Scott Jackson

Bio

Scott Jackson is a retired Major General from the United States Army with 34 years of active service including over 51 months in active combat zones.  As an Infantry Officer, he has served in positions emphasizing personal, organizational, and strategic level leadership focused on achieving multi-functional, integrated operational effects.  Throughout his career, Scott has been a proponent of Servant Leadership, and empowering subordinates through trust-based, ‘mission command’ vice command and control, building teams that excel in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments.

Throughout Scott’s career he has demonstrated excellence and achieved success in planning, synchronizing, and executing operations from the lowest tactical level as a young officer to strategic engagements and operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Western Hemisphere as a general officer, employing not just military means, but whole of government effects.  Key highlights in his career include:

• Command at all levels from platoon (36 Soldiers) to Division (thousands)
• Senior Army Liaison to the Senate
• Advanced Military Education Opportunities (School of Advanced Military Studies, War College Fellowship at MIT)
• Hand-Selected, Plank-Holder Commander for the Army’s Security Force Assistance Brigade
• US Southern Command Chief of Staff

Strategic Planning and Campaign Development.  Scott’s assignments and education have provided him the operational and academic opportunities to produce an outlook to problem solving which emphasizes systems, processes, and logic. He is a graduate of the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) where his published research paper addressed organizational and doctrinal gaps in the Army’s command and control philosophy between conventional and special operations forces as seen in the early days of the Afghanistan campaign.  Subsequently, Scott was assigned as the lead planner for the post-invasion stabilization plan in Baghdad in 2004 where he developed the initial campaign plan.  Later as a general officer, Scott applied these strategic planning skills to integrating the newly formed Security Force Assistance Brigades into the Army’s larger personnel, training, and logistical support systems- ensuring that the Army could sustain these unique, high-value organizations without sacrificing quality or ‘breaking’ the Army.  As the US Southern Command Chief of Staff, Scott directed and supervised the development of campaign plan assessment models to evaluate the command’s progress in competing with China, Russia, and other malign influences in the Western Hemisphere.

Culture Development.  Scott has always believed that a unit’s culture is the keystone to success or failure as it reflects its values, norms, and expectations.  In 2017, the Army’s Chief of Staff, hand-selected Scott to form and command the Army’s first Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB) . As the ‘plank-holder’ commander of 1^st SFAB, it was incumbent on him to identify those leader attributes, values, organizational standards and norms necessary to perform its unique mission, while always recognizing that it needed to be nested within the larger Army to ensure its long-term viability.  As ‘combat advisors,’ Scott produced an organization that possessed the technical and tactical competence with the necessary empathy to provide effective counsel to foreign partners yet always maintaining the required professional objectivity to provide accurate assessments to US leadership.  Scott’s cultural model is now the standard for all six current SFABs.

Leader Development.  Critical to the formation and sustainment of any culture is investment in leader development.  A critical task in the formation of the first SFAB and the sustainment of the other 6 in the years to come was the identification, selection, and development of the ‘right’ leaders to serve in this unique organization.  One of Scott’s enduring achievements has been the assessment and selection program for the SFABs which identifies the most qualified applicants to serve in an SFAB.  Following analysis of leader requirements and values, Scott developed a program of activities that can evaluate a candidate’s potential to serve as a leader in the formation- a program which was later largely incorporated into the Army’s current Command Assessment Program.  Utilizing the latest in leadership data models and science, Scott continued to refine the program throughout his five year command tenure and is now producing a cohort of selected leaders which exceed Army promotion and retention rates at large.

Technology and Innovation.  Scott has always been an innovator, looking for opportunities to exploit process and technical improvements into organizational missions.  Following a command assignment, Scott was selected to attend a one-year fellowship at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory to assist with the application of emerging technologies into operational requirements coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Utilizing his extensive combat experiences, Scott was able to contextualize war-fighter challenges into technical problem statements.  Similarly, Scott produced an original research paper describing the operational concept for a biometric based sensor system to enable target identification and location in dense urban environments, utilizing emerging ‘big data’ and AI concepts.  As the Chief of Staff, US Southern Command, Scott drove the integration of data-driven/informed decision-making processes.  Instituting reforms in organizational processes, work-force development, and disciplined recruiting/hiring practices, Scott maximized the capacity of the smallest combatant command headquarters by shedding unnecessary tasks to automation and AI where possible.