Dr. Wayne A. Schroeder is a nonresident senior fellow with the Transatlantic Security Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. From 2019-20 he served as project director for the Atlantic Council’s military mobility task force report, Moving Out: A Comprehensive Assessment of European Military Mobility in Europe (April 2020). His most recent publication is NATO at Seventy: Filling NATO’s Critical Defense-Capability Gaps, published by the Atlantic Council in April 2019.

Dr. Schroeder currently serves as an adjunct professor for the Fleet Seminar Program at the Naval War College. He is also an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics, where he teaches Defense Strategy, Planning and Budgeting, U.S. Bilateral Security Agreements, and International Organizations and Multilateral Diplomacy. He also teaches International Relations, Comparative Politics, and American Government at Marymount University.  He has had a 41-year career in Washington, DC with service in government, industry, public policy, the military, and higher education.  

Dr. Schroeder served as deputy under secretary of defense (resource planning/management) in the office of the under secretary of defense (comptroller) from 2001-2004, where he received the office of the secretary of defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service. He was also a professional staff member for the US Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee (1981-86) under its chairman, the late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), with responsibilities for oversight of DoD research and development programs.  Earlier in his career he served as a senior research analyst with Logicon RDA, and was on the Corporate Engineering and Washington Operations staff of Lockheed Martin. He served for more than ten years as a strategic intelligence officer in the US Army Reserve, achieving the rank of Captain. 

Dr. Schroeder has published more than 30 articles on defense and national security topics, and has contributed to numerous trade, industry and think tank studies. In 2018 he collaborated on an Institute for Defense Analyses study to Congress on financial and non-financial incentives for DoD program managers. Other recent articles include: “Just Calling: The Christian Basis for a Career in Peacemaking,” in Providence (Winter 2017), and “The Future U.S. Defense Budget,” in Orbis (Winter 2017). In 1998, he co-edited Use of Underground Facilities to Protect Critical Infrastructures, a publication of the National Academy Press. 

Dr. Schroeder is a member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), the Economics of National Security Association, the US Naval Institute, and the Eisenhower Foundation. From 2010-15 he chaired the Macroeconomic/Defense Topline team for the Professional Services Council’s annual vision forecast to the aerospace and defense industry, receiving two awards for outstanding leadership in analysis and forecasting.

An H.B. Earhart Foundation Fellow, Dr. Schroeder received his Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Southern California in 1981, specializing in Defense and Strategic Studies. He earned an M.A. in Political Science from Portland State University (1976), and graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.A. in Political Science (1974). He also served as a member of the Board of Visitors of Mary Washington College from 1995-99. Wayne Schroeder is married to Deborah Fell and resides in Bethesda, MD.  He has three children, Eric, Gretchen, and Grace, and three grandchildren, Carson, Ava and Evelyn.