Welcome Christian Lowe

While it's been a pleasure holding down the fort over the last few weeks, I'm very pleased to announce the arrival of Defense Tech's permanent editor, Christian Lowe. If you've followed military news over the last five years or so, Christian's name should be familiar.

Before joining us at Defense Tech, Christian was a senior writer for The Politico covering defense and national security issues after spending five years with the Military Times newspapers. Always running to the sound of gunfire, he has covered military operations worldwide, embedding with Army and Marine units in both Iraq and Afghanistan, observing detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, covering humanitarian missions in Lebanon and New Orleans, participating in training exercises at military bases from California to Florida and reporting on military policy and budgets in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.

Christian traveled to Afghanistan in 2002 and 2004, spending time in Kabul, Khost and Kandahar chasing the bin Laden trail and scouring the countryside with U.S. forces for Taliban holdouts. He went to Iraq in June of 2003, living in downtown Baghdad and traveling throughout the south of the country for six weeks. Christian returned to Iraq in late 2005, spending a month in Ramadi during the December parliamentary elections and patrolling the streets of Hit in al Anbar province with the U.S. Marines during the new year.

In 2005, Christian was awarded the Associated Press Managing Editor's Association award for investigative journalism after exposing that the Marine Corps had fielded tens of thousands of body armor vests to troops in Iraq that had not passed quality assurance testing by government auditors. He was also part of an Emmy-nominated documentary team that followed a group of Marine Corps officers from their first days of officer training to the battlefields of Iraq.

Raised in Charlottesville, Va., and a graduate of the University of Virginia, Christian lives on Capitol Hill with his wife Catherine and his Jack Russell terriers Noor Whali and Banjo. When he's not sniffing around for the latest defense and military news, he likes to take advantage of any opportunity to slip out of town to go hunting, fishing or surfing.

Welcome, Christian. We're psyched to have you onboard.

-- Ward