More than four decades of front-line experience ...
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Historian,
author and strategic analyst � and onetime
industrialist � Gregory R. Copley, 72, has
for almost five decades worked at the
highest levels with various governments
around the world, advising on national
security, intelligence, and national
management issues.
Copley � who
was made a Member of the Order of Australia
in the Queen�s Birthday Honours List on June
11, 2007, for his contributions to strategic
studies and philosophy � is the
Editor-in-Chief and founder (in 1972) of the
Defense & Foreign Affairs group of
publications. He is founder (in 1982, with
Dr Stefan T. Possony) and President of the
International Strategic Studies Association
(ISSA), the global non-governmental
organization (NGO) for senior professional
officials involved worldwide in the
formulation of national and international
strategic policy. And he was the founder, in
1999, of the Global Information System
(GIS), an on-line, encrypted-access core
strategic intelligence database and system
for use by governments worldwide.
Privately, Mr
Copley has worked at the highest levels with
a number of governments in Africa, the
Middle East, Latin America, Europe, and the
Asia-Pacific region to establish national
capabilities in intelligence and strategic
analysis.
In 2001, on a
more public note, Gregory Copley was one of
the founding directors of Australia�s new
grand strategy research organization, the
Future Directions Institute (FDI)
(originally known as the Centre for
International Strategic Analysis: CISA), in
Perth, Western Australia.
As well, he
has been extensively involved as an
industrialist, owning several heavy
engineering enterprises, a ship and yacht
design company, a remote-region water
purification company, and involved in airline
development.
Mr Copley,
who works in Washington, DC, retains his
domicile in Australia, and is a
sixth-generation Western Australian.
He is on
the Advisory Board of the Canadian Forces
College Foundation.
Apart from
his open information and other activities,
he has, since the early 1970s, been heavily
involved in classified strategic analysis
and operations for governments worldwide.
This has involved the preparation of
strategic philosophies for the restoration
of elected government in certain countries,
including input into the preparation of
constitutions and electoral processes. It
has, on numerous occasions, involved urgent
work of a practical and political nature to
halt existing conflicts or to prevent the
imminent outbreak of hostilities.
Mr Copley,
through Defense & Foreign Affairs,
also undertakes special conferences and
seminars for very senior political,
government and defense personnel, often at
cabinet or head-of-service level, on how to
cope with current and projected strategic
crises. He has personally also acted as an
adviser on national planning issues to a
number of governments at Head-of-Government
or Cabinet level.
Gregory
Copley has written over many years on the
r�le of monarchies in governance.
He is the
author of several thousand articles, open
and classified papers, speeches and
numerous books on strategic, defense,
aviation, and other subjects, including two
books of poetry. Mr Copley�s recent books
include UnCivilization: Urban Geopolitics in
a Time of Chaos (2012), Rise of the RedMed
(co-author, 2016); and he continues to edit
the now online Defense &
Foreign Affairs Handbook, an
encyclopedia with chapters on (in the
current edition) 287 countries and
territories worldwide. He has authored and
edited 24 separate editions (the first 16 in
print) of this unique
encyclopedia since 1976. The book has gone
to senior government officials in more than
170 countries � including some 130
heads-of-state and heads-of-government �
each year, and Judge Clark, when he was
National Security Advisor to US President
Ronald Reagan, said it was:
�indispensable to the running of the
National Security Council�.
Gregory Copley wrote the
strategic philosophy book, The Art of
Victory, which was published as an
Advance Draft edition for the
Strategy2003 conference, and which will
appear in 2006 in a more complete
professional edition. A separate version of
this book , as noted above, will be
published as a consumer (trade) book in 2006
by Simon & Schuster in New York. Even the
advance draft of the book, with cover notes
by General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., the
former US Secretary of State, drew
considerable praise from a number of
heads-of-state, and others. He also wrote
the Defense &
Foreign Affairs Handbook on
Egypt,
the first edition of which appeared in 1995.
Another book by Copley � Ethiopia Reaches
Her Hand Unto God: Imperial Ethiopia�s
Unique Symbols and Structures of Power �
appeared in 1998, as did a book which he
co-wrote and edited, Managing the Era of
Great Change. He also co-wrote and
edited The Global Strategic Condition,
published in 1999, and Conflict or Calm?
Views of the Coming Decade, published in
2000.
One of
Gregory Copley�s earliest books,
Australians in the Air, was published by
Rigby in 1973, and is still regarded as the
definitive history of Australian aviation.
Before that, when he was 18 and 19 years
old, he ghosted the first drafts of the
autobiography of noted Australian aviation
pioneer, Sir Norman Brearley: Australian
Aviator. He had also edited and written
several editions of the Australian
Aviation Yearbook in the 1960s, and
founded and edited Aero aviation
magazine, which was at that time the
largest-selling aviation journal in
Australia. He also established and ran,
during the 1960s (until 1971), a
Sydney-based 24-hour-a-day news-wire service
providing worldwide news to Australian, New
Zealand, British and other newspapers, radio
and television, following an initial career
as an award-winning defense and aviation
journalist in Western Australia.
