Col. Liam Collins, PhD.

Liam Collins is the Director of the Modern War Institute and an Academy Professor in the Department of Military Instruction at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point and a visiting Associate Professor at Princeton University. He is also serving as the executive officer for Gen (ret.) Abizaid for his Secretary of Defense appointment as the Senior Defense Advisor to Ukraine. Over the past 18 months, he has conducted more than dozen visits to Ukraine.

Previously, he served as the director of the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point where he authored “The Abbottabad Documents: Bin Ladin’s Security Measures” and co-authored Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?  both of which studied the 17 de-classified documents captured during the Abbottabad raid and released to the CTC.

COL Collins is a career Special Forces officer, who has served in a variety of special operations assignments.  He has conducted multiple operational deployments including Operational Nobile Anvil (Kosovo ’99), Operation Joint Forge (Bosnia ’00, ’02), Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan ’01,’02,’11), Operation Iraqi Freedom (’03,’04) as well as operational deployments to South America and the Horn of Africa.

He has taught courses on Insurgency & Counterinsurgency, Homeland Security and Defense, Terrorism and Counterterrorism, Internal Conflict, International Relations, American Politics, Research Methods, Military Innovation, Comparative Defense Politics and Officership.

He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the United States Military Academy (1992), a Master in Public Affairs and a PhD from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and an elected life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.