Casey Mahoney

Casey Mahoney is an Associate Political Scientist in RAND’s Defense and Political Sciences (DPS) department. His research focuses on the international governance of AI, U.S.-China competition and cooperation, security cooperation and alliance management, and strategy and force development. His doctoral research examines how coalitions’ wartime command-and-control systems function as international institutions that promote partnered militaries’ strategic effectiveness.

Prior to his Ph.D. studies and joining RAND, Casey served as served as a Nunn-Lugar Fellow at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he contributed to the Department’s counter-ISIL team as country director for Jordan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Policy, from 2015 to 2017 and supported oversight of counter-WMD programs in the Indo-Pacific in OSD, Acquisitions, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L) from 2013 to 2015. He has also conducted research at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington; the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna, Austria; and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California.

His work appears in Understanding Battlefield Coalitions (Routledge, 2024), The Oxford Handbook of AI Governance (Oxford University Press, 2024), Orbis, the Washington Post Monkey Cage blog, and elsewhere. Casey holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and a B.A. in Russian from Middlebury College.