COL CHARLES D. ALLEN (Ret.) culminated a 30-year Army career as Director, Leader Development and is currently the Professor of Cultural Science in the Department of Command, Leadership, and Management at the United States Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA. A 1978 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, his military education also includes the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the School of Advanced Military Studies, and the United States Army War College. COL Allen has served in leadership and staff positions from platoon through Corps (I and V Corps) and in Army and Joint Commands. His areas of interest include Strategic Leadership, Creativity and Innovation, and Organizational Change. He is a frequent presenter on these topics for Senior Leadership Staff Ride and outreach programs for the Army War College. He is a contributor and member of the "On Leadership" panel of the Washington Post. COL Allen is also the Steering Committee Chairman for the Executive Development Roundtable hosted by Boston University.

CHRISTIAN APPY is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of PATRIOTS: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides. Chris earned his PhD from Harvard University in the History of American Civilization.  His dissertation on American combat soldiers in the Vietnam War received the American Studies Association’s prize for the year’s best dissertation in the field and became the basis for his book Working-Class War, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press (1993) and has been used in many college and university courses on modern U.S. history. His work on PATRIOTS, which he calls “the most challenging and rewarding work of my life,” took him throughout Vietnam and the United States, talking to more than 350 men and women about their memories of that long and bitterly divisive war.  The result is an oral history that stretches from the summer of 1945, when Americans first parachuted into northern Vietnam, to April 30, 1975, when the last U.S. helicopter flew off the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon. 

RICK ATKINSON is an award-winning journalist and historian. Born in Munich, in the Federal Republic of Germany, Atkinson is the son of a U.S. Army officer and grew up on military posts. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English literature from the University of Chicago. He won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for the Kansas City Times in 1982 was head of a team that won the Pulitzer for public service at the Washington Post in 1999. He subsequently served as deputy national editor supervising national security coverage, as an investigative reporter, and as the Post’s Berlin bureau chief, covering not only Germany and NATO, but also spending considerable time in Somalia and Bosnia. He returned from Europe to become Assistant Managing Editor in 1996, before leaving in 1999 to write about World War II. He is the best-selling author of The Long Gray Line (1989), a narrative account about West Point’s class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War; and An Army at Dawn, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in History, and The Day of Battle (2007) the first two volumes in the Liberation Trilogy, a narrative history of the American Army in North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe during the Second World War. He is currently at work on volume three.

ANDREW BACEVICH is Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty of Boston University in 1998, he taught at West Point and at Johns Hopkins University. Bacevich is the author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). His previous books include American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy (2002) and The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005), among others. His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and general interest publications including The Wilson Quarterly, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The American Conservative, and The New Republic . His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, among other newspapers.

MARY LOUISE (MISSY) CUMMINGS was one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots. Her book, Hornet's Nest (2000), is a compelling and often shocking account of the discrimination and hostile environment she encountered in the fighter community. She eventually elected to resign from the Navy and joined the Virginia Tech College of Engineering in 1999. Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the United States Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2003. She is currently the Boeing Assistant Professor in the Aeronautics & Astronautics Department and Director of the Humans and Automation Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

NATHANIEL FRANK is the author of Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America (St. Martin’s Press). He is Senior Research Fellow at the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara and teaches history on the adjunct faculty at New York University's Gallatin School. Frank’s writings on gays in the military and other topics have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, Slate, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Lingua Franca and other publications. He has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, including “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show,” the “CBS Evening News,” as well as Logo, NPR, the BBC, the Associated Press, National Review and more. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Frank earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in History at Brown University.

LAWRENCE J. KORB is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Prior to joining American Progress, he was a senior fellow and director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Korb served as Assistant Secretary of Defense (manpower, reserve affairs, installations, and logistics) in the Reagan Administration. He served on active duty for four years as Naval Flight Officer, and retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of captain. Korb’s 20 books and more than 100 articles on national security issues include The Joint Chiefs of Staff: The First Twenty-five Years; The Fall and Rise of the Pentagon; Reshaping America's Military; and A New National Security Strategy in an Age of Terrorists, Tyrants, and Weapons of Mass Destruction. His articles have appeared in such journals as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Naval Institute Proceedings, and International Security. Over the past decade, Korb has made over 1,000 appearances as a commentator on such shows as “The Today Show,” “The Early Show,” “Good Morning America,” “Face the Nation,” “This Week,” “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” “Nightline,” “60 Minutes,” “Larry King Live,” “The O'Reilly Factor,” and “Hannity and Colmes.” His op-ed pieces have appeared in such major newspapers as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Christian Science Monitor.

