Dr Rhys Crawley

Dr Rhys Crawley is a senior lecturer in history at UNSW Canberra, and the author of the Official History of Australian Operations in Afghanistan, 2005-2010.

His research interests, broadly defined, are military and intelligence history, with a particular focus on Australian military history, the war in Afghanistan, special operations, First World War operational history, military logistics, espionage, and domestic security intelligence.

In 2024-2025, while contributing to 'The Netherlands and Afghanistan 2001-2021' project, Rhys was a senior research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Military History (NIMH), and a visiting scholar at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD). From 2016-2023 Rhys was an historian at the Australian War Memorial and a Partner Investigator on ARC Linkage Project 'memorySCAPE: the commemoration of war using a database narrative framework' (LP180100080). This project developed an innovative interactive Afghanistan war archive using an intelligent database narrative framework. Prior to that, from 2010-2016, he worked at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs, at The Australian National University, where he was the principal researcher and co-author of the multi-volume Official History of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and co-author of volume 1 of the Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian, and Post-Cold War Operations.

His books include Climax at Gallipoli: The Failure of the August Offensive (2014); The Secret Cold War: The Official History of ASIO, 1975-1989 (2016); Intelligence and the Function of Government (2018); Gallipoli: New Perspectives on the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force 1915-16 (2018); The Long Search for Peace: Observer Missions and Beyond, 1947-2006 (2019); and Inside GHQ: The Gallipoli Diary of Captain Orlo Williams (2025).