Dr Alexandra Ashbourne is Associate Fellow, RUSI and Director of Ashbourne Strategic Consulting Ltd, the Westminster-based niche defence consultancy, which opened in December 2004. She has particular expertise in defence policy, strategy and procurement in the UK, US, German and Eastern European defence arenas.

From 2001, she was Co-director of the defence consultancy Ashbourne Beaver Associates Ltd. Before that she was the defence analyst at the Centre for European Reform, where she chaired its Defence Industry Working Group (which studied the future of the European defence market and examined the pattern of defence industrial consolidation) and ran its Russia programme.

At St Andrews University, where she completed her PhD on the legacy of the Soviet Occupation in Lithuania, she lectured on Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet history and politics. Alex also worked as a private adviser on defence issues to Sir Menzies Campbell (then defence spokesman for the Liberal Democrats).

Publications include Lithuania: the Rebirth of a Nation, 1991-1994 (1999), Europe’s Defence Industry: a transatlantic future? (1999) and Opening the US Defence Market (2000). She contributed to Jane’s Sentinel: the Baltic States and Central and Eastern Europe (1996), a US Congress report on multilateral export controls (2001), publications for the UK Defence Export Services Organisation (2002-2004) and for the Defence Manufacturers Association (2006). She is a frequent commentator on defence issues in the national and international media and a facilitator, chairman and speaker at defence conferences around the world.

Dr Ashbourne is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Coachmakers and Coach Harness Makers and a Freeman of the City of London. She sits on the Advisory Board of the Russia Advisory Group, and is a member of the Defence Manufacturers’ Association, the Air Power Association, the Corporate Friends of SSAFA, the National Defense Industrial Association, Königswinter, the British-Lithuanian Society, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.