Writers in Residence
The CNAS Writers in Residence program provides some of America’s top
national security and defense journalists the opportunity to complete
longer book projects while benefiting from the full spectrum of the
Center’s resources and expertise.
Current Writer in Residence David Finkel is the author of The Good Soldiers,
a ground-level account of the U.S. "surge" into the Iraq war, published
in 2009 by Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. CNAS is
hosting Finkel as he writes a second book that chronicles the return of
the battalion’s soldiers after the end of their tour, exploring their
struggles to reintegrate – what Finkel calls their “trip back to
normalcy.” An editor and writer for The Washington Post, Finkel has reported from Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe, and across the United States, and was part of the Post’s war coverage in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory
Reporting in 2006.
Previous Writers in Residence include Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, whose book Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda, published in 2011 by Henry Holt and Company, tells the story of how a group of analysts within the military, at spy agencies, and in law enforcement has fashioned an innovative and effective new strategy to fight terrorism, unbeknownst to most Americans and in sharp contrast to the cowboy slogans that characterized the U.S. government's public posture.
While at CNAS, Greg Jaffe and David Cloud co-authored The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army,
released October 2009, which traces the intellectual evolution and
career development of four American generals, General Abizaid, General
Casey, General Chiarelli, and General Petraeus, who have had the
greatest impact on the way the U.S. Army has fought in Iraq. In this
page-turning narrative, the authors reveal how the four generals’
experiences are also changing the Army.
In The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008,
Tom Ricks documents the inside story of the Iraq war since late 2005.
Using hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in
Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reporting, Ricks—working in the
tradition of his highly lauded Fiasco—examines the events that
took place in Iraq as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge
was launched, and a very different war began.
With a historian’s sweep and a White House correspondent’s eye for detail, David Sanger’s The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power,
published in early 2008, looked at the challenges beyond Iraq that the
next president would face. Pacing readers through a riveting narrative,
he describes the huge costs of distraction as the Bush administration
failed to decisively win the Afghan war in 2002 and counted on regime
change in Iran and North Korea in 2003. He documents how rogue states
and great powers saw a moment to exploit America’s weaknesses in Iraq and describes the difficult choices the new
president would face while dealing with economic
meltdown, a new world of nuclear proliferation and diminished American
influence.
