Steve Miska

Strategic Advisor

Steve joined Red Duke Strategies as a senior advisor to help with leadership, strategy and business development. He works closely with the senior executive team to nurture partnerships that further veteran-centric outcomes, acts as a sounding board on strategic issues, and looks for new possibilities to contribute to overall health outcomes for veterans and the broader communities who support them.

Steve retired after 25 years in the Army, spending forty months in combat in Iraq. In 2007, on his second of three tours, Steve led a team that established an underground railroad for dozens of interpreters from Baghdad to Amman to the United States. He told the story in Baghdad Underground Railroad, published in 2021 by Onward Press, the imprint for the US Veterans’ Artists Alliance. While on the book tour, Steve was asked to joined hundreds of nonprofits advocating on behalf of Afghan allies in advance of the US withdrawal. He engaged various government agencies and stood up an operations center that became the B2B connector inside an ecosystem of veterans and other advocates helping vulnerable Afghans escape Taliban violence. Human Rights First assumed operational control over his team when the Secretary of Veterans Affairs asked him to return to government to lead PACT Act implementation. The Sergeant First Class Roscoe Robinson PACT Act, the largest expansion of veteran healthcare and benefits in a generation, brought over 780,000 veterans into the VA healthcare system, helped over six million veterans get screened for toxic exposure, and helped over a million veterans and surviving spouses get approved VA benefits. He continues to serve on the advisory boards of several nonprofits in the vulnerable refugee space.

Steve served as Director of Iraq on the National Security Council at the White House, as an assistant professor of economics at West Point, and as the Army Chair at the Marine Corps University teaching national security. He attended the United States Military Academy as an undergraduate, Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Business for an MBA, and also served as a counterterrorism fellow in National Defense University’s College of International Security Affairs. He wrote a thesis on protecting “soft networks,” vulnerable refugees who work alongside U.S. agencies in conflict zones. Steve continues to write, serve the public interest and has recently become an amateur ranch hand focusing on polo horses. He is an avid SCUBA diver having dove around the world and serves as a spotter for underwater photographers when they need a good torch.