Jack Jacobs
(Congressional medal of honour recipient, retired army colonel, business executive)
Advisor
Jack Jacobs was born in Brooklyn, New York. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Rutgers University and entered the U.S. Army in 1966 as a Second Lieutenant through the ROTC program. He served as a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division, executive officer of an infantry battalion in the 7th Infantry Division and commanded the 4th Battalion 10th Infantry in Panama. A member of the faculty of the US Military Academy, Jacobs taught international relations and comparative politics, and he was a member of the faculty of the National War College in Washington, DC.
He was in Vietnam twice, both times as an advisor to Vietnamese infantry battalions, earning three Bronze Stars, two Silver Stars and the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest combat decoration. Jacobs retired as a Colonel.
He was a founder and Chief Operating Officer of AutoFinance Group Inc, one of the firms to pioneer the securitization of debt instruments; the firm was subsequently sold to Key Bank. He was a Managing Director of Bankers Trust, where he ran foreign exchange options worldwide and was a partner in the institutional hedge fund business. Jacobs subsequently founded a similar business for Lehman Brothers.
Jacobs is the co-chair of CapZone’s USA Fund, which funds projects of the defense industrial base, and he serves on several charitable boards of directors, including the Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation and the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation. An on-air analyst for NBC News, he was a member of the team that produced the 2011 Murrow Award-winning Nightly News segment “Iraq: The Long Way Out.” Colonel Jacobs is also the co-author of the memoir, If Not Now, When? , published by Penguin and winner of the Colby Award. His second work of non-fiction is Basic, released by St. Martin’s Press in 2012, and he was an Executive Producer of the series Ten Weeks, which aired on Roku.