Woodward Featured in New Book on Warfare
John D. Woodward Jr., Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston university, is featured in the newly released book First Platoon: A Story of Modern Warfare in the Age of Identity Dominance (Penguin Random House 2021).
First Platoon is described as “an urgent investigation into warfare, good, and evil in the age of biometrics, the technology that would allow the government to identify anyone, anywhere, at any time.”
In the book, author Annie Jacobsen documents the implementation of biometric technologies by the United States Department of Defense (D0D) during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As part of her research, she interviewed Woodward on his service as the Director of the DoD Biometrics Management Office from 2003 to 2005.
Jacobsen highlighted Woodward’s background, as a CIA clandestine officer, a lawyer, and a former U.S. Army officer commissioned in the Corps of Engineers, “[which] gave him a unique understanding of what was needed to accomplish this mission…He was one of three coauthors of the textbook Biometrics: Identity Assurance in the Information Age, published in 2003.”
Details on the book can be read online.
John D. Woodward, Jr. is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. During his twenty-year CIA career, John served as an operations officer in the Clandestine Service and as a technical intelligence officer in the Directorate of Science and Technology, with assignments in Washington D.C., East Asia, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. His publications include Biometrics: Identity Assurance in the Information Age (McGraw-Hill, 2003) and Army Biometric Applications: Identifying and Addressing Sociocultural Concerns (RAND, 2001). Read more about Professor Woodward on his faculty profile.