Colonel Fernando Lujan is a U.S. Army Special Forces Officer and Foreign Area Specialist. He most recently served in the Joint Special Operations Command and as a senior advisor on Ambassador Khalilzad’s negotiating team assisting with efforts to secure a political settlement in Afghanistan.

From 2014 to 2017, he was Director for Afghanistan, then Senior Director for South Asia on the National Security Council, where he helped lead interagency planning for the South Asia Strategy.

Fernando has deployed multiple times to Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Latin America with special operations forces to carry out foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism missions. His writing has been published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Small Wars Journal. He is a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow and holds a bachelor’s degree (in physics) from West Point, and a master’s degree (in public policy) from Harvard. Fernando is currently a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins SAIS, studying the use of irregular warfare in great power competition.