Douglas Ollivant

Douglas Ollivant is a Senior National Security Studies Fellow at the New America Foundation as well as a Managing Partner at Mantid International. Most recently, Ollivant was a senior counterinsurgency (COIN) advisor to Regional Command East, as part of the International Security Assistance Force COIN Advisory and Assistance Team. He has served as Director for Iraq on the National Security Council under the Bush and Obama administrations. A retired U.S. Army officer, he has served two tours in the Iraq War, first as the operations officer for the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry Regiment during OIF II and later as the Chief of Plans for Multi-National Division-Baghdad during the “Surge”, leading the team which wrote the Baghdad Security Plan. Military service A former assistant professor at the United States Military Academy's Department of Social Sciences, he is affiliated with a group of military intellectuals, who have been tapped to provide insight and recommendations to General David Petraeus, in what was labeled by Tom Ricks as Petraeus’s “brain trust” or "warrior-intellectuals". Others in this list include, Brigadier General Bill Rapp, Colonels H.R. McMaster, Peter Mansoor, and Michael Meese, Lieutenant Colonels John Nagl, Mike George, Jen Easterly, Paul Yingling, Bill Ostlund and Charles Miller, as well as Dr. David Kilcullen and Dr. Carter Malkesian. In her 2008 book, Tell Me How This Ends, Linda Robinson called Ollivant the “right person in the right place at the right time” for his work in devising the operational implementation of the successful Baghdad Security plan. Military writings In 2006 Ollivant co-authored, with Eric Chewning, an influential article in Military Review, entitled "Producing Victory: Rethinking Conventional Forces in Counterinsurgency Operations", and a 2007 follow-on article, entitled "Producing Victory: a 2007 postscript for implementation", that articulated the need for US forces to abandon sprawling forward operating bases and move into Iraqi communities. The premise of the essay was that counterinsurgency requires military units to simultaneous execute security operations, train local security forces, promote economic development, and foster political institutions. Ollivant and Chewning argued that conventional military units best operate in such an environment when partnered with indigenous security forces co-located among the target population.