Naval War College Foundation
Newport National Security Symposium
U.S. Security Risks in an Era of Global Conflict
August 22, 2025
The 2025 Newport National Security Symposium is a leading national security conference that brings together top military leaders, defense policymakers, academics, and industry experts to address the most urgent challenges facing the United States today.
This year’s theme, “U.S. Security Risks in an Era of Global Conflict,” will focus on how America can adapt its defense strategy to meet the realities of intensifying great power competition, global instability, and rapidly evolving warfare technologies.
Key symposium topics include:
U.S. defense strategy in the face of global conflict
Maritime security and the future of naval power
Strengthening alliances and international partnerships
Cybersecurity, space, and emerging technology risks
Policy solutions to enhance U.S. national resilience
Hosted in Newport, Rhode Island, home of the U.S. Naval War College, the symposium offers a premier forum for thought leadership, collaboration, and actionable insights that shape America’s security policy in an era of uncertainty.
Join senior leaders and experts for the 2025 Newport National Security Symposium to explore solutions that will define the future of U.S. defense and global stability.
Active NWCF members, please email marketing@nwcfoundation.org for your special discounted rate!
Speakers
Innovation and the Future of Conflict
Moderated by Jennie Brooks, Executive Vice President, Booz Allen
Fiona E. Murray
Fiona Murray is the Associate Dean of Innovation at the MIT School of Management and the William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship. She is the Faculty Director of MIT’s Office of Innovation and also Faculty Director of The MIT Kuo Sharper Center for Prosperity and Entrepreneurship. Fiona is an associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her BA ’89 and MA ‘90 from the University of Oxford in chemistry. She subsequently moved to the United States and earned an AM ’92 and PhD ’96 from Harvard University in applied sciences.
Fiona is Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund and has served on the British Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology and was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for her services to innovation and entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom. She is also a member of the Ministry of Defence Innovation Advisory Panel and the European Innovation Council Joint Expert Group. She also sits on a number of Boards including Prime Coalition (a not-for-profit creating new venture fund with catalytic capital to support start-ups focused on climate impact) and MassChallenge (one of the first large-scale accelerators in New England supporting entrepreneurs solving significant global issues).
Murray is an international policy expert on the transformation of investments in science and technology into deep-tech start-up ventures that solve significant global challenges and create national advantage – from defence and security to health, food and water security. Her work includes understanding new funding approaches for innovations that arise from scientific research, and educating the next generation of technical leaders to build effective ventures. She has focused on the particular issues faced by ventures who have dual-use (commercial and government) solutions and work in contexts characterized by complex global power competition. She also works with large public and private sector organizations to effectively drive their strategic goals by linking to external innovation ecosystems especially universities, start-ups, and risk capital.
Jennie Brooks
Jennie Brooks is the senior leader for Booz Allen’s client service and delivery supporting Navy-Marine Corp clients across the nation. She and her teams develop solutions across capabilities including cybersecurity, systems engineering, and data science and analytics.
Leveraging technology and innovation for our clients’ missions, Jennie spearheads Booz Allen’s partnerships with Qualcomm and Tableau. Under her leadership, Booz Allen sponsored the Defense Innovation Voucher Program to help small and mid-sized defense companies scale their solutions, and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Series to assess the impact of AI across specialties including cybersecurity and unmanned systems.
Previously, Jennie led our work serving the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command. In this role, Jennie led integrated teams supporting Naval Systems Commands and Warfare Centers, spanning acquisition to engineering competencies.
Active in the San Diego community, Jennie serves on the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation, Rady Children’s Hospital Foundation Advisory Board, and San Diego State University College of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Board.
Jennie holds a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, San Diego, and an M.B.A. from San Diego State University.
A Conversation with Stephen A. Schwarzman
Moderated by Sir Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil.
Stephen A. Schwarzman
Stephen A. Schwarzman is Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder of Blackstone, one of the world’s largest alternative investment firms with $1.2 trillion Assets Under Management (as of June 30, 2025). Mr. Schwarzman has been involved in all phases of Blackstone’s development since its founding in 1985. The firm has established leading investing businesses across asset classes, including private equity, where it is a global leader in traditional buyout, growth equity, special situations and secondary investing; real estate, where it is currently the largest owner of commercial property in the world; multi-asset investing, where it is the world’s largest discretionary allocator to hedge funds; and credit, where it is a global leader and major provider of credit for companies of all sizes. Blackstone also has major businesses dedicated to infrastructure and life sciences investing, as well as delivering the firm’s investment management expertise and products to insurance companies.
