Lieutenant Colonel Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III is a tenured Academy Professor with the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. He is an Army aviator, military historian, and strategist, and is a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), a postgraduate program focused on the strategic and operational levels of war policy and warfighting.
His portfolio includes military command in Germany and the Balkans and research and publication in the areas of security and defense strategy, conventional arms procurement and sales (force modernization), and professional military education. He holds a B.S. in International Relations from the United States Military Academy, master’s degrees in Public Policy and Government from Cornell University, master’s degrees in Military Arts and Sciences from the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College and School of Advanced Military Studies, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University. Major Wilson is a combat veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he served as the chief of war plans for the 101 st Airborne Division (Air Assault) in Northern Iraq.
Lieutenant Colonel Wilson served with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as an International Affairs Fellow, 2005-06.
Lieutenant Colonel Wilson’s current research centers on the role and impact of the legacy of U.S. military and security “regimes” (i.e., norms, principles, rules and decision making procedures) on America’s capacity to fight, win, and finish wars of the 21st century. Major Wilson is founder and co-director of The Beyond War Project, a multiyear, cross-discipline collaborative study of the “paradox of the American way of war” (i.e., our challenges at war-termination in spite of an unmatched prowess at tactical war-fighting) dedicated to development of new effective war-policy regimes.
