Kimberly Kagan is the founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War. She has taught at West Point, Yale, Georgetown, and American University. She is the author of The Eye of Command (2006) and The Surge: a Military History (2009), editor of The Imperial Moment (2010), and has published essays in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others.

Dr. Kagan served in Kabul for seventeen months from 2010 to 2012, working directly with General David H. Petraeus and General John Allen, and received the Distinguished Public Service Award for her voluntary deployment. She served as part of General Stanley McChrystal’s initial assessment team in Kabul in summer 2009. She also conducted many battlefield circulations of Iraq between 2007 and 2010. Dr. Kagan serves on the Academic Advisory Board at the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence at CENTCOM.

She received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University and had Olin postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Yale.