Tom Goffus

About

Tom Goffus is a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and serves on the senior leadership steering group for the ADK Battlelab and National Research Center.

In the private sector, he is executive partner, global security for Elara Nova. As a senior enterprise leader, he integrates elements of defense strategy, operational complexities, industrial base capabilities, and geopolitical realities providing government and industry actionable recommendations to co-create and implement innovative solutions to key operational challenges in support of national security.

Before working in the private sector, Goffus was a national security practitioner as the senior civilian responsible for NATO operations and the NATO secretary general’s special coordinator for counterterrorism. In those roles, he helped the governments and industries of thirty-two allies provide a decisive edge by operationalizing key functional areas including space, air and missile defense, data sharing for multidomain operations, and drone/counter-drone capabilities. In this role he provided strategic and operational insights to the NATO secretary general and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Before NATO, he served at the highest levels across multiple branches of the US government as deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy, policy director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and director for strategic and Eastern European affairs for the National Security Council at the White House.

Goffus is an Air Force command pilot with over 3,000 hours in the F-15, T-37, and T-6 aircraft. He served as a squadron and group commander and is a distinguished graduate of the US Air Force Academy, with master’s degrees from the University of Washington and the US Naval War College.