Gary Schmitt


Gary James Schmitt served as executive director and president of the New Citizenship Project before becoming the executive director of the Project for the New American Century from 1998 to 2005. He is now a resident scholar and co-director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies launched in 2012.

Early life and education

Schmitt graduated from the University of Dallas in 1974 with a B.A. and the University of Chicago in 1980 with a Ph.D.

Career

In the early 1980s, Schmitt worked as a member of the professional staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and, from 1982 to 1984, served as the committee's minority staff director. From 1984 to 1988 he held the post of executive director of President Reagan's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Since then, he has held visiting fellowships at the National Interest, a foreign policy journal, and the centrist Brookings Institution, served as Coordinator for the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence's Working Group on Intelligence Reform, and worked as a consultant to the Department of Defense. In addition, he has been an adjunct professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
Schmitt helped found and direct the Project for the New American Century, a key neoconservative letterhead group formed in 1997 that played a leading role advocating war in Iraq.
In April 2012, Schmitt became co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute where he previously served as director of the Program on Advanced Strategic Studies.

Books