Ronald Harvey Spector (January 17, 1943 â March 26, 2026) was an American military historian. He was a professor at George Washington University.
Spector enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served in the Vietnam War, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the reserves. He was a historian at the United States Army Center of Military History and taught at the University of Alabama. He was tasked to prepare a study of the Grenada operation.
Spector graduated from Johns Hopkins University, and later gained a Ph.D. from Yale University.
Spector was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in India from 1977 to 1978. He taught at the National War College, the University of Alabama, and the United States Army War College. From 1990 until his retirement in 2020, he served on the faculty of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He was also a contributing writer for the Encyclopædia Britannica.
He joined the State Department's Historical Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation in the late 1980s as a representative of the American Historical Association. At the 1989 meeting, Spector and other members discussed expediting the publication of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series and improving the process of classifying and declassifying documents. He advocated reprinting and distributing the 20 backlogged volumes of FRUS to depository libraries, and suggested lobbying Congress for funding for this purpose. Spector also expressed his views on the need to maintain a complete historical record.
Spector died on March 26, 2026, at the age of 83, following a battle with cancer.
In 2012, Spector was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize, for his breadth of contributions to the field of military history. His book Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan was the 1986 winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Prize in Naval History.