The Cold War Part 2 NEW
Class | Registration opens 12/6/2026 9:00 AM EDT
We begin Part 2 in the jungles of Southeast Asia, where once again, the failure of conventional mindsets to understand asymmetrical warfare was another tragic lesson. We will look hard at the hubris of the “best and brightest” in Washington who treated a deeply complex anti-colonial insurgency as a simple spreadsheet problem. Later in the 70s, the Soviet Union, arrogant and blind to history, marched into their own Vietnam: Afghanistan systematically bled dry by nimble tech-supplied insurgencies.
In Part 2, we examine a darker, volatile chapter that begins in the jungles of Southeast Asia and culminates in 1991 with the sudden, quiet collapse of the Soviet Union. At the end of this class I will ask you, was the fall of the Soviet Union an inevitable economic collapse or was it the triumph of superior strategy and technical dominance?
Tom Marini
Tom Marini worked at University of Michigan Ross School of Business as a Business Research Librarian, William and Mary University as an Associate Director of their McLeod Business School Library, Director at University of Virginia, Darden Business School Library. He also worked with the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows' Program in which he taught classes to senior military officers who would then go to work for various participating companies for a year. For a while, he did some contracting on the side with various military companies. He also did a threat analysis on a variety of subjects, with concentrations on the Middle East and Asymmetrical Warfare with various terrorist groups. From 2009-2010, he was a Fullbright Scholar in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.