Summary
Jason Dunn-Potter spent 26 years in the United States Army Signal Corps, retiring as a Chief Warrant Officer Five. He served his first assignment in South Korea as a private who did not know how to say bathroom in Korean, deployed to Iraq twice and Laos for MIA recovery operations, served as Director of IT and Chief Information Security Officer at I Corps, and held the role of Command Chief Warrant Officer (CCWO) aka Chief Technology Officer – Strategy at the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), providing strategic IT services for White House operations encompassing over 1,400 DoD military, civilians, and contractors. He is now an Executive Innovation Director and Global Architect for the US Public Sector at Intel Corporation. His watchword is integrity. His method is the same one he has used since Seoul: figure out what you actually need, tell you the truth about what is possible, and hand it back in better shape than you found it.
Get on the Plane
He stepped off the plane in South Korea as a private. Did not know where he was going. Did not know who was picking him up. The Army had handed him a plane ticket, told him he was going to be fine, and sent him alone to a country he could not have placed on a map with confidence. That was his first of many assignments. He was nineteen years old, standing in an airport in a faraway land, without language skills, looking for the path out of the airport and to his first real unit. He found it. He got in. He figured it out.
That moment is where everything begins. Not with a speech about service or a family tradition of military sacrifice. As a teenager who did not know what he did not know, handed a ticket to somewhere unfamiliar, and told to move. “You leave your sheltered home of control and go into the wild west,” he says. “And you don’t know what you don’t know.” He has been going into the wild west ever since, and coming back with whatever was broken, fixed. He is known to most people who have worked with him as The Chief. He has also been called Mr., Cadet, Sergeant, Commander, and Sir. What the name carries that the others do not is the specific weight of a person who built his entire career on being the person in the room who actually knows.
“You leave your sheltered home of control and go into the wild west. And you don’t know what you don’t know.”
Why He Went Deep
The Warrant Officer path is a different kind of Army career. It is not the traditional command track. It is the mastery track, (Technicians / Pilots / Experts). You do not spend it climbing toward being in front of the formation. You spend it becoming the person the institution cannot function without. They are known as “Quiet Professionals”. Jason Dunn-Potter chose it because he never wanted credit, he just wanted to know how things work. Not just manage the people who know. Know. “If it’s broken, I want to be able to fix it,” he says. “Because somebody’s gonna fix it, and if it’s not gonna work, you need to find out where they’ve got to go.” The command track was available to him. The institutional pressure to follow peers in that direction was real. He understood what it would have cost him. The operational tempo. The politics. The better part of your life spent on things you did not believe in. He did not want it. He wanted the problems.
At CW5, he became the person the institution turned to when it needed to know whether something was true. Not just a manager of experts. The expert. “It’s an amazing feeling to know that everybody depends on you,” he says. “But there’s a real responsibility to be accurate. And to say when you don’t know.” At Intel, he describes the scope of his current role the same way he has always described his work: “I’m twenty feet deep and ten miles wide.” He covers everything. He walked out of a training hospital the morning of this interview, working through every innovation available to deploy across a healthcare system. He goes in, he finds the gaps and the potential fixes, he hands it back.
Photo courtesy of Jason Dunn-Potter
“It’s an amazing feeling to know that everybody depends on you. But there’s a real responsibility to be accurate. And to say when you don’t know.”
Two Wars in the Same Conflict
Dunn-Potter deployed to Iraq the first time in 2005. The unit was among the first of the Army’s modular, digitally enhanced brigades to field new equipment, including, the Joint Network Node (JNN), a satellite-based communications relay system that moved the entire architecture from terrestrial to space-based control. Nobody had trained on it at scale before going in. He and his team built it, fielded it, and integrated it into a combat zone, dusting off a rough 12-month tour. Eighteen months later, he was back. Technology had evolved again. New electronic warfare threats had emerged that did not exist on the first tour. The deployment came on short notice with almost no ramp time. He had to incorporate tools that were not there last time while training people who were still not ready for what they already had. “Same mission, same goal,” he says. “New technology, new adoption. How do we get it to work? And how do we bring everybody with us who is not ready?” They were never ready. That was not a problem he expected to solve. It was a condition he expected to manage.
Between and after those deployments he also served across Indo Pacific & Southwest Asia including a stint in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, adding another theater to the operational range of a career that was, by design, always moving toward the harder problem.
“Same mission, same goal. New technology, new adoption. How do we get it to work? And how do we bring everybody with us who is not ready?”
Laos
The Laos mission was MIA recovery, part of the decades-long American effort to bring home service members lost in Southeast Asia. Dunn-Potter went as a Commo Chief, a borrowed communications Sergeant setting up the architecture that supported three large recovery sites and the reconnaissance teams working between them. His job was technical. What happened to him was not. Each missing person had a file. A biography. A physical description. A photograph. A family history. Everything that had been documented about who they were, what they looked like, and who was still waiting for them. He spent nearly two months in the country, moving between sites, reading every file, and knowing exactly who each team was looking for before they found them.
When remains were recovered and a family met the plane, he was there. “I knew it was going to happen,” he says. “I knew what was going to happen. I knew the family was going to cry. And I still was not fine.” He compares it to watching Old Yeller, knowing the ending and crying anyway. He was not a grief counselor. He was not a recovery specialist. He was the comms chief who set up the radios and ended up carrying the weight of every file he had read. “It was emotionally living all the way through,” he says. He met people on that mission he still thinks about (just like every hard mission he’s had). The combat tours asked him to be ready for what might happen. Laos asked him to be present for what already had.
“I knew what was going to happen. I knew the family was going to cry. And I still was not fine.”
The White House
As Chief Technology Officer – Strategy of the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), Jason Dunn-Potter was responsible for strategic IT services, training, and resources for White House operations encompassing over 1,400 DoD military, civilians, and contractors. The mission of WHCA is simple to state and nearly impossible to execute: ensure the president can communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime, without failure. The tempo is not like other units. There is no deployment cycle with a reset period at the end. The phone can ring at any moment, and the answer is always go. During his time at WHCA, the Camp Fire tore through Paradise, California. His family lived there. He watched coverage from inside the White House, waiting for a clearance to call home, knowing that if they were not okay there was nothing he could do from where he was standing. When the president said they were going to California, Dunn-Potter looked at his commander and said it with his eyes before anyone said it out loud. Without hesitation, they shouted GO as he dashed out of the room. Three hours later, he was wheels up at Andrews aboard an USAF C17 Cargo plane enroute to California with an entire advance crew.
What the White House gave him was a ringside seat to history being written in real time, unfiltered, before it appeared on any screen. POTUS walking into North Korea, riots and protests, Covid lockdowns. “It wasn’t your typical White House tour, or was it?” He watched the gap between what actually occurred and what was reported the next day. He is careful about what he says and how he says it. What he will say is this: “If something happened and it’s true, we should probably say that. If it did not happen, we should say that it did not happen.” He learned there that the gap between those two positions is where most of the truth lives. He also learned the difference between proximity to power and access to power. You could be ten feet from the president and have no access. A photo op and a handshake and two sentences, and you are out of the room. His job was not to be in the room. His job was to make sure the room worked. He did that. Then he got shoved into a closet, literally.
The warning came with about sixty seconds to spare. The president was coming back aboard Marine One early to the White House from a speaking engagement. Marine One lands on the south lawn, exactly where Dunn-Potter was standing. He was trapped on the south lawn near the portico and had moments to disappear and nowhere to go. To make matters worse, he was in full dress uniform, multiple rows of decorations across his chest, and his team leader looked at him and said: I apologize sir, but I’m going to have to put you in the mop closet. Dunn-Potter said he understood. The door closed. He stood in the dark, fully decorated, watching through the cracked door as the president walked the colonnade and turned into the oval office. If the president saw someone in uniform, he’d stop to chat and the entire day (and the nation’s) would stop with him. A minute later, his team leader opened the door. Dunn-Potter walked out, straightened up, and kept moving. His job was to make sure things worked. Not to be seen. Period.
Photo courtesy of Jason Dunn-Potter
“If something happened and it’s true, we should probably say that. If it did not happen, we should say that it did not happen.”
What Transition Broke Open
Twenty-six years of structure, then nothing familiar. Dunn-Potter describes leaving the Army the way he describes landing in South Korea as a private: you do not know what you do not know. What surprised him most was not the freedom. It was the absence of formal leadership training in the private sector. In the Army there are schools for leadership, practiced examples, and mentors assigned to walk alongside you. He had been shaped by trials, tribulations, and steadied by the shoulders of giants. Among those giants was Al Morrison, who wasn’t just a mentor but a legend. In industry, he walked into meetings with no stated purpose, no declared outputs, no reason anyone could identify for why the meeting existed. He had never been in a room where nobody knew why it was scheduled. “I went to a meeting when I first got to Intel,” he says. “I asked what it was about. They said they didn’t really know.” That was alien to him. He had spent 26 years in an institution where you do not walk into a room without knowing whether it is an informative meeting or a decision-making meeting, and you do not go to an informative meeting expecting a decision.
The confidence was real, though. After 26 years, there is nothing that happens in a room that will break him. A fire alarm goes off, he knows how to evacuate that floor, grab the hose, call 911, and keep moving. He brought that with him. What he had to learn was how to deploy it inside institutions that had never been taught what he had been taught. He spent time at DISA, NETCOM, HRC and a slew of strategic roles building and shaping the Army and the nation. He was still, as he had always been, in the business of making sure things worked. He kept moving.
“I went to a meeting when I first got to Intel. I asked what it was about. They said they didn’t really know.”
The Watchword
Dunn-Potter is now an Executive Innovation Director and Global Architect for the US Public Sector at Intel Corporation. In plain language: he translates public sector mission needs into deployable, secure solutions, working with Intel teams, industry partners and government leaders from the tactical edge to the enterprise. His job is to understand what an agency actually needs, translate it into something buildable, confirm the technology can honestly deliver on what is being promised, and tell the truth when it cannot. That last part is where most people in his position fail. He does not. “My watchword is integrity,” he says. “Because that’s the reason I’m in the room. Any sales rep, any marketing person, any engineer can tell a customer anything they want about any technology, and 90 percent of the time the customer would never know.” If someone asks whether the tool makes pancakes and it does not, he says no. He would rather lose the sale than lose the relationship. He has watched people in the industry lose their integrity over a single transaction. He has never recovered from watching it.
He describes his approach with a simple image: a snow shovel and a garden spade. Both are excellent tools. Do not use them interchangeably. His job is to make sure the customer buys the right one, even if the right one is not Intel’s. He has seen technology fail in government not because it was bad technology but because the market was not ready, the pricing was wrong, the support did not follow, and nobody with his background was in the room to say so before the contract was signed. He was the customer for nearly 30 years. He watched vendors miss the mark over and over. He is now on the other side of the table, and he is determined not to repeat what he watched. “I’m not a business development guy,” he says. “I’m an innovation guy. My job is to help you solve your problem, regardless of which products you use.”
“My watchword is integrity. Because that’s the reason I’m in the room.”
What He Hands Across the Table
When Dunn-Potter sits across from a transitioning veteran, he has one rule he gives every young leader: shake every hand in every room you walk into. “You have no idea who is going to be across from you or next to you at a table twenty years from now,” he says. “Those relationships are how people get hired.” He will never hire anyone off a piece of paper. He says it is flat, without qualification. An email, a handshake, a conversation. Never a resume alone. He tells transitioning veterans not to use AI to write their resume because they will look like everyone else. Use it to read the resume and give feedback. Write it yourself. The version that sounds like everyone else performs like everyone else.
