Patrick Lloyd Hatcher has been the Kiriyama Distinguished Fellow at the University of San Francisco's Center for the Pacific Rim since 2001. From 1976 to 1991 he taught at the University of California at Berkeley in the Military Science, History, and Political Science Departments. While lecturing at Berkeley he won the Blue & Gold Faculty teaching award in 1988. For his last ten years at Berkeley he served as the Vice Chairman of the Political Science Department. He also taught at the University of California at Davis.

Born at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, his military family took him to the Philippine island bastion of Corregidor when he was three months old. After a global secondary education, he attended and graduated with a B.A. in Political Science from the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. He earned his M.A. from the University of Missouri, Kansas City in History, and his Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley.

Following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps, he served in the United States Army for twenty years, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. During his military career he worked in South Korea, South Vietnam, West Germany, Turkey, Ethiopia, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, many of these posting for the National Security Agency.

Along with his second career in academia he also found a niche in the media. NBC TV hired him during the first Gulf War to analyze the national security aspects of that clash. He now appears regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area on ABC, CBS, and Fox TV News, as a commentator on international events. Arts & Entertainment's History Channel has featured him in two History Channel films, the most recent being “Napoleon & Wellington”. In 2007 the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of San Francisco awarded him their Media Award.

Hatcher is the author of The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists in Vietnam (Stanford University Press, 1990), Economic Earthquakes: Converting Defense Cuts to Economic Opportunities (Institute of Governmental Studies Press, Berkeley, 1994), and North American Civilization at War (M.E. Sharpe, 1998), and numerous essays and book reviews.