Speaker Biographies

Bruce E. Bechtol is an associate professor of international relations at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia. Prior to joining the faculty at Quantico, he was an assistant professor of national security studies at the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, from 2003 to 2005. Prior to joining the faculty of the Air Command and Staff College, Mr. Bechtol was employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, serving as the senior analyst for Northeast Asia at the directorate for intelligence of the joint chiefs of staff in the Pentagon until 2003. From 1977 to 1997, he was on active duty in the Marine Corps, serving as a cryptologist at various duty stations in the continental United States, the Western Pacific, and in East Asia. Mr. Bechtol is the author of Avenging the General Sherman: The 1871 Battle of Kang Hwa Do (Marine Corps University Foundation, 2002) and Red Rogue: The Persistent Challenge of North Korea (Potomac Books, forthcoming). He was editor of the Defense Intelligence Journal in 2004–2005, and he sits on the editorial advisory board of the East Asian Review. In addition, he has presented papers and conducted briefings on a wide variety of intelligence and national security issues at conferences and symposiums.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and is a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle, Washington. He serves on the advisory board of the Korea Economic Institute of America and is a founding member of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Mr. Eberstadt regularly consults for governmental and international organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. State Department, USAID, and the World Bank. He has published over 300 studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security. His dozen-plus books and monographs include The Poverty of Communism (Transaction, 1988), The Population of North Korea (Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992), The Tyranny of Numbers (AEI Press, 1995), The End of North Korea (AEI Press, 1999), Korea’s Future and the Great Powers (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2001), and, most recently, The North Korean Economy: Between Crisis & Catastrophe (Transaction, 2007).

Christopher Griffin is a research fellow in Asian studies at AEI. Before joining AEI in January 2005, he was a research assistant in the strategic studies department at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Since May 2006, Mr. Griffin has been an associate editor of Armed Forces Journal, for which he writes on defense-industrial issues and military blogs.

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