Jim Golby Joins CNAS as Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Military, Veterans, and Society Program

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is pleased to announce that Jim Golby, Senior Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin, has joined CNAS as an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Military, Veterans, and Society Program.

“We’re proud to welcome Jim to CNAS,” said Kayla Williams, director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program. “With his decades of extraordinary leadership both in and out of uniform, Jim will lend invaluable expertise to our team’s work on civil-military relations and sharpening the edge of the United States’ armed forces.”

In addition to his role at the Clements Center, Jim is a Lecturer in the UT Austin Department of Government. He is also the co-host of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' "Thank You for Your Service" podcast, a non-resident senior fellow with the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the editorial board for the inter-disciplinary journal, Armed Forces & Society.

Jim served twenty years in the United States Army. He previously served as a defense policy advisor at the United States Mission to NATO, as a special advisor to two Vice Presidents of the United States, as a special assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as an assistant professor of American Politics, Policy, and Strategy at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Jim was the U.S. Mission to NATO co-lead for the 2018 Brussels Summit. He has also worked on a range of policy issues, including military strategy and policy in the Middle East and South Asia, nuclear weapons policy and arms control, the defense budget and force planning, NATO burden sharing and force generation, the development and approval of NATO operational plans, and the 2015 National Military Strategy. Before becoming an Army strategist, Jim commanded a security company in Iraq (2006-07) and led a scout platoon in combat in Iraq (2004-05). He is a former International Affairs Fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations (2016-17) and a Munich Young Leader (2017).

Jim’s research focuses on civil-military relations, military strategy, domestic sources of foreign policy, and American national security policy. He is a contributing editor at War on the Rocks, and his research and commentary have appeared in numerous outlets, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, The Economist, and The Washington Post. Jim is currently working on two main research projects: a book project, with Dr. Peter Feaver, that examines the determinants of public confidence in the U.S. military and another project that explores how political polarization shapes American civil-military relations. Jim received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and a B.S. in American Government from the United States Military Academy.

For more information or to schedule an interview with Golby, contact Cole Stevens at cstevens@cnas.org or call 202-695-8166.