In both business and philanthropy, he dedicates himself to tackling big problems with transformative solutions. His major gifts have helped establish a new center at the University of Oxford to redefine the study of the humanities for the 21st century, create a new college at MIT dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, build a first-of-its-kind student center at Yale, renovate and expand the New York Public Library, and found an international fellowship program, Schwarzman Scholars, at Tsinghua University in Beijing to educate future leaders about China.
Mr. Schwarzman is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Business Roundtable, and International Business Council of the WEF. He was named one of Barron’s “World’s Best CEOs” in 2019; one of Forbes’ Top 50 “World’s Most Powerful People” in 2018; Forbes’ most influential person in finance in 2016; and one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2007. His honors include the Légion d’Honneur and Ordre des Arts et des Letters, both at the Commandeur level, from France, and Order of the Aztec Eagle from Mexico, for his work on behalf of the U.S. in support of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2018. Also, at the University of Oxford, Mr. Schwarzman was elected a Wykeham Fellow at New College in 2021 and a Waynflete Fellow at Magdalen College in 2023. In 2024, Mr. Schwarzman was appointed as an Honorary Knight of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE) in recognition of his services to philanthropy. He is a recipient of the Arthur Ross Award for Patronage from the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art.
In 2019, Mr. Schwarzman published his first book, “What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence”, a New York Times best seller with over 1 million copies sold worldwide, which draws on his experiences in business, philanthropy, and public service.
Sir Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil.
Sir Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, where he served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History.
He is the author of sixteen books. His first, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001, after a year as a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000.
In 2003, Ferguson wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 by Penguin, and prompted Time magazine to name him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Two years later he published The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, a television adaptation of which was screened by PBS in 2007. The international bestseller, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, followed in 2008; it too was a PBS series, winning the International Emmy award for Best Documentary, as well as the Handelszeitung Economics Book Prize. In 2011 he published Civilization: The West and the Rest, also a Channel 4/PBS documentary series. A year later came the three-part television series “China: Triumph and Turmoil.” The book based on his 2012 BBC Reith lectures, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, was a New York Times bestseller within a week of its publication.
An accomplished biographer, Ferguson published High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg in 2010 and is currently writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which was published in 2015—to critical acclaim—as Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. The book won the 2016 Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. In 2011, his film company Chimerica Media released its first feature-length documentary, “Kissinger”, which won the New York Film Festival’s prize for Best Documentary.
Niall Ferguson’s most recent book is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.
Ferguson was the Philippe Roman Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics in 2010-11. His many prizes and awards include the GetAbstract International Book Award (2009), the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012), the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013), the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize (2013), the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education (2016); and Columnist of the Year at the 2018 British Press Awards. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Buckingham (UK), Macquarie University (Australia), and the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile).
In addition to writing a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, an advisory firm, and a co-founding board member of Ualá, a Latin American bank. He also serves on the board of Affiliated Managers Group and is a trustee of the New York Historical Society and the London-based Centre for Policy Studies.
Niall Ferguson is married to the author and women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He has five children.
Securing America in Turbulent Times
Moderated by Michael A. Brown, Partner, Shield Capital, Member
Michael A. Brown
Michael Brown is a partner at Shield Capital and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He serves on the Board of Advisors at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and the United States Innovative Technology (USIT) fund.
Michael previously served as the Director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) at the U.S. Department of Defense (2018-2022). DIU fields leading-edge commercial capabilities to the military faster and more cost-effectively than traditional defense acquisition methods. During his tenure, DIU introduced 100 new vendors to DoD, fielded 50 new capabilities to the military, and increased the transition rate of fielded capabilities to 50%. While at DIU, Michael created the initiative to catalyze private investment in more deep tech hardware startups, National Security Innovation Capital.
From 2016 to 2018, Michael was a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow co-authoring a Pentagon study on China’s participation in the U.S. venture ecosystem, a catalyst for the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA). FIRRMA was signed into law in August 2018 and provided expanded jurisdiction to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
Prior to civil service, Michael was the CEO of Symantec Corporation (2014-2016), at the time the global leader in cybersecurity and the world’s 10th largest software company. He is the former Chairman and CEO of Quantum Corporation (1995-2003) and Chairman of EqualLogic (2003-2008).
Michael received his BA degree in economics from Harvard and his MBA from Stanford University.
Commanding Officer
The Honorable Robert C. McCormack
John Peracchio, Naval War College Foundation Regional Director, and Brown University
Archbold D. and Helene van Beuren
Executive Officer
Mr. and Mrs. Duncan A. Chapman and Ms. Antonia A. Chapman
Mr. and Mrs. Paul A. Dimitruk
Department Head
Mr. and Mrs. James L. Lanzillo
Pasadena Capital Partners LLC
Barbara van Beuren & Stephen L. Glascock
The Honorable and Mrs. Mitchell B. Waldman