Patrick Murray - Biography
Patrick Murray (colonel, U.S. Army, retired) joined the Army when Ronald Reagan was president. He served as an armor officer and a foreign area officer for almost 25 years, he commanded forward-deployed combat units in Germany during the Cold War, lived and worked in American embassies around the globe including Moscow, Belgrade, Minsk, and Sarajevo, with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Later Col. Murray was part of a military-diplomatic exchange program between the Pentagon and Department of State, where he served in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs in Washington, D.C. In 2005, Murray became the U.S. representative to the Military Staff Committee at the United Nations in New York under Ambassador John Bolton.
In 2007, Col. Murray deployed to Baghdad, Iraq as part of the surge.
After retiring from the Army in 2009, Patrick became the Republican nominee for U.S. Congress in Northern Virginia during the 2010 and 2012 political cycles. He likes to say that those campaigns “scared him straight” about career politicians and an expansive federal government, which led him to author the book "Government is the Problem."
Murray speaks Russian and holds degrees from both Oklahoma State University and The Ohio State University. He lives and works in Alexandria, Va.