Welcome

Update (February 2021): I am pleased to announce that my on Civil-Military conflict in Malaya was published by The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. You can download a copy of the paper here.

Welcome! I am an assistant professor of international security studies at the Air War College, at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery Alabama. As an instructor in the US Air Force’s Senior PME Institution, I focus on advanced officer education to train a rising generation of senior leaders, advisors, and planners.

I am both a political scientist and a historian, focused on the fields of security studies and the Middle East, especially concerned with: the strategies, processes, and politics of irregular warfare (insurgency and civil war), the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Conflict and Security in the Persian Gulf, civil-military relations and strategic planning, long term trajectories of political development in the Middle East and its impact on security strategies and military effectiveness.

My current research projects focus on questions of civil-military cooperation during counterinsurgency campaigns, especially those involving political and military lines of operation whose goals and progress need to be coordinated. While the importance of “unity of effort” has long been established, the pervasive civil-military conflicts that emerge during COIN campaigns, and the obstacles they present to campaign success, have been largely ignored. I focus on the ways in which the systems designed to promote unity of effort succeed and fail, and how this impacts the development and implementation of strategy.

Prior to serving at the War College, I was a visiting assistant professor in the Government Department at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, NY. I received my PhD in Political Science at Yale University in 2018, and my MA in Middle East History at Tel Aviv University in 2010.