Williamson Murray is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, DC, and Professor Emeritus of History at the Ohio State University. He is co-editor of The Past as Prologue (with Richard Hart Sinnreich), The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050 (with MacGregor Knox), Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (with Allan R. Millett), and The Making of Strategy (with Alvin Bernstein and MacGregor Knox).

Jim Lacey is an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, DC, where he has written several studies on the war in Iraq and on the Global War on Terrorism. Lacey was also an embedded journalist with Time magazine during the invasion of Iraq, during which he traveled with the 101st Airborne Division. He is the author of Takedown: The 3rd Infantry Division's 21-Day Assault on Baghdad.