Speaker Biographies
June 20, 2005
Dan Blumenthal is a resident fellow in Asian studies at AEI. Previously, he was senior director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the first George W. Bush administration. In that capacity, he led a team that formulated and implemented defense policies and programs toward and for these portfolio countries. Before his service at the Pentagon, he practiced law in New York and was a research assistant at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow in defense and security policy studies at AEI. He is the author of The Military We Need: The Defense Requirements of the Bush Doctrine (AEI Press, 2005), Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Strategic Assessment (AEI Press, 2004), and AEI’s monthly National Security Outlook. In February 2005, he was appointed by Senator Bill Frist to a two-year term on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Before coming to AEI, he served as the director of strategic communications and initiatives at Lockheed Martin and as deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century. From 1995 to 1999, he was the policy group director, as well as a professional staff member, for the Committee on National Security (now the Committee on Armed Services) in the U.S. House of Representatives. Mr. Donnelly has also been the executive director of The National Interest, editor of the Army Times, and deputy editor of Defense News.
Captain Karl M. Hasslinger, U.S. Navy (Ret.), is a former nuclear attack submarine commander with a background in defense strategy. He served as a fellow on the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, as the strategic planning assistant to the director of submarine warfare on the Chief of Naval Operations staff, and as a military assistant in the Office of Secretary of Defense Net Assessment. He was a founding member of the Submarine Future Studies Group while on active duty and still serves as an industry representative. He currently manages a strategic analysis program for General Dynamics - Electric Boat in Washington, D.C.
Frederick W. Kagan joined AEI in May 2005 as a resident scholar in defense and security policy studies. Previously he was an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He is the coauthor of While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), as well as numerous articles on defense and foreign policy issues in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Weekly Standard, Policy Review, Commentary, Parameters, and elsewhere.
Thomas G. Mahnken is a visiting fellow at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). During the 2003–04 academic year he served as the acting director of the SAIS Strategic Studies Program. He is currently on a leave of absence from the U.S. Naval War College, where he is a professor in the Department of Strategy and Policy. He served in the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, where he conducted research into the emerging revolution in military affairs. He also served as a member of the Gulf War Air Power Survey, commissioned by the secretary of the U.S. Air Force to examine the performance of U.S. forces during the first war with Iraq. He is the author or editor of four books and is coeditor of the Journal of Strategic Studies.
Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt, U.S. Navy (Ret.), is a vice president and director of the Center for Strategic Studies, a division of the CNA Corporation (CNAC), a not-for-profit research center in Washington, D.C. that conducts research and analyses on strategy, political-military issues, and regional security studies. During his Navy career, Rear Admiral McDevitt held four at-sea commands, including an aircraft carrier battle group. He was the director of the East Asia Policy Office for the secretary of defense during the first Bush administration. He also served for two years as the director for strategy, war plans, and policy (J-5) for U.S. CINCPAC. He concluded his thirty-four-year active duty career as the commandant of the National War College. In addition to his management and leadership responsibilities as the founder of the Center for Strategic Studies, he has been an active participant in conferences and workshops regarding security issues in East Asia and has had a number of papers published in edited volumes on this subject.
Ronald O’Rourke has worked since 1984 as a naval analyst for the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. In that time, he has written numerous reports for Congress on various issues relating to the Navy. He regularly briefs members of Congress and congressional staffers and has testified before congressional committees on several occasions. In 1996, he received a distinguished service award from the Library of Congress for his service to Congress on naval issues. He is the author of several journal articles on naval issues and is a past winner of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Arleigh Burke essay contest. He has given presentations on Navy-related issues to a variety of audiences in government, industry, and academia.
