WSS 2026
Three days. One conversation.
The one that needed to happen.
The inaugural Whitefish Security Summit convened in April 2026 at the Whitefish Performing Arts Center — bringing together more than 130 national security professionals, intelligence officers, defense practitioners, journalists, and policy leaders for three days of frank, practitioner-grade dialogue on the threats defining this decade.
WSS was designed from the beginning as something different: not a conference where people perform expertise for a room of strangers, but a forum where serious people have the conversations they can’t have elsewhere. The setting was intentional. Whitefish, Montana is not Washington. That distance produced a different quality of engagement.
Programming spanned cyber operations and AI-enabled threat, intelligence community dynamics, geopolitical risk, influence operations, and the intersection of national security with media and culture. Discussions were structured to generate insight rather than consensus — and they delivered.
Eighty-six percent of attendees indicated intent to return. The community that formed over those three days is the foundation on which WSS 2027 is being built.
McChrystal
General McChrystal’s keynote set the intellectual frame for the Summit — addressing the nature of modern conflict, the evolution of adversarial threat, and the demands placed on institutions and individuals operating at the edge of national security. It was a frank assessment from one of the defining military leaders of the post-9/11 era, delivered to an audience that understood the weight of what he was describing.
The people in the room.
Organizations that made WSS 2026 possible.
A community, not just an event.
WSS 2026 was the proof of concept. What it demonstrated is that there is genuine appetite — among people who operate at the highest levels of national security — for a forum that prioritizes substance over spectacle, and relationship over credential display.
The conversations that happened in Whitefish over those three days continued after the event closed. That continuity is what Summit Circle was designed to formalize and sustain — a year-round community built from the constituency that made the inaugural Summit what it was.
WSS 2027 builds on that foundation. The programming will go deeper. The community will be larger. The stakes are the same.
WSS 2027
is next.
February 24–26, 2027 · Whitefish, Montana. The second annual Whitefish Security Summit — with Chris Costa confirmed as keynote and an expanded program across three days. Summit Circle charter enrollment is open through August 1, 2026.