Major General I.B. Holley Award

Created in 2007, the Major General I.B. Holley Award recognizes an individual who has made sustained, significant contributions to the documentation of Air Force and Space Force history during a lifetime of service. The Award’s inaugural presentation was to Major General I.B. Holley as a tribute to his decades of assistance, support, and encouragement to military historians.

Throughout the years, Major General Holley served as a visiting professor at the U.S. Military Academy. He taught many courses on Military History, the History of Technology, and similar subjects at Duke University beginning in 1947. Over the course of six decades, Holley wrote numerous books, scholarly papers, reviews, and critiques and demonstrated professional interests in various historical subjects, including the American Highway Revolution, Air Weapons Development and Acquisition, and Intellectual History.

Holley received the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award in 1989. Well known for his service work, Holley inspired an effort by Duke scholars in 2004 to donate scholarly books, textbooks, and journal articles to Iraqi university and college libraries, which suffered damage in the second Gulf War and previously under Saddam Hussein’s rule.

  • Become a Member

    • Featured Award Winner

    2023
    Colonel Phillip S. Meilinger, USAF, Retired, Ph.D,

    Colonel Phillip S. Meilinger, USAF (Ret.), Ph.D. received a BS degree from the United States Air Force Academy, an MA degree from the University of Colorado, and obtained a PhD in military history from the University of Michigan. A command pilot, he has served as a C-130 aircraft commander and instructor pilot in both Europe and the Pacific. He was also assigned to the Doctrine Division of the Air Staff at the Pentagon.

    Meilinger was the director of military history and deputy department head at the Air Force Academy, a professor of strategy at the US Naval War College and was founder and first Dean of the School of Advanced Airpower Studies—now the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies—the Air Force’s only accredited graduate school for the education of future strategists. The SAASS has produced some of the most innovative leaders in the USAF and shaped the

    Upon retiring from the AF, Meilinger worked as a defense analyst in the Washington DC area for six years at SAIC and Northrop Grumman. He has lectured at various military and civilian venues all over the world and is the author of more than a dozen books and over a hundred articles dealing with airpower and military history, operations, and theory. formation of strategy and theory in broad and substantial ways.

    Phil Meilinger is the quintessential model of exactly what the I. B. Holley Award was designed to recognize—an individual who has made sustained, significant contributions to the documentation of Air Force and Space Force history during a lifetime of service. The award is a tribute to his decades of writing, teaching, assistance, support, and encouragement to military airpower historians around the world.

     

    Past Holley Award Recipients

    • 2021 Daniel L. Haulman, Ph.D.
    • 2019: R. Cargill Hall
    • 2018: Lt. Gen. John L. “Jack” Hudson
    • 2017: Mr. Keith Ferris
    • 2016: Dr. Mark A. Clodfelter
    • 2015: Dr. Richard P. Hallion
    • 2014: Col. Walter J. Boyne
    • 2013: Mr. Jacob Neufeld
    • 2011: Mr. Joseph Caver
    • 2010: Dr. Alan Gropman
    • 2009: Mr. Herman S. Wolk
    • 2008: Brig. Gen. Alfred F. Hurley, USAF (Ret)
    • 2007: Maj. Gen. (Distinguished Professor Emeritus) I. B. Holley, Jr, USAF (Ret)