Malcolm Nance

Malcolm Nance
Nance in the early 2000s
Born	Malcolm Wrightson Nance (1961-09-20) September 20, 1961 (age 55) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Alma mater	Excelsior College (B.A. Arabic)
Occupation	Author, counterterrorism and intelligence commentator
Years active	1981–present
Employer	Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies (TAPSTRI), executive director
Known for	National security, Counterterrorism intelligence, Islamic extremism, SERE, torture
Notable work	Terrorist Recognition Handbook An End to al-Qaeda The Terrorists of Iraq Defeating ISIS The Plot to Hack America
Website	Official website
Military career
Allegiance	United States of America
Service/branch	United States Navy
Years of service	1981–2001
Rank	Senior chief petty officer

Malcolm Wrightson Nance (born September 20, 1961) is an American author and media commentator on terrorism, intelligence, insurgency and torture. He is a former United States Navy senior chief petty officer specializing in naval cryptology.

Nance is an expert on intelligence and terrorism, and frequently discusses the history, personalities, and organization of jihadi radicalization and al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL); Southwest Asian and African terror groups; as well as counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare. Fluent in Arabic, he is active in the field of national security policy particularly, in anti- and counter-terrorism intelligence, terrorist strategy and tactics, torture and counter-ideology in combating Islamic extremism. In 2016, he published the book, Defeating ISIS: Who They Are, How They Fight, What They Believe, and published The Plot to Hack America the same year.

In 2014, he became the executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies (TAPSTRI), a Hudson, New York-based think tank.

Nance was born in Philadelphia, and attended the city's West Catholic Boys High School. He studied Spanish, French, and Latin languages, and took advantage of free classes in Russian and Chinese offered at South Philadelphia High School on Saturdays. He graduated from New York's Excelsior College with a degree in Arabic. Nance was an interpreter for Russian, and began working in the intelligence field through research into the history of the Soviet Union and its spying agency the KGB. He subsequently devoted years of research to analyzing Middle East terrorism and sovereign nations with ties to the Russian Federation.