Draft:Justin Maddox

Justin D. Maddox (February 6, 1973) is an American expert on political warfare and an academic, he is an adjunct professor of national security studies at George Mason University. He is also a former candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. He has served as a branch chief at the Central Intelligence Agency, deputy coordinator of the U.S. Global Engagement Center at the U.S. Department of State and an advisor to the secretary of Homeland Security. He served in the U.S. Army as psychological operations team leader.

Education

Maddox attended various Department of Defense Dependents Schools and graduated from Bad Kreuznach American High School, Germany, in 1991. He received his B.A. from St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, in 1995, and his M.A. from Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program in 2004. Maddox was a freelance journalist during his undergraduate years.

Academics

Maddox became an adjunct professor of national security studies at George Mason University's Volgenau School of Engineering in 2010, and developed and taught the graduate course National Security Challenges for ten years, focusing on effective uses of technology against strategic threats.

His unclassified assessment of influence operations, titled “How To Start a War: Eight Cases of Strategic Provocation,” was published by George Mason University in 2015.

In 2021, Maddox developed and began teaching a graduate course titled “Disinformation and Policy Responses” for GMU's Schar School of Policy and Government.

He has focused in part on the difficulty of combining foreign and domestic counter-disinformation capabilities. He described the complexity of combined foreign and domestic influence operations in “A reductive look at narrative dynamics contributing to the US Capitol violence on 6 January 2021,” which Maddox briefed to the National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex.

Military and Government Career

Maddox began his professional career as a U.S. Army Psychological Operations specialist. Afterwards, he joined the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at the Department of Energy and served as an operations officer for the U.S. Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST).

In 2003, Maddox deployed to Iraq as part of the Iraq Survey Group, whose mission was to find weapons of mass destruction. Maddox wrote an article in ‘’’The New York Times Magazine’’’ about his experience there, titled “The Day I Realized I Would Never Find Weapons Of Mass Destruction In Iraq.”

Maddox joined the Department of Homeland Security in 2004, serving as an intelligence advisor to Secretary Tom Ridge and then to Secretary Michael Chertoff, and was DHS's intelligence briefer to the U.S. Congress.

In 2006, Maddox joined the Central Intelligence Agency and was assigned to the Counterterrorism Mission Center (CTMC), first serving as deputy chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Targeting and Analysis Cell in Baghdad and later managing an analytic branch leading U.S. efforts to assess messaging opportunities for foreign audiences and to counter messaging by adversaries and their supporters.

In 2014, Maddox was named deputy coordinator of the U.S. Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) at the Department of State, which was responsible for coordinating U.S. communications against terrorist propaganda, particularly Al Qaeda and the Islamic State terrorist group. The CSCC was reorganized in 2016, as the U.S. Global Engagement Center.

Maddox later detailed the work of the organization and the reorganization in “Lessons from the Information War: Applying Effective Technological Solutions to the Problems of Online Disinformation and Propaganda,” for the George Washington University Program on Extremism.

Public Commentary

Maddox has frequently participated in national and international discussions of political warfare and published several perspectives on the new era of political warfare in scholarly journals and policy reviews, including “Toward a More Ethical Approach to Countering Disinformation Online,” for Public Diplomacy Magazine, and “Toward a Whole-of-Society Framework for Countering Disinformation,” for West Point's Modern War Institute.

Politics

Maddox ran unsuccessfully as a moderate Republican for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in the predominantly Democratic 45th District, representing the city of Alexandria. He sought to reassert normalcy in a political system that he assessed had gone too far left and right. He sought to fix the damage that extremist politics had done and publicly described] his political candidacy as "running toward the fire." In this context, Maddox was cited in a New York Times article for confronting an entrenched Republican who advocated using violence to reverse the 2020 Presidential Election results.

Published works

• National Nuclear and Radiological Homeland Security Strategy, US Government, 2003
• How To Start a War: Eight Cases of Strategic Provocation, George Mason University Journal of Narrative and Conflict, 2016
• National Counter-ISIL Communications Strategy, US Government, 2016
• The Tragedy of the Mass-Shooter Algorithm, LAWFARE, 2017
• Lessons from the Information War: Applying Effective Technological Solutions to the Problems of Online Disinformation and Propaganda, George Washington University Program on Extremism, 2019
• Russia’s disinformation doctrine, rewritten by Artificial Intelligence, medium.com, 2019.
• Edward Maddox, Justice and Doctor: Putting a Cavalier's Complex Background Into Context,  Magazine of Virginia Genealogy, 2019.
• The Day I Realized I Would Never Find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, The New York Times, 2020.
• Toward a More Ethical Approach to Countering Disinformation Online, Public Diplomacy Magazine, 2020.
• Toward a Whole-of-Society Framework for Countering Disinformation, West Point Modern War Institute, 2021.
• What Motivated J6 Participation, medium.com, 2022.
• Our Compulsion To Violence: A Look at the Forces That Moved Two Brothers to Fight Each Other During the Civil War, The Civil War Monitor, 2022.
• Russia's Active Measures: Recent CBRN-enabled Influence Operations, Center for the Study of Democracy, 2022.

Personal Life

Maddox is married to former CIA officer Lisa N. Maddox (née Novom), whose observations on the war in Afghanistan, based on her participation, were featured in the 2020 Showtime Networks documentary The Longest War, and who is the CEO of Family History Intelligence. They are the parents of two daughters.