Lieutenant Colonel Joel Rayburn, a contributor to the Hoover Institution Working Group on Islamism and the International Order, is a senior military fellow at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies. A US Army intelligence officer with nineteen years of experience in intelligence and political-military affairs, he has specialized in strategic analyses of the Middle East for the past decade.  He has served in a variety of assignments and deployments in the Middle East and South Asia, with special emphasis on Iraq and Afghanistan.  Rayburn received his undergraduate degree in history and English literature from the US Military Academy in 1992 and a master’s degree in history from Texas A&M in 2002.  From 2002 to 2005 he was an assistant professor of history at the US Military Academy.