Contributors

Professor Peter J Dean (editor) was appointed as the University of Western Australia’s (UWA) first Chair of Defence Studies on 1 July 2020 and the inaugural director of the UWA Defence and Security Institute in March 2021. Prior to the commencement of this role, Peter was Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education) at UWA; he is also a Senior Fellow at the Perth USAsia Centre. Peter has an extensive background in military and defence studies. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and Endeavour Research Scholar in Australia–United States Alliance Studies as well as a non-resident fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Before joining UWA, Peter was a scholar at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre in The Australian National University’s (ANU) College of Asia and the Pacific where he held numerous research, teaching and leadership positions. Peter was the founding editor of the Melbourne University Press Defence Studies Series, is a member of the editorial boards of the Australian Army Journal, Global War Studies and the Military Studies Journal, and is a former managing editor of the journal Security Challenges. He is a regular media commentator on Australian, United States and regional defence issues. An international award-winning author, his most recent book (with Brendan Taylor and Stephan Frühling) is After American primacy: Imagining the future of Australia’s defence (Melbourne University Press, 2019).

Dr Tristan Moss (editor) is a senior lecturer at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University, Queensland. He is the author of Guarding the periphery: The Australian Army in Papua New Guinea, 1951–75 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and coeditor of Beyond combat: Australian military activity away from the battlefields (NewSouth Books, 2018). Tristan has worked on the official history of Australian operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and East Timor at the Australian War Memorial and on the official history of peacekeeping. He is also a Fulbright Scholar and winner of a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, working on a history of Australian space policy.

Professor Stephan Frühling is the Deputy Dean of the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. He researches and teaches in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, and has widely published on Australian defence policy, defence planning and strategy, nuclear weapons and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Stephan was the Fulbright Professional Fellow in Australia–United States Alliance Studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC in 2017. He worked as a ‘Partner across the globe’ research fellow in the Research Division of the NATO Defense College in Rome in 2015, and was a member of the Australian Government’s external Expert Panel on the development of the 2016 Defence White Paper. Previously, he was the Associate Dean Education of the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific (2016 to February 2020), the inaugural Director of Studies of the ANU Master in Military Studies program at the Australian Defence Force’s Australian Command and Staff College (2011–13), and managing editor of the Kokoda Foundation’s journal Security Challenges (2006–14).

Professor John Blaxland is Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at ANU. John holds a PhD in war studies from the Royal Military College of Canada, an MA in history from ANU and a BA(Hons) from UNSW. A former Army Intelligence Corps officer and defence attaché to Thailand and Myanmar, he is also a graduate of the Royal Thai Army Command and General Staff College and the Royal Military College, Duntroon. In addition to a range of chapters and articles on intelligence, military history and regional security issues, his publications include The US–Thai alliance and international relations (with Greg Raymond, Routledge, 2021); Niche wars: Australia in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001–2014 (ANU Press, 2020); In from the cold: Reflections on Australia’s Korean War (ANU Press, 2020); A geostrategic SWOT analysis for Australia (ANU Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, 2019); Tipping the balance in Southeast Asia? (ANU Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, 2017); The secret Cold War (Allen & Unwin, 2016); Manis: Time for a new forum to sweeten regional cooperation (ANU Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, 2016); East Timor intervention (Melbourne University Press, 2015); The protest years (Allen & Unwin, 2015); The Australian Army from Whitlam to Howard (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Strategic cousins (McGill-Queens University Press, 2006); and Signals swift and sure (Royal Australian Corps of Signals Corps Committee, 1998).

Professor David Horner is Emeritus Professor of Australian Defence History in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at ANU. He graduated from the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1969 and served as an infantry platoon commander in Vietnam in 1971, before retiring from the Regular Army as lieutenant colonel in 1990. David is the Official Historian of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations and the Official Historian for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. He has written or edited 37 books on Australian military history, strategy, intelligence and defence policy, is a Member of the Order of Australia and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

Dr Thomas Richardson graduated from Monash University with a BA(Hons) in 2009 and completed his doctorate, ‘As if we’d never really been there? Pacification in Phuoc Tuy Province, Republic of Vietnam, 1966–1972’, at UNSW Canberra in 2014. Between then and assuming his current position at UNSW Canberra in July 2018 he worked as a tutor and lecturer at UNSW Canberra (2015–16), as a researcher on the official history of Australian peacekeeping (2015) and as a researcher on the official history of Australian operations in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan (2016–18). Thomas’s first book, Destroy and build: Pacification in Phuoc Tuy, 1966–1972, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. He has contributed to a number of edited volumes and edited two with Tristan Moss: New directions in war and history (Big Sky, 2016) and Beyond combat: Australian military activity away from the battlefield (NewSouth, 2018). His broad research interests are Australian military history and counterinsurgency and the confluence of the two, particularly in Southeast Asia after 1945. His current project is an operational history of Australia in the Second Anglo-Boer War.

Dr Lachlan Grant is a Senior Historian at the Australian War Memorial where he was been a member of the Military History Section since 2011. He completed his PhD at Monash University in 2010 and has published widely on the Second World War and the prisoner-of-war experience. He is the author of Australian soldiers in Asia-Pacific in World War II (NewSouth Books, 2014) and the editor of For county, for nation: An illustrated history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander military service (NewSouth Books, 2018) and The Changi book (NewSouth Books, 2015); and coeditor, with Joan Beaumont and Aaron Pegram, of Beyond surrender: Australian prisoners of war in the twentieth century (Melbourne University Press, 2015); and has curated several museum exhibitions and led battlefield tours. Lachlan is currently writing a book on Australians and the battle of Normandy and is researching aircrew experiences in Bomber Command.

Michael Kelly served as a rifleman in 8/9 Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment and is a historian in the Military History Section at the Australian War Memorial. He has a special interest in Australia’s role in Asia during the Cold War, with a particular focus on the Korean War, Malayan Emergency and Indonesian Confrontation. He is an editor of In from the cold: Reflections on Australia’s Korean War (ANU Press, 2020).