Mark Thomas Esper was born on April 26,1964 and is an American politician and manufacturing executive who served as the 27th United States secretary of defense from 2019 to 2020.
60 Facts About Mark Esper
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Mark Esper subsequently served in the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army National Guard.
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Immediately before joining the Trump administration, Mark Esper lobbied for defense contractor Raytheon as its vice president of government relations.
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Mark Esper was fired by President Donald Trump by tweet on November 9,2020.
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Mark Esper was born on April 26,1964, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania as the son of Pauline "Polly" Reagan and Thomas Joseph Mark Esper.
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Mark Esper's father was a member of the Maronite Church.
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Mark Esper's paternal grandfather was an immigrant from Lebanon, and his uncle was war journalist George Esper.
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Mark Esper graduated from Laurel Highlands High School outside Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1982.
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Mark Esper received his Bachelor of Science in engineering from the United States Military Academy in 1986.
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Mark Esper was a dean's list student at West Point and received the Douglas MacArthur Award for Leadership.
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Mark Esper received a master's degree in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School in 1995 and a doctorate in public policy from George Washington University in 2008.
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Mark Esper served as an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division and deployed with the "Screaming Eagles" for the Gulf War.
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Mark Esper's battalion was part of the famous "left hook" that led to the defeat of the Iraqi Army.
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Mark Esper later commanded an airborne rifle company in Europe and served as an Army fellow at the Pentagon.
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Mark Esper served on active duty for more than ten years before moving to the Army National Guard and later the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
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Mark Esper is a recipient of the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service.
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Mark Esper was chief of staff at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, from 1996 to 1998.
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From 1998 to 2002, Mark Esper served as a senior professional staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
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Mark Esper was a senior policy advisor and legislative director for US Senator Chuck Hagel.
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Mark Esper was policy director for the House Armed Services Committee from 2001 to 2002.
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From 2002 to 2004, Esper served in George W Bush's administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy, where he was responsible for a broad range of nonproliferation, arms control and international security issues.
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Mark Esper was director for national security affairs for the US Senate under Majority Leader Bill Frist from 2004 to 2006.
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Mark Esper was executive vice president at the Aerospace Industries Association in 2006 and 2007.
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From September 2007 to February 2008, Mark Esper served as national policy director to US Senator Fred Thompson in his 2008 presidential campaign.
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From 2008 to 2010, Mark Esper served as executive vice president of the Global Intellectual Property Center and vice president for Europe and Eurasia at the US Chamber of Commerce.
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Mark Esper was hired as vice president of government relations at defense contractor Raytheon in July 2010.
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Mark Esper was recognized as a top corporate lobbyist by The Hill in 2015 and 2016.
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Mark Esper was Trump's third nominee for the position, following the withdrawals of Vincent Viola and Mark E Green.
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In mid-2018, Mark Esper published a new Army Vision that outlined the goals he wanted to achieve by 2028, as well as the ways and means to get there.
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Mark Esper was asked by reporters in February 2018 whether soldiers had concerns about serving beside openly transgender individuals.
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Trump announced the appointment of Mark Esper as Acting Secretary of Defense on June 18,2019, after Acting Secretary Patrick Shanahan decided to withdraw his nomination.
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Four days later, it was announced that Trump would nominate Mark Esper to serve as Secretary of Defense in a permanent capacity.
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Mark Esper said that his operating positions as Secretary of Defense would be apolitical, in keeping with the National Defense Strategy formulated in 2018 by his predecessor Jim Mattis.
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Mark Esper met with his European counterparts in February 2020 to discuss basing options for a new United States Army headquarters in Europe, bearing the name "V Corps" that had originally been established in World War I but was inactivated while stationed in Germany in 2013.
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Mark Esper stated the new headquarters was needed to improve military coordination among NATO partners.
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On November 24,2019, during a dispute regarding whether Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher would be stripped of his Trident pin, Mark Esper fired the United States Secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer.
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Mark Esper said he previously supported the peer review, but followed Trump's order.
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Meanwhile, Trump cited the Gallagher case as the primary reason for Mark Esper's firing of Spencer, while citing "large cost overruns" in the Navy.
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Mark Esper had significant concerns about the plan, but avoided publicly criticizing it and worked to implement Trump's directive.
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In June 2020, Mark Esper traveled to NATO headquarters in Brussels to meet with NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg and to reassure him that the US would not announce any further troop movements or reductions without first consulting with NATO allies.
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Mark Esper backed Trump's decision, saying that the Pentagon wants to send more troops to the Baltic states, Poland and Romania.
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Mark Esper authorized the Defense Department to provide civilian health authorities with five million respirator masks and 2,000 specialized ventilators.
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Mark Esper defended Modly's decision, though he conceded that he had not read Crozier's letter calling for help.
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Mark Esper named James McPherson, Under Secretary of the Army, to replace him.
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Several days following the announcement, Mark Esper extended the freeze through June 30,2020.
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Mark Esper primarily left it up to local commanders in terms of how they would respond to the pandemic, which resulted in uneven responses.
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In May 2020, at an event marking the 75th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe, Esper was criticized for interacting with seven World War II veterans who were between the ages of 96 and 100 without wearing a facemask.
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On June 18,2020, Mark Esper said that while the Defense Department has often led on issues of race and discrimination, he cited underrepresentation of minorities in the officer ranks as a particular problem.
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On November 9,2020, days after his election loss, Trump tweeted that Esper was "terminated," and that he had been replaced by Christopher C Miller, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center who would serve as Acting Secretary of Defense.
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Mark Esper had written his resignation letter four days earlier, when a winner had not yet been determined.
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In November 2021, Mark Esper sued the Department of Defense for preventing the publication of parts of his memoir.
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Mark Esper dropped the suit three months later; his attorney said DoD had withdrawn "the overwhelming majority" of its objections to material it had deemed classified.
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Mark Esper said he considered resigning several times but remained on concerns he would be replaced by a Trump loyalist who was providing dangerous ideas to the president.
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Mark Esper said he told Miller that would be a war crime; Miller flatly denied the episode occurred.
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Mark Esper gave several interviews in 2022 as part of his book tour.
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Mark Esper said that, while in office, he was unaware of previous incidents of Chinese surveillance balloons in US airspace.
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Mark Esper is currently the Distinguished Chair of the Modern War Institute at the US Military Academy at West Point.
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In 2021, Esper was named the first John S McCain Distinguished Fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, a Washington, DC-based think tank; he is a member of the Institute's Board of Trustees.
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Mark Esper is a frequent guest on news shows such as CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and Bloomberg, and participates in the professional speaking circuit through the Worldwide Speakers Group.
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Mark Esper is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, the US Global Leadership Coalition, and the Council on Foreign Relations.