He also tells them the thing nobody tells them clearly enough: if you had a process and a plan and a map, leaving the military would be manageable. If you are trying to figure it out alone, that is a terrible idea. This is the first time for everyone, and the first time you do something you are never great at it. He gives them the map. He gives them the process. He gives them what Al Morrison gave him, translated into language that works for where they are going. “This isn’t like your last job, but use your skills to navigate the new environment and you’ll be just fine.”
Photo courtesy of Jason Dunn-Potter
“Shake every hand in every room you walk into. You have no idea who is going to be across from you or next to you at a table twenty years from now.”
What the Ranch Is For
He goes home to a small ranch in Boerne, Texas, northwest of San Antonio. Land and trees and a deer that has been eating his magnolia since the day he moved in. He planted it the day the family arrived. The deer found it shortly after. They have been in a territorial dispute ever since, and he says it with the kind of pleasure that belongs to a man who spent 26 years in places where the disputes were not about magnolias. “The world is my problem when I put on my Intel hat and step out the door,” he says. Police departments, school districts, hospitals, and government agencies. Every problem you can dream of. When he comes home, the problem set narrows.
“The world is my problem when I put on my Intel hat and step out the door.”
Strip away Intel, the credentials, the certifications, the dozen professional organizations, and what remains is a man who finds value in knowledge and in handing that knowledge to the next person in the room. He talked to a university hospital that morning. He is certain three people in that meeting will never look at their workflows the same way again. He walked them through a camera above a sink that turns green after twenty seconds of handwashing. Not complicated. Not experimental. Available now. Not standard anywhere. The gap between what is possible and what is deployed is where he has always lived. He goes twenty feet deep. He comes back with it fixed or at least on a path. He has been doing that since a private stepped off a plane in Seoul and did not know how to say bathroom, and the Army said he was going to be fine, and he was.
RESOURCES
Intel Government Technologies
intel.com/government | https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/government/overview.html
Intel’s public sector technology programs covering defense, federal, state, local, and education agencies.
AFCEA International
afcea.org | https://www.afcea.org
Professional association connecting military, government, and industry leaders in defense communications and technology.
USAWOA | United States Army Warrant Officers Association
usawoa.org | https://www.usawoa.org
Professional organization dedicated to the development and support of Army Warrant Officers past and present.
Warriors Ethos
warriorsethos.org | https://www.warriorsethos.org
Veteran mentorship and transition support organization. Dunn-Potter serves as a senior mentor.
IVMF | Institute for Veterans and Military Families
ivmf.syracuse.edu | https://ivmf.syracuse.edu
Free technical training and certification funding for veterans through programs including Onward to Opportunity (O2O).
DPAA | Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency
dpaa.mil | https://www.dpaa.mil
The agency responsible for recovering and identifying Americans missing from past conflicts, including MIA recovery operations in Laos.
Veterans Crisis Line
Dial 988, then press 1 | veteranscrisisline.net | https://www.veteranscrisisline.net
ABOUT JASON DUNN-POTTER
Jason Dunn-Potter is a Executive Innovation Director and Global Architect for the US Public Sector at Intel Corporation under Intel Governmental Technologies (IGT), working with government agencies and industry partners across defense, federal, state, local, and education sectors. He retired from the United States Army as a Chief Warrant Officer Five after 26 years of service in the Signal Corps. His assignments included Chief Technology Officer – Strategy at the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), Director of IT Services and Chief Information Security Officer at 7th Infantry Division Headquarters, theater communications engineer for Southwest Asia with the 335th Signal Command, and time at the Army Software Factory at Army Futures Command. He holds a Master of Science in Information Technology, an active CISSP, and nearly a dozen industry certifications. He serves as a senior mentor for Warriors Ethos and is a past president of two USAWOA chapters. He lives in Boerne, Texas.
Learn More | veteranexcellence.org
Veterans Excellence Magazine profiles veterans in post-service leadership across every industry.