Space Studies Group

Dr. Montgomery McFate is a professor at the US Naval War College. Formerly, she was the Senior Social Scientist for the US Army Human Terrain System. She has held positions at RAND, IDA and the US Navy Office of Naval Research. She served on the Army Science Board, the Defense Science Board, and was an instructor at the Johns Hopkins SAIS. Dr. McFate received a PhD in Anthropology from Yale U. and a JD from Harvard. Her dissertation concerned counterinsurgency in N. Ireland. She is the editor of Social Science Goes to War (Oxford U. Press, 2015), author of Military Anthropology (Oxford U. Press, 2017 forthcoming) and was a key contributor to US Army Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency.

James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface-warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.”