Charles J. Hitch (January 9, 1910 – September 11, 1995) was an American economist and Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1965.
He was educated at Kemper Military School before leaving for the University of Arizona, where he became a member of the Delta Chi fraternity and received a BA in economics in 1931.
That year, he became the first Rhodes Scholar to join the university's faculty as a fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford.
Between 1948 and 1961, he was head of Rand Corporation's Economics Division in Santa Monica, California.
He was posthumously elected to the 2002 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.