About the Author
Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Roblyer was the National Defense Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the 2002-2003 academic year. He served as a visiting researcher in the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS), marking the twentieth anniversary of this fellowship and of the exchange of ideas between the Air Force and ACDIS. Lt. Col. Roblyer did research on the moral dimensions of the military’s approach to minimizing collateral casualties and damage. His research was partially supported by a research grant from the Air Force Institute of National Security Studies.
Lt. Col. Roblyer spent the five years preceding this fellowship in two assignments at the Pentagon. Initially he worked in the headquarters of the Air Force with command and control policies and funding that directly supported the people and systems discussed in this paper. Following that, he served on the Joint Staff where he designed and conducted politico-military tabletop war games for two years. It was in this forum, listening to senior defense leaders wrestle with difficult issues both before and after the start of the Global War on Terrorism, that his interests were piqued regarding this research topic.
Lt. Col. Roblyer was commissioned in May 1984, and was a Distinguished Graduate of the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) at Texas A&M University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physics with a minor in psychology. He entered the space operations field as the Air Force was creating Air Force Space Command and helped certify its first squadron of military communication satellite operators. In 1992, Lt. Col. Roblyer received a Masters of Science in Space Operations from the Air Force Institute of Technology. Since then, his experience broadened to include space-based missile warning operations and a staff position at the headquarters of Air Force Space Command, where he returned in June 2003.