Eric Schmitt

Eric Schmitt is a veteran national security correspondent for The New York Times, where he has spent four decades reporting on U.S. military affairs, counterterrorism, and global security challenges. With a career spanning more than 40 years at the paper, Schmitt began as a news assistant and rose through the ranks to become one of the Times’s leading voices on defense and foreign policy.

For more than three decades, he has focused on the U.S. military and overseas counterterrorism operations, covering every major conflict involving American forces since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. His reporting has taken him across Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe, where he has written extensively on evolving security threats and U.S. strategy abroad. Over the course of his career, he has shared in four Pulitzer Prizes for distinguished journalism.

Schmitt is the co-author of "Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda," an in-depth examination of America’s covert fight against Al Qaeda. He began his journalism career covering local education for the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick, Washington. A graduate of Williams College with a degree in political science, he also studied in Madrid for a year and later served as a journalism fellow at Stanford University.