Sebastian Gorka

Sebastian Gorka
Born	United Kingdom
Education	Ph.D. in Political Science
Alma mater	University of London Corvinus University of Budapest
Occupation(s)	Advisor, editor, lecturer , Fox News contributer
Website	TheGorkaBriefing.com

Sebastian L. Gorka is a national security professional specializing in irregular warfare, including counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. He is a full-time Professor of Strategy and Irregular Warfare of the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC and the Chairman of Threat Knowledge Group. Previously he served as the Major General Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University. He is a founding member of the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs and has served as the Associate Dean for Congressional Affairs and Relations to the Special Operations Community at the National Defense University. Gorka is also currently affiliated with USSOCOM’s Joint Special Operations University, and is a regular instructor for the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg, as well as the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. He has testified before Congress on the threat of ISIS and Global Jihadism and briefed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Intelligence Council, the National Counterterrorism Center and the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, Gorka became an American citizen in 2012.

Gorka is the author of 2016 New York Times bestseller book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War published by Regnery.

Family background and early life

Sebastian Gorka is the son of Paul and Susan Gorka who escaped from Communist Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He was born and raised in the U.K. where he attended St. Benedict’s School for Boys, Ealing Abbey, and received his first degree from the University of London.

Gorka’s father, Paul, had been part of a secret Catholic students' organization in college after World War II. As the Soviet Union took control of Hungary and neighboring states his father helped organize covert anti-Soviet intelligence gathering activities in support of British Intelligence. After supplying information on how Moscow was taking control of the country, Paul Gorka and his group were betrayed to the Soviets and Hungarian Secret Police by the MI-6 double-agent Kim Philby, and at the age of 20 received a life sentence from a Communist court. During the events of the 1956 Revolution, Gorka’s father was liberated from political prison by Hungarian freedom-fighters who had captured a Soviet tank. After escaping to the West with the young daughter of one of his fellow prison-mates, (the future Mrs Paul Gorka), Sebastian's father published his story of anti-Communist resistance and the betrayal by the Cambridge Apostles in the book Budapest Betrayed.

Gorka married Katharine Cornell Gorka on July 6, 1996 in Hungary.

Education

Gorka is a graduate of the University of London where he received his Bachelor of Arts honors degree in Philosophy and Theology. At university, he joined the British Territorial Army reserves, serving in the Intelligence Corps.

He holds a Masters in International Relations and Diplomacy from the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration. After that institution was renamed the Corvinus University of Budapest, he went on to study for, and receive a Ph.D. in Political Science, writing a dissertation on the strategic differences between the politically motivated terrorism of the Cold War and religiously motivated terrorists such as Al Qaeda.

Gorka was also a Kokkalis Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Career

Gorka briefing at SOCOM Wargame Center

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, Gorka left the U.K. to work in the first freely-elected government of the newly democratic Republic of Hungary. In Budapest he served in the Ministry of Defense for 5 years working on international security issues and Hungary’s future accession into NATO.

In 1997 Gorka was awarded the second Partnership for Peace International Research Fellowship at the NATO Defense College in Rome.

In 1998 Gorka was awarded the Kokkalis Fellowship at Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. At Harvard he became one of the founding members of the Council on Emerging National Security Affairs, CENSA. Before starting the second year of his public policy fellowship, he was hired by the RAND Corporation. At RAND he worked under Stephen F. Larrabee in the fields of transatlantic security and counterterrorism. In 2000 the former U.S. Defense Attache to Hungary invited Gorka to move back to Budapest and establish and head the Center for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy where he continued his work on national and international security.

After the September 11th attacks of 2001, Gorka became a public figure in Hungary when he was asked by the MTV, the Hungarian National Television Corporation to provide non-stop live expert commentary on the events occurring that day in the United States and then later in Afghanistan and around the world as part of the Global War on Terror. His new national visibility led one year later to Gorka being asked to serve as an official expert on the parliamentary investigatory committee created to uncover the Communist background of the new Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy. It had been revealed, soon after the 2002 general election, that Medgyessy, who had served in the Communist government prior to 1989, had been an undercover officer in the Secret Police, the organization which had maintained the previous dictatorship and helped crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Gorka used his recently acquired public prominence to speak openly on the “democracy deficit” of having a former secret policemen serve as the Prime Minister of a NATO nation. (Hungary had acceded to the transatlantic alliance in 1999).

After the committee’s mandate elapsed, Gorka established an independent think-tank with his wife Katharine Gorka, The Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security focusing on issues of international security and democratic transition in post-dictatorial regions. Katharine Gorka had been the director of the USAID-funded Democracy Network program for Central and Eastern Europe. All through the 1990s and early 2000s, Gorka was a contributor to the JANES group of publications out of the U.K., writing for JANES Intelligence Review, JANES Terrorism Monitor, and JANES Islamic Affairs Analyst, among others.

