john heidenrich
senior director, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, and national security
john@just-consulting.com
John Heidenrich has 25 years of in-depth analytical experience in assessing military forces, especially ground forces, in almost every form or operation, from peacekeeping to peace-enforcement, insurgency and unconventional warfare, stability operations, and conventional forces at the level of medium-intensity warfare (the Gulf War) and high-intensity (weapons of mass destruction/WMD).
He began his career at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), working primarily as a military capabilities analyst responsible for the far northern flank of NATO (Scandinavia and the Soviet Kola Peninsula), and later, during the Gulf War, as an Iraqi ground forces analyst. Proficient in all-source intelligence analysis, including open source, his expertise includes in-depth order-of-battle, doctrine (strategy, operational art, tactics), training, equipment, logistics, readiness, foreign connections, industrial base, and combat effectiveness assessments, to include identifying vulnerabilities to kinetic and/or psychological warfare.
In the mid-to-late Nineties, on a U.S. Government grant, he performed research into how to address violent ethnic/religious conflict (such as genocide) with a variety of response options, including various forms of military force; this research culminated in his book How To Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the Concerned Citizen (Praeger/Greenwood, 2001).
In 2004-2005, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), he directly supported its high-profile Office of Force Transformation in the development of cutting-edge military strategy, tactics and doctrine. That was followed by direct support of the Joint Staff (JS) in refining network-centric warfare theories and technical practice at the strategic and operational levels.
Other contractual work in the early 2000s involved Defense Department clients related to WMD and the implementation of international arms control agreements such as the complex Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty. After some doctrinal-related work with the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), he worked for several months at CENTCOM's Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence (AFPAK CoE), where his last assignment was to identify the Clausewitzian "center of gravity" of the Taliban insurgency.
Throughout his career, the many military theaters he has directly monitored and assessed for Intelligence Community (IC) clients range from Africa to the Arctic.
In uniform, he has served as an Airborne-qualified commissioned officer in the Army Reserve and National Guard, serving in units associated with Military Police, Military Intelligence, Special Forces, and Cavalry (Armor & Aviation), as well as an aide-de-camp and as a Pentagon action officer in the Office of the Chief, Army Reserve (OCAR).
He holds a master's degree from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree from the American University in Washington, D.C. and has a Top Secret clearance.