BOARD OF ADVISORS

ED MEESE III

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Former United States Attorney General Edwin Meese was among President Ronald Reagan’s most important advisors. As Chairman of the Domestic Policy Council and the National Drug Policy Board, and as a member of the National Security Council, he played a key role in the development and execution of domestic and foreign policy.

During the 1970s, Mr. Meese was Director of the Center for Criminal Justice Policy and Management and Professor of Law at the University of San Diego. He earlier served as Chief of Staff for then-Governor Reagan and was a local prosecutor in California.

Mr. Meese is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute of United States Studies, University of London.

He earned his B.A. from Yale University and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley

JAMES J. CARAFANO

James Jay Carafano, a leading expert in national security and foreign policy challenges, is The Heritage Foundation’s Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, E. W. Richardson Fellow, and Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies. Carafano, a 25-year Army veteran with a master’s and doctorate from Georgetown University, joined Heritage in 2003 as a senior research fellow in homeland security and missile defense.

Carafano is an accomplished historian and teacher as well as a prolific writer and researcher whose most recent book is “Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World” (Texas A&M University Press, 2012), a survey of the revolutionary impact of the Internet age on national security. He was selected from thousands to speak on cyber warfare at the 2014 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas, the nation’s premier tech and social media conference.

Carafano also is president of a nonprofit organization, Esprit de Corps, which educates the public about veteran affairs. In this capacity he co-produced and co-wrote the documentary “Veteran Nation,” an official selection of the 2013 G.I. Film Festival. Before coming to Heritage, Carafano was a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington policy institute dedicated to defense issues.

In his Army career, Carafano rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He served in Europe, Korea and the United States. His assignments included head speechwriter for the Army Chief of Staff, the service’s highest-ranking officer. Before retiring, Carafano was executive editor of Joint Force Quarterly, the Defense Department’s premiere professional military journal.

A graduate of West Point, Carafano holds a master’s degree and a doctorate from Georgetown University as well as a master’s degree in strategy from the U.S. Army War College. 

He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the Institute of World Politics and has served as a visiting professor at National Defense University. 

He serves on the board of trustees of the Marine Corps University Foundation and advisory boards for the West Point Center of Oral History, the Hamilton Society and Operation Renewed Hope Foundation, which serves homeless veterans. He formerly was a senior fellow at George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute. He also previously served on the congressionally-mandated Advisory Panel on Department of Defense Capabilities for Support of Civil Authorities, the National Academy’s Board on Army Science and Technology and the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Committee. From 2012 to 2014, he served on the Homeland Security Advisory Council convened by the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.