Board of Directors

An entrepreneurial innovator in the digital corridor of northern Virginia with projects in the grassroots sector of political campaigning, the surging “coliving” movement of the innovation/startup sector, and the group communication sector of the voice technology arena. Craig’s counseling and tech-innovation projects have been covered by major media, including CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, Redbook, Time, Sirius Radio, CBS, and Oprah Winfrey. Craig was educated at Yale, the University of California-Santa Cruz, Georgia State University, and New York University’s graduate school of social work. He also briefly attended Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, and Reed College (around the same time Steve Jobs was there).

James Kidd has worked in the publishing industry for over 20 years. He has edited books, magazines, newspapers, policy papers, newsletters, op-eds, and various other writings. He was assistant editor of This Rock magazine, managing editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin, and assistant director of research editing at the Heritage Foundation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Dallas.

Lawrence J. Korb, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He is also a senior advisor to the Center for Defense Information and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He was formerly a senior fellow and director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From July 1998 to October 2002 he was council vice president, director of studies, and holder of the Maurice Greenberg Chair.

Prior to joining the council, Dr. Korb served as director of the Center for Public Policy Education and senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, dean of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, vice president of corporate operations at the Raytheon Company, and director of defense studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Dr. Korb served as assistant secretary of defense (manpower, reserve affairs, installations, and logistics) from 1981 through 1985. In that position, he administered about 70 percent of the defense budget. For his service in that position, he was awarded the Department of Defense’s medal for Distinguished Public Service. Dr. Korb served on active duty for four years as a naval flight officer and retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of captain. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the State University of New York at Albany and has held full-time teaching positions at the University of Dayton, the Coast Guard Academy, and the Naval War College.

Dr. Korb has authored, co-authored, edited, or contributed to more than 20 books and written more than 100 articles on national security issues. His books include The Joint Chiefs of Staff: The First Twenty-Five Years; The Fall and Rise of the Pentagon; American National Security: Policy and Process, Future Visions for U.S. Defense Policy; Reshaping America’s Military; A New National Security Strategy in an Age of Terrorists, Tyrants, and Weapons of Mass Destruction; Serving America’s Veterans; and Military Reform.

His articles have appeared in such journals as Foreign Affairs, Public Administration Review, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Naval Institute Proceedings, and International Security. Over the past decade Mr. Korb has made over 2,000 appearances as a commentator on such shows as The Today Show, The Early Show, Good Morning America, Face the Nation, This Week, The News Hour, Nightline, 60 Minutes, Larry King Live, The O’Reilly Factor, and Hannity and Colmes. His more than 100 op-ed pieces have appeared in such major newspapers as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Eric W. Miller is a 20-year Army veteran currently serving as the Chief of Strategy and Intelligence for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Arlington, Virginia.

Eric’s tenure in the Department of Defense has included time in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs, where he led the Senate confirmation process for both the Secretary and Undersecretary of the Army. Previously, Eric was the deputy and then acting national intelligence manager for economics at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), leading economic intelligence integration across the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Eric has additionally held various positions in strategy, intelligence, and economics disciplines, including as a strategic planner at ODNI, as a faculty member at the National Intelligence University, as a military and economic legislative assistant to a U.S. Congressman, and as Army appropriations liaison to Congress.

Eric’s doctoral and post-doctoral studies examine scaling social impact within social enterprises and nonprofit organizations, and he is a certified nonprofit consultant. In addition, Eric has earned an MBA, a masters in strategic intelligence, and a masters in financial planning. Eric also serves as an adjunct faculty member at National Intelligence University and George Mason University, teaching courses on strategy, management, and global business economics.

Kat Murti is a libertarian, feminist, and activist working to make the world a better, freer place one day at a time.

A self-described “creature of the internet,” Kat believes in using the power of social media to spread the ideas of liberty online.

Kat is the co-founder and executive director of Feminists for Liberty, an anti-statist and anti-sexist organization that is uplifting libertarian feminist voices, promoting gender equality without abandoning classically liberal ideas, and changing the narrative about both feminism and libertarianism.

She is also associate director of audience engagement and acquisition at the Cato Institute and a co-leader of the D.C. chapter of the Ladies of Liberty Alliance (LOLA) as well as a communications consultant for the international organization.

