Alyssa I. Agard

Research & Leadership

I am the founder, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Agard Research Associates Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research institute advancing interdisciplinary scholarship at the meeting of behavioral science, historical analysis, and public policy. I built it from the ground up: federal tax-exempt status, state compliance, financial systems, the intranet the organization runs on, editorial operations, and a growing complement of research interns and volunteers. It exists because I hold that rigorous scholarship ought not be gated behind institutional access or professional pedigree, and that it belongs to the people whose lives are shaped by the decisions it informs.In practice this means publishing work that a legislator, an administrator, and an interested resident can each read to their own purpose. ARA's policy analyses have examined federal documentary proof of citizenship proposals and their consequences for New Jersey voters, the state's Pay and Benefits Transparency Act, and its temporary disability and family leave insurance programs, each written to distinguish plainly what is enacted from what is merely proposed. Alongside these I develop civic education, most recently a nonpartisan workshop on New Jersey's county line ballot system, and professional development programming for small businesses and private schools across the state, addressing cultural competence, social-emotional learning, and compliance under FERPA, HIPAA, OSHA, and EEOC frameworks.

Academic Foundation

I am pursuing a Master of Public Policy at Rutgers University's Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, concentrating in Political Processes and Institutions with a research focus in foreign affairs and defense policy. My graduate work examines how governance structures, institutional behavior, and technological change shape policy outcomes, strategic stability, and public trust.I hold a Bachelor of Arts in History from Georgian Court University, where I graduated magna cum laude and served as Chapter President of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society. Additionally, I hold an Associate in Arts in Political Science and Humanities from Brookdale Community College. My undergraduate research ranged across the California Gold Rush, Gilded Age entrepreneurship, and American military conflict through the World Wars and the Cold War.My longer trajectory is to pursue a doctor of philosophy in international/foreign affairs with a specialization in war and strategic studies, and a law degree (JD) concentrating in international law. I seek both forms of training because the questions I care about are settled by people holding both kinds of authority, and I would rather understand each on its own terms than take either on report.

Research Agenda & Current Work

My research sits at the convergence of defense strategy, emerging technology, and deterrence theory. I am chiefly interested in how institutional decision-making, technological entanglement, and unexamined doctrinal assumptions interact to shape strategic stability in contested domains.Currently under peer review, "The Intelligentized Security Dilemma" argues that the convergence of the PLA's systems destruction warfare doctrine with artificial intelligence, quantum sensing, hypersonic weapons, and counterspace capability produces a security dilemma of a novel kind, one whose compressed timelines and cross-domain entanglements render Cold War stability models obsolete. Soon to be published in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies, "Deterrence in Orbit" takes up Joint All-Domain Operations and the space-nuclear entanglement problem, naming the space-nuclear firewall as the doctrine's unstated and untenable assumption and proposing a Space-Nuclear Integration Cell to manage what that assumption leaves unmanaged.

Professional Experience

Where no existing tool will answer a question, I build one. ATLAS adjudicates crisis escalation algorithmically across an eight-level ladder, so that signaling and inadvertent escalation may be tested rather than merely argued about. Degraded Constellation models the erosion of missile warning coverage under counterspace attack. The Primacy Premium, my current build, forecasts how defense spending, arms transfers, and commercial risk pricing would reallocate under three distinct pathways to Chinese military primacy, calibrated against seven decades of IMF and SIPRI data. The quantitative work runs on Python, R, SPSS, SQL, and ArcGIS; when a model must reach readers who will not install anything, it runs in the browser instead.The same principle governs what I have had to learn. To study the vulnerability of systems in orbit is to confront the physics that governs them, and I would rather understand that physics than take it on authority, so I taught myself its fundamentals and am extending the study into quantum physics now. I claim no credential in it. I claim only that a question demanding technical understanding is owed technical understanding.

Before the Policy Work

Before the research I worked in behavioral health and special education. As a Registered Behavior Technician, I delivered early intervention to infants and toddlers with autism and developmental delay. Additionally, I have taught in general and special education classrooms across New Jersey. I have extensive experience interpreting and implementing IEPs and 504 plans for students whose needs no standard lesson or approach accommodates.I do not treat this as prologue. It is the reason my policy orientation is grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction, and the reason I am unsentimental about institutional accountability. I have sat on the floor with a child working toward a target that a written plan had reduced to a line item. Policy that does not account for the people it governs is not policy worth writing.

Beyond the Work

I am, at my core, a historian, and my intellectual life runs well past the defense work that occupies most of my professional attention. My interests move from the Mongol Empire and the statecraft of Inner Asia to Norse and Viking martial tradition, and thence to the whole arc of American conflict from the Revolution through the Cold War. I came to anthropology and archaeology for the same reason I came to history, which is that they disclose what people chose to do and, more tellingly, what they believed they were doing when they chose it.I read Latin fluently and am working through Russian, Mongolian, and Mandarin Chinese, for the plain reason that a translation is someone else's reading and I would rather have my own.I have been reading and writing music since I was twelve, self-taught, and I compose in the classical tradition. I have never regarded this as separate from the rest of it. A composition is formal structure held under tension until it resolves, and so, in its way, is a model: both are built rather than fitted, and both fail in the same manner when the architecture beneath them is unsound.There is more to know, if you are inclined. A separate page offers a quieter look at the thinking behind the work: philosophical reflection, writing, compositions, sketches, and photography.For access, email [email protected].

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