Curt A. Klun, DSNS

Dr. Curt A. Klun is a national security strategist and scholar-practitioner with nearly three decades of service at the U.S. Department of Justice. He spent fourteen years at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Special Operations Division, supporting integrated operations among U.S. and foreign law-enforcement, intelligence, and defense partners against transnational drug-trafficking networks. He received four DEA Exceptional Service Awards.

From 2014 to 2025, Dr. Klun served as a Senior Policy Analyst with the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Executive Office, developing national-level policies, strategies, and plans addressing transnational organized crime as both a public-safety and national-security threat. He built new interagency relationships and coordination processes, while strengthening established partnerships across the law-enforcement, intelligence, defense, and national-security communities. He also served as Strategic Planner to the U.S. Council on Transnational Organized Crime and at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy on the staff of the United States Interdiction Coordinator. His work has emphasized strategic planning, national security reform, interagency integration, and whole-of-government responses to adaptive networks.

Dr. Klun’s professional and academic work focuses on adapting hierarchical national-security institutions to confront networked threats, while preserving constitutional governance and democratic accountability. He holds graduate degrees from George Mason University and the Marine Corps Command and Staff College and earned his Doctor of Statecraft and National Security from The Institute of World Politics. In 2025, he received IWP’s Outstanding Alumni Service to IWP Award.

Publications

• For a More Perfect Union (working title), book manuscript in development.
• Contributing writer, Joint Concept for Competing, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2023.
• Curt A. Klun, “War on Drugs: Lessons Learned from 35 Years of Fighting Asymmetric Threats,” Project on National Security Reform, October 2010.