Terry J. Pudas has served since October 2001 as the deputy director of the Office of Force Transformation, which provides recommendations for linking the Department of Defense’s transformation efforts to strategic functions, evaluates the transformation efforts of the military departments, and promotes synergy by recommending steps to integrate ongoing transformation activities. Other responsibilities of the office include monitoring service and joint experimentation programs and making policy recommendations to the secretary and deputy secretary of defense. Mr. Pudas entered the U.S. Navy through the Aviation Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida, in 1969 and was designated a naval aviator in May 1971, served in numerous fighter squadrons, and served as an exchange pilot with the German Navy. He commanded at both the squadron and wing level. He served as air officer on board USS Midway (CV-41) and conducted operations in support of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He retired from the U.S. Navy in September 2001 with over thirty-two years of service after serving as the deputy and executive assistant to the president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
Rear Admiral Paul M. Robinson, U.S. Navy (Ret.), is vice president and general manager of surface combatant programs at Northrop Grumman Ship Systems (NGSS), where he is responsible for setting NGSS objectives for all surface combatant programs and ensuring their successful accomplishment, including both the U.S. Navy’s DDX and DDG 51 programs. Before assuming this position in January 2005, he was the vice president of Ingalls operations of NGSS, which he joined in August 1998 after having served for thirty-three years in the U.S. Navy. His duties in the Navy in the early years included assignments aboard ship and ashore. For the last twenty-three years, he served in leadership and program management positions related to the shipbuilding industry. His final Navy assignment was as vice commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, the largest and most complex material and acquisition organization in the Department of Defense.
Andrew L. Ross is professor of strategic studies and director of studies in the Strategic Research Department of the U.S. Naval War College's Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He served as director of the Naval War College’s project on "Military Transformation and the Defense Industry After Next" and during the 2001–2002 academic year served as the acting director of the college’s advanced research program and as coleader of the college's strategy task group. From 1989 to 2000, he served as a Secretary of the Navy senior research fellow and then a professor of national security affairs in the college’s National Security Decision Making Department. His work on grand strategy, national security and defense planning, regional security, weapons proliferation, the international arms market, defense industrialization, and security and development has appeared in numerous journals and books. He is the editor of The Political Economy of Defense: Issues and Perspectives (1991) and coeditor of three editions of Strategy and Force Planning (1995, 1997, and 2000). He is currently writing a book on military transformation. He has held research fellowships at Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, the University of Illinois, and the Naval War College; he also taught in the Political Science Departments of the University of Illinois and the University of Kentucky.
Robert O. Work is a senior defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. His areas of expertise include defense strategy, defense transformation, and maritime affairs. In 2001 he retired as a Marine colonel after twenty-seven years of service. His military occupational specialty was artillery. He commanded an artillery battery and an artillery battalion and was the camp commander of the Joint Artillery Training Facility at Camp Fuji, Japan. He has also served as a battalion S1 (adjutant), battalion S-2 (intelligence officer), S-3A (assistant operations officer), regimental fire support coordinator, and S-4A (assistant logistics officer) on artillery battalion staffs and as a regimental S-3A, S-3 (operations officer), S-4 (logistics officer), and executive officer. His key non-artillery positions included aide-de-camp to the commanding general of the U.S. Marine Corps Development Command, as well as enlisted force planner at U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters. In 1990, he became the head of the space plans and operation integration branch at U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters. After his tour as a battalion commander, he became the first director of the Strategic Initiatives Group, a strategic analysis and planning cell reporting directly to the commandant of the Marine Corps. From 1999 to his retirement, he served as the military assistant and senior Marine aide to Richard Danzig, the seventy-first secretary of the U.S. Navy.
John J. Young, Jr., was nominated on June 24, 2001, by President George W. Bush to serve as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, and sworn in on July 17, 2001. He was previously a professional staff member for the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Defense. During his tenure with the committee, he served as the staff analyst for a variety of Department of Defense procurement, research, development, test, and evaluation programs as well as environmental restoration and compliance programs. He was most recently responsible for reviewing and making funding recommendations to the committee on all Defense Department aircraft procurement programs; Navy aircraft-related research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) programs; Air Force RDT&E programs; and Defense-wide RDT&E programs, including the activities of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Mr. Young previously worked with what is now Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems in Fort Worth, Texas, participating in the cooperative engineering education program at Georgia Tech. Under this program, he worked in eight different engineering groups primarily supporting the F-16 program and advanced fighter technology efforts. He next worked at the BDM Corporation in Huntsville, Alabama. In this position, he provided engineering support to the Army Space and Strategic Defense Command Lethality and Target Hardening Office and developed configuration designs and aerodynamic performance predictions for a hollow-nosed interceptor concept. He subsequently joined the technical staff at Rockwell Missile Systems Division in Duluth, Georgia, completing work on tactical missile proposal efforts, thrust vector control tests, and computational fluid dynamics modeling of missiles and nozzle flows. He became a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in 1988, where he worked on hypersonic weapon designs and maneuvering reentry vehicle aerodynamics as well as standoff bomb concepts. While at Sandia, he was selected as an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Congressional Fellow.
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