Integrity
Every product is built with honesty, accuracy, and reliability. Where evidence runs out, the document says so.
About the Firm
A practitioner firm with a scholarly spine.
Matador Strategies was built to do one thing well: take problems that are genuinely complicated and produce material a decision maker can act on without having to become an expert first.
Positioning
What the firm is
Matador Strategies is a research, advisory, and content development firm. It is not a management consultancy that borrowed a security vocabulary, and it is not a marketing agency that discovered artificial intelligence. The work rests on operational counterintelligence experience, doctoral research in statecraft and national security, and a practice of writing that holds up in front of professional audiences.
Clients come to the firm for three reasons. They have adopted technology faster than they have governed it. They have built something that a government or regulated buyer might want and cannot translate it into that buyer's language. Or they are carrying a security problem, usually about people rather than systems, that they do not have the internal expertise to name.
Complex information should enable confident decisions, not demonstrate the sophistication of the person delivering it. Matador Strategies, on clarity
Institutional Values
Four commitments the work is measured against
Clarity
Complex information should enable confident decisions. Structure is a service to the reader, not a display of rigor.
Foresight
Strategic thinking and anticipation guide every stage of development. Second order effects are part of the analysis.
Discipline
Each framework and resource is designed with precision and purpose. Nothing ships because a deadline arrived.
Founder
Dr. Shane A. McNeil
Principal and founder. Two decades of counterintelligence practice across operational, instructional, and policy roles, now applied to commercial and institutional clients.
Dr. McNeil's professional background includes senior counterintelligence and policy work within the defense and intelligence community, including service as a counterintelligence policy advisor on the Joint Staff, operational assignments overseas, and leadership in counterintelligence instruction, policy reform, and strategic planning.
He holds a Doctor of Statecraft and National Security from the Institute of World Politics, completed in February 2026. His dissertation, Defending the Idea of America: Statecraft, China, and the Strategic Role of Counterintelligence, argues that counterintelligence is a strategic instrument rather than a defensive support function, and that the distinction matters for how the United States competes.
He is President and Chairman of the Board of the Sentinel Research & Policy Institute, a national security research nonprofit, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Emergency Management, Homeland Security, and Criminal Justice at Columbia Southern University.
He writes on counterintelligence, strategic competition, and technology policy, and publishes long-form work through the Matador Publishing imprint.
Credentials
- Doctor of Statecraft and National Security The Institute of World Politics · 2026
- M.A., Forensic Psychology University of North Dakota
- Graduate Certificate, Executive Public Policy Liberty University
- President and Chairman of the Board Sentinel Research & Policy Institute
- Adjunct Professor Columbia Southern University
The Entity
Corporate detail
Matador Strategies research and analytical products are developed exclusively from publicly available information. The firm's work reflects professional expertise and does not represent the views of, imply access to non-public information from, or carry endorsement by any government agency or institution with which its principal is or has been affiliated.
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