| Colonel Bruce B.G. Clarke | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 26, 1943 Ft. Benning, Georgia |
| Allegiance | United States of America |
| Service/branch | United States Army |
| Years of service | 1965 - 1995 |
| Rank | Colonel |
| Commands held | 2nd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, 2nd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment District Advisor, Khe Sanh 3d Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 8th Infantry Division |
| Awards | Legion of Merit Bronze Star with V for Valor and One Oak Leaf Cluster Presidential Unit Citation with One Oak Leaf Cluster Combat Infantryman Badge Jump Wings Ranger Tab Army Staff Identification Badge Saint George Award |
Bruce Bennett Gorham Clarke (born January 26, 1943, Ft. Benning, Georgia) is a former U.S. Army officer. Clarke is currently president of Bruce Clarke Consultants, Inc., a defense consulting firm. He is widely published on military and national security affairs including Expendable Warriors and a regular column for the Examiner.
Contents |
Clarke was born in Ft. Benning, Georgia to LTC Arthur F. Gorham and Corrine "Colonel" Bennett Gorham (later Clarke). After LTC Gorham was killed leading paratroopers from the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment during Operation Husky, the allied invasion of Sicily during World War II, Clarke's mother married Edwin R. Clarke who adopted Clarke. Clarke's siblings are Dr. Richard Clarke and Cindy Clarke Carnahan.[1]
Clarke married his wife Sue in 1969 after the two had met on a blind date during a golf tournament upon his return from Vietnam. While a graduate student at UCLA, the Clarkes appeared on the Newlywed Game winning a bedroom set. The Clarkes have three children, a daughter and two sons, and three grandsons.
Clarke attended public schools in Wichita, Kansas before winning a scholarship to the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts.[2] Excelling both as a student and as an athlete, Clarke was accepted to both Stanford and Harvard but, to the surprise of many of his Ivy League-bound classmates, elected to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
In 1961, Clarke joined the Class of 1965 at West Point. While at West Point, Clarke was known for overloading on political science courses. He graduated third in his class in military history. Upon graduation in June 1965, Clarke received a commission as a second lieutenant in the cavalry.
Clarke holds a master of arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a graduate of the Command and General Staff College and the National War College. Clarke was a member of MIT's Center for International Studies' Seminar II.
Following Ranger and Airborne Schools, Clarke commanded a 160-man airborne cavalry troop in Germany. From there he deployed to Vietnam first as an assistant district advisor and then as a district advisor. Clarke fought in the Battle of Khe Sanh and later participated in both the planning and retaking of the combat base. In 2007, Clarke wrote about his experiences in Expendable Warriors from Praeger Security International.[3]
Returning from Vietnam, and recently married, Clarke moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of California, Los Angeles where he earned a master of arts degree. Because of a shortage of officers, Clarke was forced to leave UCLA before finishing his PhD for a teaching post in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point. Among his students at West Point was David H. Petraeus.[4] Clarke next attended the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas and then moved up through a variety of positions within the 1st Infantry Division at Ft. Riley, Kansas.
In 1979, Clarke was tapped to join the Army Staff in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans in the Political-Military Division under future Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General John Shalikashvili. One of his first assignments was as a member of the Reagan-Carter presidential transition team. Clarke also worked on the ABM Treaty. In early 1982, he left the Pentagon to take command of the 2nd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Bad Kissingen, Germany. Clarke and his troopers were responsible for over 150-km of the East-West German border in the Fulda Gap. During this period, the Squadron fielded both the M1 Abrams main battle tank and the M2 Bradley fighting vehicle.
Next, Clarke attended the National War College graduating with the class of 1985. From there he joined the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency inside the State Department working for Ambassador Ken Adelman. Clarke served as the senior military officer in arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union. After his first year at the State Department he was selected for brigade command but the busy pace of Soviet-American negotiations caused his assignment to be extended one year beyond the normal two year posting. In his three years at the State Department, he regularly shuttled between negotiations in Washington and Geneva. This period include three summit meetings between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev: the November 1985 Geneva Summit, the October 1986 Reykjavík Summit and the December 1987 Washington summit where the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed.
In 1988, Clarke returned to the uniformed Army as commander of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division at Ft. Riley, Kansas. The brigade was composed of 2-16 Infantry Battalion, 3-37 Armor Battalion, and 4-37 Armor Battalion, plus supporting units and a battalion from the Minnesota National Guard. Clarke's training of the Dagger Brigade for desert combat would prove fortuitous as days after giving up command in 1990 to Colonel Tony Moreno, Iraqi forces overran Kuwait. The 2nd Brigade eventually helped lead the ground invasion during Operation Desert Storm capturing Safwan, the site of the cease fire talks between General Norman Schwarzkopf and Iraqi commanders.[5] In recognition of his service to the armor community, in 1990 Clarke was inducted into the Order of Saint George, one of the U.S. Armor Association's highest honors.[6] That same year, Kansas Governor Mike Hayden named Clarke an "honorary Kansan" apparently unaware that Clarke was a lifelong Kansan.
Clarke's final posting was as Director of National Security Studies at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. While at the Army War College he published extensively on military modernization and helped shape the work on conflict termination studies. In late-1992 this work was put to the test when, following President George H. W. Bush's deployment of forces to Somalia for Operation Restore Hope, Clarke led a team to consult with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on building an exit strategy. The military and political bureaucracies rejected their advice and failed to establish a coherent policy to guide the withdrawal of forces. The U.S. was further drawn into the conflict before President Bill Clinton pulled troops out after the Battle of Mogadishu and the Blackhawk down incident. Clinton and his Secretary of Defense Leslie Aspin were roundly criticized for also failing to establish an exit strategy. For his work at the Army War College, Clarke was awarded the General Dwight D. Eisenhower Chair in National Security in 1994. In 1995, following 30-years on active duty, Clarke retired. Army Chief of Staff General Gordon R. Sullivan presided over the ceremony and awarded Clarke the Legion of Merit.
Following his retirement from the Army, Clarke was the Training Manager at the Royal Saudi Land Forces Armored Institute in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia training Saudi armor officers and soldiers on the M1A2 main battle tank. After the Gulf War, the Saudis purchased 315 M1 tanks, enough to outfit a full armored division (or two mechanized infantry divisions). In 1998 Clarke returned to the U.S. and joined QuVis, a start-up technology company, where he helped them develop their military and government business.
In 2000, Clarke founded Bruce Clarke Consultants, Inc. to work with defense contractors on technology integration issues. Since 2005 he has also served as an advisor to Rockhill Partners, a venture capital partnership. His work on defense issues, national security strategy and knowledge of the Middle East has led to his advising at least two members of the U.S. Senate. He also drew upon his experience during the Carter-Reagan presidential transition as a paid advisor to incoming Kansas Governor Bill Graves.
Clarke is the author of Expendable Warriors (Praeger Security International, 2007) with a foreword by former Joint Chiefs Chairman General John Vessey. The book is set to be released in paperback in April 2009 by Stackpole Books. He is also the author of Conflict Termination: A Rational Model (Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1992). He was a contributor to Managing Contemporary Conflict: Pillars of Success edited by Max G. Manwaring and William J. Olson (Westview Press, 1996) and Maneuver Warfare Anthology, edited by Richard D. Hooker, Jr. (The Presidio Press, 1993).
In addition to a regular column for the Examiner he began writing in July 2009,[7] Clarke has authored numerous publications for military audiences having been published in the Army Times, Armor, the Joint Forces Journal, Military Review, Infantry, Field Artillery and the Journal of Conflict and Terrorism. Clarke has also been published in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, and The Topeka Capital-Journal.