Richard Kouyoumdjian Inglis

Richard Kouyoumdjian Inglis is Vice Chairman of AthenaLab, a Chilean think tank dedicated to national security, defence and international relations.

He is a Lieutenant Commander in the Chilean Naval Reserve, having been in active service with the Chilean Navy between 1986 and 1994. During that period, he commanded the LCU ‘Fueguina’, specialising in gunnery and missiles. He was also the gunnery officer of the PFG ‘Lynch’, a Leander class frigate and of the DLG ´Capitan Prat´, a former Royal Navy County-class destroyer.

In 1992, Richard was posted to the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) as a naval observer for a nine-month tour, where he was the deputy port authority of Phnom Pehn and the deputy commanding officer of the UN Naval Station of Kampot. After his time in active service with the Chilean Navy, he spent the next twenty years as a Citibanker and as senior executive of local Chilean banks. He was later the Group CEO of Indumotora, a Chilean automotive group and, more recently, an executive director and board member of Drake Enterprises AG.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Naval and Maritime Sciences from the Academia Politecnica, an MBA from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, and a MA in War Studies from King´s College London. His main interests are in the development of the maritime and naval narrative, and the utility and purpose of navies in the 21st century.

Richard is a regular columnist on defence and international relations matters in Chilean newspapers. He has also published in the USNI Proceedings, The Naval Review, the Australian Naval Institute, and the Chilean Revista de Marina. His War Studies dissertation was published by the Corbett Centre as the Corbett Paper No. 20.