April 18, 2005
Speaker Biographies
Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow in defense and security policy studies at AEI. He is the author of Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Strategic Assessment (AEI Press, 2004), AEI’s monthly National Security Outlook, and a forthcoming study, The Defense Requirements of the Bush Doctrine (AEI Press, 2005). In February 2005, he was appointed by Senator Bill Frist to a two-year term on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Before coming to AEI, he served as the director of strategic communications and initiatives at Lockheed Martin and as deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century. From 1995 to 1999, he was the policy group director, as well as a professional staff member, for the Committee on National Security (now the Committee on Armed Services) in the U.S. House of Representatives. Mr. Donnelly has also been the executive director of The National Interest, editor of the Army Times, and deputy editor of Defense News.
Frederick W. Kagan is an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He is the coauthor of While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (St. Martin's Press, 2000), as well as numerous articles on defense and foreign policy issues in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Weekly Standard, Policy Review, Commentary, Parameters, and elsewhere. He will be joining AEI this summer as a resident scholar in defense and security policy studies.
Sean Naylor is a senior writer at Army Times and author of Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (Berkley Hardcover, 2005), which he wrote after spending four months in Afghanistan embedded with U.S. troops in early 2002. His articles about Operation Anaconda earned him the White House Correspondents Association's 2003 Edgar A. Poe award for excellence in reporting an issue of regional or national importance. He has also covered U.S. military action in Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia. Most recently he was embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division’s cavalry squadron as the unit fought its way from Kuwait to Baghdad at the leading edge of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. His work has been featured in USA Today and many other Gannett newspapers, as well as the New York Times and the Washington Monthly, and he has appeared on National Public Radio, NBC’s "The Today Show," ABC News' "Nightline" and "Good Morning America," CNN and CNN Headline News, and ABC Radio. A former John M. Olin Fellow in Defense Journalism at the Boston University Center for Defense Journalism, he is also the coauthor, with Thomas Donnelly, of Clash of Chariots: The Great Tank Battles, published by Berkley Books in 1996.
Kalev Sepp is an assistant professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He coauthored an official study of U.S. Army special operations in the Afghanistan expedition and, most recently, has served in Iraq as a consultant on intelligence operations and theater strategy. He is a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who served in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America for twenty-four years. He has direct experience in counterinsurgency, urban warfare, psychological operations and civil affairs, drug interdiction, interagency coordination, nuclear-chemical-biological defense, and strategy formulation. As an assistant professor at the U.S. Military Academy, he taught courses on insurgency and civil wars and military and international history. He was also a resident scholar at Harvard University and is a commentator on military affairs on National Public Radio. His current research interests include counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, special operations, and "small wars."
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