August Cole is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council. He is the director of the Art of Future War project, which explores narrative fiction and visual media for insight into the future of conflict.
His fiction writing tackles themes at the core of American foreign policy and national security in the twenty-first century, including the privatization of military and intelligence operations and the future of American power in the Pacific.
He is also writer-in-residence at Avascent, an independent strategy and management-consulting firm focused on the defense and aerospace sectors.
From 2007 to 2010, Cole reported on the defense industry for the Wall Street Journal. From Washington, he covered companies ranging from Boeing to Blackwater, as well as broader defense policy and political matters. He helped break many major national security stories, including foreign cyber spies hacking into the US Joint Strike Fighter program, major defense contractors doing “Smart Power” development work in Africa, US sales of F-16 fighters to Iraq, and a Blackwater civilian shooting incident in Afghanistan. He has discussed his reporting on CNBC, The John Batchelor Show, PRI’s The World, To the Point, and NPR’s Day to Day.
From 1998 to 2006, Cole worked as an editor and a reporter for MarketWatch.com, a pioneering financial news website, where he covered defense issues, including private military contractors. He also has extensive experience writing about the automotive and airline industries, as well as the Internet economy. Cole was named to the Journal of Financial Reporting’s Top 30 Journalists under 30 in 2002 and 2003.
He holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Cole is also a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
