Center for a New American Security

Andrew Exum is a Senior Fellow with the Center for a New American Security. A native of East Tennessee, Exum was educated in Philadelphia, Beirut and London.

From 2000 until 2004, Exum served on active duty in the U.S. Army. He led a platoon of light infantry in Kuwait and Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and later led a platoon of Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Exum returned to Afghanistan in 2009 to serve as an advisor to Gen. Stanley McChrystal and subsequently participated in an assessment conducted for Gen. David Petraeus in 2010. Exum served as a subject matter expert on Egypt and the Levant for the 2008-2009 CENTCOM Assessment Team.

Exum earned a B.A. in classics and English literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 and received the Cane Award upon graduation. He later earned an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut and a Ph.D. in War Studies from the University of London. Exum has also formally studied in Cairo, Paris and Tangier.

Exum is the author of one book, This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story from the Frontlines of the War on Terror (Gotham, 2004), which won a Distinguished Writing Award from the Army Historical Foundation, and has published opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian and many other newspapers. Recent publications of note include a contribution to the New York Times best-selling e-book Beyond Bin Laden (Random House, 2011) and an essay on Afghanistan in the French security studies journal Politique étrangère.

Exum aims to engage in conversations with his readers through social media. While on a one-year fellowship at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Exum started a blog on small wars and insurgencies, Abu Muqawama, that he continues to edit at CNAS. Exum was also named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 100 voices in foreign policy on Twitter.

Exum is a member of the American Political Science Association, the Middle East Studies Association, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Exum lives with his wife Natalie in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C, and attends a neighborhood church. In addition to his writing and research activities, he turns out on Saturdays in the fall and spring for the Washington Irish R.F.C.