Background
Richard has held three chairs: Olin Distinguished Professor of National Security, U.S. Military Academy; Secretary of the Navy Senior Research Fellow, Naval War College; and Brigadier General H.L. Oppenheimer Chair of Warfighting Strategy, U.S. Marine Corps.
Since the mid-1980s, he has served as a security consultant to various U.S. government agencies concerned with national security. In 2013, he published a book on the U.S. Marine Corps’ 2004–2008 counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq: The Marines Take Anbar: The Four-Year Fight to Defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. In 2016, he published a study with the United States Institute of Peace focused on designing a new U.S. approach to security sector reform that draws on existing theory, international practice, and U.S. experience. He would like to identify flexible tools for addressing dysfunctional security sectors in fragile states. He also published a monograph-length study focused on Task Force (TF) 714, the U.S. national counterterrorism (CT) force that was deployed to Iraq to find, degrade, and dismantle the Al-Qaeda dominated insurgent apparatus (AQI) that had burgeoned dramatically in 2003.
Richard holds both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. His bachelor’s degree is in political science and Slavic languages and literature from the University of California.