Center for a New American Security

Greg Jaffe is the new Pentagon Reporter at the Washington Post.  Prior to the Post, he was a reporter with the Wall Street Journal since 1995. He covered the Pentagon full time for the Journal out of the paper’s Washington bureau since January 2000. He has made 10 trips, each averaging about a month, to Iraq since 2003 and has embedded with troops at all levels throughout the country. Jaffe was on leave from the Wall Street Journal working on a book about the four Army generals – John Abizaid, George Casey, Peter Chiarelli, and David Petraeus – who have had the greatest impact on the conduct of the Iraq war. The book titled The Fourth Star, published by Crown/Random House in Fall 2009, reveals how the Army's winnowing process led to the four generals’ ascension, and how each man's theories about modern warfare have been – and are being – tested. Jaffe shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for a series on defense spending. In 2002 and 2005, Jaffe won the Raymond Clapper Award for Washington coverage. He also won the Gerald R. Ford award for defense coverage in 2002. In 2007 he won the Military Reporters and Editors award for best overseas coverage. Jaffe is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. His first job in journalism was with the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Ala. There he co-authored a series on the questionable fundraising tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation’s wealthiest civil rights charity that was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism. Jaffe grew up in Northern Virginia and lives in Arlington, Va., with his wife and two children.