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.

Williamson Murray, Ph.D is the current Ambassador Anthony D. Marshall Chair of Strategic Studies where he lectures across the schools within the Marine Corps University (MCU) such as the Marine Corps War College (MCWAR,) the School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW,) the Command and Staff College (CSC,) and the Expeditionary Warfare School (EWS.)

Dr. Murray graduated from Yale University in 1963 with honors in history. He then served five years as an officer in the United States Air Force, including a tour in Southeast Asia with the 314th Tactical Airlift Wing (C-130s). He returned to Yale University where he received his Ph.D. in military-diplomatic history, working under Hans Gatzke and Donald Kagan. He taught two years in the Yale history department before moving on to Ohio State University in fall 1977 as a military and diplomatic historian. He received the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award in 1987. He took early retirement from Ohio State in 1995 as Professor Emeritus of History.

Dr. Murray has taught at a number of academic and military institutions, including the Air War College, the United States Military Academy, and the Naval War College. He has also served as a Secretary of the Navy Fellow at the Navy War College, the Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, the Matthew C. Horner Professor of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University, the Charles Lindbergh Chair at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, and the Harold K. Johnson Professor of Military History at the Army War College. He served as a consultant with the Institute of Defense Analyses, where he worked on the Iraqi Perspectives Project. In 2008 he completed two years as the 1957 Distinguished Visiting Professor of naval heritage and history at the U.S. Naval Academy. From 2011 through 2013, he served as a Minerva Fellow in the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College. At present he is The Ambassador Anthony D. Marshall Chair of Strategic Studies at the Marine Corps University.

He has written a wide selection of articles and books. He is the author of The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939, The Path to Ruin (Princeton University Press, 1984); Luftwaffe (Nautical and Aviation Press, 1985); German Military Effectiveness (Nautical and Aviation Press, 1992); The Air War in the Persian Gulf (Nautical and Aviation Press, 1995); and Air War, 1914-1945 (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999). Professors Murray and Allan Millett have published an operational history of World War II, A War To Be Won, Fighting the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2000) which has received rave reviews from a number of newspapers and journals, including The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The Naval War College Review, The Journal of Military History, and Strategic Review.. Professor Murray was a major contributor to The Cambridge History of War, ed. by Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge University Press) and also authored with Major General Robert Scales, Jr. The Iraq War, A Military History (Harvard University Press, 2003). He has also edited with Allan Millett a number of books on the implications of the past for current military thinking: Military Effectiveness, three volumes (Allen and Unwin, 1988; reissued by Cambridge University Press, fall 2010)); Calculations, Net Assessment and the Coming of World War II (Free Press, 1992); and Military Innovations in the Interwar Period (Cambridge, 1996). Professor Murray has also edited with MacGregor Knox, The Making of Strategy, Rulers, States, and War (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050 (Cambridge, University Press, 2001). He also edited with Richard Sinnreich The Past as Prologue, The Importance of History to the Military Profession (Cambridge University Press, 2006). In 2009 he published The Making of Peace: Rulers, States, and the Aftermath of War which he edited with James Lacey (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Conflicting Currents: Japan and the United States (Praeger, 2009). In 2011 he published three books: The Shaping of Grand Strategy, Policy, Diplomacy, and War, which he edited with Richard Sinnreich and James Lacey (Cambridge University Press), War Strategy and Military Effectiveness (Cambridge University Press), and Military Adaptation in War, With Fear of Change (Cambridge University Press). In 2012 he published Hybrid Warfare, co-edited with Peter Mansoor and in 2014 Cambridge published Successful Strategies, coedited with Richard Sinnreich and The Iran-Iraq War, coauthored with Kevin Woods. At present he has the following completed manuscripts A Savage War, A Military History of the Civil War, coauthored with Wayne Hsieh (scheduled for publication by Princeton University Press in 2016); The Battle of Generals, coauthored with James Lacey (scheduled for publication by Random House in 2016); and Grand Strategy and Coalition Warfare (coedited with Peter Mansoor (scheduled for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2016).

Some of Professor Murray’s most recently published articles include: “Clausewitz Out, Computer In, Military Culture and Technological Hubris,” The National Interest, Summer 1997; “Air War in the Persian Gulf: The Limits of Air Power,” Strategic Review, Winter 1998; “Preparing to Lose the Next War?,” Strategic Review, Fall 1998; “Does Military Culture Matter?,” Orbis, Winter 1999; “The Emerging Strategic Environment, An Historian’s View,” Strategic Review, Spring 1999; “Military Culture Matters,” Strategic Review, Summer 1999; “Military Experimentation in the Interwar Period,” Joint Forces Quarterly, spring 2000;.and “What History Suggests about the Future, Orbis, Fall 2008. He has also written a number of pieces that have appeared recently in Military History Quarterly, Military History, and World War II.

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