CHRISTOPHER HOLSHEK
He is also Executive Director and Founder of the National Service Ride project, a veteran-led initiative in partnership with local schools, to integrate service-learning curriculum strategies that mobilize American youth to serve their country through their communities, fostering an empowering and unifying strategic narrative of citizenship, service, and social responsibility that helps pass the generational baton of leadership and move a divided nation forward. Much of this is based on his book, Travels with Harley – Journeys in Search of Personal and National Identity.
A rare American with UN field mission service in civilian and military capacities in the Balkans and Africa, he is the principal author of the Peace Operations Training Institute’s course on civil-military coordination in peace operations, currently being updated.
A retired U.S. Army Civil Affairs officer with over three decades of civil-military conflict management experience at multiple levels and settings across the full range of operations, his assignments included: command of the first Civil Affairs battalion deployed to Iraq in support of Army, Marine and British forces; Chief of Civil-Military Coordination for the UN Mission in Liberia; and European Command Military Representative at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He was also a senior associate with the Project on National Security Reform.
For his services then and since, he was inducted as a Distinguished Member of the Civil Affairs Regiment (Corps) in 2017 as well as 2021 recipient of the NATO CIMIC Centre of Excellence Award of Excellence. In addition to his contributions to U.S. Army, Joint, NATO, and UN civil-military and peace & stability operations policy and doctrine, he has published in numerous formats on national strategy, civil-military, humanitarian, and peace & stability operations issues, including The Huffington Post, Foreign Policy, Sicherheit & Frieden, and The Modern War Institute.