Elbridge A. Colby is the Under Secretary of War for Policy (principal policy adviser on defense/foreign policy). He is a longtime U.S. national‑security official and strategist: Harvard College and Yale Law School graduate; served over five years in Defense, State and the intelligence community (including with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq); was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development (2017–2018) and a lead architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy; later was a senior fellow at CNAS and co‑founder of The Marathon Initiative; and is the author of The Strategy of Denial.