DR. LEWIS BERNSTEIN
Before his current assignment as Command Historian, Dr. Bernstein served as a Senior Historian at the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Huntsville, AL from 2001 to 2005 and as Assistant Command Historian, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, KS from 1994 to 2001. Before joining government service in 1994, Dr. Bernstein taught Chinese, Japanese and Southeast Asian history at Boise State University, Brigham Young University and the Kansas City Art Institute. He was also a visiting lecturer at The University of Kansas in modern Chinese history.
As a senior historian, he prepared analytic and narrative projects to provide the commander historical perspective on current policies and programs as well as the histories of specific programs or research efforts. He developed historical data collection policies for the staff and major subordinate elements of the command and a plan for a digital archive. Specific projects included research to help the Army maintain funding for US Army Kwajalein Atoll and the Reagan Test Site; research support for the MACOM Task Force; he also served on the Space and Missile Defense Command 2005 Quarterly Defense Review team for Roles and Missions. He was the primary author of the Space and Missile Defense Command lessons learned monograph for Operation Iraqi Freedom and created a digital archive for the Space and Missile Defense Command Operation Iraqi Freedom material and served as the command’s liaison to the Center for Army Lessons Learned. He researched, wrote and delivered scholarly papers before professional audiences, most recently "The Evolution of the Missile Threat during the Cold War" and "Learning and Transmitting Lessons in the Pacific War: From GALVANIC to FLINTLOCK, November 1943-February 1944.”
While serving at Fort Leavenworth, he executed that command’s history program, i.e. collected appropriate documents, ran the oral history program and wrote and edited command histories. Additionally he served as a special research assistant to the Commanding General, Combined Arms Center, conducting research and writing short studies, papers and memoranda on various aspects of Army history, which he performed for the Army Training and Leader Development Panel and the group developing the IDIV O&O. He worked with the Combined Arms Center Plans Officer on setting up the Combined Arms Center FDIC and wrote studies detailing the shape of previous Combined Arms Center organizations. He was the primary author of the Combat Studies Institute study, Sixty Years of Reorganizing for Combat: A Historical Trend Analysis. He also worked with the speechwriter in preparing material for speeches of Commanding General, Combined Arms Center.
He created archival structures, protocols and procedures for archiving paper and electronic documents in a digital archive using archival software, trained and supervised archival technicians in their use for inclusion in the Center for Army Lessons Learned Database Haiti Collection. He also helped develop a Statement of Work, including budget, and supervised contractors in Army Experimental Force Collection in the Center for Army Lessons Learned Database. He supervised, directed and evaluated contractor research on Army Experimental Force project resulting in manuscript and digital archive collection of documents. He developed a Memorandum of Agreement with the U.S. Army Battle Command Training Program to supervise contractor research on that organization’s history to include a manuscript and creating a Battle Command Training Program Historical Collection in the Combined Arms and Fort Leavenworth Archives. As part of Commanding General’s special staff, he worked on issues of historical memorialization, including naming structures, streets and dealing with the State Historical Preservation Office.
He served on Masters of Military Arts and Sciences thesis committees, directing candidates’ research and occasionally taught military history classes at the US Army Command and General Staff College. He has also been involved in Officer Professional Development, giving lectures and participating in staff rides. Lectures at Combined Arms Center included “The Conduct of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in the Vosges Mountains, October 1944” for the 25th Infantry Division (Light) and he was a leader of a Kwajalein staff ride at SMDC.
He earned a Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from The University of Kansas as well as an MBA. He holds an MA from The Pennsylvania State University and a BA from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. His government awards include two Commander’s Award for Civilian Service, two Quality Step Increases as well as an Incentive Award and a Federal Cash Performance Award. He was one of the team at CAC that won the 1996 Smithsonian Award (recognizing visionary use of information technology, developing digital archival structures, protocols for archiving electronic documents and making them widely available to a Department of Defense audience) and a 1996 Hammer Award from the Vice President’s National Performance Review Board (recognizing excellence in customer support, elimination of bureaucratic red tape and employee empowerment, for devising new ways of operations resulting in greater efficiency and savings). He has held a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship and won university teaching awards.
He has written book reviews for various historical journals including The Journal of Military History and Military Review. His most recent publications include The Eastern Mandates Campaign: A Staff Ride Guide to the Seizure of Kwajalein Atoll (co-author), (Huntsville: US Army Space and Missile Defense Command Historical Office, 2004), Seize the High Ground: The Army and Space and Missile Defense (co-author) (Washington, D.C.: US Army Center of Military History, 2004) and The House on the Bluff (Fort Leavenworth: Combined Arms Center History Office, 2001). He has served as a consultant to the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA and serves on the board of the online World War I Document Archive. He is a member of the Association for Asian Studies and the Society for Military History.