Michael E. O'Hanlon

Michael Edward O'Hanlon (born May 16, 1961) is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, specializing in defense and foreign policy issues. He began his career as a budget analyst in the defense field.

O'Hanlon earned an A.B. in 1982 (in Physics), M.S.E. in 1987, M.A. in 1988, and a Ph.D in 1991 all from Princeton University, and is now a visiting lecturer there. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kinshasa, Congo in the 1980s. O'Hanlon is reasonably fluent in French, having taught physics in French in the Peace Corps for two years in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1980s.

O'Hanlon married Cathryn Ann Garland in 1994. They have two daughters. In addition to his work in the U.S. foreign policy field, he is an activist for people with special needs.

Along with Brookings scholar Philip Gordon, O'Hanlon wrote in the Washington Post in late 2001 that any invasion of Iraq would be difficult and demanding and require large numbers of troops. This article led to Kenneth Adelman's famous prediction of a 'cakewalk' in a subsequent rebuttal in that same newspaper, but Gordon and O'Hanlon's argument was validated by subsequent events on the ground. He argued at a major forum on Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in the fall of 2002 that an invasion of Iraq could lead to 150,000 U.S. troops remaining in that country for 5 years, while expressing his view that a war should occur only if inspections failed to fully confirm the disarmament of Saddam's stocks of weapons of mass destruction.

By late 2002 and early 2003, O'Hanlon appeared in the American media as a public proponent of the Iraq War. Interviewed by Bill O'Reilly in Fox News in February 2003, he was asked “Any doubt about going to war with Saddam?” O'Hanlon replied “Not much doubt.”

O'Hanlon predicted in early 2003 in the journal Orbis that an invasion of Iraq could lead to as many as several thousand American fatalities, a prediction also confirmed by later developments. He decided in 2003 to create Brookings' Iraq Index, a web-based resource tracking trends in the country that has been perhaps Brookings most widely viewed site this decade, and which led to later decisions to create Afghanistan and Pakistan indices at Brookings as well. Excerpts of these indices ran on a quarterly basis in the New York Times from 2004 through 2012.

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