Brian R. Price

Dr. Brian R. Price writes about military culture, technology, and war. His research interests include modern American military history, medieval/Renaissance, and counter-insurgency/full spectrum operations. An Associate Professor of Military History at Hawai'i Pacific University. Simultaneously, he teaches "chivalric" martial arts and historical swordsmanship and modern combatives based on the early fifteenth century work of Fiore dei Liberi through the Schola Saint George (http://www.scholasaintgeorge.org). Dr. Price's current writing is founded on research into American Air Force modernization efforts of the 1970s and 1980s, based on original archival material and oral histories. Part of his writing is based on his deployment to Afghanistan in 2011-12 as a senior social scientist, where he focused on the military subcultures of the Afghan National Army (ANA), Afghan Local Police (ALP) and surviving networks of Soviet-era Mujahidin. While deployed he worked closely with French forces as part of Task Force LaFayette and the 1/82nd Airborne as part of Task Force Devils, experiencing both the Tajik-influenced culture of the North and the Pashtun-dominated one of Ghazni, accompanied combat patrols to friendly and hostile villages and working closely with the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), Dept. of State, USAID, and PRTs, in addition to combat troops. Dr. Price's interests focus on the conceptual basis for the conduct of war and native systems for the regulation of violence, the role of technology in war, and in the vibrant debates concerning the Military Revolution, Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs) and in "New War", as well as in forms of insurgency and terrorism. He has a special intereest in the Human Terrain System (HTS) and the role of HTS and similar components of modern militaries in counterinsurgency and in offensive, defensive and stability operations. He is working on a book discussing the Afghan approach to warfare, based on numerous oral histories. The use of oral histories in a combat environment is the subject of an in-progress article. Based on nearly three decades' experience, he maintains his previous interests in medieval or "chivalric" culture and has adapted the historical armored fighting principles of Fiore dei Liberi into practical combatives useful by armored modern combatants, a variant on the historical material he developed and applied while in Afghanistan, teaching members of the Afghan National Army, Afghan Local Police as he cross-trained with the French Foreign Legion, American special forces, and members of the French and American armies. Although books on historical swordsmanship and armour have been on hold during his deployment, he is again working on several long-awaited titles, including Techniques of Medieval Armour Reproduction II and Advanced Sword in Two Hands. Dr. Price received his Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and its Military History Center, where he maintains an affiliation, and his BA in International Relations from UCLA, where he specialized in US-Soviet relations and in terrorism.