Jason Dempsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and a Senior Adviser to the Columbia University Center for Veteran Transition and Integration. He has written extensively on civilian military relations, our counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, and the limitations of American military power. He has also written on Army efforts toward gender integration and the experiences of Hispanics in the military. He is the author of Our Army: Soldiers, Politics and Civil-Military Relations (2009), the first major work to delve into the social and political attitudes of active-duty soldiers of all ranks.
Jason spent over twenty years in the Army as an infantry officer, deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan during his service. He last served as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a prior delegate to the U.S.—Italy Young Leaders Conference. In 2010 he was selected to serve in the Office of the First Lady as a White House Fellow, where he worked on the development and implementation of Joining Forces, the First Lady and Dr. Biden’s initiative to support military families. Jason is a graduate of the United States Military Academy and holds a PhD in political science from Columbia University.