Johns Hopkins scholar next in Constitution Day Series

Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University will discuss "An Old Enmity: The Professional vs. the Citizen Soldier, from Colonial Times to Today" at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7, in Davis Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. 

Cohen is the latest in Skidmore's Constitution Day Speakers Series. Admission to the talk is free and open to the public.

The Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Cohen directs the strategic studies program at SAIS and the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, which he founded. He has twice won the SAIS Excellence in Teaching Award. For 10 years he led an SAIS partnership with the Maxwell School of Public Affairs at Syracuse University in providing executive education to general officers and senior Defense Department officials, the National Security Studies program.

Cohen is a 1977 graduate of Harvard College who received a Ph.D. in political science there in 1982. Before his current appointment at Johns Hopkins, he taught at Harvard College and the U.S. Naval War College. In February 1990 he joined the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and in July of that year he was appointed professor of strategic studies at SAIS.

From April 2007 through January 2009 he served as counselor of the Department of State with special responsibility for advising the Secretary on matters pertaining to Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Russia, as well as general strategic issues. He was the lead Department of State liaison with the deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. He represented the Department of State in interagency coordination with senior National Security Council staff, Department of Defense, and intelligence community officials on a number of issues, including the Syrian/North Korean reactor crisis of 2007, and the Somali piracy problem in 2008.

Cohen's books include the prize-winning Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (2002), Commandos and Politicians (1978), and Citizens and Soldiers (1985). His most recent book is Conquered Into Liberty (2011) in which he describes how five peoples - the British, French, Americans, Canadians, and Indians - fought over the key to the North American continent: the corridor running from Albany to Montreal dominated by the Champlain valley and known to Native Americans as the "Great Warpath." Cohen reveals how conflict along these 200 miles of lake, river, and woodland shaped the country's military values, practices, and institutions.