Significant Contributions Service Award

Dr. Benjamin S. Lambeth has been one of the most informed and prolific observers of military affairs for the past several decades. Since 2011, he has been a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C.  Prior to that time, he served for 37 years at the RAND Corporation.  He previously worked in the Office of National Estimates at the Central Intelligence Agency, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and at 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, from which he later earned his doctoral degree in political science.

A civil-rated pilot, Dr. Lambeth has flown or flown in more than 40 different types of fighter, attack, and jet trainer aircraft with the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and with eight foreign air forces worldwide. He also attended the USAF’s Tactical Fighter Weapons and Tactics Course and Combined Force Air Component Commander Course, the Aerospace Defense Command’s Senior Leaders’ Course, and portions of the Navy Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN) and Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Instructor’s Course. In 1988, he received initial qualification training and a front-seat checkout in the F/A-18 Hornet. In 2002, he was elected an honorary member of the Order of Daedalians.

In 2008, Dr. Lambeth was appointed by the Secretary of Defense to serve an eight-year term as a member of the Board of Visitors of Air University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Air Force Association, the U.S. Naval Institute, the Association of Naval Aviation, and the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots Association. He also previously served on the editorial advisory boards of Air and Space Power Journal and Strategic Studies Quarterly.

He is the author of dozens of publications, including 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. He also wrote Russia’s Air Power in Crisis (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999); NATO’s Air War for Kosovo (RAND, 2001); Mastering the Ultimate High Ground: Next Steps in the Military Uses of Space (RAND, 2003); Air Power Against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom (RAND, 2005); Air Operations in Israel’s War Against Hezbollah (RAND, 2011); The Unseen War: Allied Air Power and the Takedown of Saddam Hussein (Naval Institute Press, 2013); and Airpower in the War against ISIS (Naval Institute Press, 2021).