Lieutenant Colonel Luke Wessell is a serving officer in the Australian Army. He grew up in Batemans Bay, NSW, before graduating from the Royal Military College – Duntroon and commissioning into the Royal Australian Infantry Corps in 2005.

As a junior officer Luke served in a variety of tactical leadership roles. These include command positions at the platoon and company levels across mechanised, motorised and air-mobile infantry units, and as the operations officer for the Australian Army’s contingency response combined-arms Battle-Group. Luke has also held key instructional appointments including tactics instructor for Army’s Combat Officers’ Advanced Course.

Since completion of Command and Staff College in 2019 Luke has served at the operational and strategic levels of Defence. In 2020 he posted to Army Headquarters in the Directorate of International Engagements. On promotion to Lieutenant Colonel in 2021 he posted to Headquarters Joint Operations Command, responsible for joint operations and plans outside Australia’s immediate region. The highlights of this posting include appointment as the lead operational planner for the non-combatant evacuation operation from Afghanistan, and the development of military options for whole of government responses to a variety of other contingencies.

Lieutenant Colonel Wessell has deployed on overseas operations multiple times. These include deployments as a platoon commander in Iraq, an embedded mentor in Afghanistan, operations staff officer in Timor-Leste, United Nations secondee in Syria and Israel, and most recently to the Middle-East as the Deputy Director of Plans for the military coalition to defeat Da’esh. Having spent nearly twenty years either preparing for, supporting, or participating in a variety of conflicts, his academic interests are focused on understanding what motivates individuals and governments to participate on any side of armed conflict.

Lieutenant Colonel Wessell holds a Master of Islamic Studies and a Master of Military and Defence Studies. He speaks Persian as the result of both formal language study and his time in Afghanistan. He maintains a working level of Persian language proficiency through community engagement wherever possible, and previous work with the Australian Red Cross Migration Support Program. In his spare time Luke is an outdoor enthusiast. In 2023 he and his wife both took career breaks to pursue a personal goal of travelling Australia in a caravan while home schooling their children.

Following his secondment to the Australian National University, Lieutenant Colonel Wessell will take command of the 51st Battalion, Far North Queensland Regiment. This unit is responsible to integrate modern interagency technologies with traditional indigenous communities and methods to provide surveillance on Australia’s Northern approaches through Queensland and the Torres Strait.