Thom Shanker

Thom Shanker is the director of the Project for Media and National Security (PMNS), an initiative within the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs that works to deepen public understanding of national security. Previously, he was the National Security/Foreign Policy Editor for the New York Times' Washington Bureau, after serving for for 13 years as the newspaper’s Pentagon and military correspondent. He is co-author of Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda, a New York Times bestseller. For the war in Afghanistan, Shanker embedded with Army Special Forces at Kandahar during the initial invasion of Afghanistan, and later conducted numerous reporting trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. Prior to joining the Times in 1997, he was foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune. He was the Tribune's senior European correspondent, based in Berlin, from 1992-1995, with most of that time spent covering the wars in former Yugoslavia. He was the Tribune's Moscow bureau chief from 1985-1988, covering the first years of the Gorbachev era and issues of superpower arms control. He returned to Moscow from 1990-1992 to cover the death of the USSR and the collapse of the communist empire in Eastern Europe.

Andrew Hoehn is senior vice president for research and analysis at the RAND Corporation. He is responsible for all U.S.-based research and recruitment of RAND's 1,300 research staff. He is author of several RAND volumes, including the recent “Strategic Choices for a Turbulent World” (RAND, 2017). Mr. Hoehn previously served as a RAND vice president of Project AIR FORCE (PAF), where he oversaw research and analyses on strategy, force employment, personnel and training, and resource management. Previously, Hoehn was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, during the years just preceding and following 9/11, responsible for developing and implementing U.S. defense strategy, force planning and assessments, and long-range policy planning. Earlier, he had several management and staff positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Prior to joining government, Hoehn was associate editor of the Marine Corps Gazette.