AUTHOR AND FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE BING WEST TO DELIVER 2014 KRISTENSEN LECTURE 

Bing West will deliver the 2014 LCDR Erik S. Kristensen Lecture in the Great Hall of McDowell Hall on the campus of St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD on Wednesday, April 9th 2014 at 7:30pm. His lecture Lessons from a Decade of Frustrating War is free and open to the public.

The Honorable Francis J. “Bing” West is a war correspondent and military historian. He served as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration. Other posts he has held include: Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Vice President of the Hudson Institute and Dean of Research at the Naval War College. A graduate of Georgetown and Princeton Universities, he served in the infantry in Vietnam, where he was a member of the Marine Force Reconnaissance team that initiated Operation Stingray – attacks behind North Vietnamese lines.

As President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, he chaired the Security Commissions with El Salvador, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Pakistan, South Korea and Japan. Among other awards, he is the recipient of the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Medal and Tunisia’s Medaille de Liberté, awarded for actions after a raid from a neighboring country.

West has served as an adviser to the commander of the US Central Command and embedded with our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan on more than thirty occasions over the past dozen years. He is the author of numerous bestselling military books. These include The Village, a narrative of advising and surviving under fire that has been on the Marine Commandant’s Reading List for 40 years; The Strongest Tribe, a history of the Iraq War; The Wrong War, a history of the Afghanistan War. His latest book, Into the Fire, describes the actions of a Marine sergeant who was awarded the Medal of Honor. His articles appear in The Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The National Review, Foreign Affairs Magazine and The Washington Post. He appears on NPR, CBS and Fox News.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Infantry Order of St. Crispin, West has served on the boards of the Center for Naval Analyses and the Broslio National Security Center in Rome and is a member of Military History Working Group at the Hoover Institution. He is the recipient of the Colby Military History Award, the Marine Corps Foundation Award for Leadership, the General Goodpaster Prize for Military Scholarship, the Father Clyde E. Leonard Award, the Free Press Award, the Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Award and the VFW National Media Medal.