RACHEL MADDOW hosts MSNBC’s and Air America’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” featuring her take on the biggest stories of the day, political and otherwise, including lively debate with guests from all sides of the issues, in-depth analysis and stories no other shows in cable news will cover.  Maddow received a bachelor's degree in public policy from Stanford University. She earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford University, which she attended on a Rhodes Scholarship. Her doctoral thesis is titled HIV/AIDS and Health Care Reform in British and American Prisons. She was the first openly gay American to win a Rhodes Scholarship. Rachel got her start in broadcasting as the co-host of The Dave in the Morning Show on WRNX radio in Holyoke. She is currently working on a book on the changing role of the military in U.S. politics, due out in the fall of 2009.

CULLEN MURPHY is Editor At Large at Vanity Fair and former Editor of The Atlantic Monthly and The Wilson Quarterly. From the mid-70s until 2004, he and his father, John Cullen Murphy, wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant. He is also the author of The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own (1999) and the award winning Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (2007), which compares the politics and culture of Ancient Rome with that of the contemporary United States. A graduate of Amherst College, Cullen is a former director of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

PAUL RIECKHOFF is the executive director and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the first and largest organization for veterans of the War on Terror. During his time in the Adamiyah section of central Baghdad, he led his light infantry platoon on hundreds of combat patrols with the 3rd Infantry and 1st Armored Divisions. He continues to serve his country as an Infantry Officer in the New York Army National Guard. A graduate of Amherst College, Rieckhoff is a frequent TV and radio commentator and has appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Fox’s Hannity & Colmes, NBC Nightly News, 60 Minutes II, CNN’s Paula Zahn Now, ABC’s World News Tonight, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Air America's Al Franken Show, and NPR’s All Things Considered, among many other programs. He and IAVA have also been featured across the country in numerous major national newspapers and magazines. He was named one of “America’s Best and Brightest of 2004” by Esquire.

SARAH SEWALL teaches international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she also directs the Program on National Security and Human Rights. She led the Obama Transitions National Security Agency Review process in 2008. During the Clinton Administration, Sewall served as the first Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance. From 1983-1996, she served as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell on the Democratic Policy Committee and the Senate Arms Control Observer Group. Before joining Harvard, Sewall was at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences where she edited The United States and the International Criminal Court (2002). Her more recent publications include the introduction to the University of Chicago Edition of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual (2007) and, with John White, Parameters of Partnership: U.S. Civil-Military Relations in the 21st Century (2009). She is a member of the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee and the Center for Naval Analyses Defense Advisory Committee. She graduated from Harvard College and Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

MICHAEL L. “MIKEY” WEINSTEIN is the Founder and President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Described by Harper's magazine as “the constitutional conscience of the U.S. military,” Mikey and his family have a long and distinguished U.S. military history spanning three consecutive generations of military academy graduates and over 130 years of combined active duty military service in every major combat engagement our country has been in from World War I to the current Global War on Terror. A 1977 Honors Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, and a registered Republican, Mikey was Assistant General Counsel in the Reagan White House. His constitutional activism has been covered and profiled extensively in the print media including the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the Denver Post, The Guardian and many other national and international newspapers and periodicals including Time magazine.  He is the author of With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military (2006). 

LT. COL. ISAIAH WILSON III is an Associate Professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point where he directs the American Politics, Policy, and Strategy program in the Department of Social Sciences. He is a former Army aviator and military strategist with peace enforcement and combat experiences in the Balkans in the 1990s and later in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, where he served initially as a researcher and military historian on former Chief of Staff of the Army, General Eric Shinseki’s Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group (OIFSG) and later as chief of plans for the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) under the command of General Dave Petraeus during that unit’s 2003-04 tour of duty in Northern Iraq. His current research includes voting behavior of U.S. military personnel and diversification, acculturation, and integration within the U.S. Army.