Colonel Fernando Lujan
Chamberlain Project Retiring Officer Teaching Fellow, Howard University, 2023-2024
Colonel Fernando Lujan was a U.S. Army Special Forces Officer and Foreign Area Specialist. He most recently served with the State Department as a member of the U.S. negotiating team seeking a political settlement in Afghanistan.
From 2014 to 2017, he was Director for Afghanistan, then Senior Director for South Asia on the National Security Council at the White House, where he helped lead interagency planning for the South Asia Strategy and regional counterterrorism efforts.
As a member of the CJCS “Af-Pak Hands” program, Fernando was trained in Dari and embedded with various Afghan military units throughout southern Afghanistan, then later served as the Deputy Commander of the Commando Special Operations Advisory Group at Camp Morehead.
Over a 23-year military career, he deployed with special operations forces throughout Latin America, South Asia, and the Middle East. His writing on Afghanistan and irregular warfare has been published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Small Wars Journal.
Fernando was selected as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, where he researched small-scale approaches to counterterrorism, culminating in the Center for New American Security report “Light Footprints: The Future of American Military Intervention.”
He holds a bachelor's degree (in physics) from West Point, and a master’s degree (in public policy) from Harvard. Fernando is currently a Ph.D. student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he is researching the strategic use of social media by competing state actors to advance their foreign policy objectives in the developing world.
Dr. Scott A. Smitson
Chamberlain Project Retired Officer Teaching Fellow, Amherst College, 2022-2023, 2023-2024
Dr. Scott A. Smitson is a Strategist, Global Futures Forecaster, Political Scientist, and Educator. He is a retired US Army Officer, serving over twenty-one years on active duty in both combat arms and as an Army Strategist. As a Strategist, he led multi-disciplinary groups and facilitated senior leader decision- making by assessing, developing, and articulating policy, strategy, and plans at the national and international levels, all while integrating U.S. instruments of power, most especially defense and diplomacy. His military career culminated in his assignment as the Strategy Branch Chief at USSOUTHCOM, where he served as the principal strategic advisor to the 4-Star Commander on matters directly impacting current operations and mid-to-long term national policy and strategy for U.S. military activity and operations across Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, encompassing 31 countries and 16 dependencies and areas of special sovereignty.
Dr. Smitson served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy from 2010-2013, and helped establish the West Point Grand Strategy Program in 2013. He also was an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a frequent Principal Lecturer at the International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO) in Andalo, Italy, and has also held adjunct Professorships with Florida International University (FIU), University of Miami, and over the past two years with the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University.
Dr. Smitson earned a Joint PhD in Political Science and Public Policy from Indiana University’s School of Environmental and Public Affairs (SPEA) as well as a MA in Political Science. He was a Distinguished Military Graduate at the Ohio State University. His publications include “The Road to Good Intentions: British Nation-Building in Aden” (NDU Press), “The War on Terror Ten Years On” (Strategos: Journal of the US Army Strategist Association), “An American in Her Majesty’s Ministry of Defense” (War on the Rocks), “Solving America's Gray-Zone Puzzle” (Parameters), “After Mosul: Enlarging the Context of the Syria-Iraq Conflict(s)” (New America), and "The Compound Security Dilemma: Threats at the Nexus of War and Peace" (Parameters).
Courtney A. Short
Chamberlain Project Retired Officer Teaching Fellow, Colorado State University Pueblo, 2021-2022, 2022-2023
Courtney A. Short retired from the U.S. Army as a Colonel after more than twenty two years of service. She was an Assistant Professor of History at two service academies – the United States Military Academy at West Point and the United States Air Force Academy – and is a former International History Division chief and deputy head of the Department of History at the United States Air Force Academy.
Courtney specializes in American Military History, Modern Japanese History, and Race and Identity Studies. She is the author of Uniquely Okinawan: Determining Identity During the U.S. Wartime Occupation (Fordham University Press, 2020), which received the 2017 Society for Military History Edward M. Coffman First-Manuscript Prize Honorable Mention. Her research has reached international audiences through presentations in the Pacific and Europe, and has been featured in podcasts and as a part of educational lecture series at the United States Army War College. She is also a contributing author in the forthcoming Worst Military Leaders from Reaktion Books.
Over the course of her army career, she served in many diverse assignments around the world. She served as an operations officer in Air Defense and Infantry at the battalion and brigade level, as the speechwriter for two four-star commanding generals and one three-star commanding general, and as the garrison commander for Carlisle Barracks. She was stationed in South Korea for two extended tours and deployed to Afghanistan with an Infantry Brigade Combat Team.
Courtney has a B.A. in History from Barnard College, Columbia University and an MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Heidi A. Urben
Chamberlain Project Retired Officer Teaching Fellow, Howard University, 2021-2022
Heidi A. Urben is a recently retired U.S. Army colonel who served more than 23 years on active duty as a military intelligence officer. Her last position before retiring in 2020 was command of the Army’s largest military intelligence brigade at Fort Meade, Maryland. Heidi previously served on the Joint Staff, as a battalion commander in Hawaii, as an Assistant Professor of American Politics, Policy, and Strategy in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy, as the Military Aide to the Secretary of Defense, and in two light infantry divisions. Her deployments include a peacekeeping operations deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina and two tours in Afghanistan.
Heidi’s research interests focus on civil-military relations, defense and military policy, and national security strategy. She also serves as an adjunct associate professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program.
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a senior associate (non-resident) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy, and a visiting research fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. She has been working on a book entitled, Sounding Off: Party, Politics, and the Erosion of Norms in the Post-9/11 Army that will be published with Cambria Press later this year.
