Rachel Ellehuus
RUSI Director-GeneralSenior Management
Biography
Rachel Ellehuus became Director-General of RUSI on 6 January 2025.
Rachel joined RUSI after serving nearly three years at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as the United States Secretary of Defense Representative in Europe and Defense Advisor to the United States’ Mission to NATO.
Prior to that, she was Deputy Director of the Europe and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC and a Senior Advisor at WestExec Advisors. Previously, she served in multiple roles in the U.S. Department of Defense to include Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy. Her time in the Pentagon also included an exchange to the UK Ministry of Defence's Strategy Unit, where she worked on the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review.
Rachel has numerous publications to her name, most recently Europe’s High-End Military Challenges (2022) and The Challenge of Political Will in Europe (2022). She holds a BA from Colgate University and a MA from the College of Europe.
