David A. Harris, Jr.

Lieutenant General David A. Harris, Jr. is a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense program within the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is also the founder and chief executive officer of DashFive LLC, a national security strategy and policy advisory firm serving corporate boards, defense and technology firms.

A retired Air Force lieutenant general, Harris has worked the same problem from both ends: how the United States turns new technology into capability that works in combat. He employed it in the nation’s most demanding operations, then decided what the Air Force would buy and how it would field it. Much of that work was carried out with allied governments and coalition partners across Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. As the Air Force’s chief strategist and senior requirements executive, Harris authored the first Air Force force design, which governs capability investment across a $188 billion enterprise, and signed the first trilateral Collaborative Combat Aircraft capability concept memorandum with Japan and Australia. As deputy combined force air component commander for US Central Command, he integrated a nineteen-nation coalition.

Harris serves on the advisory boards for Shield AI and Foundation Stack AI, and the University of Alabama College of Engineering named him a distinguished engineering fellow, its highest recognition for alumni. He writes on national security for The Hill and The Washington Times and is the author of the forthcoming One Step Ahead: Hard Lessons Won on Strategy and Leadership.