James Sterling Corum is an American air power historian and scholar of counter-insurgency. He has written several books on counterinsurgency and other topics. He is a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve.

Early life

Corum was educated at Heidelberg, Gonzaga University (BA, 1975), Brown University (MA, 1976), and Oxford (M. Litt., 1984). He graduated Ph.D from Queen's University in Canada in 1990. His first teaching post, from 1979 to 1981, was at Oxford as a German language tutor in the History faculty.

Career

Corum became professor of Comparative Military Studies at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Air University, Alabama. During 2005 he was both a visiting fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a visiting fellow of the Levershulme Program on the Changing Nature of War in the Department of International Politics at Oxford. He was then a professor of military history in the Department of Joint and Multinational Operations at the US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth. In 2008 he was also an adjunct professor of military history at Austin Peay State University. From 2009 to 2014, Corum was dean of the Baltic Defence College in Tartu, Estonia. From there, he became a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford. Corum's primary speciality is air power history and he argues more in favour of integrated air power than of so-called strategic missions independent of the joint battlespace.