Barry Praxis helps defense organizations connect capabilities to strategy and plans. Its principal brings three decades of military leadership and operational command, built global campaign and contingency plans on the Joint Staff, helped write the National Military Strategy, and writes joint doctrine. That experience now goes to work on your strategy, planning, doctrine, and education requirements.
Each engagement is scoped to your requirement and delivered personally by the principal. No hand-offs to junior staff.
Strategy development, global campaign and contingency planning support, and the analysis that links capabilities, resources, and risk to strategic objectives. Built on experience as a principal author of the National Military Strategy and the Joint Strategic Campaign Plan.
Typical engagement: red-team a draft strategy or campaign plan, or trace how a capability portfolio supports strategic objectives, then deliver written findings and a briefing on a fixed timeline.
Writing, revising, and reviewing joint and service doctrine and operating concepts. Draws on direct experience supervising development of JP 5-0, Joint Planning, and building the Joint Risk Analysis Manual.
Typical engagement: draft or revise a doctrine publication or concept, staff it through review, and adjudicate comments to a signature-ready product.
Course design, lesson development, exercises, and faculty development built on five years as Course Director at the National War College and holder of the Chairman’s Chair for JPME II.
Typical engagement: build or redesign a JPME course or elective with learning outcomes mapped to JPME standards, or teach a block of instruction as visiting faculty.
Games and exercises designed to test strategies and plans, not just rehearse them: scenario design, adjudication, white cell control, and after-action analysis for strategic and operational-level events.
Typical engagement: design and run a one- to three-day strategic game that stress-tests a draft plan for a command staff or war college seminar, then deliver the after-action report.
Cleared for sensitive work. Every service is available at the TS/SCI level for DoD, Intelligence Community, FFRDC, and defense industry teams.
Praxis means turning theory into practice. Every engagement follows the same disciplined arc a staff officer would recognize.
A short scoping conversation to define the decision, the audience, the classification level, and what a successful outcome looks like.
A tailored game, course, or analytic product, built on doctrine, history, and evidence, with a clear scope, timeline, and deliverables.
Personal facilitation or instruction, followed by a written after-action report or findings that leadership can act on.
Few consultants have both written national-level strategy and taught it to future flag officers. Barry Praxis brings operational command, Joint Staff experience, and graduate-level teaching to every engagement.
Principal author of the 2016 and 2018 National Military Strategy and the Joint Strategic Campaign Plan. Supervised development of JP 5-0 and developed the Joint Risk Analysis Manual and Annual Joint Assessment.
Commanded Joint Task Force-Bravo, the oldest standing JTF in U.S. history, across seven Central American nations.
Held the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair for JPME II at the National War College, ensuring compliance with JPME Level II accreditation standards.
Led the redesign of the Military Instrument of National Power course around wargaming and staff exercises, recognized as the most innovative curriculum development at NWC in two decades.
Colonel Steven T. Barry, PhD, USA (Ret.) is the founder and principal of Barry Praxis, LLC. Over 30 years in uniform, he commanded in combat at multiple levels, culminating in command of a Joint Task Force, and served on the Army Staff and Joint Staff in the Pentagon.
His final assignment was five years as an Associate Professor at the National War College, where he served as Course Director for the Military Instrument of National Power and held the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair for JPME II. Earlier, he taught diplomatic and military statecraft as a teaching fellow at Georgetown University and directed the History of the Military Art course at West Point.
He holds a PhD and MA in History from The Ohio State University, is the author of Battalion Commanders at War (University Press of Kansas), and maintains an active TS/SCI clearance. He is a service-disabled veteran based in Northern Virginia.
The analytic method behind every engagement is the one behind the scholarship: primary sources, hard evidence, and no conclusions the record will not support.
Operation Husky put more assault troops ashore on its first day than Normandy would eleven months later, yet still let more than 100,000 Axis troops escape across the Strait of Messina. A study in coalition command, joint coordination, and planning to destroy a force rather than merely take ground.
Read the article →How the Army prepared its battalion commanders, and how they performed in their first battles from North Africa to Sicily.
View the book →Everything needed to add Barry Praxis to a solicitation, a subcontracting plan, or a vendor file. A capability statement and references are available on request.
Barry Praxis is available for project-based contracts, subcontracts, retainer arrangements, and cleared engagements.