Richard Shultz

Richard H. Shultz, Jr. is the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Security Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He teaches graduate-level courses on various aspects of international security affairs to include: the role of force in international politics; internal conflict and irregular war; special operations strategies for responding to irregular warfare challenges; origins, conduct, and termination of war; intelligence and national security; and crisis management.

At the Fletcher School he also is Director of the International Security Studies Program. The ISSP prepares U.S. and international graduate students for public and private sector careers in national and international security policy. Director responsibilities include management of courses and curriculum; conferences and workshops; senior-level speaker series; the military fellows program; crisis simulation exercises; fundraising.

He has held three chairs: The Olin Distinguished Professorship of National Security Studies at the U.S. Military Academy, Secretary of the Navy Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, and Brigadier General H. L. Oppenheimer Chair of War-fighting Strategy, U.S. Marine Corps. Currently he is Senior Fellow at the U.S. Special Operations Command's Joint Special Operations University.

Previously, in Washington, he served as director of research for the National Strategy Information Center from 2004-2012. In 2010 he completed with Roy Godson a major study focused on Adapting America's Security Paradigm and Security Agenda to meet the challenges posed by 21st Century armed groups and the states that support them. He also completed a study on Armed Groups and Irregular Warfare: Adapting Professional Military Education, a curricular guide for military educational institutions, among other publications and reports.

He has served as a security consultant to various U.S. government departments and agencies concerned with national security affairs. For the last ten years that has included as a senior fellow to the Special Operations Command's Joint Special Operations University. As a senior fellow, he deploys abroad as a member of military education teams to teach courses on terrorism/counterterrorism, special operations integration, and asymmetric challenges to NATO to foreign military officers. This has included programs taught in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, Tunisia, Morocco, Mali, Kenya, Cameroon, each of the Baltic nations, and the NATO School in Germany. As a senior fellow, he also conducts unclassified research and prepares studies for publication in SOCOM/JSOU's monograph series. Other consultancies have included with other components of SOCOM and the Marine Corps.

Research and Publications

• In April 2020 his new book--Transforming US Intelligence for Irregular War: Task Force 714 in Iraq--was published by Georgetown University Press. Building on earlier work focused on military innovation in the Iraq war, his new book reveals the extent to which the intelligence methods and capabilities employed by the U.S. to meet the challenges posed by a 21st century armed group--Al Qaeda in Iraq--are different from those employed against 20th century state adversaries. To date, the extent to which changes took place in intelligence operational methods and procedures has not been documented. To fill this gap, this study exams how JSOCs Task Force 714 adapted the intelligence functions of collection, analysis, and the paramilitary variant of covert operations to fight a 21st century irregular war in Iraq. This includes details on how Task Force 714 was the first component of the US military to transform into an intelligence driven organization capable of analyzing and exploiting massive amounts of intelligence--"big data"--through the adoption and employment of a state-of-the-art data integration systems. The Forward for the volume is by General Joseph L. Votel, US Army (Ret), former Commander of US Central C …