctrine, and structures for engaging in information and cyber confrontation.

Keir Giles is the author of "Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West" (Brookings, January 2019), an examination of the persistent factors causing relations with Russia to fall into crisis. His latest book, "Russia's War on Everybody" (Bloomsbury, 2022) examines the human impact of Russia's covert warfare waged against the West.

As a hobby, Keir has taught human anatomy and physiology and established a successful business delivering training and supplies for complementary therapists, including playing a key role in the regularisation of education for complementary therapy practitioners in the UK. He is a Senior Associate Member of the Royal Society of Medicine. Recognition of his extracurricular activities also includes a National Small Business Award (UK) and a shared Gold Sony Award for radio journalism. Outside the UK, Keir Giles has published and provided advice, analysis and expertise via NATO Defense College, a number of NATO Centres of Excellence, Defence Research and Development Canada, US Army War College, US Naval War College, the Swedish Defence Research Agency, the Portuguese and Ukrainian National Defence Universities and others. His publications are available at https://conflictstudies.academia.edu/KeirGiles

I also love his short bio:

Keir Giles's professional experience includes periods as a pilot, movie actor, interpreter, translator, network engineer, stand-up comedian, UK national Small Business Award winner, librarian (twice), award-winning radio journalist, editor, web designer, security guard, radio presenter (in English and French), anatomy teacher, tax consultant, Amnesty International researcher, and rodent care attendant. Consequently, he is now a leading expert in Russian cyber, intelligence and military campaigns against the West.

Here is a link to a report on my original ‘Warfighting’ thread, which highlighted his NATO handbook.

Founding members: Please register below the paywall for our event today Sunday, August 20, 1:30 pm for an hour with Keir, where we will be discussing his book, ‘Russia’s War on Everybody’ and how we penetrate the dismissive propaganda of Russia’s hybrid attacks on the West. As always, if you can afford to, please buy his book to support his vital work.

Here is a print report based on a RadPod interview with Keir:

Registration below, and can’t wait to see many of you on Sunday.