Colonel Christina Bembenek is the 2020-2021 United States Army War College Fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. She is a career Army intelligence officer with extensive experience in the Middle East. She completed her undergraduate studies at West Point, earning a B.A. in international relations with a concentration in the Chinese language, and completed an MA in International Diplomacy at Norwich University. Bembenek is also an Olmsted scholar, which allowed her to study, in Arabic, as part of an M.A. program in Public Law and Political Science at Mohammad V University in Rabat, Morocco. During her 20 years in the Army, Bembenek has served in multiple locations overseas including Kosovo, Iraq, and Germany. She was an integral member of the Central Command (CENTCOM) commander’s staff at Macdill Air Force base in Tampa, and her most recent assignment was at Ft. Bragg, NC where she served as the senior intelligence officer (G2) for the 82nd Airborne Division.