Dr. Mark Moyar joined Hillsdale College in July 2021 as the William P. Harris Chair of Military History, and in 2024 became the director of the college’s Center for Military History and Strategy. From 2018 to 2019, he served as the Director of the Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation at USAID, and previously served as the Director of the Project on Military and Diplomatic History at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. He holds a B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Cambridge.
Dr. Moyar’s newest book is Masters of Corruption: How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged the Trump Presidency (Encounter Books, 2024), which is based on his experiences as a political appointee in the Trump administration. He is currently writing the third volume of a trilogy on the Vietnam War, following Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968 (Encounter Books, 2023).
Dr. Moyar’s books also include Oppose Any Foe: The Rise of America’s Special Operations Forces (Basic Books, 2017), the first comprehensive history of America’s special operations forces. His book Aid for Elites: Building Partners and Ending Poverty with Human Capital (Cambridge University Press, 2016) illuminates the nexus of international development, governance, and security, and the value of human capital in each of these sectors. His critique of US national security policy during the Obama era is entitled Strategic Failure: How President Obama’s Drone Warfare, Defense Cuts, and Military Amateurism Have Imperiled America (Threshold, June 2015).
His book A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq (Yale University Press, 2009) draws upon case studies in counterinsurgency leadership to advocate an alternative approach to counterinsurgency, focused on empowering the right people rather than on implementing the right methods. The NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan commissioned a Dari translation of A Question of Command for use in training Afghanistan’s security forces, and the book has been widely read among the U.S. armed forces and civilian agencies. His first book, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey (Naval Institute Press, 1997; Bison Books, 2007), focused on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in the Vietnam War.
Dr. Moyar is a member of the Hoover Institution Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict. From 2004 to 2010, he served as a professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University, where he held the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism. He has also taught at Texas A&M University and the Foreign Service Institute, and served as a Senior Fellow at the Joint Special Operations University. Dr. Moyar has worked as a consultant for the senior leadership of the Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan, U.S. Central Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, and the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan.
Dr. Moyar’s articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. He speaks at a wide range of public and private institutions around the world. Among the subjects on which he speaks are national security strategy, international development, leadership, corruption, and higher education.