Heidi holds a B.A. in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame, a M.S. in National Security Strategy from the National War College, and a M.P.M., M.A., and Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University.
Ty Seidule
Chamberlain Project Retired Officer Teaching Fellow, Hamilton College, 2020-2021, 2021-2022
Ty Seidule retired from the U.S. Army as a Brigadier General after more than thirty-five years of service. He is a Professor Emeritus of History and former head of the Department of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was recently named a New America fellow.
Ty is the creator and co-editor with Clifford Rogers of the enhanced digital textbook the West Point History of Warfare, which won the George C. Marshall Foundation/Society for Military History Digital Prize. He co-edited the four volume West Point History of Warfare series published by Simon and Schuster, including histories of the Civil War, World War II, and the American Revolution. Three of the books won the Army Historical Foundation Award for Distinguished Writing. His latest book Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause was published in January 2021 by St. Martin’s Press.
A leader in digital and public history, Ty has worked to inspire a broad audience to study the past. He created and led student projects using augmented and virtual reality. A video he made called “Was the Civil War About Slavery?” has thirty million views on social media, making it one of the most watched history lectures ever. He created three Massive Open Online Courses on military history viewed by hundreds of thousands of students around the world. With Nike, he helped design football uniforms for Army West Point using history as inspiration, three of those uniforms won national awards for design.
Over the course of his army career, Ty served in command and staff positions in peace and war in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Germany, Italy, the Balkans, and Kenya. He received a B.A. from Washington and Lee University and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the Ohio State University.
Derek Handley
Chamberlain Project Retired Officer Teaching Fellow, Amherst College, 2019-2020
Derek G. Handley is a retired Navy Commander who earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University in May 2018 while completing a Mellon predoctoral fellowship at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference. He also earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007.
Derek’s Navy career began at the Naval Recruit Command, San Diego. After graduating from boot camp, he attended and graduated from the Broadened Opportunity for Officer Selection and Training (BOOST) program in 1990. A 1994 graduate of Hampton University, Derek was commissioned through the Reserve Officer Training Program. He was designated a Naval Aviator in 1997 and flew SH-60 Bravos in Mayport, Florida.
In 2000, Derek was selected for redesignation as a public affairs officer (PAO) and in 2001, he became the PAO for Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center, Fallon, NV. In 2003, he served on a seven-person public affairs team supporting the Department of Defense’s Media Embed Program for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
In 2004, Derek left active duty and immediately affiliated with the Navy Reserve as a public affairs officer for Navy Community Outreach. Subsequent positions include serving as a media operations officer for U.S. Joint Forces Command, as Executive Officer of the Joint Public Affairs Support Element Reserve, and as a public affairs officer in the Office of Special Assistant for Public Affairs to the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In 2014, he returned to active duty to serve as an instructor in the English Department of the U.S. Naval Academy. In 2017, Derek retired from the Navy with 28 years of active and reserve service.
Joseph Slaughter
Chamberlain Project Retired Officer Teaching Fellow, Wesleyan University, 2019-2020, 2020-2021
Joseph P. Slaughter is a recently retired Navy Lieutenant Commander who earned his Ph.D. in United States History from the University of Maryland, College Park in December 2017. He also earned a M.A. in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College in 2011 and a M.A. in United States History from the University of Maryland in 2006.
Joseph’s Navy career began at the United States Naval Academy, where he graduated with a B.S. in History and was commissioned an Ensign in May 1999. He was designated a Naval Aviator in 2001, and from 2001-2005 he served as a C-2A Greyhound pilot, logging over 100 carrier arrested landings over the course of two deployments on the USS Harry S. Truman. From 2006-2008 he served as an instructor of History at the U.S. Naval Academy History Department.
After making two deployments on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower as a Catapult and Arresting Gear Officer from 2008-2010, he returned to the Naval Academy History Department, where for the next nine years he taught over one thousand Midshipmen in courses ranging from early American history to premodern and modern world civilizations. Joseph retired from active duty in June 2019 and currently resides in Middletown, Connecticut with his wife Casey, daughter Wren, and son Graydon.
Robert Cassidy
Chamberlain Project Retired Officer Teaching Fellow, Wesleyan University, 2019-2020, 2020-2021
Bob Cassidy is a recently retired U.S. Army colonel with over three decades of experience studying and practicing the art of war and peace. He is conducting research on policy and strategy problems in America’s wars. His books include War, Will, and Warlords; Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror; and Peacekeeping in the Abyss. Colonel Cassidy has served as a special assistant to three senior generals, a special operations director of assessments, a special mission task force planner, a battalion commander, and a brigade operations officer. He has also served as a military intelligence sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division. He has deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and Grenada.
Bob Cassidy earned his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School, where he concentrated in security studies, diplomacy, and international law. He has master’s degrees in international relations and security studies from Boston University, the Fletcher School, and the U.S. Naval War College. Bob earned the Diplôme d'Études Supérieures de Défense from the École de Guerre. He has taught strategy and campaigning at the U.S. Naval War College and international relations at West Point. He was a Senior Fellow in the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group. His military qualifications include ranger, jumpmaster, helicopter aviator, survival, evasion, resistance, escape, and Russian and French proficiency.
Bob Cassidy's scholarly work has generally explored strategy, irregular war, and military culture. Specifically, his research and publications include comparative studies on peace operations in Bosnia and Somalia, the Soviet and Russian wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and the post-2001 insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. His recent research and writing have focused on the absence of strategy and its implications for the West's wars against non-state sectarian militants. Colonel Cassidy raises questions about the costs and consequences of a propensity for tactics over strategy for the United States and its partners.
Read this interview with Col. Cassidy to learn more about his approach to teaching, and how commanding troops compares to teaching students.