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Colonel
James L. Cook
Permanent Professor 2002–
B.A., Brandeis University
B.A., University of Colorado, Boulder
M.A., The Catholic University of America
Ph.D., Universität Heidelberg
Jim Cook, the Academy’s 75th Permanent Professor, was born to an Air Force family in 1959 in Roswell, New Mexico, then home of Strategic Air Command’s Walker AFB. He received a scholarship to Brandeis University and graduated with his Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy in 1980, at age 20. While working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, he decided to take a few courses and in 1983 ended up with a second Bachelor’s degree, this time in Mathematics, from the University of Colorado. After graduating from the Officer Training School at Lackland AFB, TX, in 1985 he attended the Communications-Computer Officer Basic Course at Keesler AFB, MS, where he was a Distinguished Graduate. For his first assignment, 1986–1991, he was sent to the basement of the Pentagon as an Air Staff Project Officer and Command and Control Branch Chief to oversee communications-computer systems in the group that served Air Force and many Department of Defense command, control, communications, and intelligence services in the building. For the last two years of that tour, Jim was the Executive Officer for that 1,100-member organization. During that assignment, the Academy reached out to sponsor him for graduate work, and he attended The Catholic University of America, completing his Master’s degree in Philosophy in 1992. He then came to the Academy and taught for four semesters in the Department of Philosophy and Fine Arts before being selected for sponsorship for his PhD. Jim chose to pursue his doctorate at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany’s oldest and top-ranked university, and the home of any number of philosophical luminaries (this despite his not ever having been to Germany and his only experience with the language was listening to his mother and grandmother talk). He completed his PhD in Philosophy and graduated magna cum laude in 1997. From 1997 to 1999 he was assigned to Ramstein Air Base, Germany, as the Chief, Communications-Information Systems, responsible for technical aspects of the first deployable NATO Combined Air Operations Center. During these two years at Ramstein he supported NATO’s Partnership for Peace and other exercises, and he was certified as a Foreign Area Officer. In 1999 he returned to the Academy faculty and in 2002 was confirmed as Permanent Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy. During his tenure, the Department of Philosophy has continued its emphasis on military ethics while expanding its academic offerings. In addition to the traditional Philosophy minor, the Department began offering a Philosophy major (in 2012), and administers the multidisciplinary minor in Religion Studies (established in 2013). For eight months in 2009, Jim Cook was deployed as the Senior Advisor to the National Military Academy of Afghanistan. He took a sabbatical year in 2015–2016 as a Visiting Research Professor at Heidelberg, offering invited papers and teaching graduate lessons at the university as well as in Oslo, Prague, and Zürich. Jim serves on the Ethics Oversight Panel for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.