Colonel (Ret.) Christopher Holshek

Biography:

Christopher Holshek is an international peace & and security consultant focusing on civil-military relations in policy and practice as well as peace operations related civil-military training and education. A Senior Fellow with the Alliance for Peacebuilding and a civil-military strategic analyst with Wikistrat, he was recently a Senior Associate with the Project on National Security Reform as well as Country Project Manager in Liberia for DoD’s Defense Institutional Reform Initiative working in Africa on defense ministerial capacity development in order to promote civilian oversight of the military.

A retired U.S. Army (Reserve) Civil Affairs officer, he has three decades of civil-military experience at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels in joint, interagency, and multinational settings across the full range of operations, among them command of the first CA battalion to deploy to Iraq in support of Army, Marine and British forces, as well as Senior U.S. Military Observer and Chief of Civil-Military Coordination for the UN Mission in Liberia and the European Command’s Military Representative at USAID.

In addition to numerous contributions to U.S. Army, Joint, NATO, and United Nations civil-military, peace and stability operations, he has published extensively on national security strategy and civil-military, stability, and peace operations. An executive director of the Cornwallis Group, a director in the Civil Affairs Association, and a visiting lecturer at George Mason University, he has been blogging for The Huffington Post since December 2010.