Michael Pregent

Michael Pregent is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. He is a senior Middle East analyst, a former adjunct lecturer for the College of International Security Affairs, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.

Mr. Pregent is a former intelligence officer with over 28 years experience working on security, terrorism, counterinsurgency, and policy issues in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southwest Asia. He is an expert in Middle East and North Africa political and security issues, counter-terrorism analysis, stakeholder communications, and strategic planning.

He spent considerable time working against malign Iranian influence in Iraq as an advisor to Iraq’s Security and Intelligence apparatus, including an embedded advisory role with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s extra-constitutional Office of the Commander-in-Chief, an office set up to ensure Iranian-backed Shia militia party control of Iraq’s security and political process.

Mr. Pregent served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, served as a liaison officer in Egypt during the 2000 Intifada, as a counter-insurgency intelligence officer at CENTCOM in 2001, and as a company commander in Afghanistan in 2002.

Mr. Pregent served as an embedded advisor with the Peshmerga in Mosul from  2005-2006. Also, as a civilian SME working for DIA, he served as a political and military advisor to USF-I focusing on reconciliation, the insurgency, and Iranian influence in Iraq from 2007-2011. He was a violent extremism and foreign fighter analyst at CENTCOM from 2011-2013.

He holds a master's in strategic public relations from George Washington University and is a graduate of the US Army’s Defense Language Institute in Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Dialect. Mr. Pregent is a free-lance writer for the The Wall Street Journal and a contributing writer to the Daily Beast.

Mr. Pregent has numerous publications on ISIS, Iran’s Qods Force, and on Syria and Iraq. His writings have been published in Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Tower Magazine, Long War Journal, New America Foundation, CNN, Al-Jazeera, Business Insider, and the Daily Beast.

He frequently appears as an expert analyst on Shia militias, Iran, Iraq, and ISIS with appearances on BBC World News, Al-Jazeera International, CNN, CNN International, and Fox News.