Dr. Jeffrey Gardner

Leadership.

Dr. Jeffrey Gardner

Chief of Curriculum and Senior Faculty

Dr. Jeffrey Gardner serves as the Chief of Curriculum and Senior Faculty at the Irregular Warfare Center (IWC), where he has led educational development and instructional design since 2023. A premier subject matter expert in intelligence, counter-terrorism, and hybrid warfare, Dr. Gardner shapes the academic frameworks that prepare the joint force and international partners for complex global security challenges. He brings over 18 years of elite instructional excellence to the Center, spanning both military and civilian academic institutions.

Dr. Gardner’s foundational expertise is rooted in a distinguished career as a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, serving at all echelons from tactical units to strategic headquarters. His operational background includes key deployments to the Balkans, Afghanistan, and within a Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq. At the strategic level, he served on the staff of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and within the U.S. European Command. Following his military retirement, Dr. Gardner seamlessly transitioned his tactical and strategic insights to multinational defense posture, serving as a counter-terrorism planner and instructor for NATO Allied Command Transformation.

An accomplished academic and instructor, Dr. Gardner spent a decade on the faculty at the NATO Special Operations University. There, he designed and taught advanced intelligence courses, including Countering Hybrid Threats and Comprehensive Defense, for Allied Special Operations Command (SOFCOM). His extensive history in professional military education also includes tenure as an Assistant Professor and Curriculum Lead at the U.S. National Defense University’s Joint and Combined Warfighting School, where his contributions to joint professional education earned him Faculty of the Year honors in 2011.

In addition to his academic roles, Dr. Gardner has demonstrated leadership in domestic crisis operations, having served as a Colonel commanding a state defense force brigade dedicated to incident response, command and control, and crisis management. A highly credentialed scholar-practitioner, he holds a PhD in Homeland Security, three master’s degrees, and is a graduate of the Air War College. He is formally designated as both an Army Strategist and a U.S. Joint Planner, and continues to influence the next generation of security professionals by instructing civilian university courses in Homeland Security and Defense.