A Florida native, Jim Stavridis attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, and spent over thirty years in the Navy, rising to the rank of 4-star Admiral. Among his many commands were four years as the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, where he oversaw operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Balkans, and piracy off the coast of Africa. He also commanded US Southern Command in Miami, charged with military operations through Latin America for nearly three years. He was the longest serving Combatant Commander in recent US history.
In the course of his career in the Navy, he served as senior military assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense. He led the Navy’s premier operational think tank for innovation, Deep Blue, immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
He won the Battenberg Cup for commanding the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet and the Navy League John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational leadership, along more than 50 US and international medals and decorations, including 28 from foreign nations. He also commanded a Destroyer Squadron and a Carrier Strike Group, both in combat.
He earned a PhD from The Fletcher School at Tufts, winning the Gullion prize as outstanding student in his class, as well as academic honors from the National and Naval War Colleges as a distinguished student. He speaks Spanish and French.
Jim has published six books on leadership, Latin America, ship handling, and innovation, as well as over a hundred articles in leading journals. An active user of social networks, he has tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook. His TED talk on 21st century security in 2012 has had over 700,000 views. He tweeted the end of combat operations in the Libyan NATO intervention. His memoir of the NATO years, “The Accidental Admiral,” was released in October 2014.
Admiral Stavridis is also the Chair of the Board of the US Naval Institute, the professional association of the Nation’s sea services: Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine.
Jim is the 12th Dean at The Fletcher School, a post he assumed in the summer of 2013. He is happily married to Laura, and they have two daughters – one working at Google and the other an Ensign in the US Navy.
Top Five Books:
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes — A searing portrait of a young Marine officer's first 60 days in vicious combat in Vietnam. Counter-insurgency turned upside down. Read it alongside Arkady Babkenko's "One Soldier's War" about the Soviet experience in Chechnya.
The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Montserrat — War at Sea, with all of the human costs; and a gripping portrait of command.
Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian — This just one of an entire series of 20 novels set two centuries ago during the Napoleonic wars. They are a sustained meditation on life at sea, leadership in war, human interaction and the meaning of friendship, and great power politics. Taken together, the novels are the greatest sustained work of fiction in the 20th century. Really.
The Peloponnesian Wars by Thucidides — History was invented by the ancient Greeks, and this superbly told tale of coalition warfare, diplomacy and war, the rise and fall of city states, and the power of personality has it all.
The Memoirs of U.S. Grant — Human in scale, epic in execution, and beautifully written by a dying General who lived with passion and conviction — often misled by others, but always searching for his true north. Perhaps the best autobiography written.
The One That Shaped Me The Most:
Not a single book, but the collected works of Hemingway have had great influence on me. Taken together, they cover so many of the situations in which we find ourselves in the military and in the lives we have led — war itself, of course; but also the challenges of relationships, the turmoil of change, the danger of over-reliance on others, the need for a moral code, the bleak outcomes life offers in the end, the sense of resilience, a passion for life and all that it offers — the list goes on and on. Classics that I come back to again and again are "The Sun Also Rises," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "The Snows of Kilamanjaro," "The Old Man and the Sea," "A Farewell to Arms," "A Moveable Feast," and the Nick Adams short stories. I own a half dozen first editions, and a signed copy of "A Farewell to Arms" that I count among my most prized possessions.
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