Center for a New American Security

Thom Shanker is a correspondent covering the Pentagon, the military and national security for The New York Times. He joined The Times in 1997, and was assistant Washington editor, responsible for managing the newspaper’s coverage of foreign policy, national security and economics from the Washington bureau. He was named Pentagon correspondent in May of 2001 and has covered military affairs and national security strategy, including efforts at transformation within the Pentagon and the global campaign against terrorism. For the war in Afghanistan, he embedded with Army Special Forces at Kandahar. He has conducted numerous reporting trips to Iraq, and has embedded in the field with units from the company level through battalion, brigade, division and corps.

Shanker is co-author, with Eric Schmitt, of “Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda,” published in 2011 by Times Books and Henry Holt & Co. “Counterstrike” was researched and written while both served as writers-in-residence at CNAS.

Prior to joining The Times, Shanker was foreign editor of The Chicago Tribune. During his lengthy career as a foreign and national security correspondent, Mr. Shanker was The Tribune's senior European correspondent, based in Berlin, from 1992-1995. Most of that time was spent covering the wars in former Yugoslavia, where Mr. Shanker was the first reporter to uncover and write about the Serb campaign of systematic mass rape of Muslim women. He also wrote about European integration, NATO policy, nuclear smuggling and the withdrawal of American, British, French and Russian troops from Berlin following the reunification of the German capital.

Shanker was The Tribune's Moscow bureau chief from 1985-1988, covering the first years of the Gorbachev era as well as issues of superpower arms control. From 1988-1990, he was The Tribune's Pentagon correspondent. Mr. Shanker returned to Moscow from 1990-1992 to cover the death of the USSR and the collapse of the communist empire in Eastern Europe. He also spent one year as the foreign and military affairs writer on The Tribune's editorial board.

Mr. Shanker spent two years in the master's degree program at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, specializing in strategic nuclear policy and international law, passing his master’s orals with Highest Honors. He graduated Cum Laude with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Colorado College, and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws by the college in 2004.

Shanker has been published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The American Journalism Review andMilitary Review. He is a contributor to “Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know,” an anthology published by Norton. He also is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.