Douglas Abbott Macgregor (born January 4, 1947) is a retired colonel in the United States Army, former government official, author, consultant, and political commentator.

[1] An Armor Branch officer by background, Macgregor was a leader in an early tank battle in the Gulf War[2] and was a top planner in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

On November 11, 2020, a Pentagon spokesperson announced that Macgregor had been hired to serve as senior advisor to the acting secretary of defense,[5] a post he held for less than three months.

[4] Breaking the Phalanx was rare in that an active duty military author was challenging the status quo with detailed reform proposals for the reorganization of U.S. Army ground forces.

[12] It advocated that "the Army restructure itself into modularly organized, highly mobile, self-contained, combined arms teams that look extraordinarily like the Marine Corps' Air Ground Task Forces".

[3] In the fall of 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had read Breaking the Phalanx, insisted that General Tommy Franks and his planning staff meet with Colonel Macgregor on January 16–17, 2002 to discuss a concept for intervention in Iraq involving the use of an armored heavy force of roughly 50,000 troops in a no warning attack straight into Baghdad.

[19] Carlson regularly praised Macgregor, describing him as "our first choice for foreign policy analysis" and "one of the people we trust to give us real information".

[19] In May 2019, on the Carlson show, Macgregor urged Trump to replace senior national security officials, describing them as "part of this bipartisan globalist elite".

[19] When John Bolton was removed from the White House in September 2019, Macgregor was one of five finalists under consideration for selection as President Trump's National Security Advisor.

[20][21][22] In 2019, Aviv Kochavi, Chief of the Israeli Defense Force General Staff made MacGregor's 2003 book, Transformation under Fire, required reading for high-ranking officers.

[23] In April 2020, Macgregor was reportedly Trump's second choice candidate to succeed John Rood as undersecretary of defense for policy, a position given instead to fellow Fox contributor Anthony Tata.

[24][25] As of 2024, he was the chief executive officer of a group called Our Country Our Choice,[26][independent source needed] and an associate member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

[7] He had argued that the German concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, used to cope with Germany's Nazi past and its atrocities during World War II, was a "sick mentality".

[35] In December 2020, President Trump appointed Macgregor to a three-year term on the advisory board of the United States Military Academy at West Point, his alma mater.

[37] During the beginning of the Iraq War, Macgregor disagreed with those who wanted to slow the advance into Baghdad in order to fight Fedayeen paramilitary forces.

[7] In a 2013 radio appearance, Macgregor spoke of an "entitled" "underclass" of people that were concentrated in "large urban areas", and the threat he said they posed: "And when the food stamps stop, when the free services end, when the heating bills aren't paid and the heating doesn't come through in many of these large cities—Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles—this underclass that resides in these places, I think could become very violent.

[24] In April 2021, on Frank Morano's radio show, Macgregor blamed the Democratic Party for non-European immigration purportedly to "outnumber the numbers of Americans of European ancestry".

[5] In a 2016 presentation to military students, Macgregor said that "old alliances like NATO may vanish", arguing that it is "time to reexamine U.S. investment in 'allies' that are doing too little to secure their own sovereign interests" and that the "Cold War ended 27 years ago".

[49] Macgregor has made statements in support of Israel having defensible borders, the annexation of the Golan Heights, and the decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

After one of his appearances, Macgregor's comments were characterized by veteran Fox News Pentagon correspondent Jennifer Griffin as "distorting" and "appeasement" and that he was being an "apologist" for Putin.

After Griffin's remarks, Tucker Carlson—who hosted Macgregor on two successive nights—remarked, "Unlike many of the so-called reporters you see on television, he is not acting secretly as a flack for Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon.

[8][61] His opinions on Russia and Ukraine have caused controversy, with some including Liz Cheney describing Macgregor as being a member of the "Putin wing of the GOP.

Liz Cheney tweeted in response: "Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch – Why do you continually put Douglas MacGregor on @FoxNews to spread Putin's propaganda and lies?

"[70][additional citation(s) needed] In an October 2021 speech to the Serbian American Voters Alliance, Macgregor blamed America's problems on what "the Russians used to call certain individuals many, many years ago, rootless cosmopolitans".