Claire Russo joined the Marine Corps after earning her bachelor's degree in Political Science from Tulane University. Claire was trained as an intelligence officer and spent most of her time in the service mapping and targeting al Qaeda and Islamic State networks in the Middle East. While there, she developed an expertise in Sunni political dynamics. After her time in the Marines, Russo worked as a civilian advisor to the Army and spent over a year in Eastern Afghanistan building a program to employ women strategically in US counterinsurgency efforts.
Upon her return to the US, Russo won an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations to study the role of women in conflict and combat. Russo worked with policy agents in Washington DC, as well as operational military forces in the US, to effectively integrate women into every aspect of American Foreign Policy. Additionally, she trained teams of women to support the special operations forces and developed programs of instruction for military units deploying to Afghanistan on the effective employment of women in counterinsurgency campaigns.
Claire continued her work on inclusive and effective foreign policy while working with agents of USAID, DoS and DoD to build operational relationships between agencies. Streamlining process, maximizing workflows and increasing efficiency of foreign policy was the focus of Claire's work in the last several years. She worked on a special project to increase the ability of civilian technical companies to work in the open source intelligence space and tailor their products to the U.S. intelligence community.
Most recently, Claire ran for Congress in the fifth district of Virginia and then served as the chief of staff of the Veterans Military Families Coalition for the Biden Campaign. Claire is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. She is married to an active duty soldier and is the mother of three children.