Jon Askonas is a professor of U.S. foreign policy for the TFAS Virtual Summer program. He works on the connections between the republican tradition, technology and national security at Catholic University. He is currently working on a manuscript examining post-war organizational forgetting processes in militaries. The book will address the relationship between how the U.S. Army organizes itself for war, how it adapts to new challenges (using case studies from Vietnam and Iraq) and why it forgets much of what it has learned after the war winds down. He is also working on essays on the deep political, moral and practical implications of the volunteer military, and on the connection between artificial intelligence research and authoritarian surveillance.
He has a bachelor of science in international politics from Georgetown University and a doctor of philosophy from the University of Oxford. He has worked at the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. Embassy in Moscow and the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been supported by the Beinecke Scholarship, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation and the Cyril Foster Fund. His writing has appeared in Russian Analytical Digest, Triple Helix, Fare Forward, War on the Rocks and the Texas National Security Review.