Areas of Expertise

• Irregular warfare/hybrid threats/strategic competition
• National identity and societal resiliency
• Special Operations Forces 
• Insurgency, terrorism, and counterterrorism

Academic Degrees

• Ph.D., International Relations, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Master’s of Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School
• Bachelor of Arts, Cultural Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz

Heather S. Gregg is Professor of Irregular Warfare/Hybrid Threats at the George C. Marshall Center European Center for Security Studies, Garmisch, Germany. She is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. 

Prior to joining the Marshall Center, Dr. Gregg was a professor at the U.S. Army War College, and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where she worked primarily with Special Operations Forces. She is the 2017 recipient of the NPS school-wide Hamming Award for excellence in teaching.  Dr. Gregg was also an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation from 2003-2006. She has conducted research for USASOC, OSD, TRADOC, NCTC, JIEDDO, and Department of State. 

In addition to academic experience, Dr. Gregg has spent time in several regions of conflict, including Palestine/West Bank and the former Yugoslavia, in addition to working in Qatar and Japan, and studying in Hungary. From 2013-2015, she was part of teaching and engagement teams in Tajikistan. In 2016, she taught at the Indonesian Defense University on subjects relating to asymmetric warfare. Most recently, she has participated in a series of engagements with NATO’s Center of Excellence, Defense Against Terrorism in Ankara, Türkiye.

Dr. Gregg has published extensively on irregular warfare, religiously motivated conflict and extremism, including: Religious Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2020); “Religiously Motivated Violence” (Oxford University Press 2016); Building the Nation: Missed Opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan (University of Nebraska 2018); The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from the Crusades to Jihad (University of Nebraska 2014); and co-editor of The Three Circles of War: Understanding the Dynamics of Modern War in Iraq (Potomac, 2010).