Dana Priest -

Who is she? Why should we care - She is a part of the problem, not part of the solution.

United States Institute of Peace: Guide to Specialists ArchiveFormer Specialist Profile

Dana PriestGuest Scholar (October 2000–December 2001)

Areas of SpecializationCivil-military relations • Media-military relations • Media and conflict • Women in conflict and peacemaking

Project Focus"Civil-Military Relations in the Formulation and Execution of American Foreign Policy"

BackgroundDana Priest is a guest scholar at the Institute and a recent recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant. She is currently working on a book about the military’s expanding influence over American foreign policy and its implications for civil-military relations. An award winning journalist,

Priest is on leave from the Washington Post, where she has worked for fourteen years on a variety of beats, including as assistant foreign editor. Since 1995, she has written about the U.S. military, first as the Post’s Pentagon correspondent and now as an investigative reporter.

Priest has covered breaking American foreign policy stories from around the globe, including Operation Just Cause in Panama, and she reported from Baghdad in the weeks before the start of Operation Desert Storm. She has written extensively about the nation’s four regional commanders-in-chief, the Army’s peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, women in the military, and the Defense Department’s programs to rebuild the militaries of Central Europe.

Before joining the Post, Priest worked as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Priest was recently awarded the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the National Defense for her series "The Proconsuls" in the Post last Fall.