Academic Chairs

Dr. James Lacey has been the Professor of War Policy Strategy at the Marine Corps War College (MCWAR) at the Marine Corps university (MCU) for the past decade. Prior to that he was a widely published senior analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, DC. Lacey served over a dozen years on active duty as an infantry officer and is retired from the Army Reserves. In addition to teaching at MCWAR he has also taught graduate level courses in Military History and Global Issues at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities. Dr. Lacey was an embedded journalist with Time magazine during the invasion of Iraq, where he traveled with the 101st Airborne Division. He has written extensively for many other magazines and his opinion columns have been published in, National Review, The Weekly Standard, the New York Post, the New York Sun, Foreign Affairs and many other publications. Jim Lacey is also regularly published in Military History Magazine, Military History Quarterly, and the Journal of Military History.

Lacey is the author of Moment of Battle (Bantam), The First Clash (Bantam), Takedown: the 3rd Infantry Division’s 21-Day Assault on Baghdad (Naval Institute Press), Pershing (Palgrave-Macmillan) The Making of Peace (Cambridge University Press) and The Making of Grand Strategy (Cambridge University Press) and Keep from all Thoughtful Men (USNI, 2010) He also has published a trilogy of works on global terrorism (Naval Institute Press). His two most recent books are Great Strategic Rivalries (Oxford, 2017) and The Washington War, dealing with the relationship between FDR, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the War Cabinet during WW II (Bantam, 2019).  His latest work, Gods of War, dealing with those times in history when great captains have fought each other was published in May 2020.  He is currently researching The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire and Models of Great State Competition.

Mr. Kael Weston represented the U.S. government for over a decade as a State Department official. Across seven consecutive years in Iraq and Afghanistan (2003-2010), he worked closely with frontline U.S. military units, local Iraqi and Afghan leaders, and coalition partners in Fallujah, Baghdad/Sadr City, and Khost and Helmand provinces. While serving previously at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York City, he was the U.S. representative on the UN Security Council’s Al Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee. Weston is author of the book, The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan (Knopf/Penguin Random House, 2016), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Military Times’ Best Book of the Year, and recipient of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation’s General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award. Currently the writer-in-residence in the Honors College at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, he has also written for Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal and has been frequently interviewed on NPR about U.S. foreign policy. Weston is a graduate of the University of Utah (BA), University of Cambridge (MPhil), and did additional PhD coursework at the London School of Economics and was a Fulbright Scholar in the Netherlands.

As the Marine Corps University (MCU) Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism, Mr. Weston lectures across the schools, including the Marine Corps War College – MCWAR, the Command and Staff College – CSC, the School of Advanced Warfighting – SAW, and the Expeditionary Warfare School – EWS.

Website: www.jkweston.com