Jason Dempsey, PhD, is one of the nation’s leading experts on military demographics and civilian-military relations and President of MissionWise Growth Partners. He has a long history with the military, academia, and service to transitioning veterans. 

Dempsey spent 22 years as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army, serving in airborne, ranger, air assault, and mechanized infantry units. He deployed both to Iraq and Afghanistan and last served as special assistant to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he wrote and launched the Call to Continued Service.

In addition to his conventional military assignments, he received a doctorate in political science from Columbia University and taught American politics at West Point. He is the author of Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Military Relations, the first book to comprehensively cover the social and political attitudes of active-duty service members of all ranks. 

Detailed to the White House while on active duty, he led the inter-agency efforts around implementation of Presidential Study Directive – 9, Strengthening Our Military Families. Prior to that, he was in the Office of the First Lady as a White House Fellow, where he worked with First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden to launch the Joining Forces campaign – a bipartisan effort to connect Americans to those who serve.

Since his military retirement he has taken on a portfolio of efforts in support of veterans transitioning from military service to higher education. In addition to serving as President of MissionWise Growth Partners, he is also an adjunct Senior Fellow with the Center for a New American Security, where he has published several reports on veteran transitions, including: Veteran Tech Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, Veteran Pathways to Employment: Hurdles and Opportunities, and Transitioning to Tech: Veteran Perceptions Regarding Careers in the Technology Sector. He has written for the Atlantic magazine on the challenges facing the military 50 years after the end of the draft, and is co-editor of a book on that topic that will be released by Oxford University Press later this year.