Nathaniel Fick

Nathaniel Fick is President Center for a New American Security, who was promoted from Chief Operating Officer when the co-founders, Michell Flournoy and Kurt Campbell, took policy-level positions in the Obama Administration's U.S. Department of State. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Fick is considered one of the intellectual advocates of the counterinsurgency doctrine articulated by GEN David Petraeus.

Fick began his career as a United States Marine Corps officer in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. In Iraq, he was in Force Reconnaissance, a special operations unit. He left as a captain, dissatisfied with command and policy trends. He documented his concerns in what became a 2005 New York Times bestseller One Bullet Away, required reading for Marine officers deploying to United States Central Command.

His ideas have been strongly influenced by his undergraduate major in classics. "..the idea that we as members of a free society bear an obligation to serve in its defense, at least for a little while. Cincinnatus traded his plow for a sword ... and then back for a plow. It's why I joined the Marines, and then returned to the civilian world--but I learned more in those five years than during any other period in my life."

Military advisor

After his uniformed service, he stayed involved with military matters, and was a civilian instructor at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy,

Politics

In 2007, he wrote that "There are five items on my foreign policy wish list, shaped both by pride at having served alongside our nation’s flag in Afghanistan and Iraq and by the reality of having buried too many comrades beneath it:"

• Restore the American ideal in the world, recognizing that force is part of the national arsenal, not its only means of implementing grand strategy
• Dclare "explicit the threeway relationship between energy, the environment, and national security."
• Prevent nuclear terrorism with strong counterproliferation efforts, controlling poorly accounted nuclear materials as well as complete nuclear weapons
• Insert necessary ambiguity into U.S. policy toward Iraq. "We must draw down while keeping sufficient forces in the region to deny al-Qaeda a safe haven and to prevent genocide in Iraq. Total withdrawal is irresponsible, and so is talk of deadlines."
• "Call on all Americans, not only on political loyalists, to serve...If our policies are to reflect our ideals, then the military, the Foreign Service, the intelligence community, and all the other arms of our government must be diverse cross-sections of American society."

He spoke at 2008 Democratic National Convention and later served on the Obama administration Presidential Transition Team at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.