West is from the Dorchester, Milton and Scituate sections of Boston. He is a graduate of Georgetown University (BA) and Princeton University (MA), where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He was an infantry officer in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. He served with a Combined Action Platoon that fought for 485 days in a remote village. He was also a member of the Marine Force Reconnaissance team that initiated "Operation Stingray"--small unit attacks behind enemy lines. He authored a study at the RAND Corporation entitled: "The Strike Teams: Tactical Performance and Strategic Potential". This paper was the featured event at the 1970 DoD Counterinsurgency Research and Development Symposium. The RAND Military Systems Simulations Group implemented a classified model of West's concept. This doctrinal innovation was directly opposed by MACV {Military Assistance Command Vietnam} that favored the Army's concept of Air-Mobility "Fire and Thunder Operations". By way of rebuttal, West wrote The Village, chronicling the daily lives of 15 Marines who protected the people by living among them in their hamlets. The book became a classic of practical counterinsurgency and has been on the Commandant’s Required Reading list for 36 years.

West served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration, and chaired the United States Security Commissions with El Salvador, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, South Korea, and Japan. He is currently president of the GAMA Corporation, which designs wargames and combat decision-making simulations.

West is the author of seven books. His collaboration with retired Marine Major General Ray "E-Tool" Smith, The March Up, was awarded the Marine Corps Heritage prize for non-fiction, as well as the Colby award for military history. (Smith, a legendary fighter, had received numerous awards for valor). West also authored a foreword for Boredom by Day, Death by Night: An Iraq War Journal by Marine Sergeant Seth Conner. The Veterans of Foreign Wars presented West with its National Media Award in 2005, after he wrote the book No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah. His latest book, The Strongest Tribe, is a history of the Iraq War that was a New York Times Bestseller and was ranked by Foreign Affairs Magazine as #7 among the top foreign policy books of 2009.

In The Strongest Tribe and in a subsequent article in Military Review about counterinsurgency lessons, West argued that the current doctrine of nation-building and winning hearts and minds by economic development was based on Western liberal theory rather than the realities of battle. West has grave reservations about extolling the effects of "non-kinetic COIN" (counterinsurgency). He believes that the warriors, not the people, defeat warriors, and that America's mistake in both Iraq and Afghanistan was to concede all authority to appoint and to remove for cause military and police officers. He believes insurgencies proceed from the bottom up, and must be dealt with at the local level. To that extent, each American battalion operates as a separate franchise. Variations among units are extraordinary because the high command has lacked a set of practical guiding principles.

Among other awards, West is the recipient of the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Department of the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Medal, and Tunisia's Medaille de Liberté. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Middle East Institute, and the Infantry Order of St. Crispin, he appears frequently on C-SPAN and The News Hour.

His articles appear in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The National Review, and The Washington Post. He lives with his wife Elizabeth in Newport, RI. His website is http://www.westwrite.com [1].

Bing is scheduled to attend the 2010 Bilderberg Meeting.