About me

I am the inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy and director of research in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, where I specialize in U.S. defense strategy and budgets, the use of military force, and American national security policy. I also direct the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy, and Technology at Brookings, and teach at Georgetown University as well as Columbia University. I had the privilege of being a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board from 2021 to 2025; I was also a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011–2012. My book To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution, is to be published in January 2026.

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In 2023, I published a book titled Military History for the Modern Strategist: America's Major Wars since 1861, with the paperback version coming out the following year. My other books include The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint (Yale, 2021); Defense 101: Understanding the Military of Today and Tomorrow (Cornell, 2021); The Senkaku Paradox: Risking Great Power War over Limited Stakes (Brookings, 2019); Beyond NATO: A New Security Architecture for Eastern Europe (Brookings, 2017); The Future of Land Warfare (Brookings, 2015); Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century (with Jim Steinberg, Princeton University Press, 2014); Crisis on the Korean Peninsula (with Mike Mochizuki, McGraw-Hill, 2003); and Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo (with Ivo Daalder, Brookings, 2000).  I’ve also published in numerous journals and newspapers, and done lots of live media over the years as well.  I consider it a privilege to participate so frequently in this nation’s security-related discussions and debates.​​

I was an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office from 1989-1994, where I won the Director's Award in 1992. My doctorate from Princeton is in public and international affairs, where I was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship; my bachelor's and master's degrees, also from Princeton, are in the physical sciences. I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1982-1984, where I taught college and high school physics in French. Earlier, I worked on a dairy farm in Upstate New York, where I grew up. As a side note, during college, I attempted (unsuccessfully) with a team of Princeton experimental physicists in the "Gravity Group" to disprove Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

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Affiliations: Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy, The Brookings Institution; Adjunct Professor, Columbia University; Adjunct Professor, Center for Security Studies, Georgetown University
 

Education: Ph.D. (1991), M.A. (1988), M.S.E. (1987), B.A. (1982), Princeton University