Dr. Linton Wells II
Employment:
Former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and DoD Chief Information Officer; President and CEO, Global Resilience Strategies
Dr. Linton Wells II is an American public servant who served a total of 51 years in government service. He served 26 years in the United States Navy as an officer, and then was appointed by the White House as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, serving through two administrations of both parties, both the Democrat Bill Clinton and the Republican George W. Bush.
He wrote many books, articles, and white papers on matters of national security, including important texts related to the use of American military capabilities in global humanitarian operations. His expertise focused on the strategic impacts of technological change and on building resilience to natural and man-made disasters as issues of US national security. He shaped, over five decades of public service, current US Department of Defense directives that link policy and technology with public-private cooperation. His writings significantly altered U.S. and international approaches to civil-military engagement, US policy in global humanitarian assistance, and global public-private partnerships in disaster relief.
He has also made fundamental contributions to technical areas that have defined network-enabled military capabilities and cyberspace operations. After retiring from public service, he continued to contribute to the international STAR-TIDES network that he had founded in 2007. The international STAR-TIDES network, a consortium of some 5,000 global nodes comprising agencies, organizations, institutions and individuals in 40+ countries that promote the free exchange of research results on global issues of human security.
He was listed by Fortune magazine in 2016 as one of the top 16 “Players of Tech”.