Lt. Col.-Dr. John A. English retired from the Canadian army in 1993 with 37 years of service and regimental affiliation with the King’s Own Calgary Regiment, the Queen's Own Rifles, and Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. He also served on exchange with the Queen’s Own Buffs and the Queen’s Royal Surrey Regiment in British Army of the Rhine. In the course of his postings, he lived in England, Germany, Denmark, Cyprus, six Canadian provinces, and Alaska. Educated at Royal Roads and the Royal Military College (RMC), he went on leave without pay to obtain an MA in history from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina in 1964. He graduated from Canadian Forces Staff College Toronto in 1972, received an MA in war studies from RMC in 1980, and earned a Ph.D. from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, in 1989. From 1974-1977 he was a Tactics Instructor at the Combat Training Centre in Camp Gagetown, New Brunswick, and, between 1979-1981, Staff Officer to the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff in National Defence Headquarters, Ottawa. After a tour as a War Plans Officer with NATO’s Central Army Group in Heidelberg, Germany, he was promoted and called back to the Combat Training Centre as Commanding Officer of Tactics Division. In 1984 he returned to Queen’s University as the first Canadian Visiting Defence Fellow and between 1985-1986 and 1988-1990 served as an instructor with the Canadian Land Forces Command and Staff College in Kingston. He finished out his service as Senior Staff Officer Curriculum Planning, in the collocated National Defence College. In 1992 he received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) fellowship and a professorship at Queen's University. In 1994 he was awarded a SSHRC research grant and for five years from 1997 to 2002 served as a Professor of Strategy with the US Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. On return to Canada he was employed as director of the Defence Minister’s Monitoring Committee on Change.

Lt. Col.-Dr. English is the author of A Perspective on Infantry republished in paperback as On Infantry (Praeger, 1984), The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign: A Study of Failure in High Command (Praeger, 1991) [republished in paperback as The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign (Stackpole,2009)], Marching through Chaos: The Descent of Armies in Theory and Practice (Praeger, 1996), Lament for an Army: The Decline of Canadian Military Professionalism (Irwin, 1998), Patton's Peers: The Forgotten Allied Field Army Commanders of the Western Front 1944-45 (Stackpole, 2009), and Surrender Invites Death: Fighting the Waffen SS in Normandy (Stackpole, 2011). He is also co-author of On Infantry: Revised Edition (Praeger, 1994) [translated into Chinese] and principal editor of The Mechanized Battlefield: A Tactical Analysis (Pergamon, 1984). More recently he published The Role of the Militia in Today‘s Canadian Forces (Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute, 2011) and An Historical Examination of the Use and Abuse of Canadian Army Honorary Colonels (Royal Canadian Military Institute Otter Paper, 2013). He has been a member of the Royal Canadian Military Institute since 1971 and continues to write on military subjects. His latest work, Monty and the Canadian Army was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021.