A small
selection of significant analysis openly
published in the Defense & Foreign
Affairs publications included:
� Analysis
and supporting intelligence in April 1972 as
to how the Sadat Government would expel the
Soviets from Egypt (contrary to official
Western belief at the time). Proven correct
within six months.
� Analysis
in early 1973 as to how the demographic,
economic and strategic trends would
precipitate the break-up of the USSR by the
early 1990s (with Stefan Possony).
� Reporting,
in advance of Western government sources,
the penetration of the Peruvian Government
of Soviet arms sales, and the Peruvian,
Argentinean and Bolivian plans for attacks
on the Pinochet Government in Chile
(1973-74).
� Analysis
in 1973 on the prospect for a space-based,
energy-derived weapons system to be used in
an ABM (anti-ballistic missile) mode to
suppress a Soviet first strike capability
(by Dr Stefan Possony). Information noted by
then ex-Governor of California Ronald Reagan
who later developed it as the Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI).
� Analysis
during the mid-1970s to the effect that the
USSR was devoting some 13 to 14 percent of
GNP to defense. Official CIA view at the
time was around four percent. Subsequent red
team/blue team exercises confirmed our
analysis.
� Detailed
analysis, supported by original
intelligence, in 1974-75 to the effect that
radical, revolutionary activity would lead
to the destabilization of Iran and the
overthrow of the Shah.
� Detailed
projections in the late 1980s as to the �end
of the age of ideology� and the withdrawal �
in the face of the collapse of ideological
communism and the Soviet economy � of the
USSR from Eastern Europe, preparatory to the
transformation of the Soviet Union. At this
stage, no-one else was making such
projections.
� Detailed
analysis in early 1990 as to how and why
Iraq would attempt to emerge as a major
regional �great power� and would be forced
to expand its access to the Persian Gulf in
an attempt to outmaneuver. Subsequent
analysis and reports in June-July 1990
specified and forecast accurately how Iraq
would invade Kuwait (when, how and why). No
other intelligence service matched the
accuracy or timeliness of this prediction
which, had it been acted on by the major
powers, would have prevented the invasion of
Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War.
� First
major reporting on the Libyan-Iraqi
deployments in the Sudan before and during
the Gulf War, and their strategic impact on
the Red Sea environment.
� First
major reporting in the 1980s and early 1990s
on India�s emergence as a new great power.
� First
�clean sheet� analysis during the 1970s and
1980s of Australia�s strategic environment,
leading to The Dibb Report, and the
subsequent transformation of Australian
defense planning base by (then) Minister of
Defence Kim Beazley.
� Significantly
different analysis than was popular on the
strategic origins and conduct of the
conflict(s) in the former Yugoslavia in the
1990s and the emergence of a new
anti-Western power bloc centered
around the People�s Republic of China (PRC),
North Korea (DPRK), Iran, Sudan and other
states.
� Unique
analysis during 1996 of the impending energy
crisis in Asia, and the PRC�s strategic
response to this, coupled with its Islamist
insurgency problem.
� Unique
analysis from the early 1990s to current
period on radical Islamist (political, as
opposed to Islamic/religious) strategic
activities including terrorism. And so on:
there were many more pioneering works of
analysis in the journal, which continues
serving the international community.
� Unique
and detailed intelligence and analysis on
the change of leadership in Pakistan in
1999, and the subsequent Indo-Pakistani
conflict.
� Early
and detailed analysis during the 1990s until
2003 on the potential for energy supplies
from West Africa and Libya.
� First
revelations, in 2002, of the illness of
Libyan leader Mu�ammar al-Qadhafi, and
ongoing revelations in the 1999-2003
timeframe of the Libyan weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) programs, and the
attempted coup against Qadhafi in December
2002.
� Detailed
intelligence from the early 1990s to 2003 on
the North Korean WMD programs (nuclear
weapons and ballistic missiles) and their
links with Iranian and Iraqi WMD programs. �
And so on.
Gregory
Copley won the 1990 Award of The Asian
Council, of Japan, for his work in strategic
policy. He was at that time the only
non-Asian to have won this Award.
He has
chaired dozens of conferences and seminars
on strategic issues, and spoken at these and
many other international conferences on
defense and strategic issues around the
world. He has lectured extensively on
psychological strategy, grand strategy and
intelligence matters to a wide range of
professional audiences in classified and
unclassified sessions in various countries
[notably the US, UK, Germany, Singapore,
Sweden, Taiwan, South Africa, Egypt, India,
Pakistan, Japan, Nigeria, etc.]. He lectured
on several occasions to the US Air Force
School of Special Operations, for example.
Mr Copley has been invited on several
occasions to testify before the US Congress
and notably provided key testimony to the US
House of Representatives Hearings on
Nigeria, relating to that country�s
constitutional crisis and human rights, in
August 1993. He also authored a study,
Nigeria�s New Government, when President
Ibrahim Babangida came to office. In 1998,
he undertook two major briefings to the US
Congress (including one to the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee) on changes in
Africa.
