The ACD/EWI team specializes in economic warfare, purposeful interference in civilian infrastructure, including the financial markets, transnational criminal and terrorist organizations and their links, and more. We provide knowledge-based analysis and risk assessment in articles, white papers, Blog posts, special briefings, and scenario/wargaming. We identify methods and strategies used by radical regimes and groups, and criminal gangs to subvert Western political and economic systems.
Founder & President
Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Founder and President of the New York-based American Center for Democracy and its Economic Warfare Institute. (See her bio here)
ACD & EWI FELLOWS
J. Millard Burr – A senior Fellow, worked for many years in the Department of State. In his last assignment, he served as a logistics advisor for the Operation Lifeline Sudan program, U.S. Agency for International Development. Dr. Burr has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Oregon and has served as Special Assistant to The Geographer, U. S. Department of State. In a career that spanned more than three decades, he had numerous assignments in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. With collaborator Dr. Robert O. Collins, he is the author of four books dealing with the emergence of Islamist movements. The “Terrorist Internationale” is the capstone of that work.
Dr. Stephen Bryen – is the author of the new book, “Technology Security and National Power: Winners and Losers” (Transaction Publishers). Dr. Stephen Bryen has 40 years of leadership in government and industry. He has served as a senior staff director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Trade Security Policy, as the founder and first director of the Defense Technology Security Administration, as the President of Delta Tech Inc., as the President of Finmeccanica North America, and as a Commissioner of the U.S. China Security Review Commission. Dr. Bryen’s expertise and high effectiveness have earned him the highest civilian awards of the U.S. Defense Department on two occasions and established him as a proven government, civic, and business leader in Washington, D.C., and internationally. Dr. Bryen is regarded as a thought leader in technology security policy.
Thomas L. Cranmer has been writing political, economic, and technical analyses for decades. For 30 years, he was a planner and a treasurer with Mobil Oil, negotiating projects in a wide range of countries, especially in almost all Muslim counties. He was Mobil’s representative to the nuclear energy and electrical industries. Part of his negotiating time was spent in Europe and South America, and he wrote extensively about the risks of doing business in Venezuela, Brazil and other Latin American countries. He was VP of the U.S. Business Council for SE Europe. While with the State Department in India before Mobil, he studied Arabic, Farsi (Persian), and Urdu in the Imam’s office in the largest mosque in India. His regular duty was to develop and finance projects. He also has studied French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Oxford Press (India) published his book, which was the first to analyze the economics of farming and the methods of the food distribution system in India, and the success of free enterprise in agriculture.
After Mobil, he was a manager of Iraqi oil, gas, and electricity reconstruction operations based in Baghdad for the State Department. He was also a business consultant in a wide range of countries, including Outer Mongolia and Eastern Europe. He identified cases of Russian money laundering and Chinese violations of trade agreements. Mr.Cranmer is an editor and writer for the Fairfax Free Citizen in Virginia. He covers foreign, national, and local issues, especially topics relating to threats from Islamic fascism, electricity interruption, and climate change fanatics. He studied geology, engineering, and political science at Yale and has an MBA in finance and economics from Columbia. His security clearance is Top Secret.
Ganesh Sahathevan, a Fellow at the ACD’s Economic Warfare Institute, is a researcher and reporter from Sydney, Australia, who focuses on South East Asian business, economics and politics. This work has led him to research structures that support terrorist and jihadist activities in the region and their links to similar structures in other parts of the world. Ganesh investigated financial mismanagement in Malaysia prior to the financial crisis in the 1990s. He obtained the degrees Bachelor of Economics (majoring in Accounting), an LLB from Monash University, and an LLM from the University of Sydney.
Col. Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, IDF (Ret.), is the director of research in the Orient Research Group Ltd. and a Board member of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs headed by Dr. Dore Gold. Mr. Halevi consults on Middle-East and Arab affairs to the Wall Street Journal and is a special consultant to the Linde vs. Arab Bank lawsuit.
