Becca Wasser

Adjunct Senior Fellow, Defense Program

Research Areas

Becca Wasser is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and an expert on defense strategy, military operations, and wargaming. She serves as Defense Lead at Bloomberg Economics, where she directs research and analysis assessing how the evolving geopolitical, technological, and macroeconomic trends impact defense strategy, military operations, and future conflict.

At CNAS, Wasser formerly served as deputy director of the Defense Program, where her work focused on the future of warfare, particularly the long-term implications of great power competition for the defense industrial base, the integration of AI and autonomy into military operations, and conventional and nuclear deterrence in an increasingly proliferated world. Wasser also led The Gaming Lab, where she designed and facilitated innovative wargames and scenario-based assessments to inform senior defense and policy decisionmakers.

She previously served as a staff member on the bipartisan, congressionally appointed 2022 National Defense Strategy Commission, authoring key sections of the Commission’s report on adapting U.S. defense strategy for a more contested and uncertain security environment.

Prior to CNAS, Wasser was a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, providing analytic support on national security and defense issues to the U.S. Department of Defense and serving as liaison to U.S. Army HQDA G-3/5/7. She also worked as a research analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in Washington, D.C., and Manama, Bahrain.

Her analysis appears across Bloomberg platforms and in major outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and War on the Rocks, as well as The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, CNN, and MSNBC.

Wasser holds an M.S. in Foreign Service, with distinction, from Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a B.A. in international and global studies from Brandeis University.