Ph.D. in political science, University of California Santa Barbara; M.S.S. in strategic studies, U.S. Army War College
Christopher M. Schnaubelt is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. His primary research areas are homeland security/homeland defense, counterinsurgency, stability operations, security force assistance, and partner capacity development. Prior to joining RAND, he was deployed to Kabul as a U.S. Department of the Army Civilian serving as the Senior Advisor to the Afghan Deputy Minister of Interior for Strategy and Policy as part of the U.S. DoD Ministry of Defense Advisor (MoDA) program. He served as the Transformation Chair at the NATO Defense College in Rome, Italy from 2008 to 2011. From 2006 to 2008, he worked for the State Department in U.S. Embassy Baghdad as the Deputy Director for National Security Affairs in the Joint Strategic Plans and Assessments (JSPA) office with projects that included writing the 2006 Joint Campaign Plan Assessment and working directly for Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus as a co-director of the Joint Strategic Assessment Team that drafted a new joint campaign plan to implement “the surge” in 2007. He is also a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel with assignments that included brigade-level command of a Total Army School System training regiment, Chief of Policy for CJTF-7 in Iraq, command of two different tank battalions, and Director of Training and Director of Research and Analysis at the National Interagency Civil-Military Institute while serving in the California Army National Guard; and a deployment in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina as Director of Logistics for Area Support Team-Balkans while serving in the U.S. Army Reserve.