• 1998 – 2002 Head of the Palestinian Research Branch in the IDF Intelligence Unit. • 2002 – 2003 Head of the Information Branch in the IDF Spokesperson Unit. • 2003 – 2004 Senior Advisor for policy planning in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Mr. Halevi has written many articles for both Hebrew and English publications, including “Al-Qaeda’s Intellectual Legacy: New Radical Islamic Thinking Justifying the Genocide of Infidels.”
William B. Scott serves as a flight-testing and aerospace business development consultant and is currently writing fiction and nonfiction books.
He retired as the Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, based in Colorado Springs, CO. In 22 years with Aviation Week, he also served as Senior National Editor in Washington and in Avionics and Senior Engineering Editor positions in Los Angeles. He focused primarily on advanced aerospace and weapons technology, business, flight-testing and military operations, wrote more than 2,500 stories for the magazine, and received 17 editorial awards. He is a coauthor of three books: “Space Wars: The First Six Hours of World War III,” its sequel, “Counterspace: The Next Hours of World War III,” and “Inside the Stealth Bomber: The B-2 Story.” During a nine-year Air Force career, Scott served as aircrew on classified nuclear sampling missions; as an electronics engineering officer at the National Security Agency, working space communication security programs; and as an instrumentation and flight test engineer. He was also a civilian FTE/program manager and proposal group manager for three aerospace companies: General Dynamics (F-16 Full Scale Development program), Falcon Jet Corp. (Coast Guard HU-25A development and certification), and Tracor Flight Systems Inc. (Canadair Challenger development and certification, plus numerous fighter, transport and helicopter test programs).
Scott is a six-time Royal Aeronautical Society “Journalist of the Year” finalist. He won the Society’s 1998 Lockheed Martin Award for the “Best Defense Submission” and received both the 2006 and 2007 Messier-Dowty awards for “Best Airshow Submission.” He also was part of an Aviation Week team that won a 2004 Neal Award for its coverage of the space shuttle Columbia tragedy. A Neal award is the business-to-business magazine equivalent of a newspaper Pulitzer Prize.
Scott is a Flight Test Engineer (FTE) graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School (Masters equivalent) and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from California State University-Sacramento.
Leslie Lebl is the principal at Lebl Associates and a writer, lecturer, and consultant on political, security, and military matters. She is a former Foreign Service Officer with particular expertise in European political, defense, and counter-terrorism issues, radical Islam in Europe, Balkan peacekeeping, and Russian politics and economy. Her publications have appeared in the Policy Analysis series of the Cato Institute, Policy Review, Orbis, City Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Hartford Courant, EuroFuture, and Atlantic Perspective. A monograph, Advancing U.S. Interests with the European Union, was published by the Atlantic Council of the United States.
A graduate of Swarthmore College (B.A. in history, 1972), Ms. Lebl received an M.A. in foreign affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1979.
Hadassah Jacobs is a Fellow at ACD who specializes in global geo-strategy, ideological trends, and ideological warfare. As a Content Alchemist and Digital Polymath, she has curated a diverse sector of academic works and non-fiction material on various important topics.
Hadassah graduated Magna Cum Laude in Jewish Studies and European & Middle Eastern History from Florida Atlantic University and e her Master’s degree in National Security Studies from the University of Haifa in Israel, where she is now a Ph.D. candidate. Hadassah has authored several books, including “The Halo Effect,” and the upcoming “Convergence: A Look into the Convergence of 3 Radical Ideologies on the White House and the United States.”
As an influencer, Hadassah offers numerous courses, podcasts, videos, and social media content on various digital platforms. She discusses topics such as the Iranian Axis, US-Israel Relations, ideological trends undermining the Israel-U.S. ethos, Holocaust history, and geopolitical trends.
Hadassah, who travels extensively, resides in Israel and Illinois, working tirelessly to promote democratic values, expose the enemies of freedom, and support allies of the United States.
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