Wayne Raabe

Wayne C. Raabe is a Senior Consultant at Lexpat Global Services.  He has extensive expertise in the justice and defense sectors, particularly in international investigations, mutual legal assistance, interagency operations, counternarcotics, and maritime law and operations.  He spent 13 years in the Senior Executive Service of the United States Government.

Mr. Raabe served as the Director of Interagency Partnering (J9) at U.S. European Command, where he led a team that embodied a “whole of society” approach in building and strengthening sustainable partnerships with other government agencies and outside organizations to ensure regional security and stability to better execute the command’s operations in Europe, Asia, the Arctic, and the Atlantic.

Prior to his leadership role in the Department of Defense, Mr. Raabe was a career prosecutor in the Department of Justice, first as a Trial Attorney in DOJ’s Criminal Division, and then as Principal Deputy Chief of the Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section.  At the Justice Department, Mr. Raabe served as lead representative to the National Security Council-led Maritime Security Interagency Policy Committee and the Maritime Operational Threat Response Plan event resolution process.  Mr. Raabe also served as the lead U.S negotiator for the maritime boarding amendments to the SUA Convention from 2003 to 2005, and on the interagency team that drafted the 2005 National Strategy for Maritime Security and its eight sub-plans, including the Maritime Operational Threat Response Plan and the National Strategy to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness.

Mr. Raabe also served in uniform in the United States Coast Guard as a deck watch officer, operations officer, and commanding officer afloat.  As a Coast Guard Law Specialist, he was an operations law advisor and the lead defense counsel for the Coast Guard Pacific Area.  After a tour afloat as executive officer, he served as assistant division chief of the Headquarters Office of Maritime and International Law, appellate defense counsel before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and was designated as a Special Courts-Martial Trial Judge.

Alongside his work for Lexpat, Mr. Raabe has supported programs implemented by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and is an adjunct seminar leader at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.  He was also a member of the adjunct faculty of the Georgetown University Law Center from 2015-2018, where he taught International Criminal Law.  He graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in June 1975, and graduated from the University of the Pacific/McGeorge School of Law, Sacramento, CA, in June 1984.