Gregory
Copley became concerned with the decline of
shipbuilding in Britain during the 1970s and
1980s, and felt that the decline had, by the
1980s, begun to eat into the core capability
of Britain�s maritime capabilities. As a
result, he set out, in 1987, to save from
closure the Clyde, Scotland, shipbuilding
facility, Ailsa Shipbuilders. The Ailsa
company, which became the Ailsa-Perth Group,
was founded by the Marquess of Ailsa in
1885. The Scottish Ailsa-Perth shipyard was
sold in February-March 1996, once it became
clear that the company � and the craft of
shipbuilding in Britain � was once again
secure. In 1994, his Ailsa-Perth Group
acquired the former Royal Docks at Chatham,
near London, and Ailsa-Perth Marine Ltd. �
of which Mr Copley was Chairman � was
actively involved in the repair, refit and
construction of ships and large yachts. The
Chatham Royal Docks, founded in 1554, was
the site of the construction of Viscount
Horatio Nelson�s flagship, HMS Victory.
Mr Copley sold up his shipbuilding interests
in 1997 to focus more completely on his
international relations activities.
Before this,
however, Mr Copley acquired the
then-120-year-old G. L. Watson & Co. Ltd.
yacht and ship design bureau in 1994. G. L.
Watson & Co. has designed more head-of-state
and Royal yachts than any other firm in the
world, and has also designed four America�s
Cup racing yachts.
Among his
Scottish activities, Gregory Copley served
for a period, under Sir Ian MacGregor, as
Vice-Chairman of Highland Express, the
Scottish national airline, at the request of
the (then) UK Secretary of State for Defence,
George Younger (now Viscount Younger,
Chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland).
In September
1997, at the Strategy�97 conference
chaired by Copley in Washington DC, former
US Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig,
Jr., praising Copley as a strategic
philosopher and close colleague of Stefan
Possony, said that Gregory Copley had
�... made a
significant contribution in helping to bring
about an end to the Cold War�.
Earlier, in
his book, The Conservative Decade:
Emerging Leaders of the 1980s, author
James C. Roberts had said of Copley:
�Gregory R.
Copley, at age 33, is already the potentate
of his own mini-empire of foreign affairs
concerns. A native of Australia ... Copley
manages a thriving Washington-based
enterprise ... He does much of the writing
himself, displaying a literate style and an
encyclopedic knowledge of international and
strategic realities as he threads his way
through matters as diverse as the coup in
Afghanistan and the RAF�s newest fighter
plane. Surveying Copley�s enterprises, it
can be said that his activities are as
far-flung as those of the US State
Department and that his grasp of world
realities is vastly superior.�
For his work
in the build-up to the 1991 Gulf War, when
tensions were quietly running high between
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Great
Britain, a Saudi Cabinet Minister, Bandar
Bin Abdallah Bin Abdulrahman Al Saud, said
in a letter to Copley:
�In a very
critical moment, your impressive efforts
contributed positively to clear major
problems and set the record straight between
both countries.�
Lt.-Gen.
Aliyu Mohammed, former Chief of Staff the
Nigerian Army and later National Security
Advisor to President Olusegun Obasanjo, said
of Copley and Defense & Foreign Affairs:
�Defense &
Foreign Affairs publications and
conferences have always been unique in their
assiduous and impartial attention to African
strategic affairs, so often ignored or
undervalued in international publications.
During my tenure as National Security
Advisor to the President of Nigeria and as
Chief of Staff, Nigerian Army, Defense &
Foreign Affairs pointed out � as no
other publication did � the significant and
ongoing strength of Nigerian (and African)
contributions to World peacekeeping efforts
... It is important that Defense &
Foreign Affairs continue to provide its
impartial analysis and unique grand strategy
perspective for the coming generation of
military and political leaders.�
The late US
Congressman Sonny Bono, a Member of the
House of Representatives National Security
Committee and the Subcommittees on Military
Procurement & Military Personnel, noted in
1997:
�Both you and
Dr Stefan Possony, your co-founder [of
Defense & Foreign Affairs] have been no
strangers to Capitol Hill, and your writings
and occasional testimony have been greatly
appreciated.�
Australian
Federal Opposition Leader and former
Minister of Defence Kim Beazley, MP, said,
on the 25th anniversary of Defense &
Foreign Affairs in 1997:
�... Your
publication has been an invaluable source of
intelligence. The thoroughness with which
you have reported the affairs of states
which do not necessarily ring bells in
day-to-day media headlines in Europe and US
has been a valuable policy tool. ... Keep up
your good work over the next 25 years.�
On June 9,
2004, in introducing Copley to a number of
Central Asian leaders, Kyrgyz Republic
President Dr Askar Akaev said: �In
Washington, there is Brzezinski, Kissinger,
and Copley.� Dr Akaev later paid additional
tribute to Copley in his book on global
strategic options.
Gregory
Copley serves as a visiting professor and
lecturer at a number of institutions around
the world, currently including the European
Cultural Centre, of Delphi, Greece; the
University of Belgrade; Intercollege, in
Nicosia, Cyprus; and the University of
Western Australia. He lectures at other
universities from time to time,.
Mr Copley is
married to Pamela von Gruber, a US citizen,
who is also a Director of the International
Strategic Studies Association, Publisher of
the Defense & Foreign Affairs
publications, and a Director of GIS.
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