2017 Chief of Army History Conference
The Skill of Adaptability: The learning curve in combat
Speaker Biographies
Peter Mansoor, Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired), is
the General Raymond E. Mason, Jr. Chair of Military
History and a CNN military analyst. He served a 26
year career in the U.S. Army that culminated in his
service in Iraq as the executive officer to General
David Petraeus during the period of the surge
in 2007-2008. He has authored a history of this
experience, Surge: My Journey with General David
Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War, which
was a finalist for the inaugural Guggenheim-Lehrman
Prize in Military History in 2013.
Ian Beckett is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society,
he has been Chairman of the Council of the Army
Records Society since 2000, and is also Secretary
to the Buckinghamshire Military Museum Trust. He
is on the executive council of the Buckinghamshire
Record Society, and is on the editorial boards of Small
Wars and Insurgencies, and of two monograph
series, Insurgency, Counter-insurgency and National
Security (Routledge), and The History of Military
Occupation (University of Illinois Press). He has
previously held chairs in both the UK and the US.
Aimee Fox-Godden is a lecturer at King’s College
London. She completed her PhD at the University
of Birmingham, and during her doctorial study was
a Visiting Scholar at UNSW Canberra (ADFA). She
also held scholarships with the Royal British Legion
and the AWM. Dr Fox-Godden’s primary research
interests focus on the British Army of the First
World War, particularly in experiences in ‘side-show’
theatres. More broadly, she is interested in military
administration, including planning and logistics, and
military innovation. She is particularly interested in
how the military accommodates and responds to
change, along with the frictions associated with
the movement of expertise and knowledge across
organisational and geographical boundaries.
Elizabeth Greenhalgh is a graduate of the Victoria
University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and
arrived in Australia in 1987. She worked as research
assistant in the Department, then School, of History,
UNSW @ ADFA and after completing her PhD edited
the international journal War & Society between
2005 and 2010. She then became a full-time
researcher, being awarded a UNSW postdoctoral
fellowship and then an Australian Research Coucil
Fellowship (2010-2014). She has published three
books with Cambridge University Press on Franco-
British relations and on the French Army during the
First World War. Currently she is working on a study
of France’s battles on the Western Front in 1915,
and also on a study of how the Allies won the First
World War.
Spencer Jones currently is a Senior Lecturer in
Armed Forces and War Studies at the University of
Wolverhampton. He is also the Regimental Historian
for the Royal Regiment of Artillery. Dr Jones’ key
works include the award-nominated From Boer War
to World War: Tactical Reform of the British Army
1902 - 1914 and the edited collection Stemming
the Tide: Officers and Leadership in the British
Expeditionary Force 1914 which was runner-up for the
2013 Templer Medal. His most recent work, Courage
without Glory: The British Army on the Western Front
1915 as been shortlisted for the British Army Book of
the Year Award.
Adrian Threlfall is a lecturer at Victoria University
and a member of the education team at Melbourne’s
Shrine of Remembrance. He is the author of Jungle
Warriors: From Tobruk to Kokoda and beyond, how
the Australian Army became the world’s most deadly
jungle fighting force.
Serving our Nation
Alexander Hill teaches at the University of Calgary.
His main interests are in military history and the
military and political history of Russia and the Soviet
Union since 1914. His research is concerned primarily
with Soviet military, naval and strategic history. He
has written on the nature and military effectiveness of
the Soviet partisan movement in north-west Russia,
1941-1944, and on the development of Soviet naval
power in the Arctic up to the first months of the Great
Patriotic War. Dr Hill is also an Assistant Editor of the
Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
Daniel Marston is a Professor at the Australian
National University and the Principal of the Military and
Defence Studies Program at the Australian Command
& Staff College in Canberra. His research focuses
on the topic of transnational military culture and
how armies learn and adapt to new environments.
His first book Phoenix from the Ashes, an in-depth
assessment of how the British/Indian Army turned
defeat into victory in the Burma campaign of the
Second World War, won the Field Marshal Templer
Medal Book Prize in 2003. The second volume, The
Indian Army and the End of the Raj, was Runner Up
for the Templer Medal in 2014.
Sharon Tosi Lacey earned her Ph.D. in military
history from the University of Leeds, and is also a
graduate of the United States Military Academy and
Long Island University. She has served as a U.S. Army
officer for more than 22 years and published more
than 30 articles on military issues in magazines and
journals. She currently lives in Northern Virginia with
her husband and four children.
Ashley Ekins is Head of the Military History Section
at the Australian War Memorial. A graduate of the
University of Adelaide, he specialises in the history
of the First World War and the Vietnam War. He
researched and wrote two volumes of the Official
History of Australian Involvement in Southeast Asian
Conflicts 1948-1975 on Australian ground operations
in Vietnam: On the Offensive (co-authored with the
late Dr Ian McNeill, published in 2003); and Fighting to
the Finish (published in 2012).
Craig Stockings is the Official Historian of Australian
Operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor.
As a junior officer he served during the INTERFET
deployment to East Timor in 1999-2000, followed
by an appointment as the Aide-de-Camp to the
Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia.
His academic career has seen the publication of
critically well regarded books on Army’s history.
Professor Stockings’ most recent book is Britannia’s
Shield: Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton and
Late Victorian Imperial Defence. His role as Official
Historian is now focusing on the INTERFET operation.
Richard Iron served for 37 years in the British Army,
largely spent on operations in Northern Ireland, the
Falkland Islands, the Balkans and Iraq. He instructed
at the UK’s Joint Staff College and subsequently
led development of British Army doctrine. He also
deployed to the Coalition Land Component HQ in
Kuwait in 2002-03, where he led a UK/US planning
team. COL Iron was also responsible for the British
Army’s subsequent analysis of the Iraq War. He
also led development of land doctrine in NATO for
six years and was an expert military witness for the
prosecution in the Sierra Leone War Crimes trials.
Ian Hope’s operational experiences include the
first Gulf War in 1991, multiple tours in the Balkans,
Africa, and Afghanistan, and domestic operations.
He commanded the 1st Battalion Princess Patricia’s
Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group (Task Force Orion)
in combat in Kandahar in 2006, earning the Meritorious
Service Cross. Colonel Hope is now serving on faculty
at the NATO Defense College in Rome.
Jeffrey Record is a well-known defence policy
critic and teaches strategy at the Air War College in
Montgomery, Alabama. He served as a pacification
advisor in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam
War and in a variety of policy analyst positions. Dr.
Record also has also served as Legislative Assistant
for National Security Affairs to Senators Sam Nunn
and Lloyd Bentsen, and later as a Professional Staff
Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He is the author of eight books and over a dozen
monographs, and was the Australian Army’s Keogh
Chair in 2016.