SHANNON BEEBE

  • SHANNON BEEBE

This may have been noted elsewhere already, but a reader alerts me to a news article in the Washington Post on Shannon Beebe, who grew up in Arkansas and died recently in a Virginia small plane crash.

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His bio here. Interesting life. West Point graduate. Bush pilot. Expert on African affairs. A thinker on such subjects as global warming and security in the evolving world. For example:

By the mid-2000s, Beebe had forged a friendship with Mary Kaldor, a British academic tapped by the European Union to generate ideas to bolster security on the continent. Beebe and Kaldor decided to collaborate on a book. The thesis: Traditional armies are no longer sufficient to stabilize conflict zones, and U.S. military forces should collaborate more with non-governmental organizations to protect civilians and communities rather than focusing on destroying enemies.

When the book, “The Ultimate Weapon Is No Weapon,” was published in 2010 by Public Affairs, Beebe got flak from some parts of the military, Kaldor said.

“In Angola, he wanted to go out and find what the people were really wanting and develop a strategy around that, but that’s not what the Pentagon wanted,” Kaldor said. “He was very frustrated.”

As Channel 4 noted, he was a 1987 graduate of Lake Hamilton High School. There will be a funeral Aug. 20 in Hot Springs.

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