Eliot A. Cohen

ELIOT A. COHEN is the Robert E. Osgood Professor and ninth dean of SAIS. A graduate of Harvard College, Dr. Cohen received his PhD in political science at Harvard in 1982. After teaching at Harvard and at the Naval War College (Department of Strategy) he served on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, coming to SAIS in 1990. A recent book is Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (Free Press, 2002): other books include (with John Gooch) Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War. In 2011 he published Conquered into Liberty.

In 1991-93 Dr. Cohen directed the U.S. Air Force’s official multi-volume study of the 1991 Gulf War, the Gulf War Air Power Survey. He has an extensive background in executive education, to include programs for general officers in the American armed forces and senior executives in the private sector. He has served as an intelligence officer in the United States Army Reserve, and is a member of the Defense Policy Advisory Board of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.