Lieutenant Colonel Rich Morales is a US military officer attached to the Defense Attaché Office at the US Embassy London and is studying at Cambridge University on a funded US Army PhD Fellowship at the Centre for Strategy and Performance. He has led military organisations and served on planning staffs though training and UN peacekeeping in the United States, Germany, the Balkans and multiple combat tours in the Middle East. As a new lieutenant, Rich led a tank platoon in Desert Storm and most recently spent over 24 months in command of Task Force Knight, a 900-soldier Combined Arms Battalion deployed to several provinces in Iraq and responsible for security, development, civic and tribal engagement and security force training across one third of central Baghdad.

His developmental assignments include– Strategic Planning at a Fortune 500 multi-national helicopter firm and duty in Washington DC as a White House Fellow in the Executive Office of the President (Office of Management and Budget), Special Assistant and Military Aide to the Head of NASA, and Deputy for Borders and Transportation Security in the Department of Homeland Security Transition Planning Office.

Rich is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at the US Military Academy at West Point, where he previously taught engineering economics, dynamic systems analysis, tactics and ethics. His research included the study of installation management and the design of joint and combined military headquarters. He has published papers on operations and military command and control systems. While at Yale he was a Teaching Fellow in courses in Strategy, Information Technology, and War and Society.

He holds a BS in Aerospace Engineering from the US Military Academy, a Yale University MBA, and an MA in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval College of Command and Staff where he was a Mahan Scholar. He studied systems dynamics and organizational learning at MIT and program analysis at the Defense Resource Management Institute.

Lieutenant Colonel Morales was recently selected for promotion to Colonel and is currently a doctoral student whose research focuses on the implementation of service strategies associated with the delivery of support solutions to military forces by the private sector. He is studying the role of co-creation in availability contracts between defence firms and the UK and US military, supervised by Dr Ken Platts and advised by Mr John Mills.

Rich is a member of St John's College, Cambridge, where he rows with the Lady Margaret Boat Club. He met his wife Christy, a paediatric nurse, in kindergarten and they are proud parents of an infant son, Matthew. He is fluent in Spanish.

(Current as of Jan 2011.)