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Photo: American Enterprise Institute

Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC

David Rubenstein Distinguished Visitor - Class of Spring 2008


Frederick Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, and a former professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His fields of research include the American military and defense issues, particularly defense transformation, defense strategy and warfare, and the military budget. Kagan has published extensively on military history and conservative military policy. He co-authored with his father, Donald Kagan, the book While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001). It argued in favor of massive military spending and warned of future threats, including from a potential revival of Iraq’s WMD program. Along with his father and his brother, Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Kagan signed the neoconservative Project for the New American Century manifesto, entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” More recently, he published the report “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq” in January 2007, which was intended to counter the Iraq Study Group’s report by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, and which is said to have strongly influenced President George W. Bush’s subsequent “surge” plan for changing the course of the Iraq War. Kagan is also the author of Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (Encounter Books, 2006).

 

Kagan received his BA in Soviet and Eastern European Studies, and PhD in Russian and Soviet military history, both from Yale University.

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