Montgomery McFate
Senior Fellow, Jennings Randolph Fellowship Program
December 2006-August 2007
Project Focus:
National Security and Cultural Knowledge
Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations
ARCHIVED SPECIALIST PROFILE
A cultural anthropologist by training, Montgomery McFate’s work emphasizes the importance of sociocultural knowledge
in the formation of national security priorities. Before joining the Joint Advanced Warfighting Program at the Institute for Defense Analyses, she served as an American Academy for the Advancement of Science fellow at the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR). She was awarded a Distinguished Public Service Award by the Secretary of the Navy for her work at ONR. McFate also worked at RAND as a social scientist, at the law firm of Baker and McKenzie in San Francisco as a litigation associate, and as a consultant to various government agencies.
She has published in the Journal of Conflict Studies, Military Review, and Joint Forces Quarterly, and has held grants from the National Science Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Smith-Richardson Foundation, among others. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University.
Publications:
- "Does Culture Matter? The Military Utility of Cultural Knowledge," Joint Forces Quarterly
(No . 38, 2005).
- "Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship," Military Review (March/April, 2005).
Available on usip.org:
