Michael Patrick Mulroy

Mulroy is a retired U.S. Marine and served as a commissioned officer and an enlisted Marine on active duty and in the reserves. He served as an Armored Crewman (United States military occupation code (MOS) 1811) of a M1 Abrams tank, a Judge Advocate (MOS 4412) and an Infantry Officer (MOS 0302).[6] His military awards include the Joint Service Commendation Medal, the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, the Afghanistan Campaign Medal, the Iraq Campaign Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, among others.[23]

Mulroy was against the decision to pull all U.S. military forces out of Afghanistan. He explained that the U.S. should have kept a residual force that could have preserved everything that the coalition and Afghan partners had fought for the last 20 years.[24]

Mulroy is a retired Paramilitary Operations Officer (PMOO) from the Special Activities Center (formerly named Special Activities Division) of the CIA. PMOOs are a hybrid of a clandestine intelligence officer and a military special operator, belonging to the Special Operations Group (SOG) within SAC.[25] They are recruited primarily from the United States Special Operations Command.[26][27]

Mulroy joined the CIA in 1998. While at the CIA, Mulroy spent most of career in conflict areas.[28] His positions included service as a Chief of a Department in Special Activities Center (SAC), a Chief of Station, a Chief of an Expeditionary Team, a Chief of Base in Afghanistan, a Deputy Chief of a Branch in Special Activities Division (SAD) and a PMOO in a Branch in SAD, among others.[29]

Official DoD Photo

Mulroy was DASD from October 20, 2017 to December 1, 2019. The DASD for the Middle East is a member of the Senior Executive Service in the Secretary of Defense's office.[30] Mulroy was responsible for DoD policy and for representing the DoD in the interagency for the countries of Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.[6][7] As DASD for the Middle East, Mulroy was responsible for implementing the National Defense Strategy of 2018 in that region and the Irregular Warfare Annex (IWA) to that strategy.[31]

At a workshop at RAND Corporation in October 2019, Mulroy officially rolled out the IWA, saying it was a critical component of the 2018 NDS. He noted that irregular warfare (IW) included counter-insurgency (COIN), counter-terrorism (CT), unconventional warfare (UW), foreign internal defense (FID), sabotage and subversion, stabilization (warfare), and information operations (IO). He continued that IW had been perceived as limited to the CT effort used to fight violent extremist organizations but should be applied to all competition areas, including the great powers of China and Russia and the rogue states of North Korea and Iran. Mulroy said that the U.S. must be prepared to respond with "aggressive, dynamic, and unorthodox approaches to IW" to be competitive across these priorities.[32]

In late 2020, during the delay in the transition between the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration, the incoming team for the DoD reached out to several former members of then-Secretary James Mattis for assistance. Mulroy was one of the former officials and one of the few that agreed to assist.[33]

Mulroy is a co-maker along with U.S. Navy SEAL Eric Oehlerich, of the documentary film, My Star in the Sky, which in the Acholi dialect of Uganda and South Sudan is “Lakalatwe.” The film portrays the relationship between two former child soldiers in the Lord's Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony, who rebelled against the government of Uganda for decades. Mulroy's goal in making the film was to draw attention to the ongoing abuse of child soldiers in many countries. Foreign Policy reports that the documentary came about after Mulroy and Oehlerich met a family of former child soldiers during Operation Observant Compass (OOC).[15] Mulroy called OOC a “model” for how to address child soldiers using influence operations instead of lethal force and working with Non-Government Organizations (NGOs)s who found mothers of child soldiers and had them broadcast messages over the radio to come home. Mulroy said that he hopes that OOC serves as a model for future programs to address child soldiers, as well as other operations, as it showed how the U.S. military could use “soft power, influence operations” and other aspects of so-called “irregular warfare” to fight the problem.[15]

This documentary has been screened at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs,[34] the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C. based think tank for international affairs,[35] the Enough Project, a non-profit group to end crimes against humanity,[36] Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy,[37] and the Truman National Security Project.[38][39][15]

In an interview for the podcast Frog Logic, a podcast primarily for the special operations community, Mulroy said, "I don’t think anyone became a Marine, or a SEAL, or a [CIA] paramilitary officer with the idea that they were going to fight a child.”[40]

Mulroy is on the Board of Directors for the Grassroots Reconciliation Group (GRG).[41] GRG was initiated as part of a United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded program called the Northern Uganda Peace Initiative (NUPI) to reconcile and rehabilitate former child soldiers of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army.