David Tucker

David Tucker is the Deputy Director for Special Operations in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict.

Before coming to work at the Department of Defense, he served as a Foreign Service Officer in Brazzaville, Congo; Abidjan, Ivory Coast; and Paris, France. Prior to entering government service, Tucker was Director of the International Seminar in American Studies at the Claremont Institute. He also taught at the University of Chicago as a William Rainey Harper Fellow.

Tucker received a Ph.D. in History from Claremont Graduate School in 1981.

He is the author of “Facing the Facts: The Failure of Nation Assistance,” Parameters (Summer 1993); “American Support for Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the 1980s: Lessons for the Future,” in Statecraft and Power, (1994) a book he co-edited; “Peacetime Engagements,” (with Christopher J. Lamb) in America’s Armed Forces: A Handbook of Current and Future Capabilities (Greenwood Press, 1996); Skirmishes at the Edge of the Empire, The United States and International Terrorism (Praeger, 1997), as well as a number of other articles on defense and national security.