Ohio State Selects Petraeus Aide as Military History Chair
Colonel Peter R. Mansoor is influential advisor in shaping "surge" strategy in Iraq.
COLUMBUS -- The Mershon Center for International Security Studies and the Department of History at The Ohio State University are proud to announce that they have selected Col. Peter R. Mansoor as the next Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair of Military History.
Mansoor, currently serving as executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, will begin his duties at Ohio State in September 2008. He will assume a joint appointment between the Mershon Center and the History Department, teaching classes, conducting research, and organizing speaking and conference events in the fields of military history and national security studies.
Mansoor is a highly decorated officer with more than 25 years of distinguished military service. He currently serves as a key advisor to Petraeus, commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq. In this position, Mansoor assists Petraeus with strategic planning for the U.S. war effort in Iraq, and helps to prepare Petraeus for key meetings with top leaders in the Executive Branch, Congress, and in the Iraqi government. Mansoor was one of the major authors of the report on the situation in Iraq, delivered by Petraeus to Congress on Sept. 10-11, 2007.
While working for Petraeus in his previous assignment, Mansoor was hand-picked in the fall of 2006 to serve on a "Council of Colonels" that assisted the Joint Chiefs of Staff in reassessing the strategy for the Iraq War. The outcome of this effort was the "surge" strategy currently being employed in Iraq.
Mansoor is also the founding director of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Under his leadership, the Counterinsurgency Center helped to revise the final version of the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24, which was published jointly by the Army and Marine Corps in December 2006. This document was the first revision of U.S. counterinsurgency operations in more than 20 years, incorporating lessons learned during conflicts throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
In 2003-04, Mansoor served as Commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, in Iraq, which was responsible for security and stability in the Rusafa and Adhamiya districts of Baghdad, an area of 195 square kilometers and 2.1 million people. After the April 2004 uprising of militia loyal to the Shiite cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr, Mansoor's brigade combat team restored the holy city of Karbala to coalition control within three weeks, an operation that earned the organization a Presidential Unit Citation for collective valor in combat.
In 1997-99, Mansoor was Special Assistant to the Director for Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff, responsible for research and planning that supported ongoing peace operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the withdrawal of United Nations weapons inspectors from Iraq, and U.S. and NATO operations during the Kosovo campaign.
In addition to his military service, Mansoor has a long record of academic experience. He was an assistant professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., teaching such courses as Weapons and Warfare in the 20th Century, West Point and the American Military Experience, and the History of Military Art. His research interests include modern U.S. military history, World War II, and counterinsurgency operations.
Mansoor is author of The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941-45 (University Press of Kansas, 1999), which won the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award and the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award. He has also recently completed Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq, to be published by Yale University Press in Fall 2008.
Mansoor graduated first in his class from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1982, and received master's and doctoral degrees in military history from The Ohio State University in 1992 and 1995. He also has a master's in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College. In 2005-06, Mansoor also served as a Senior Military Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Comments
This is a wonderful advancement, to get people like this into an academic environment. Hopefully having a warrior on the payroll will help to give the tens of thousands of students who pass through OSU a better view that all soldiers are not the caricatures that is sometimes portrayed in academia. On the other hand, this does raise a question: "With such an obviously qualified man, why has the government not done backwards cheetah flips to keep him around?" You could look at this as another example of "brain drain" from the military.
On balance, I think it is a positive, though.