Dr. James Lacey is the Professor of Strategy at the Marine Corps War College.  He also holds the Horner Chair of War Studies at Marine Corps University.  Prior to taking this position, he was a widely published senior analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, D.C.  Lacey served over a dozen years on active duty as an infantry officer and is retired from the Army Reserves.  

Lacey is the author of Moment of Battle (Bantam), The First Clash (Bantam), Takedown: the 3rd Infantry Division’s 21-Day Assault on Baghdad (Naval Institute Press), Pershing (Palgrave-Macmillan) The Making of Peace (Cambridge University Press) and The Making of Grand Strategy (Cambridge University Press) and Keep from All Thoughtful Men (USNI, 2010) He has also published trilogy of works on global terrorism, published early in 2008 (Naval Institute Press).  Three of his more recent books are Great Strategic Rivalries (Oxford, 2017) and The Washington War, dealing with the relationship between FDR, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the War Cabinet during WW II (Bantam, 2019) and Gods of War (Bantam, 2020), dealing with those times in history when great captains have fought each other.  His latest books are, Rome: A Strategy of Empire, was published by Oxford in July 2022 and an edited volume – Supreme Leadership (Routledge) – was published in 2023. 

Current Research Interests include The American Revolution, 1944 in the European Theater, Future conflict and competition, and Operational level warfare through the ages.