Admiral Craig Faller, USN (Ret.)

Admiral Craig Faller is a retired four-star flag officer with decades of global and national security leadership experience. He currently serves as a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Senior Fellow at the National Defense University, Senior Fellow at Florida International University, and on the advisory board of the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory.

From 2018 to 2021, Faller led the United States Southern Command in Miami, Florida, where he commanded a diverse team of 7000 people with an annual operating budget of over $1 billion. In this role, Faller enhanced Western Hemisphere security by building strong, trusted partnerships between the United States military and Latin American and Caribbean security forces. His team rapidly and effectively responded to myriad complex security challenges, including transnational criminal organizations, the Venezuela crisis, the global pandemic, and the August 2021 Haiti earthquake. Previously, Faller served as the senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense, James Mattis. As the Department of the Navy’s Chief of Legislative Affairs, he represented the Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations on Capitol Hill. Leading the Navy’s 5,000-person recruiting organization, Faller started a digital recruiting program and a new branding, marketing and advertising strategy. As the Director of Operations for United States Central Command, he coordinated military operations and activities across the Middle East. Earlier in his career he commanded an aircraft carrier strike group and two warships.

Faller is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy with a bachelor of science in systems engineering and the Naval Postgraduate School with a master’s in national security affairs.