Frederick W. Kagan (born March 26, 1970) is an American military historian, strategist, and neoconservative thinker renowned for his influential contributions to U.S. defense policy and national security. He currently serves as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he directs the Critical Threats Project, focusing on analyzing global threats, military strategy, counterterrorism, and defense innovations. He is a long-time colleague at AEI and has co-authored regional strategy papers with other scholars. Previously, Kagan was a professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he educated future military leaders on historical and strategic perspectives. His work has been particularly influential in developing counterinsurgency doctrines during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he advocated for troop surges and strategic adjustments that impacted policy decisions, including co-authoring key reports that influenced the Bush administration's 2007 Iraq troop surge strategy. Kagan hails from a prominent intellectual family deeply embedded in neoconservative circles. He is the son of Donald Kagan, a distinguished Yale classics professor and Hudson Institute fellow, and brother to Robert Kagan, a fellow neoconservative foreign policy expert affiliated with the Brookings Institution and the Aspen Strategy Group. Together with his father and brother, Frederick was a signatory to the Project for the New American Century's manifesto 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' (sources differ on year: 1997 or 2000), which called for increased U.S. military spending, interventionist policies, and regime change in Iraq. This family legacy underscores the Kagans' collective influence on American conservatism and international relations. Kagan's research and writings cover the history of warfare, American military commitments, and defense policy. He has authored books such as 'The Lessons of the Peloponnesian War' and 'Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy,' and contributed to policy debates through AEI publications, testimonies before Congress, and data-driven threat assessments on challenges from Iran, ISIS, and Russia. His alignment with neoconservative interventionism has drawn both praise for strategic foresight and criticism from anti-war advocates and some historians for contributing to prolonged U.S. engagements in the Middle East, with allegations of intellectual overreach in justifying the 2003 Iraq invasion based on flawed intelligence. Married to Kimberly Kagan, a fellow strategist and founder of the Institute for the Study of War, he continues to influence U.S. foreign policy debates as a key voice in conservative think tanks.