On 29 November, the Combating Terrorism Center was honored to host Jen Easterly at its annual Yearling Lecture. Ms. Easterly is the current Managing Director of Morgan Stanley and Global Head of the firm’s Cybersecurity Fusion Center and former Special Assistant to President Obama and Senior Director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council.
In her lecture to West Point’s Class of 2021, she drew from her nearly three decades of government service (including over 20 years in Army intelligence and cyber operations) to share her perspective on the crucial role of the imagination in creating positive change. By highlighting successes and failures of imagination in a moving historical account of the terrorist threat landscape prior to and following 9/11, Ms. Easterly encouraged the cadets to seize every opportunity to expand and leverage their imaginations to better understand themselves, our adversaries, and the world so that they may be prepared to effectively confront the most ambiguous and complex problems of the future.
