Peter Mansoor, a Minnesota native, graduated first in his class at the United State Military Academy at West Point, NY in 1982. In 1992, he received a Master of Arts degree in Military History and in 1995 he earned a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. In the fall of 2008, Peter returned to Ohio State as the General Raymond Mason, Jr. Chair of Military History.

Col. Mansoor is a scholar as well as a solider, and after a more than twenty year career in the military, he went to war for the first time. In 2003 he took command of a fighting brigade of 3,500 troops in Iraq. His book Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq is a memoir of his two years in Iraq and grew out of the journals he kept to convey this time in his life to his children and grandchildren

The October 2008 review by Mark Moyar in The Wall Street Journal stated, "Col. Mansoor displays the knowledge of a soldier alongside the narrative gifts of a true historian, weaving dramatic events together, capturing the thoughts and emotions of street-level fighters, and describing Iraq as it tries to emerge from the maelstrom of war."

Peter served a second term in Iraq (2007-08) as the executive officer to Commander General David H. Patraeus, Multi-National Force. He was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategy Group that proposed the surge strategy in Iraq (2007) and was a founding director of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center (2006). The experiences and observations of Col. Mansoor provide our leaders, military, and American citizens with not just the knowledge of the Iraq war but of the needed policy changes.

More about Peter Mansoor
From The Ohio State University website