Richard H. Kohn chairs the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is Professor of History. From 1992 to 2000 he served as Executive Secretary of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, a consortium of faculty at Duke, Carolina, and North Carolina State interested in national and international security issues broadly defined.

Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, he was educated at Harvard College (AB, magna cum laude, 1962) and at the University of Wisconsin--Madison (MS, 1964; PhD, 1968), where he concentrated in United States military and 18th century history, and minored in military studies. He was Assistant Professor of History at the City College of the City University of New York from 1968 to 1971, and served on the Rutgers University faculty as Assistant, Associate, and Professor of History from 1971 to 1984. During the academic year 1980 1981 he held the Harold Keith Johnson Visiting Chair of Military History at the US Army Military History Institute and Army War College. From 1981 to 1991 he was Chief of Air Force History and Chief Historian for the United States Air Force, and from 1985 to 1990 an Adjunct Professor at the National War College. In 1991 he was Visiting Scholar in Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

Kohn has lectured at numerous universities and to a variety of academic and military audiences, and has served as an advisor and consultant to various academic and government organizations and agencies. He has been a Pulitzer Prize juror and an expert witness before the US Indian Claims Commission. President of the Society for Military History for two terms (1989-1993), he has been an elected member of the Council of the American Historical Association, chair of the Public History Committee for the Organization of American Historians, a member of the Presidential Materials Review Board for the National Archives and Records Administration, on the Advisory Board of the US Air Force's Gulf War Air Power Survey, and chair of the Advisory Committee on Research and Collections Management for the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum and the board of directors of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History. Currently he serves on the USAF's Air University Board of Visitors and as a consultant to the US Commission on National Security/21st Century, the government group reviewing American national security policies and institutions.

Among his awards are the Organization of American Historians Binkley-Stephenson Prize, the Society for Military History's Victory Gondos Memorial Service Award, two Department of the Army Certificates for Patriotic Civilian Service, and the Department of the Air Force's Organizational Excellence and Exceptional Civilian Service Awards.

A specialist in American military history and civil-military relations, Kohn is the author of Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (1975). He has also edited, co-edited, or co-authored some eight other volumes on American military history, including the first-ever American issue of the Revue Internationale d'Histoire Militaire, the periodical of the International Commission on Military History; titled The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989, it was also published in book form by the New York University Press in 1991. He was a co-author of The Exclusion of Black Soldiers from the Medal of Honor in World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1997), the report that resulted in the award of seven medals of honor to black soldiers of that conflict. Recent publications include: "Civil-Military Relations: Civilian Control of the Military," in John Whiteclay Chambers II, editor, The Oxford Companion to American Military History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122-125; (with Peter D. Feaver), "The Gap: Soldiers, Civilians and their Mutual Misunderstanding," The National Interest, No. 61 (Fall 2000), 29-37; and "The Early Retirement of General Ronald R. Fogleman, Chief of Staff, United States Air Force," Aerospace Power Journal, XV(Spring 2001):6-23. Currently he is working on a book about presidential war leadership in American history, and co directing a project investigating the gap between military and civilian attitudes and culture in the United States today.