In 2004, Gorka was asked to join the faculty of the new US initiative, the Program for Terrorism and Security Studies (PTSS), a Defense Department-funded program based out of the George C. Marshall Center for European Security in Garmsich-Partenkirchen, Germany. The PTSS was created after the 9/11 attacks by COL Nick Pratt, USMC ret. in order to build an international network of counterterrorism practitioners focused on the global threat of Al Qaeda. At the same time Gorka began to teach for USSOCOM’s Joint Special Operations University, MacDill Air Force Base. He served on the faculty of the PTSS until he and his family moved to the United States in 2008. In America Gorka joined the US Defense Department as a professor for the National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington D.C. There he taught on the ASD(SOLIC)-funded Masters Program in Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism as part of the Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program, finally taking the position of Associate Dean of Congressional Affairs and Relations to the Special Operations Community. Gorka then left government service in order to assume the privately-endowed Major General Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University. In August 2016, he joined the Institute of World Politics on a full-time basis as Professor of Strategy and Irregular Warfare, and also serves as Vice President for National Security Support.

With his wife, Katharine Gorka, he also runs the private Virginia-based company Threat Knowledge Group. TKG provides training and strategic support to the armed services, the FBI, elements of the US Intelligence Community, and state and local law enforcement. He is co-author and editor of the TKG reports: ISIS: The Threat to the United States and The Islamic State and Information Warfare: Defeating ISIS and the Broader Global Jihadist Movement.

Between 2011-2013 Gorka taught US National Security and Foreign Policy for Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

Since 2014 Gorka has acted as editor for National Security Affairs for the Breitbart News Network.

Since 2015 he has maintained TheGorkaBriefing.com, a site which hosts his public analyses and media interviews. Gorka has appeared on the BBC and CNN, and is a regular guest on the FOX News Channel, the FOX Business Network, WABC’s the John Batchelor Show, the Sam Sorbo Show, and the Lars Larson Show.

Gorka is a two-time recipient of the US Department of Defense Joint Civilian Service Commendation, first awarded to him the by US Special Operation Command.

Policy Positions

Gorka presenting his testimony, "Ten Years On: The Evolution of the Terrorist Threat," to the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, June 22, 2011

In his articles, Congressional testimony, and his 2016 book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, Gorka claims that since 9/11 America has become superb at applying force against high value terrorist targets, whether through the use of drone strikes or Special Operations raids, but is still losing the war against what he terms the "Global Jihadi Movement" (GJM). This lack of success is the result, according to Gorka, of America failing to counter the ideology of Global Jihadism and the Obama Administration's belief that terrorism is the result of unemployment and lack of education instead of ideology.

Gorka has argued that America acts astrategically due in part to the influence of the Cold War. According to Gorka, This lack of strategic behavior has made decision makers and strategists reactive instead of proactive and fundamentally incapable of prioritizing American national interests.

Gorka has claimed that Carl von Clausewitz's writings (or flawed interpretations of his works) have had a negative impact on the Western understanding of unconventional warfare.

In the post-2001 debate between the pro- and anti-Counter-insurgency (COIN) circles, Gorka has argued that COIN and FM 3-24, or the so-called "Petraeus Manual", were un-American approaches and fatally flawed choices for both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gorka has frequently criticized the intrusion of politics and what he describes as political correctness into counterterrorism practices and policies. Gorka has claimed that both the Bush and Obama administrations have excised mention of religion when analyzing and discussing the terrorist threat, which he says has made America less capable of defeating groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. Gorka has advocated the teaching of works of key Jihadist theorists within the military and law enforcement communities and the inclusion of their Enemy Threat Doctrine within the intelligence cycle.

Other

Gorka is currently awaiting sentencing at 9:30 AM on 3 February 2017, after pleading guilty in Arlington County Circuit Court on 8 August 2016, to a weapons charge for illegally carrying a firearm in the terminal at Reagan National Airport on 31 January 2016.

Publications

• Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War (ISBN 978-1-62157-457-6), Regnery Publishing, 2016.
• With Katharine Gorka, "ISIS: The Threat to the United States," Threat Knowledge Group, November 2015
• "Understanding the Enemy" in Special Warfare, Volume 27, Issue 2, April–June 2014.
• With David Kilcullen "An Actor-Centric Theory of War" in: Joint Force Quarterly 60, January 2011.
• With Christopher Harmon, Andrew Pratt (Co-editors) Toward a Grand Strategy Against Terrorism (ISBN 978-0-07-352779-6), McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2010.
• With David Kilcullen “Who’s Winning the Battle for Narrative? Al-Qaida versus the United States and its Allies” in: Influence Warfare, Edited by James J. F. Forest, Praeger, 2009.
• "Understanding history's seven stages of Jihad" in: CTC Sentinel 2, 10, October 2009.
• With Stephen Sloan "Contextualizing Counterinsurgency" in Journal of International Security Affairs 16, Spring 2009.
• Content and End-State-Based Alteration in the Practice of Political Violence since the End of the Cold War: The difference between the terrorism of the Cold War and the terrorism of al Qaeda: The rise of the “transcendental terrorist”, PhD dissertation, 2007.

Congressional Testimony

• Subject Matter Expert Briefing, House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, US Congress, January 8, 2016
• Ten Years On: The Evolution of the Terrorist Threat , House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, US Congress, June 22, 2011

External links

• Official website
• Profile of Gorka at the Institute of World Politics website
• Profile of Gorka at the Marine Corps University website.