Alexus Grynkewich

Alexus Grynkewich is a U.S. Air Force general serving as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) since 2025, the four-star command that exercises operational authority over all NATO military forces in Europe. A fighter pilot by background, Grynkewich previously held senior command and staff positions in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, including director of operations at CENTCOM, and his career has spanned the post-9/11 counterterrorism operations, the Iraq and Syria campaigns against ISIS, and the post-2022 European defense posture following Russia's full invasion of Ukraine. The June 2026 WIRED reporting on the Dialog leak identified Grynkewich as a long-standing Dialog attendee, with attendance since 2021.¹²

The SACEUR is the operational commander of NATO's military forces and the principal U.S. four-star command in the European theater. Peter Thiel (chairman of Palantir Technologies, a major defense and intelligence contractor) and Auren Hoffman (chairman of SafeGraph, the location-data broker) run the Dialog network that Grynkewich has attended since 2021.

Career and Path to SACEUR

Grynkewich graduated from the United States Air Force Academy and was commissioned into the Air Force as a fighter pilot, flying combat missions in the post-9/11 period. His career progressed through operational and command assignments, with repeated rotations through the CENTCOM area, including senior positions in the air campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. His staff assignments included the Joint Staff and the CENTCOM director of operations role, the latter placing him at the operational center of U.S. military activity across the Middle East and Central Asia.²

Grynkewich was nominated for his fourth star and assigned as SACEUR in 2025, in the first year of the second Trump administration. The SACEUR assignment is dual-hatted as commander of U.S. European Command (EUCOM), which means the officeholder commands both the NATO alliance forces and the U.S. forces in the European theater. The position is the senior U.S. military command in Europe, and its holder is the principal military interlocutor with the European allies on Russia, Ukraine, and the broader NATO posture. The 2025 appointment placed Grynkewich at the operational head of the alliance at a moment of sustained high-intensity European security crisis.²

Dialog Attendance

The WIRED report on the 2026 Dialog leak identified Grynkewich as having attended Dialog retreats since 2021. The 2021 onset of his attendance predates his SACEUR assignment by four years but overlaps with his senior CENTCOM and Joint Staff positions, the operational and policy roles closest to the intelligence and defense-contracting community that Dialog convenes. The onset also coincides with the first year of the Biden administration, indicating the Dialog attendance spans administrations rather than tracking a single party, consistent with the leak's broader finding of bipartisan government-side attendance.¹

Grynkewich's SACEUR command and his continuing Dialog attendance place an active four-star military commander in the same off-the-record setting as the executives whose firms contract to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Anduril Industries (the Palantir-adjacent defense firm backed by Thiel's Founders Fund) joins Palantir Technologies and SafeGraph as the commercial principals whose interests in Pentagon procurement and intelligence-agency data sourcing intersect with the SACEUR's command authority. The Dialog convening is where that intersection occurs in person and off the record.¹

The Procurement and Convening Overlap

The SACEUR/EUCOM command is a major consumer of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms, of data-fusion software, and of autonomous systems, which are the product categories supplied by the Thiel-network defense-tech cluster (Palantir's data-fusion platforms, Anduril's autonomous systems, the broader 8VC portfolio). The Dialog convening places the commander who consumes those platforms in a recurring, off-the-record setting with the principals of the firms that supply them. Whether any specific procurement decision was discussed at Dialog is not alleged; the 2026 leak is the first primary record of the cross-attendance.¹

The 2026 Dialog registrants named by WIRED include Representative Jim Himes (the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee), Senator Cory Booker (Democrat, New Jersey), and Senator Ted Cruz (Republican, Texas), alongside Grynkewich, whose military command is formally nonpartisan but whose appointment was made by the Trump administration. The cross-party roster shows the convening network reaches across the oversight, legislative, and operational-military tiers of the U.S. national-security apparatus rather than filtering by party.¹