Early Life and Education

Dr. William C. Bradford was born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1966, and moved to Munster, Indiana, in 1975, where he lived just two blocks away from his childhood sweetheart and future wife.

Munster, Indiana 1978

He was selected as the youngest member of the Junior National Olympic Modern Pentathalon Team in 1979, and he was the Indiana State Track and Field Champion in 13-14 boys 3200 meter run in 1980. Bradford attended Munster High School through his junior year and was on the National High School All American Swimming Team at age 15.  His life-long passion for teaching grew out of his experience teaching swimming and water safety to children through the Munster Swim Club.

In 1982 Bradford relocated to train with the Miami Hurricanes Swim Club and attend Coral Gables High School, graduating in 1984.  He was a National Merit Finalist and earned a full academic and swimming scholarship to the University of Miami in 1984.  At Miami, he earned a BA in English literature in 1988 and an M.A in Middle Eastern studies in 1991, as well as All-Conference Honors in swimming.  

University of Miami Hurricanes Swimming 1985

William Bradford won a Dorothy Danforth Compton Minority Fellowship and an Institute of World Politics Fellowship at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Science with major fields in International Relations, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Comparative Politics. His 1995 doctoral dissertation is entitled “United States foreign policy decision-making in Arab-Israeli crises: The association of United States presidential personality constructs with political and military crisis outcomes” (AAT 9537394). After winning the Landon H. Gammon Fellowship, Bradford earned an LL.M. from Harvard University in International Law, Human RightsLaw, and the Law of Armed Conflict in 2001. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Miami School of Law, where he served as project editor of the University of Miami Law Review and was a member of the Order of the Coif, and a Dean’s Merit Academic Scholar.  Bradford graduated summa cum laude from the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida,  where, as a Poe Ethics Fellow, he earned an MBA in Strategy/Economics.

Career

While serving as a Strategic Military Intelligence Officer in the U.S. Army, Bradford authored a politico-military assessment of the Bosnian conflict for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili as part of a Department of Defense brief to congress in the Fall of 1995. Bradford served at the War Gaming and Simulation Center, National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C., and in a strategic military intelligence detachment supporting CENTCOM, SOUTHCOM, Special Operations Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other agencies within the intelligence community.

Bradford served as a teaching fellow at the University of Miami School of Law from 1998-2000, and then as Landon H Gammon Fellow at Harvard Law School from 2000-2001. He taught international law, law of armed conflict, national security law, property, and federal Indian law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law from 2002 to 2006.

While at Indiana, Bradford was named a Dean’s Fellow in recognition of scholarly excellence in both 2004-2005 and 2005–2006, and was voted Best New Professor by Indiana Law students in 2005. He was a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary Marshall Wythe School of Law in 2005-2006.

From 2004-2006 Bradford served as a special advisor for law of war and detainee affairs to the Staff Judge Advocate of the 101st Airborn Division, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He also served as Ambassador to the United Nations for the Miami Tribe of Indians of Indiana from 2004-2006. Bradford served as Attorney General of the Chiricahua Apache Nation from 2006-2009, 2010-2011, and beginning again in 2015 to present.

In 2011-2013, Bradford was a Visiting Professor at the United States Coast Guard Academy, New London, Connecticut, teaching Criminal Justice, Military Law, Maritime Law, and American Government. He was an advisor to the Combat Arms Team and the Women’s Leadership Council as well as a volunteer assistant coach to the Swimming Team and the Law of Armed Conflict Mock Trial Team.

From  2013-2015, William Bradford was an Associate Professor of Law, Stategy and National Security at the National Defense University, Near East South Asian Center for Strategic Studies, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.  

Associate Professor, National Defense University, Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies

He was seconded to the National Defense College, United Arab Emirates, as part of the founding faculty, where he taught international law, strategy, national security, defense components, and international negotiation and war gaming and simulation.  His students included senior military and civilian officials of the UAE government.  

Founding Faculty, National Defense College, United Arab Emirates

National Archives of the United Arab Emirates

National Defense College, United Arab Emirates

While deployed to Abu Dhabi and teaching at the UAE’s National Defense College, Dr. Bradford wrote his controversial scholarly article, Les Trahison Des Professeurs: the Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column, natlseclj_278-461_bradford1-1.pdf  which was published in the National Security Law Journal.  The article was lauded by the administration at the UAE National Defense College, and Bradford was invited to the University of Uppsala, Sweden in December 2014, to give a talk on his article and expertise in combating radical islam that resulted in a lively and constructive discussion on how best to use instruments of national power to combat ISIS.

Research presentation to the Faculty of Law at the Unversity of Uppsala, Sweden

 In August of 2015, Dr. Bradford was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law and assigned to the Diversity Committee at the United States Military Academy.  Soon after he began teaching at West Point, liberal law professors in a firestorm of political correctness, pressured the incoming student board of the National Security Law Journal and subsequently,the administration at George Mason University Law School, to “repudiate” his Trahisons des Professeurs article, which had been in publication for many months.  When it was discovered that Dr. Bradford had been working on a new and as-yet unpublished article on how to prevent a military coup d’etat, the Obama Administration fired Bradford from West Point.  

Bradford has been a frequent commentator in national and international media on law of war issues regarding Iraq and the War on Terror and on the rights of indigenous peoples. On December 16, 2003, he was a guest on The Big Story With John Gibson, commenting on the tactics interrogators were likely to use on the just-captured Saddam Hussein. On July 7, 2005, he was interviewed by the BBC and by CBS Radio News on the terrorist bombings in London. He has also been interviewed as an expert on issues concerning the laws of war by Radio France, Westwood One Radio Network, the Dallas Morning News, and other media outlets.