Rear Admiral Philip Yu, US Navy (ret), is a nonresident senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
During his naval career, Yu served his at-sea tours aboard fast attack nuclear submarines and ballistic missile submarines, along with staff tours at fleet headquarters in Yokosuka, Japan and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. After transferring to the US Navy’s Foreign Area Officer community, Yu served multiple tours overseas working alongside allied nations, from the transatlantic alliance at NATO, coalition headquarters in Afghanistan, to combined forces headquarters in South Korea, as well as with partners in Taiwan. As a staff officer at US Indo-Pacific Command and on the Navy headquarters staff at the Pentagon, Yu led trilateral military cooperation initiatives between Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington. As a senior officer, Yu was responsible for risk reduction dialogue between the US military and the People’s Liberation Army of China, and he culminated his career as the US defense attaché to the Russian Federation, advising and reporting on events in Moscow during the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion of neighboring Ukraine.