Mike Gallagher

Dr.

Mike Gallagher is a distinguished fellow at Hudson Institute. He is also head of defense at Palantir Technologies.

Dr. Gallagher represented Wisconsin’s Eighth District in the United States House of Representatives from 2017 to 2024. In the 118th Congress, he served as the founding chairman of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, as chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation, and on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. From 2019 to 2021, he served as cochairman of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.

Prior to Congress, Dr. Gallagher served for seven years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps as a counterintelligence/human intelligence (CI/HUMINT) officer and regional affairs officer for the Middle East and North Africa, earning the rank of captain. He deployed twice to Al Anbar Province, Iraq, as a commander of intelligence teams and served on General David Petraeus’s Central Command assessment team. He also spent three years working in the US intelligence community, including tours in the National Counterterrorism Center and the Drug Enforcement Administration. He subsequently served as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s lead Republican staffer for the Middle East, North Africa, and counterterrorism and as the national security advisor for Governor Scott Walker’s presidential campaign. He also worked in the private sector at an energy and supply chain management company in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Dr. Gallagher earned a PhD in international relations from Georgetown University, a master’s degree in security studies with honors from Georgetown, a master’s degree in government from Georgetown, and a master’s degree in strategic intelligence from National Intelligence University, where he won the award for academic excellence. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University with a focus on Near Eastern studies and Arabic and attended Middlebury’s Arabic immersion school. He was the honor graduate from Marine Corps Officer Basic School, the honor graduate from Marine Corps CI/HUMINT Basic Course, and the honor graduate from the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) Intelligence Officers Course.