Dean G. Popps
Contacts
Dean G. Popps currently serves as Senior National Security Advisor to the Williamson Law Group (WLG) with clients in the defense industry and business. Prior to joining WLG he served for 12 years as Senior Counsel* to a mid-sized GovCon law firm in Tysons Corner, VA, He also serves, or has served, on various Boards of Directors of US companies and Advisory Boards, in addition to regular advocacy assignments with one of Capitol Hill’s most reputable boutique defense government relations firms. His special expertise, in recent years, has been serving as an independent, outside director for US-based companies, which are foreign owned, and which require Foreign Ownership Control and Influence (FOCI) mitigation under the supervision of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), an agency of the Department of Defense.
Prior to government service in 2003 in Iraq at the request of the then US president, Mr. Popps was a successful telecommunications entrepreneur-CEO, senior P/L executive, attorney, and consultant for more than two decades. He semi-retired in 1999 following the successful sale of the Dallas Fort Worth Teleport, a business he founded in 1984 along with the Trammell Crow family of Dallas, to NYSE-listed competitor. As an original wildcatter in the birthing of the satellite and cable tv era, he was an original incorporator of C-SPAN, cable’s long running public affairs network, along with founder Brian Lamb and Bob Tisch. Shortly thereafter, he provided the first satellite transmission for the then-fledgling BET cable network and the first successful attempts at closed captioning by satellite. He participated in the founding and operation of 3 satellite teleports, Washington, DC, New York, and Dallas Fort Worth.
He served two presidential administrations as the Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ALT) and the Army Acquisition Executive (AAE) in the Department of the Army as a political appointee from 2004 to 2008 and holding over at the request of the new administration from 2008 to 2010, then officially retiring from government after his successor was confirmed by the United States Senate.
While in these positions, Mr. Popps led the execution of the Army’s acquisition function and the acquisition management system which included more than 600 Army and Joint Programs of Record and record procurement budgets during wartime. His responsibilities included providing oversight for the life cycle management and sustainment of Army weapons systems and equipment from research and development through test and evaluation, acquisition, logistics, fielding, and de-militarization. In addition, he was responsible for appointing, managing, and evaluating Program Executive Officers (PEOs) and managing the 42,000-person Army Acquisition Corps and the Army Acquisition Workforce. In 2009, he appointed the first woman to a PEO position in the history of the Army Acquisition Corps. He was also responsible for communicating key acquisition messages and information to Congress.
In 2008, he was appointed by then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, to serve on the Commission on Wartime Contracting, an independent, bipartisan commission established by Congress to study wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
From 2004 until 2007 as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary ALT, he also served as the Director of Iraq Reconstruction and Program Management. He was primarily engaged in overseeing Army’s executive agency of the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund (“IRRF”). His office, in partnership with the Army’s Project and Contracting Office (PCO) and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), successfully committed, obligated, and disbursed the majority of the Fund’s $18 billion for over 4,000 projects in Iraq.
In 2003, following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Popps was recruited from the private sector to join the Department of Defense’s Coalitional Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, Iraq, where he served as Director of Industrial Conversion to the Coalition, working to restructure and align the former regime’s state-owned 52 Military Industry Commission companies into the new Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology. He served as the first CPA Deputy Senior Advisor to that ministry and also assisted in the ministerial restructuring of the former Iraqi nuclear reactor site at Al-Tuwaitha while leading efforts to retain and re-direct thousands of former Iraqi WMD scientists. He was involved in non-proliferation, intelligence, and radiation source collection issues that have impacted post-war Iraq. He also served on the CPA’s Iraq Transition Planning Team in June 2004 and worked to transfer authority to the new Iraqi government.
He has been recognized for his work, most notably with The Joint Civilian Service Commendation Award from Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III in 2004, The Secretary of Defense’s Medal for the Global War on Terrorism in 2008, the US Army Engineer Regiment’s Bronze de Fleury Medal in 2008 for work in Iraq Reconstruction, the US Army’s Distinguished Civilian Service Medal in 2009 for his service as the Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army and Army Acquisition Executive, and the Secretary of the Army‘s 4-star Leadership Award in 2010.
He is co-chairman of the Strategic Materials Advisory Council, a non-profit in Washington, DC, he helped found to advocate for America’s strategic supply line and materials. Currently, he serves on 3 Boards: Watts Constructors, a subsidiary USG construction contractor in McLean, Virginia of Dubai based ORASCOM; John Cockerill Defense America Auburn Hills, Michigan with parent offices in Belgium, that company being Belgium’s oldest defense (cannons and tank turrets for military vehicles) company; and lastly, Millennium Corporation of Arlington, Virginia, a mid-sized, minority-owned cyber and government services contractor firm.
In past years, he has successfully served as a director of a member of the Board of Directors of the Eutelsat America Corporation (as an independent FOCI Director) in Washington, DC with parent offices in Paris, France, the third largest satellite commercial carrier fleet in the world; as a Director of IAP Worldwide Services, Inc of Cape Canaveral, Florida, an expeditionary logistics and services firm used by the US military; and as a Bank Restructure Director for HDT Global in Solon, OH, an expeditionary product company for the military, government and industry. Also of particular note, as a past Independent Outside FOCI Director, he concluded a wind-down of war related USG contracts and the moth balling of the US business side of Global Integrated Security (USA) of Reston, Virginia. On the public company side, he served on the founding board of directors of Global Defense & National Security, Inc, a NASDAQ listed company, “GDEF”, which went public in October 2013 as a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC).
He serves (or has served) on the Government Services Committee (GSC), Finance, Audit, and Compensation and Governance committees, some as committee chair, within those respective companies. He is a Life Member of the Association of the United States Army.
As a known commentator on national security issues, he appears frequently on Sirius XM Patriot Network as the Senior National Security Analyst for the David Webb Show and has made numerous other radio and television news appearances on such diverse programs as FOXNEWS, Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs, and The Food Network’s popular Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives with Chef Guy Fieri. He and his wife, Lise, live in McLean, Virginia and have four adult children and four grandchildren.
*Member in good standing of both the State Bar of Georgia (Emeritus) and the District of Columbia Bar (Inactive).