Prof. Blankshain Takes Over as Chair of National Security Affairs Department

Prof. Jessica Blankshain, Ph.D., a 12-year veteran of the U.S. Naval War College’s National Security Affairs (NSA) Department, officially took over as the chair of the department on July 3, 2026.

Blankshain arrives as the head of the department after a three-year stint as director of NSA’s Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) section. She takes over for retired U.S. Navy captain and Prof. Derek Reveron, Ph.D., who completed the maximum two four-year terms in the seat.

The department’s deputy chair position also turned over, with U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Barringer taking over for retired U.S. Navy captain and Assoc. Prof. Joseph Gagliano, Ph.D.

“They left the department in really great shape for us,” Blankshain said, additionally noting the work of retired U.S. Air Force Col. Dana Struckman, who served as the deputy chair for 14 years before Gagliano took over. “They spent the better part of the last decade making great decisions about the curriculum and great hires, bringing on extraordinary faculty. Our amazing department staff – academic coordinator Denise Murphy and secretary Mary-Elizabeth Parris – keep the department running smoothly and have been invaluable in facilitating this leadership transition.

“I really love this department, and I really love this college,” she continued, adding that her initial priorities in the job include advocating for the NSA faculty – developing, retaining and promoting the department’s instructors – and ensuring the curriculum continues to evolve and maintain relevance.

“We’ve continued to develop our curriculum based both on student feedback and internal feedback, as well as the priorities of the Navy,” said Blankshain, who recalled having an interest in the military at a young age, choosing to write papers about case studies in war as a Chicago-area elementary school student decades ago.

“We teach our warfighters how to think, not what to think,” she said of the NSA course load. “We focus on the practical application of what we teach – talking about the military as a tool of national power in policy, how it relates to other tools of national power and why it matters for students who will go on to positions of increased leadership in the force.”

Blankshain also spent four years on the Faculty Advisory Committee, including two one-year stints as the chair and one year as the vice chair. Along with fellow NSA faculty members Prof. Nikolas Gvosdev, Ph.D., and Prof. David Cooper, Ph.D., she co-wrote the 2019 textbook “Decision-making in American Foreign Policy: Translating Theory Into Practice.”

Reveron said that became “the national standard” for teaching foreign policy at the graduate level.

“There was no textbook, so she and her colleagues wrote one,” he said.

Blankshain’s pathway to the chair position can be traced back to 2013, when she met Reveron at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University – she was a graduate student teaching assistant and he had just stepped in as one of the teachers of her class on American national security. Reveron, who had already been teaching at the Naval War College for 10 years at that point, encouraged her to apply for an assistant professor position at the Newport, Rhode Island, institution after graduation.

“I believe she’s the first to have been hired as an assistant professor out of grad school to come all the way up through the ranks to become chair of a department,” said Reveron.

Gagliano has taken over Blankshain’s FPA director job, while Reveron returns to the faculty to, as he said, “be the best professor of national security affairs I can be.”

“As a chair, I learned academic leadership is clearly different than military leadership,” Reveron wrote, in part, in a letter to his department after turning over the position. “I learned to appreciate that being a department chair is about peer leadership – not command – and we shared collective responsibility for the outcomes of the curriculum, hiring, and research decisions we made even if I was the one who answered the evening texts or weekend emails and stood in front of the students explaining our choices.”

The NSA department at war college is one of the nation's largest and most vibrant graduate departments teaching foreign policy analysis and international security. The NSA department offers two courses that lead to the master's degree and Joint Professional Military Education credit: national security decision making (NSDM) for senior-ranking students and theater security decision making (TSDM) for mid-ranking students. These courses provide a broad interdisciplinary foundation in contemporary security studies to analyze how the U.S. government makes foreign policy decisions and the role the U.S. plays in the world.

Established in 1884, NWC informs today’s decision-makers and educates tomorrow’s leaders by providing educational experiences and learning opportunities that develop their ability to hedge aggressively, innovate continuously, fight distributively, delegate confidently, and command with clarity within complex battlespaces.