About Me

Editor

Armed Forces Journal, November 2011I’m the editor of Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine of analysis and commentary on the military questions of the day. The nation’s oldest military-themed publication, it was founded in 1863 as the Army Navy Journal. More recently, it was named one of the top-10 small-circulation magazines by ASBPE.

I also oversee the other two magazines in the Defense News Media Group: C4ISR Journal and Training & Simulation Journal.

Before that, I was the managing editor of Defense News, the weekly newspaper of global military policy and procurement.

And before that, I created and ran the newsroom for Military.com, which in 2001 became the first online-only publication granted a Pentagon press pass. (I also hacked together a web scraper in Perl to help compile a morning newsletter.)

Reporter

I reported for Navy Times for three years, traveling all over the globe to cover the U.S. Navy at work.

I cut my daily-journalism teeth at the Annapolis Capital, covering military issues when I wasn’t filling the weekly page about a neighborhood just north of the Severn River.

Author

I’ve written two books.No Higher Honor cover

Other stuff

I have a Soviet and Eastern European degree from Yale, which renamed its Russian Studies major in 1990 and had to change it back in 1992. (Oops.) After graduating, I programmed the water jet cutter for a company that made Major League Baseball replica jerseys. Then I moved to Moscow, arriving just after Boris Yeltsin hauled down the Soviet flag over the Kremlin and departing just before the attempted coup in 1993. (One of my freelance articles was published in the first issue of the Moscow Times.)

More recently, I started Pecha Kucha Night in Philadelphia.