Dissertation

Friends Against Friends: Theory of Issue Linkage and the Politics of Restraining Allies

Committee Members

Philip Potter (Chair), Dale Copeland, Todd Sechser, Will Hitchcock (History Department)

Biography

James Kwoun is a career intelligence officer in the U.S. Army with two decades of active-duty service. Throughout his career, he has provided intelligence support to senior officials across the U.S. government, including the White House, Department of Defense, Department of State, and various Intelligence Community agencies. His work has shaped national policy, military planning at the theater level, and combat operations in various overseas locations. James has served overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea, and three countries on the African continent. He currently serves as a Professor of Strategic Intelligence at the National Intelligence University, a position awarded annually to one U.S. Army officer through a competitive selection process.

               He has held a variety of roles, each focused on a unique function within the U.S. government. While assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency, James led the development of strategic assessments to support national policymakers, including regular contributions to briefings to the President, Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. This assignment included a tour on a Pentagon-based team responsible for leading the Department of Defense initial response to Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While assigned to a Combatant Command, James was part of a team that developed campaign and contingency plans that organized the resources across the theater to address current and hypothetical threats. At the tactical level, James has served as the senior intelligence officer for units involved in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

James is passionate about applying an interdisciplinary approach to national security challenges. He is particularly interested in how perspectives from social science, history, applied research, and intelligence analysis can be integrated into a broader analytic framework to better understand complex threat environments.