Thom Shanker is the director of the Project for Media and National Security (PMNS), an initiative within the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs that works to deepen public understanding of national security. Previously, he was the National Security/Foreign Policy Editor for the New York Times' Washington Bureau, after serving for for 13 years as the newspaper’s Pentagon and military correspondent. He is co-author of Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda, a New York Times bestseller. For the war in Afghanistan, Shanker embedded with Army Special Forces at Kandahar during the initial invasion of Afghanistan, and later conducted numerous reporting trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. Prior to joining the Times in 1997, he was foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune. He was the Tribune's senior European correspondent, based in Berlin, from 1992-1995, with most of that time spent covering the wars in former Yugoslavia. He was the Tribune's Moscow bureau chief from 1985-1988, covering the first years of the Gorbachev era and issues of superpower arms control. He returned to Moscow from 1990-1992 to cover the death of the USSR and the collapse of the communist empire in Eastern Europe.
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An urgent look at how America's national security machine went astray and how it fails to keep us safe—and what we can do to fix it. Again and again, American taxpayers are asked to open their wallets and pay for a national security machine ... SEE MORE