Lieutenant General (Retired) Charles “Hoop” Hooper is known as an agile, resilient, and high-impact leader, who offers an uncommon blend of strategy and partnership development, disciplined leadership, and operational expertise—supplemented by global insight and deep cross-cultural experience. He is one of the nation’s foremost experts China’s military and defense industries, US-China military relations, US security cooperation and financial assistance, and foreign military sales. Hooper has over thirty years of experience in security policy formulation and execution, strategic intelligence, military diplomacy, sensitive negotiations, education, and transformational leadership of large, complex organizations. He has served in operational assignments with the 25^th Infantry and 82^nd Airborne Divisions, taught Chinese foreign policy at the Naval Postgraduate School, and served as the senior China policy official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the senior Department of Defense strategist and planner for US Africa Command, and the senior US military officer in Egypt. He is a fluent Chinese linguist who served seven years in Beijing, culminating with his assignment as US Defense Attaché to China from 2007 to 2009. In his final military assignment, Hooper was director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, responsible for the overseas sale of all weapons, military equipment, support services, and training packages for the United States government. He was also a postgraduate research fellow at the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Among his numerous honors, Hooper was awarded the National Defense Medal by the French Government and was the first Army student-officer and first Harvard Kennedy School of Government student selected to give a Harvard University graduate student commencement address. He is a member of MENSA, the Council on Foreign Relations, and is on the board of directors of the National Bureau of Asian Research.

Hooper holds a Bachelor of Science from the United States Military Academy, West Point, a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Master of Strategic Studies from the US Army War College. In addition to English, Hooper speaks Mandarin Chinese and the Egyptian dialect of Arabic.