TROY — Miami County Liberty will present a talk, “Jihad: the Threat to the Republic,” by Dr. Sebastian Gorka, in the Crystal Room, 845 W. Market St., Troy, at 7 p.m., Oct. 11.
The presentation is free and open to the public.
Gorka serves as the vice president and professor of strategy and irregular warfare at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. Previously, he was the Major General Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at Marine Corps University, where he provided courses and lectures on irregular warfare. Before that, he was associate dean of Congressional affairs and relations to the Special Operations Community at National Defense University.
He is an internationally recognized authority on issues of national security, irregular warfare, terrorism and democratization and has testified before Congress and briefed the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center, NIC Inc. and the commandant of the Marine Corps. His website, TheGorkaBriefing.com, is a collection of his national security commentary and analysis.
Gorka is an adjunct professor with the U.S. Special Operations Command Joint Special Operations University, where he serves as lead instructor of the Special Operations Combating Terrorism course, as well as of the interagency and senior/executive counterterrorism courses. He is also an adjunct professor in national security at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and is a regular instructor with the U.S. Army’s Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg and for the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division.
Gorka holds a doctorate in political science from Corvinus University in Budapest. His dissertation was “The Evolution of Terrorism: The Difference between Cold War Political Violence and al Qaeda.” He was a Kokkalis Fellow at Harvard’s J. F. Kennedy School of Government, focusing on public policy and international security, as well as an international research fellow at the NATO Defense College. He earned his master’s degree in international relations and diplomacy at Budapest University and his bachelor’s degree from the University of London.
Gorka was born in the United Kingdom to parents who escaped Communism during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and is fluent in Hungarian, with working knowledge of German and French. In the United Kingdom, he served with 22 Company of the Intelligence and Security Group (V) of the British Territorial Army Reserve, but he is now a proud American. He is married to Katharine Cornell Gorka, president of the Threat Knowledge Group and the Council on Global Security.
