BIO: Rear Admiral Michael T Franken

Rear Adm. Franken served as the vice director, Strategy, Plans, and Policy (J5) at U.S. Central Command since July 2008. In that position, he was involved in regional security engagement, regional planning efforts, and future force posture in U.S. Central Command.

His formative operational assignments consisted of postings on guided missile destroyers. He was the first commanding officer of USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81) and took the ship through work up training with the Royal Navy. His operational tours in USS King (DDG 41), USS Dahlgren (DDG 43), USS Barry (DDG 52), and Churchill garnered multiple Battle "E" decorations.  As commodore, he commanded Destroyer Squadron 28 and Commander, Task Group 152.0 in the Eisenhower Strike Group from 2006-2007.

Ashore, Franken served in four operational staff positions ranging from a readiness squadron to a four-star fleet command. He also served in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, in four other Pentagon staff positions, and in the Joint Staff as United States Pacific Command division chief and deputy JOD chief in the Joint Operations Directorate. He presented the worldwide orders book to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from 2003 to 2005, and was the first military officer to serve as a military legislative fellow for late Senator Ted Kennedy. He authored past Navy posture statements in the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel, congressional testimony in Navy’s Deep Blue, and Navy’s 2003 forcible entry study.

Raised in rural Iowa, Franken is a 1981 distinguished Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps graduate from the College of Engineering at the University of Nebraska, and obtained a Master of Science degree from the College of Physics at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is a graduate of the Brookings Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Seminar XXI.

Franken is the new Commander, Combined Joint Task Force, Horn of Africa in Djibouti, Africa.