Alison R. Vernon

Alison R. Vernon has been a senior research analyst at CNA’s Center for Naval Analyses for 10 years. During her time at CNA, she has conducted studies ranging from an overview of military operations in the 1990s, U.S. civil-military relations, the issue of interagency cooperation during military operations, and the role of humanitarian operations in the War on Terror.

She has also been the lead for the project that has analyzed the impact in host nations of nine recent humanitarian engagement and disaster relief operations. In 2007, the project analyzed the USS Peleliu in the Pacific, USNS Comfort and HSV Swift in Latin America and Operation Sea Angel II in Bangladesh. As follow-on to the original work, she has directed efforts to examine the African Partnership Station in West-Central Africa and East Africa (2008, 2009, and 2010), USNS Mercy in the Pacific, USS George Washington in Latin America, JTF-Caring Response in Burma, Continuing Promise (2008 and 2009) in Latin America, and Operation Unified Response in Haiti in 2010.

From this work, she developed an assessment model for humanitarian civic assistance operations and military training missions that allows tactical-level operations and their effects to be linked to the achievement of strategic goals. She has briefed SACEUR about this work, and he wrote about this model in his blog.

As part of these efforts, she has traveled extensively in Asia, South and Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa, speaking to national leadership about their perceptions of these operations and the role of the US military as part of an overall US foreign policy designed toward creating partnerships. She has briefed multiple combatant commands and senior Navy leadership at the Pentagon with the results of this work.

She did her doctoral research at Ohio State University where she specialized in civil-military relations in democratizing nations. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in Romania, and she speaks Spanish and Romanian.