Christopher Holshek

Colonel (ret.) Christopher Holshek is an international peace & and security consultant whose main project in 2016 is a National Service Ride to promote citizenship and service in America, based on his book, Travels with Harley – Journeys in Search of Personal and National Identity. He is a retired U.S. Army Civil Affairs officer with over three decades of civil-military experience at multiple levels and settings across the full range of operations, among them command of the first Civil Affairs battalion sent to Iraq in support of Army, Marine and British forces, as well as the 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 the U.S. Agency for International Development. In addition to numerous contributions to U.S. Army, Joint, NATO, and UN civil-military and peace and stability operations policy and doctrine, he has published extensively on national strategy, civil-military, and peace and stability operations issues. A rare American with UN field mission service in civilian and military capacities, he co-wrote the Peace Operations Training Institute’s course on civil-military coordination in peace operations as well as contributes to many other civil-military training and education initiatives internationally. He is a Senior Fellow at the Alliance for Peacebuilding, Honorary Co-Chair of the Peace & Security Committee of the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area, a U.S. Global Leadership Coalition “Veteran for Smart Power,” and a Director in the Civil Affairs Association. Col. (ret.) Holshek writes extensively on peace & security, strategy, civil-military, and peace operations issues, and his articles have appeared in Foreign Policy and The Huffington Post, among other publications worldwide.