Benjamin Lambeth

Dr. Benjamin S. Lambeth is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He previously was a Senior Research Associate at the RAND Corporation. Before joining RAND in 1975, he served in the Office of National Estimates at the Central Intelligence Agency. Prior to that, he worked for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Institute for Defense Analyses. From 1970 to 1973, he was a Graduate Associate of the Center for International Affairs and a Teaching Fellow in Government at Harvard University. He has written extensively on air warfare and other defense-related matters and has lectured widely on these subjects, including at all of the U.S. senior military service schools. A civil-rated pilot, Dr. Lambeth has flown or flown in more than 40 different fighter, bomber, attack, mobility, surveillance, and jet trainer aircraft types with the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, as well as with eight foreign air forces worldwide. He also has attended the USAF Tactical Fighter Weapons and Tactics Course and Combined Force Air Component Commander Course, the Aerospace Defense Command’s Senior Officers’ Course, Air Force Space Command’s Senior Leaders’ Course, and portions of Navy Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN) and the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Instructor’s Course. In December 1989, he became the first U.S. citizen to fly the Soviet MiG-29 fighter and the first Westerner invited to fly a combat aircraft of any type inside Soviet airspace since the end of World War II. Dr. Lambeth graduated with honors in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received an M.A. with distinction in Government from Georgetown University and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Air Force Historical Foundation, the Board of Visitors of Air University, and the Editorial Advisory Boards of Air and Space Power Journal and Strategic Studies Quarterly. He also is the author of The Transformation of American Air Power (Cornell University Press, 2000), which won the Air Force Association’s Gill Robb Wilson Award for Arts and Letters in 2001. In 2002, he was elected an honorary member of the Order of Daedalians, the national fraternity of U.S. military pilots.