Former senior military correspondent for the Washington Post and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks will speak at Cordiner Hall at 7 p.m. on Thursday.

His lecture, titled “The Three Things Americans Don’t Understand about the War in Iraq Right Now,” will cover his most recent book, “The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008,” as well as the Obama administration’s efforts in the ongoing Iraq War.

Ricks’ first book on the Iraq War, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003-2005, was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and a no. 1 New York Times bestseller. His other books include Making the Corps, where he follows a platoon of young, aspiring marines through 11 weeks of boot camp, and A Soldier’s Duty, a novel about a U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, published some four months before the actual U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001.

Ricks was a part of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting. In 2000, he was a part of the Wall Street Journal team that won for a series of articles on how the U.S. military might change to meet the new demands of the twenty first century. In 2002, he was a part of a Washington Post team that won for a series of articles about the beginning of the U.S. counteroffensive against terrorism.

In January, Ricks joined the Center for a New American Security, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, where he is researching the history of American officership. He is currently focusing on the American ideal of a general.

Ricks also recently became a contributing editor for Foreign Policy magazine, where he writes a blog called “The Best Defense” (http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/).