About Speaker

Michael O’Hanlon is 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 he specializes in U.S. defense strategy and budgets, the use of military force, and American national security policy.

He is a senior fellow and directs the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy, and Technology. He also co-directs the Africa Security Initiative. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and Columbia University and was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board from 2021 to 2025.

He was also a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011 to 2012. His newest book, timed to coincide with the nation’s 250th birthday, is To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution.
In 2023, O’Hanlon published Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars since 1861. The paperback version of the book, with a preface covering the American Revolution as well as the declared wars of the 19th century, came out in 2024.