Isnel López

Isnel López is a Colombian Marine Corps Officer with 18 years of extensive command and operational experience, currently attending the Colombian Command and Staff Course at the “Escuela Superior de Guerra (ESDEG),” Master’s Candidate in Strategy and Geopolitics. He most recently served as Deputy Director of the Amphibious Instruction and Training Center and has held leadership and staff assignments across all echelons, including small combat units, riverine combat commands, battalion-level chief of operations, and brigade level planning Officer. He is a graduate of the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia, where he earned a Master’s degree in Military Studies, complementing his prior postgraduate studies in Maritime Policy and Strategy completed at the “Almirante Padilla” Naval Academy in Colombia. His professional and academic work focuses on counterinsurgency, ethical leadership, military strategy, amphibious operations, with particular research interests in criminal governance, transnational crime and hybrid threats, as well as emergent concepts like strategic foresight for force design, decision dominance in cognitive warfare, and new typologies of war such as agentic and phantasmal warfare.