'Right person, right officer, right job': Alumnus helps oversee Israel-Lebanon ceasefire

When Jasper Jeffers III enrolled at Virginia Tech in the early 1990s, he originally planned to return to his nearby Giles County home after graduation and help run the family’s small sawmill business in Ripplemead, a scenic 30-minute drive from Blacksburg.

But those plans started splintering the longer he spent in the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets and in ROTC. After graduating in 1996 with degrees in political science and government from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, he found himself pining to serve his country before returning to his hometown.

Now, almost 30 years later, he still hasn’t made it back to Giles County, at least not on a permanent basis.

“There was never a scenario where I envisioned doing any more than the minimum required to complete my service obligation for my [ROTC] scholarship,” Jeffers said. “Obviously, life has a weird way of taking what you think you’re going to do and changing it.”

Today, Jeffers is a major general in the U.S. Army, working as a commander in the U.S. Special Operations Command Central located at MacDill Air Force in Tampa, Florida. Jeffers received a promotion in July and this past November, was assigned arguably the most important task of his career.

On Nov. 27, U.S. Army officials sent Jeffers to Beirut, Lebanon, for the “implementation and monitoring mechanism” of the cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon. The Lebanese Armed Forces, the Israel Defense Forces, the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon, and France are also participating in this 60-day ceasefire process.

“This is a really tough problem,” Jeffers said via Zoom from Beirut two weeks before Christmas. “This is a very complex neighborhood. It’s a complex country with an incredible history, but a difficult one. We’re from Special Operations headquarters, so one of the things we talk about a lot is how we are comfortable in uncertainty. I call them ‘unstructured problems’ – they don’t have a clear beginning, middle, or end. That’s kind of our specialty.

“We are just taking this process day by day. This is difficult. It’s a tactical, operational, and strategic problem, and you can only go day by day. You have to work very closely with a variety of partners, the five different members of the ceasefire makeup here. … It’s just one of those things where you have to be patient and occasionally decisive and step through it day by day.”

Jeffers’ experience makes him ideal for the role, according to Maj. Gen. Kelly Dickerson '95, who works in the Office of the Chief, Army Reserve. Dickerson was a year ahead of Jeffers in the Corps of Cadets, and during the late summer before his senior year, Dickerson, along with a few other seniors, helped prepare underclass cadets for the upcoming year. Dickerson said the seniors noticed that Jeffers, though only a junior, could have taught them a few things.

“When I found out he was being sent to Lebanon for that role, I thought, ‘Right person, right officer, right job,’” Dickerson said. “As soon as I found out, I texted him, ‘Hey, brother, you’re the right guy. Let us know what you need, and we’re all proud of you.’ He comes back, and he’s like, ‘I’m ready.’

“The military, when they put people in charge of our biggest challenges, they get it right. They put the right people in the right job – and there’s no mistake they put the right person in charge.”

Jeffers’ experience includes serving in Iraq as a company commander and air operations officer during the second Gulf War. He also has spent time in Afghanistan, and he led a brigade within the U.S. Army Special Operations Command in Syria to push back the Islamic State group.

Those experiences give him a perspective in how to negotiate conflicting interests in some of the world’s most volatile regions.

“I have been in situations where you’d have to step into an unstructured problem,” Jeffers said. “You’d take a small team, a small special operations team, and step into a little bit of uncertainty and try to help manage it. The real beauty, I think, of special operations is the great people that we have. If you pull them together on a little team, it’s amazing how you can work your way through some tough problems.”

Jeffers said he learned the value of surrounding himself with great people while in the Corps of Cadets. He followed in the footsteps of his brother, Jacob, who graduated from Virginia Tech and retired from the military after a 22-year career. Jasper came to Virginia Tech on an ROTC scholarship, joined the Highty-Tighties – the corps’ regimental band – and established relationships with classmates. He said he quickly realized that like-minded people, ones willing to spend a career serving, could not be found in many professions outside the military.

“I love serving,” Jeffers said. “I’ll keep serving as long as it makes sense for the Army, and at this point in my career, it really is about giving back. I don’t know that I was the best young officer when I was growing up, and I had a lot of senior leaders that looked out for me. I really feel like paying it forward is me giving the chance to help some younger leaders and younger soldiers. I’m just trying to be the person who looks out for them in the way many of my mentors looked out for me.”

Jeffers often gets the opportunity to connect with Hokies – “I’d say I run into Hokies all over the place,” he said. While in Beirut, he came across a college classmate of his, Col. Joseph Becker ‘96, who serves as a senior defense official in Beirut.

Jeffers also often connects with the younger generation of officers in large part because Virginia Tech’s Corps of Cadets commissions so many into the Army. So there are a lot of opportunities for him to connect with the Hokie community.

“Some of my best friends in the world are still my buds from starting in the Corps of Cadets there at Tech,” Jeffers said. “I think there’s the ethos that’s connected to all of us who get the chance to be at Tech, and to kind of grow up in the corps. We connect to Ut Prosim in a more than emotional way. It’s meaningful for our whole lives, and I think that can sound maybe a little bit trite, but it’s a real thing in that we get the chance to keep serving. I think that idea shaped me throughout my career, but it’s not lost on me today. It’s still something very, very important to how I think about myself, my own personal identity, and what I want to try to be for the people around me.”

In less than two years, Jeffers will have served 30 years in the Army. Many tend to contemplate retirement following 30 years of service, but those who both know him and understand the importance of his work hope to see him remain service.

Dickerson knows many in the Department of Defense, and he said they speak highly of Jeffers’ work.

Which, to Dickerson, doesn’t come as a surprise.

“I’m not at all surprised at his success in the military,” Dickerson said. “Whether it was the military or his family business, he was going to be incredibly successful, but in a way as to where and when you meet him, you don’t know you’re talking to a Special Forces two-star general. You think you’re meeting one of your neighbors who has come to hang out at a picnic, quite frankly. That’s how humble and sincere he is as a person.”

Serving in the military involves sacrificing time away from loved ones, and for Jeffers, that has meant time away from his wife and three children who live in Tampa. It also has meant sacrificing personal hobbies and self-interests.

But Jeffers said that being an example of service motivates him more than the benefits of retirement.

“It’s something that I think about – what do I want to model for my kids?” Jeffers said. “That’s something that’s important to me, and what I would hope they would learn from. I’m not always there even when I’m back, so I try to think about quality time versus maybe quantity of time, but I also want to model for them a life of service and hope. They can learn from that.

“But there’ll be a natural point where the Army looks at me and says, ‘Hey, it’s probably time,’ and when they come, I’ll be ready to step aside.”