Anna Simons is a Professor Emerita of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School. She joined the Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict curriculum at NPS (1998-2019) after six years as an assistant and then associate professor of anthropology at UCLA. She has written several books and multiple monographs: Networks of Dissolution: Somalia Undone (1995); The Company They Keep: Life Inside the U.S. Army Special Forces (1997); The Sovereignty Solution: A Commonsense Approach to Global Security (2011, co-authored); Got Vision? Unity of Vision in Policy and Strategy (2010); 21st Century Cultures of War: Advantage Them (2013); 21st Century Challenges of Command: A View from the Field (2017), and most recently a not-yet-published monograph about military advising. She has overseen various research efforts for the Office of Net Assessment and other offices within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as well as for several different military commands. As a member of the Defense Analysis Department, Simons happily taught courses in the anthropology of conflict, military advising, low intensity conflict in Africa, political anthropology, and comparative SOF. She also ran six iterations of the Long-Term Strategy Seminar sponsored by ONA. Once upon a time she attended Harvard, briefly worked as a journalist, then as a presidential speechwriter, spent multiple years as a vagabond abroad (predominantly in Africa and Israel), accidentally went back to Harvard for her PhD, and even more accidentally ended up in Somalia for her dissertation fieldwork. Way back when she had hoped to live with camel nomads. She now lives in Montana among cattle ranchers.