Biography

Larry M. Wortzel is a leading authority on Asia, China, strategy, and national security. He is Senior Fellow in Asian Security at the American Foreign Policy Council and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute of Strategic Studies. From September 2015 to August 2021, Wortzel was an adjunct research professor at the U.S. Army War College. He consults on strategy and policy for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, U.S. military services, agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, and American defense corporations as president of Asia Strategies and Risks, LLC.

Wortzel is a retired U.S. Army colonel who spent much of his 32-year military career in the Asia-Pacific region. During a thirty-two-year career in the U.S. Marine Corps and Army his experience spans service as an infantry unit leader, a signals intelligence collector, a human source intelligence collector, a counter-intelligence officer, and as a strategist. Twelve years of his service was in the Asia-Pacific region. A graduate of the U.S. Army War College, Dr. Wortzel earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Political Science from the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

His experience in the military started in 1964 with three years in the U.S. Marine Corps where he was an infantryman. After attending Rutgers University, in 1970 he joined the U.S. Army as a signals intelligence collector. He studied Mandarin Chinese at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California and was assigned to with the Army Security Agency to Northeast Thailand, near Vientiane, Laos. There, he monitored China’s military activities during the Vietnam war. By 1973, he graduated from the Army’s Infantry Officer Candidate, Airborne, and Ranger Schools. After serving as an infantry officer for four years, including a tour of duty in an infantry brigade on the demilitarized zone in South Korea. In 1978 he shifted back to military intelligence, attending the military intelligence officer advanced course and training as a counterintelligence human source intelligence officer. 

Wortzel served with the U.S. Pacific Command’s intelligence center as an intelligence analyst on China and Vietnam. He traveled widely throughout East Asia as part his duties. The Army then selected him as a foreign area officer specializing in China and Asia.  He completed his Ph.D. work at in comparative politics at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and studied advanced Chinese at the Defense Language Institute and at the National University of Singapore.  During his time at the University of Hawaii, Wortzel spent nine weeks in China with a group of graduate students participating in geography research with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  From Singapore, he also traveled in China, Korea, Japan, Republic of Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.  

In 1983, Wortzel returned to the U.S. and was assigned to the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command.  In that capacity he served as a counterintelligence special agent. He was assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense as a counterintelligence officer and espionage investigator. He also developed policies and programs to protect emerging U.S. technology and weapon systems. 

Wortzel was assigned by the Defense Intelligence Agency as assistant Army attaché in the U.S. Embassy in China from 1988 to 1990. There he traveled throughout China observing political and military events and was part of a security assistance program designed to help the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s defenses against the Soviet Union. He spent weeks at one of China’s military exercise areas with an artillery division and made a parachute jump with the PLA’s 15th Airborne Army. He observed and reported on events during the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Massacre and helped evacuate U.S. citizens, embassy dependents and U.S. students from China after June 4.