Sylvia Longmire is a [medically] retired Air Force captain and former Special Agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. During her eight years with AFOSI, she conducted numerous criminal investigations and worked extensively in the fields of counterintelligence, counterespionage, and force protection. During her last assignment, Ms. Longmire worked at HQ AFOSI as the Latin America desk officer, analyzing issues in the US Southern Command area of responsibility that might affect the security of deployed Air Force personnel. From Dec 2005-Jul 2009, Sylvia worked as a senior intelligence analyst for the California state fusion center and the California Emergency Management Agency’s Situational Awareness Unit, focusing almost exclusively on Mexican drug trafficking organizations and southwest border violence issues. Between 2004 and 2011, she regularly lectured on terrorism in Latin America at the Air Force Special Operations School’s Dynamics of International Terrorism course. She holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of South Florida in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, with a focus on the Cuban and Guatemalan revolutions.

Ms. Longmire has been published in Small Wars Journal, Henley-Putnam University’s Journal of Strategic Security, the Journal of Energy Security, the American Bar Association’s National Security Report, Tuft University’s Fletcher Forum on World Affairs, Stanford University’s The Peregrine, and the US Army Counter Terrorism Center’s The Sentinel. Her writing was also regularly featured in Homeland Security Today magazine’s Borders & Intelligence column, for which she was awarded an ASBPE award. Ms. Longmire has been interviewed extensively by national, international, local, and Internet news outlets, including Hannity, Fox & Friends, Stossel, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and Geraldo at Large on Fox News Channel, John King USA and At This Hour on CNN, Jose Díaz-Balart and The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC, CNN International, The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, BBC Radio, the Miami Herald, the Houston Chronicle, and the San Diego Union-Tribune, as well as Mexico’s Proceso, El Universal, El Diario, and Rio Doce. She has also appeared as a guest expert on The History Channel’s Brad Meltzer’s Decoded and America’s War on Drugs, and has regularly consulted with producers of National Geographic Channel’s Border Wars and Drugs, Inc. series.

Ms. Longmire is currently an independent consultant and freelance writer, and contributor to American Military University’s InHomeland Security blog. She is also on the Board of Advisors for Stanford University’s non-profit organization Love Thy Neighbor, Mexico, the editorial board for Norwich University’s Journal of Transnational and International Crime, the Board of Advisors for IDGA’s Homeland Security Week 2015, and the Advisory Board for The Mob Museum. Her first book, Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico’s Drug Wars (Palgrave Macmillan), was published in September 2011 and was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was also a contributor to Glenn Beck’s Cowards: What Politicians, Radicals, and the Media Refuse to Say (Threshold Editions). Her most recent book, Border Insecurity: Why Big Money, Fences, and Drones Aren’t Making Us Safer (Palgrave Macmillan) was published in April 2014 and was nominated for a 2015 Arizona-New Mexico Book Prize.

Ms. Longmire has had multiple sclerosis (MS) for 14 years and is a staunch advocate for MS education and research. She is the President and founder of The PreJax Foundation, a non-profit organiztion that provides scholarships to students with MS or who have a parent with MS. Sylvia is also the former Ms. Wheelchair USA 2016, and works as an accessible travel writer and travel agent. She is available for public speaking engagements and interviews.

About Longmire Consulting

A necessary move across the country in 2009 required Ms. Longmire to leave her analyst position in California after a challenging, but rewarding, four-year run. Due to family commitments, she decided not to pursue a traditional analyst position, and instead she turned to freelance writing and consulting.

Making the transition from writing government reports to articles suitable for mass consumption in a newspaper or magazine was fascinating, and quite a bit of work. However, over the ensuing months, her writing grabbed hold in outlets like Homeland Security Today magazine and MexiData.info. Slowly, reporters started to contact her for her input on stories they were writing about the drug war, as did radio show hosts, students, and concerned citizens. Soon, she was spending a considerable amount of work-from-home time replying to email requests for information on the drug war, writing articles, and doing interviews. Ms. Longmire then began working as an expert witness for Mexican immigration and asylum request cases. She finally decided to gather up all the various types of work she was doing related to Mexico’s drug war and border security under the umbrella of Longmire Consulting. Ms. Longmire is now considered one of the nation’s foremost go-to experts on these issues.