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H.R. McMaster

Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow

H.R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. At Stanford, he is also the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at the Graduate School of Business. He is the host of Today's Battlegrounds and is a regular on GoodFellows, both produced by the Hoover Institution.

McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the US Army for thirty-four years and as the twenty-fifth assistant to the US president for national security affairs. As the director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, McMaster designed the future army; and as commanding general of the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Georgia, he oversaw training, education, and modernization for the Army’s infantry, armor, and cavalry force. He has commanded organizations in wartime including the Combined Joint Inter-Agency Task Force–Shafafiyat in Afghanistan; the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq; and Eagle Troop, Second Armored Cavalry Regiment in Operation Desert Storm.

McMaster holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was an assistant professor of history at the US Military Academy. He is author of Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam; Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World; and At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. His many essays, articles, and book reviews on leadership, history, and the future of warfare have appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Free Press, The New York Times, and The Economist.

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