In addition to the PublicSquare.net board, Kat serves on the board of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), an international nonprofit empowering young people to end the global war on drugs, and the advisory board of the White Coat Waste Project, a taxpayer watchdog group focused on ending government funding for animal experimentation.

Kat previously worked at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and is an alumnus of the Koch Internship Program, the Koch Associate Program, and the Koch Summer Fellowship Program.

She was recognized as one of the Red Alert Politics 30 Under 30 in 2018, as well as a 40 under 40 Outstanding BIPOC leaders in Drug Policy in 2021. She has been named an SSDP All-­Star Alum in December 2010, SSDP Spotlighted Alum in January 2012, an A. Kathryn Parker Outstanding Alumnus in Service to SSDP in March 2016, and LOLA of the Month in May 2016 and August 2020.

Kat grew up between North Texas and South India, earned a political science degree at the University of California at Berkeley, and now lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband and son.

In her free time, Kat enjoys food, fashion, and travel and volunteers with a wide variety of pro-liberty causes. You can find her on Twitter at @KatMurti.

Chris Payne serves as executive vice president at Hurt, Norton & Associates, a Washington, DC-based consulting firm. He specializes in defense acquisitions, intelligence, and appropriations work as well as congressional relations and corporate counseling. He retired from the U.S. Army in 2009 after a distinguished 20-year career that included congressional relations tours with the army’s appropriations liaison office and the U.S. Special Operations Command’s liaison office. He also served as the military legislative assistant to Congressman Jack Kingston (GA-01) under the army’s Congressional Fellows program.

Mr. Payne served multiple tours with joint commands, special operations forces, and intelligence community agencies. Additionally, he worked extensively with budgets and acquisition programs for the army, the intelligence community, and Southern Command and directly interfaced with various congressional committees and member offices.

He is a graduate of Presbyterian College and holds an M.S. from the National Intelligence University and an M.A. from the Notre Dame Graduate School at Christendom College. He is past president and life-time board member of the Thomas More Society of America and a member of Padre Pio Council 10754 of the Knights of Columbus. He and his wife, Leslie, have five children and reside in Reston, Virginia.

Kelley Vlahos is the executive editor of The American Conservative magazine. A resident of Arlington, Virginia, she has spent the last 17 years as a reporter and columnist in Washington, D.C., serving as a long-time political writer for FOXNews.com and contributing editor at TAC before taking the helm of the website in June 2017. Before that, she worked as a writer, digital editor, and social media maven at WTOP.com, the Washington area’s top all-news network.

Beginning her career in 1994 at the Connecticut daily, Torrington Register Citizen, Vlahos went on to nearly five years of reporting for the Greater Hartford daily, The New Britain Herald. Her experience there took her from town and city government and budgets to state Supreme Court cases, the Connecticut General Assembly, crime, education, healthcare, economic development, local and state elections, music and arts, and politics at every imaginable level.

Moving to the nation’s capital in 1999, Vlahos took reporting jobs on both sides of the ideological spectrum, writing mainly about health care, families, and mental health issues for the NASW News. She then shifted to covering Capitol Hill and national politics–including the 2000 presidential election–for ConservativeHQ.com, before landing in the Internet policy and technology beat at the Washington bureau of Bridge News, a global financial newswire now part of Reuters. She began her time at FOXNews.com in June 2001 and has since written about everything from national security and civil liberties in the wake of 9/11 to campaign finance reform, veterans, Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Middle East, gun control,the Department of Defense, the conservative movement and the progressive netroots, the media, and the federal budget. She wrote over 100 “House Hunting” and Senate race profiles for 2002 through 2006 election cycles, as well as coverage of the 2004-2008 national conventions; 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections; and every midterm cycle in between.

Vlahos has been a regular contributor to The American Conservative since 2007, concentrating on national security, war policy, civil liberties, the drug war, and returning veterans. She’s written extensively about homeland security policy for Homeland Security Today magazine.

Meanwhile, her articles and commentary appeal across the political spectrum and have been reprinted in places as diverse as by The Utne Reader, The Spectator (UK) and Truth-out.org.
Vlahos has been interviewed by Al Jazeera, Russia Today, Democracy Now!, POTUS Sirius-XM, and FOX News’s Freedom Watch w/Judge Napolitano. She’s done a wide variety of local and national radio, from the left (Pacifica Radio), right (The Michael Savage Show), and libertarian (The Scott Horton Show).