Kimberly Ellen Kagan (born 1972) is an American military historian. She heads the Institute for the Study of War and has taught at

West Point The United States Military Academy (USMA), also known Metonymy, metonymically as West Point or simply as Army, is a United States service academies, United States service academy in West Point, New York. It was originally established as a f ...

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the worl ...

, Georgetown University, and

American University The American University (AU or American) is a private federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C. Its main campus spans 90 acres (36 ha) on Ward Circle, mostly in the Spring Valley neighborhood of Northwest D.C. AU was chart ...

. Kagan has published in '' The Wall Street Journal'', '' The New York Times'', '' The Weekly Standard'' and elsewhere. In 2009, she served on Afghanistan commander Gen.

Stanley McChrystal Stanley Allen McChrystal (born August 14, 1954) is a retired United States Army general best known for his command of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 to 2008 where his organization was credited with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarq ...

's strategic assessment team.

Early life

Kimberly Kagan is the daughter of Kalman Kessler, a Jewish accountant and school teacher from New York City and his wife Frances. She received her BA(1993) in classical civilization and her PhD in history from Yale University. At Yale, Kagan met her husband

Frederick Kagan Frederick W. Kagan is an American resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Career Both he and his father, Donald Kagan, who was a professo ...

, who is an American resident scholar at the

American Enterprise Institute The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, known simply as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is a center-right Washington, D.C.–based think tank that researches government, politics, economics, and social welfare. A ...

(AEI), son of

Donald Kagan Donald Kagan (; May 1, 1932August 6, 2021) was a Lithuanian-born American historian and classicist at Yale University specializing in ancient Greece, notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War. He formerly taught in the Dep ...

, a well-known historian, and brother of Robert Kagan, another well-known writer and publicist. Kagan held an Olin Postdoctoral Fellowship in Military History at Yale in International Security Studies from 2004–2005. She is an affiliate of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, where she was a National Security Fellow from 2002–2003.

Career

She served on the Joint Campaign Plan Assessment Team for Multi-National Force-Iraq-U.S. Mission Iraq in October 2008, and as part of the Civilian Advisory Team for the CENTCOM strategic review in January 2009. Kagan served in Kabul as a member of General

's strategic assessment team, composed of civilian experts, during his strategic review in June and July 2009. She and her husband returned to Afghanistan in the summer of 2010 to assist General David Petraeus with transition tasks following his assumption of command in Afghanistan. They were granted "top secret" clearance, and spent hours analyzing intercepted transmissions of the Taliban. Their assessment that US forces should attack the

Haqqani network The Haqqani network is an Afghan Islamist group, built around the family of the same name, that has used asymmetric warfare in Afghanistan to fight against Soviet forces in the 1980s, and US-led NATO forces and the Islamic Republic of Afghanis ...

was communicated directly to field commanders in the east, creating some confusion since Petraeus did not issue this command himself. Kagan also serves on the Academic Advisory Board at the Afghanistan- Pakistan Center of Excellence at CENTCOM. Kagan is the founder (2007) and President of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). ISW describes itself as a "non-partisan non-profit think tank which seeks to provide research and analysis specifically regarding issues of defense and foreign affairs. ISW produces comprehensive reports on the realities of war; focusing on military operations, enemy threats, and political trends in diverse conflict zones". Kagan supported the 2007 troop surge in Iraq and subsequently advocated for an expanded and restructured American military campaign in Afghanistan. On May 25, 2010, Kagan participated in a briefing on

Capitol Hill Capitol Hill, in addition to being a metonym for the United States Congress, is the largest historic residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., stretching easterly in front of the United States Capitol along wide avenues. It is one of the ...

focusing on Iraq's political crisis that included remarks from Iraqi Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie and Kenneth Pollack, Senior Fellow at the

Brookings Institution The Brookings Institution, often stylized as simply Brookings, is an American research group founded in 1916. Located on Think Tank Row in Washington, D.C., the organization conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in ...

. Kagan also participated in a Brookings Institution event entitled "Prospects for Afghanistan's Future: Assessing the Outcome of the Afghan Presidential Election" alongside Michael E. O'Hanlon. Kagan's organization, ISW, funded the creation of a 34-minute documentary, ''The Surge: the Untold Story'' with CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, ISW Chairman, U.S Army General

Jack Keane John M. "Jack" Keane (born February 1, 1943) is a retired American four-star general, a former Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is a national security analyst, primarily on F ...

(ret.) and LTG James Dubik (ret.) describing the surge strategy in Iraq and how some high-ranking US officers claim to have pacified the country and thus won the war. Along with General Keane, Kagan is an advisory board member of Spirit of America, a

501(c)(3) organization A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of the 29 types of 5 ...

that supports the safety and success of Americans serving abroad and the local people and partners they seek to help.

Works

* * * Kagan has published numerous essays including "Don't Short-Circuit the Surge"; "How to Surge the Taliban"; and "Why the Taliban are Winning—For Now".

References

External links

Institute for the Study of War

The Future of Iraq: A Conversation with General Raymond T. Odierno

CENTCOM in 2010: Views from General David H. Petraeus
* *
C-SPAN ''Q&A'' interview with Kagan, December 9, 2007
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kagan, Kimberly Jewish American historians American military historians Yale University alumni Living people 1972 births American women historians 21st-century American Jews 21st-century American women