President-elect Donald Trump tapped Kathleen Troia “KT” McFarland to be Deputy National Security Advisor, the transition team announced Friday.

Mcfarland will be answering to retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, whom Trump recently appointed to be his National Security Advisor. The post of deputy national security adviser does not require the confirmation of the Senate.

A former Fox News national security analyst, McFarland held national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. McFarland served as an aide to Dr. Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council staff from 1970 to 1976.

At the start of the first term of the Reagan administration, she was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee Staff as well as a senior speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. She later became the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (PA) and Pentagon spokesman.

In 2006, in an effort to take on then Sen. Hillary Clinton, McFarland ran in the Republican Senate primary in New York only to be defeated by then-Republican Yonkers Mayor John Spencer.

McFarland received bachelor’s degrees from George Washington University and Oxford University, and her masters degree from Oxford. She later went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD program where she studied nuclear weapons, China and the Soviet Union.

McFarland received graduate fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Institute for the Study of World Politics, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (Hubert Humphrey Fellowship).

She is married to Alan Roberts McFarland and is the mother/stepmother of five.

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