Overview
I'm an award-winning, Department of the Army-designated, military historian focusing on combat history and organizational transformation. My work also includes advising the producers of the PBS series "History Detectives," and the PBS documentary "Salinger," plus appearing on/advising the Fox News/Business Channel series War Stories with Oliver North episode titled "Hell in the Hürtgen Forest." The Center for Army Leadership used excerpts from A Dark and Bloody Ground for instructional purposes, and in December 2022 I appeared live on WW2TV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8JZkirgDH4). I am also the Chairman of the Commonwealth of Kentucky Perryville Battlefield Commission.
I have over 30 years' experience in designing and conducting experiential instruction ('Staff Ride') programs for the U.S. Army and am partnered with award-winning military historian Steven Ossad to develop Corporate Staff Rides (CSR) to help senior business executives make better decisions.
During my 20-year Army career, I was a logistics/supply chain management officer with over 6 years of service in Germany and 8 years in various staff positions at the Pentagon (including the Army Secretariat, a hand-picked team reporting directly to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans, and at the US Army Special Operations Agency). I also advised a Presidentially-appointed commission investigating a Korean War incident, the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the U.S., and a review of retroactive awards of the Medal of Honor to WWII African-American and Asian-American soldiers. After the Army, I directed the design and implementation of PC supply chain solutions for a Fortune 50 media company and am now employed by a top-tier strategy and technology consulting firm.
A Dark and Bloody Ground – the Hürtgen Forest and Roer River Dams 1944-1945, describes the price paid by the common soldier when senior leaders cannot visualize long term goals. It won the F. C. Pogue Prize from the Eisenhower Center for American Studies. Nothing Less Than Full Victory uses small-unit case studies (such as D-Day, Metz, the Battle of the Bulge and Remagen) to describe how the U.S. Army transformed itself from an ill-prepared constabulary to a global force in just 4 years.
NEWS:
My recently completed history of the US Army's dramatic liberation of over 3,700 Allied civilians in Manila in early 1945 is under contract with a major publisher.
My essay, "Generating and Sustaining US Combat Power in World War II" will appear in the second edition of World War Two Companion (ed. by Zeiler and Dubois, to be published in 2025 by Wiley).