2nd Lieutenant Holland Pratt ’22, Armor

Holland, an International History major with a Regional Studies minor from Washington state, was one of 32 Rhodes Scholars chosen this year from the United States.  Pratt will study next year at Oxford University and pursue Master of Science degrees in two distinct fields: Global Governance and Diplomacy, and Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. West Point leadership selected her to be the 2021-22 First Captain, the highest position a cadet can achieve. As First Captain, she follows in the footsteps of Douglas MacArthur, William Westmoreland and other top American generals who held the same position and is the seventh woman in the two-century history of West Point to lead the corps of 4,400 cadets. Holland has been involved with the CHGS since she was a plebe. A military history major with a Middle Eastern Regional Studies minor, Pratt said she was inspired by the inhumanity of the Holocaust. Her undergraduate research has focused on the coordination among military, civilian and international organizations to prevent and respond to mass atrocities. In XH415, she developed a Myanmar Situation Assessment for the United States’ Indo-Pacific Command region and played a leading role in West Point’s Mass Atrocity Prevention Practicum in 2020. Pratt intends to play a formative role in clarifying the military’s role in preventing and resolving mass atrocities by establishing a Standard Operating Procedure to clarify objectives and to identify ways and means among civilian agencies, the U.S. military and allied forces in the international community. She commissioned as an officer in the Armor branch after graduating from West Point.