Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post from 2000 through 2008. Until the end of 1999 he had the same beat at the Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for 17 years.

He reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2000 for a series of articles on how the U.S. military might change to meet the new demands of the 21st century. It's posted at pulitzer.org.

Ricks also was part of a Washington Post team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for reporting about the beginning of the U.S. counteroffensive against terrorism. Those articles are also posted at pulitzer.org.

He is the author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, which was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.

His second book on that war, The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, was published on Feb. 10, 2009.

He also wrote Making the Corps, which won the Washington Monthly's "Political Book of the Year" award. He also has written on defense matters for the Atlantic Monthly and other publications. His first novel, A Soldier's Duty, about the U.S. military intervening in Afghanistan, was published by Random House in June 2001 -- some four months before the U.S. actually did intervene there.

Born in Massachusetts in 1955, he grew up in New York and Afghanistan and graduated from Yale in 1977. He now lives in Silver Spring, Md., with his wife and children. For recreation he enjoys whitewater kayaking, downhill skiing, and reading military history. He is a member of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, the Society for Military History, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military for the Washington Post from 2000 through 2008.

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