Montgomery McFate

Dr. Montgomery ‘Mitzy’ McFate is a professor at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Formerly, she was the Senior Social Scientist for the US Army’s Human Terrain System, which she helped develop from a ‘good idea’ to a $150 million dollar-a-year Army program. She has held positions at a variety of think tanks, including RAND and the Institute for Defense Analyses. She was an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow at the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research, where she was awarded a Distinguished Public Service Award by the Secretary of the Navy. She has served on the Army Science Board and the Defense Science Board, and was an instructor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Dr. McFate received a BA from UC Berkeley, a PhD in Anthropology from Yale, and a JD from Harvard Law School. She is the editor of Social Science Goes to War (Oxford University Press, 2015) and author of Military Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2018). She was a key contributor to US Army Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency, and has published in such journals as Journal of Conflict Studies, Military Review and Joint Forces Quarterly.