Lieutenant General Mike Plehn is a retired 3-star general and former President of National Defense University. With more than 37 years of military service Mike has flown more than 2000 hours including 375 combat hours over Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He developed a new radar warning receiver program to protect crews flying over Bosnia.

In 2014, as a leader in the Pentagon, Mike established and led an international donation group that delivered more than fifty C-17 plane-loads of donated arms to Iraq, enabling them to stave off ISIS and leading to the restoration of security across the country. Mike graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy and holds three master’s degrees. Mike will discuss how wars start and how they end.