Lieutenant Colonel Jason Dempsey is a career infantry officer in the United States Army, currently serving in Washington, DC. His last assignment was as the operations officer for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division. The brigade completed redeployment from a year in Afghanistan on January 21st, 2010. In January, 2009, Jason deployed as the operations officer for Task Force Chosin, a 650-person task force responsible for interdicting insurgent movement along 140km of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in Kunar Province. Midway through the deployment he was selected to serve as the brigade operations officer for Task Force Spartan and was responsible for coordinating and planning the actions of a 3200-person task force conducting counterinsurgency operations in Wardakand Logar, two previously unoccupied provinces located immediately south of Kabul. In 2005 Jason volunteered for deployment to Iraq where he traveled between Baghdad and Kirkuk working with State Department and military personnel to help draft and coordinate policy towards Kirkuk and the reconciliation of conflict stemming from the displacement of Kurdish and Shiite populations in northern Iraq. Jason is a graduate of the United States Military Academy and holds a PhD in political science from Columbia University. The focus of his research is the political and social attitudes of members of the military. In addition to Our Army, LTC Dempsey has published articles on presidential approval ratings during foreign policy crises, Army efforts toward gender integration, counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and the experiences of Hispanics in the United States Army, the latter article co-authored with Robert Shapiro and published in the Spring 2009 issue of Armed Forces & Society. In 2005 he was awarded a Dwight Eisenhower / Clifford Roberts Fellowship for his work. Because of his research he was also asked to serve as a working group member of the Army’s Commission on Officer Diversity and Advancement from 2004-2006. Jason is a graduate of the Command and General Staff College and the Amphibious Warfare School of the United States Marine Corps. His other military assignments have included tours with the 82nd Airborne Division, the 75th Ranger Regiment, and the 3rd Infantry Division. He is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a 2004 delegate to the U.S.—Italy Young Leaders Conference.
Books
Our Army: Soldiers, Politics and American Civil-Military Relations (2010)
Conventional wisdom holds that the American military is overwhelmingly conservative and Republican, and extremely political....
Articles
Joining Forces: Bridging the Civil-Military Divide (with C. Bradford Cooper), The Forum (2011)
This paper focuses on the members of the military and their families who have served...
The Missing Civilians: We soldiers can't win the fight in Afghanistan on our own, Foreign Policy (2010)
It is time for the U.S. military to develop an understanding of counterinsurgency that acknowledges...
The Army's Hispanic Future (with Robert Shapiro), Armed Forces & Society (2009)
Using data from the Citizenship & Service: 2004 Survey of Army Personnel, a probability sample...
Public Evaluation of Presidential Performance During Foreign Policy Crises, The Forum (2006)
This paper examines criteria the public use when evaluating a president’s action in foreign policy....