Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti. Headlines in the press give account of unrelenting armed conflict around the world. World powers as well as warring parties must decide how best to conduct, resolve, and prevent such costly and tragic entanglements.
The Salon on Military Power and Warfare in our Time will reflect on the nature and utility of military force in a world where the grim reality of war is all too familiar but the battlespace has been transformed by technology, emerging ideologies, contestable strategies, and a variety of warring parties “without uniforms” pursuing violence outside conventional restraints and calculations.
The overarching question is what is the role military power – and its limits – in a battle narrative that: (a) plays out in ungoverned territories or densely populated cities, (b) involves non-state actors, (c) addresses issues that have defied resolution for decades, (d) pits asymmetrical forces against each other, and (e) accounts for the use of cheap weapons (drones, IEDs) that exact a high human cost on both civilians and combatants.
The agenda for this Salon is ambitious, but the course of discussion itself will sort out the topics of highest priority to participants in the Salon. In this way, it should identify policy priorities among participants and, possibly, “course corrections” in the present approaches of government leaders.
Col (Ret) John Agoglia sparked a lively conversation last year at the Salon on political-military interface in operations like that in Iraq. His first-hand views of key leaders, his own role in shaping current doctrine on war in urban terrain and military operations other than war, and his frank and informed assessment of US strengths and weaknesses in the use of military power in high-stakes conflicts make Col. Agoglia a welcome interlocutor in this time Salon conversation.
Colonel (Ret) John Agoglia’s 30 years of experience comprise operations management, war gaming, strategic planning, and multinational negotiations aimed at developing and implementing strategic policies to influence bilateral, multilateral and intra-governmental civilian-military processes and relationships in the Asian-Pacific, Middle Eastern and European regions.
Colonel Agoglia 30 years as a career officer in the U.S. Army extends to critical work in Iraq and Afhangistan. In Iraq, he was involved in developing CENTCOM plans for the invasion of Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror. In May of 2003, Colonel Agoglia served as CENTCOM liaison officer to the U.S. Civil Ambassador in Iraq, Paul Bremer. Earlier he was Director of the Counterinsurgency (COIN) Training Center-Afghanistan, during a 29-month deployment from 2008-2010.
Colonel Agoglia has recently worked with and lead a four-person team at the National Defense University, Ft. McNair, Washington D.C., designing and facilitating table top exercises for the Office of The Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (OSD-P) that focus on emerging complex national security strategic-policy issues. He is a 1980 graduate of the United States Military Academy and holds a master’s degree in Strategic Planning from the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS).
Location
Setting: In-Person DACOR Bacon House 1801 F Street, NW Washington, DC 20006 UNITED STATES
