Commander Fredrick “Skip” Vincenzo, USN (ret.), is a nonresident senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. With twenty-eight years of active service—more than two thirds of that spent temporarily deployed on overseas operations or permanently assigned overseas—Vincenzo has a deep bench of expertise that covers a wide range of areas including the full spectrum of special operations, Korean security affairs, information operations, counter terror, NATO, and countering hybrid threats. With more than fifteen years of assignments focused on Korean security issues, Vincenzo was the US Special Operations Command’s de facto bench of Korea expert, prior to his retirement in 2021. His groundbreaking work on information-based sub-national deterrence is emerging as one of the most promising options for dealing with aggression coercion of authoritarians like Russia, China, and North Korea. 

Vincenzo’s professional writing has appeared in numerous online security publications, and his largest collaborative piece, “An Information Based Strategy to Reduce North Korea’s Increasing Threat,” was cited by both the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs Magazine as one of the few underexplored options for dealing with an increasingly dangerous North Korea.

Vincenzo graduated from the United States Naval Academy with a Bachelor’s of Science in oceanography, and he was commissioned in May 1993 and went on to successfully complete the arduous Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL School in 1994.