A Pentagon Trailblazer, Rethinking U.S. Defense - Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times.

Michèle A. Flournoy, one of the highest ranking women in the history of the Pentagon, did not have a childhood that would immediately suggest a future as a defense policy intellectual who is rethinking how America fights its wars.

Her mother was an actress and singer who performed at the Copacabana, the legendary New York nightclub, and was the understudy to Vivian Blaine in “Oklahoma” on Broadway. Her father was a cinematography director in television at Paramount Studios. She herself is a 1979 graduate of Beverly Hills High School who spent her summers playing, she said, “a lot of beach volleyball.”

But Ms. Flournoy, who went on to Harvard and then Balliol College at Oxford (“I majored in rowing”), has spent her entire professional life immersed in the theory and practice of war, from the arms control debate of the 1980s to the counterinsurgency doctrine of today...

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