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Dr. Ben Connable was a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, the director of research at DT Institute, and adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Connable is a retired Marine Corps Middle East foreign area officer and intelligence officer with extensive experience in Iraq and the broader Middle East. He served as cultural advisor and senior analyst in Anbar Province, Iraq, and as the Marine and Naval attaché to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
From 2009 through 2021, Connable was a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation where he led over twenty research projects for US government and allied sponsors. His diverse research portfolio included detailed studies of Iraq security issues and Iraqi security forces, the crises in Syria and Yemen, the Russian military threat, NATO security issues, refugee dynamics and policies, irregular warfare, assessment methodologies, and intelligence policy. Connable’s most recent work focused on the analysis of will to fight and methods for analyzing, modeling, gaming, and simulating human behavior in conflict.
Connable received his MA in national security affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School and his PhD in war studies from King’s College London. His doctoral thesis is entitled Warrior-Maverick Culture: The Evolution of Adaptability in the US Marine Corps. Other notable works include How Insurgencies End, Embracing the Fog of War, and Will to Fight. Connable has published extensively, including with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs.