Thomas-Durell Young - Defense Security Cooperation University

Faculty

Education & Professional Practice

Dr. Thomas-Durell Young is a Senior Lecturer in European civil-military relations within Education and Professional Practice (EPP) at the Institute for Security Governance (ISG). He has a background spanning 20+ years of designing, delivering, and assessing institutional capacity building (ICB) projects in Central and Eastern Europe. Dr. Young is also an academic associate for the comparative defense planning curriculum offered by the Department of National Security Affairs, US Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, CA. The author of many professional and academic publications, his latest book is Anatomy of Post-Communist European Defense Institutions: The Mirage of Military Modernity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

Prior to joining ISG in 2000, Dr. Young was a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College where he supported the Army Staff's policy and planning branch on subjects related to European political-military affairs, NATO issues, and national-level defense planning. From 2001 to 2014, Dr. Young was Staff Consultant at the RAND Corporation (Santa Monica) where he assessed defense planning and management issues. In a prior part of his professional development, he was a professional staff member for a Member of Congress.

From 2000 to 2018, Dr. Young was the Program Manager, Europe, for the Center for Civil-Military Relations (CCMR) at the Naval Postgraduate School. His responsibilities at CCMR were to develop and manage the execution of defense planning and management assistance projects throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Some of the key reform projects he has managed include the oversight of comprehensive defense planning reform projects in Estonia, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro. He also developed the methodology and executed the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Defense Institution Building survey and road-map development process.

Dr. Young received his Doctorate of Philosophy and Certificat des Etudes Supérieurs in International Economics and Policy from the Institut Univérsitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, Université de Genève (Geneva, Switzerland), is a graduate of the US Army War College (Carlisle Barracks, PA), and holds a Master of Arts with Great Distinction from the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University (Bologna/Washington, DC). His foreign languages are French, Italian, and German. Dr. Young is married to the former Ms. Earlene Ewins, who is a consulting actuary. They are the proud parents of two sons, Adrien and Julien, who are both Eagle Scouts and professional engineers. His hobbies include flat-water sculling, alpine skiing, archaeology, opera, Lieder, chamber music, botany, Mediterranean cooking, and English literature.