Linda Robinson is a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation and best-selling book author. Her books include: One Hundred Victories: Special Ops and the Future of American Warfare (2013); Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (2008), Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces (2004), and Intervention or Neglect (1992). She has conducted extensive field research on five continents and testified before the U.S. Congress on special operations and counterterrorism.
Ms. Robinson has led or co-led 20 studies at RAND, including Modern Political Warfare (2018), Making Victory Count (2017) and Improving Strategic Competence (2014), which received awards and wide distribution. She has been a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Johns Hopkins, the Wilson Center and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. From 2010 to 2017 she was a special government appointee to the National Defense University and Army War College boards of visitors, and she received the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal for her contributions to strategic leader development and professional military education during her tenure as chair of the U.S. Army War College board.
Ms. Robinson was Senior Editor at Foreign Affairs and Latin America Bureau Chief and Senior Writer at U.S. News & World Report. She received numerous awards including the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Reporting on National Defense and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University. Robinson graduated from Swarthmore College and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She lectures at educational institutions and speaks frequently to a wide range of public and government policy audiences around the world.
Recent public appearances include the UK Chief of Defense Staff Strategy Forum, Future Warfare conference at the Australian Defence Force Academy, the Alliance for Peacebuilding conference at USIP, Returning Foreign Fighters conference in Doha, CSIS Security Forum, the Middle East Peace and Security conference in Kurdistan, and the annual SOF Policy Forum of the Global SOF Foundation. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of its Washington Program Committee.