I am Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University, where I am on the faculty of the Political Science Department and the Elliott School of International Affairs.

My research and teaching focus on international relations and foreign policy, with a particular specialization in security issues, including civil-military relations, military operations and strategy, energy security and the Gulf, defense politics, and nuclear proliferation. My current book project, Authoritarian Armies on the Battlefield, explores sources of variation in the fighting effectiveness of non-democratic regimes, using archival research to examine the cases of Iran and Iraq (1980-88) and North and South Vietnam (1954-75).

My work has been published in International Security, Security Studies, The Non-Proliferation Review, and The Washington Quarterly, and I also am co-author of U.S. Defense Politics: the Origins of Security Policy with Harvey Sapolsky and Eugene Gholz (second edition forthcoming from Routledge, 2014). My writing or remarks have appeared in Reuters, the Financial Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Politico, Al Jazeera English, Bloomberg News, The Hill, The Monkey Cage blog, and other outlets. I have received funding from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Brookings Institution, Harvard University’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, the American Political Science Association, the Center for International Studies and the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the George Washington University.