Speaker biographies

General Jack Keane is senior managing director and co-founder of Keane Advisors, LLC, a private equity and consulting firm. He serves as a national security analyst for ABC News and speaks throughout the nation on national security and leadership. Still active in national security, General Keane conducted a personal assessment of the security situation in Iraq for senior defense officials in 2004, 2005, and 2006. He has been elected to the board of directors of MetLife, General Dynamics, and Allied Barton Security. He is a senior advisor to Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts, one of the nation’s largest private equity firms. He is also an advisor to the chairman and CEO of URS Corporation. He is a member of the secretary of defense’s policy board, a commissioner on the Congressional Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, director of the George C. Marshall Foundation, director of the Knollwood Foundation, a member of the executive committee of the Pentagon Memorial Fund, chairman of the Terry Maude Foundation, and chairman of the Senior Executive Committee of the Army Aviation Association of America. General Keane, a four-star general, completed thirty-seven years in public service in December 2003, culminating as acting chief of staff and vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army. As the chief operating officer of the Army for four-and-a-half years, he directed 1.5 million soldiers and civilians in 120 countries, with an annual operating budget of $110 billion. General Keane was in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and provided oversight and support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. General Keane is a career paratrooper and a combat veteran of Vietnam who was decorated for valor, and spent much of his military life in operational commands employed in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He commanded the famed 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and the legendary Eighteenth Airborne Corps, the Army’s largest war fighting organization.

Michael A. Ledeen, a resident scholar at AEI, is an expert on U.S. foreign policy. His research areas include state sponsors of terrorism, Iran, the Middle East, Italy, U.S.-Chinese relations, intelligence, and Africa (Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe). A former consultant to the National Security Council and to the U.S. State and Defense Departments, he has also written on leadership and the use of power. He is the author of The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction (St. Martin’s Press, 2007) and The War against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened, Where We Are Now, How We’ll Win (St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

R. James Woolsey, director of the CIA from 1993–95, has been a vice president in Booz Allen Hamilton’s energy practice since 2002. He is currently co-chairman, with former secretary of state George Shultz, of the Committee on the Present Danger. Previously, Woolsey was a partner at the law firm of Shea & Gardner in Washington, D.C., where he practiced for twenty-two years in the fields of civil litigation and alternative dispute resolution. During the twelve years he served in the U.S. government, he held numerous positions, including posts as ambassador to the Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) in Vienna, 1989–91; under secretary of the Navy, 1977–79; and general counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, 1970–73. He was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as delegate at large to the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and the Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST); he served in that capacity on a part-time basis in Geneva from 1983–86. As an officer in the U.S. Army, he was an adviser on the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) in Helsinki and Vienna from 1969–70.

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