Greg Jaffe has roamed widely for The Washington Post in recent years. Through deep reporting and engaging writing, he has chronicled how theme park workers struggled to survive the pandemic.
He scored the first interview with the whistleblower who helped trigger Donald Trump’s first impeachment. He profiled a barista who fought to unionize Starbucks.
He spent time with a high school civics class in Pennsylvania before and after the 2024 election.
But Greg has always been drawn regularly back to a topic that he long distinguished himself covering: the U.S. military. A new administration is taking over. A new defense secretary is also promising an era of disruption. He is eager to return to the Pentagon beat full time. And we’re thrilled to announce that he is coming to do so for The Times.
Greg will be joining an already all-star lineup of Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and John Ismay. Together they will be looking to break news. They aim to provide smart analysis. They will file compelling enterprise as the Trump administration reshapes the country’s national security posture. We will track Pete Hegseth’s promised efforts to shake up the Pentagon at a time of dangerous global instability.
Greg joined The Post in 2009 after a 14-year stint at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a member of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Pentagon coverage. He spent his first three years at The Post covering the Defense Department and regularly embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He then covered the White House in the last two years of the Obama administration before taking on a series of narrative and feature writing jobs. He was a Pulitzer finalist for his stories in 2020 on the suffering and disruption of theme park workers as their jobs disappeared during the pandemic.
He is the co-author of “The Fourth Star,” a book about the lives of four Army generals who commanded troops in Iraq. A D.C.-area native, Greg graduated from Williams College and started his career at The Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama.