David E. Firester, Ph.D., is a political scientist and senior intelligence analyst whose research examines the intersection of cognition, warfare, and institutional adaptation. He is the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (TRAC Intelligence Press, 2025), which argues that intelligence and military failures are rarely about information scarcity; they are about interpretive rigidity.
He brings two decades of all-source analytical experience to that argument: U.S. Army intelligence, including a year-long deployment to Iraq; the Defense Intelligence Agency; the Department of Homeland Security; corporate threat intelligence for Fortune 500 clients; and earlier sworn police service in New York. A combat veteran, he is Founder & CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, an open-source intelligence and investigative research firm, and founder of The Gennisi Group, a geopolitical intelligence consulting firm.
He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Center, CUNY, in 2023, and an M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University in 2011. From 2011 to 2020 he taught at four CUNY colleges: Politics of Terrorism at Hunter College; Introduction to Political Science and Domestic and International Use of Force at Queens College; and American Government at Baruch College and John Jay College.
His peer-reviewed work appears in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. His commentary has appeared in RealClearDefense, inFOCUS Quarterly (Jewish Policy Center), The Daily Wire, The Algemeiner, Middle East Forum, American Thinker, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Lima Charlie News, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), and FrontPage Magazine.
David Firester’s Security Forum began in 2012 as a free public resource on terrorism, intelligence, and national security. Its archive remains here. New writing is published on Substack.
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