Robert J. Dalessandro

Robert J. Dalessandro is a retired Colonel in the U.S. Army and the current Assistant Chief of the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C. He has had a lifelong passion for military history and the material culture of the American soldier. Colonel Dalessandro graduated from the Virginia Military Institute with a degree in History in 1980. His graduate studies included work at the College of William and Mary, where he studied Historical Archeology, a Masters of Military Arts and Science in History from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and a Masters of Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College and a Graduate Certificate in Collections Management at the George Washington University.

He has had a wide variety of Army leadership and staff assignments including time as a platoon leader, command at company, depot and battalion level and staff assignments at echelons of command ranging from battalion through Department of the Army level.

Colonel Dalessandro is widely published on the lifeways and material culture of the American Soldier in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. He is co-author of the Organization and Insignia of the American Expeditionary Forces, 1917-1923, he serves as editor of the Army Officer’s Guide, co-author of Willing Patriots: Men of Color in the First World War and the forthcoming American Lions: the 332nd Infantry Regiment in Italy in World War I.