After 10 years under the leadership of retired Maj. Gen. Juan Ayala, the city’s Military and Veterans Affairs Department has a new leader: Retired Maj. Gen. Scott Jackson.
Jackson served in the United States Army for 34 years. He was the third generation in his family to join the Army, his son Ben recently made it four. While serving in the military, he spent more than four years deployed to combat zones, including three deployments to Iraq.
He went on to serve as the Army’s Director of Legislative Affairs for the Senate, then commanding the Security Force Assistance Command at Fort Bragg before serving as the founding commander of the Army’s 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade at Fort Benning.
Most recently in the military he was the Chief of Staff for U.S. Southern Command in Miami, the joint formation responsible for operations south of Mexico. He then retired from active duty and became the chief operating officer at a startup.
The San Antonio Report sat down with Jackson to talk about his new position at the city as its director of the Military and Veterans Affairs Department.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What drew you to this opportunity?
Service. A lot of veterans would tell you that you stay in the military or in public service because you have a very clearly defined mission with a good purpose, and you’re surrounded by good people. And don’t get me wrong, my time in the private sector was great. I had great people. I learned a lot, but it didn’t have the same fulfilling purpose and mission that I had. Having this opportunity to come back to this job was the chance to fulfill that personal need for purpose.
Your predecessor had this job for 10 years. Are there things that you’re looking to do differently or things that you’re looking to continue?
Juan’s a legend. So first and foremost, I think of all my time in 34 years, I really can’t think of times where I’ve ever followed somebody like him. He touched so many parts of this government. He was kind of the jack of all trades for the city in some respects, and everybody loved him. So the short answer is, I want to sustain what Juan was doing. I mean, it was working. It was right. It was taking care of the people.
The job number one remains no change in mission to Joint Base San Antonio. We don’t lose missions. We maintain what we’ve got, and ideally we grow. That’s job one. Juan had the same mission as I do. My secondary priority is veterans. Veterans, service members, family members. Between our office and the hundreds of nonprofits in San Antonio, we have a great veteran support network. However, I think we could be more tightly integrated and synchronized.
One of my primary efforts will be trying to figure out how to get everybody rowing in rhythm. How can we get better synergies between the organizations? Everybody’s strapped for resources. It’s the nature of the game. You never have enough resources, so it’s about getting return on investment from those resources.
We have large private organizations, nonprofits coming in, like Team Red, White, and Blue next year, and Blue Star Families, which come with extensive resources. Then we have smaller ones. There’s space here in San Antonio for all of them. The tent is big enough for everybody. We’ve just got to get integrated.
There’s almost a quarter million veterans in the San Antonio area, some of the largest veteran populations in the United States. It’s the fastest growing in the United States, and so you need to view that as an asset. A competitive advantage, and I think that’s where this office, along with the Economic Development Division and the other parts of the city government, the county government, can work together to communicate the competitive advantage that veterans bring to the local economy.
There’s a smaller story to be told that’s just as important. That’s the veteran-owned businesses, the veteran workforce. We need to, either through policy programs and communication, reinforce what we can do with veterans.
Last week, one of the first places I went was out to the Good Samaritan Veterans Outreach and Service Center, where they have the very first Small Business Administration-sponsored veterans support center, the only one in the United States. The first of 10, but they built it here in San Antonio, and the whole purpose of that facility is to facilitate the transition for veterans to build their own small business, navigating SBA, navigating small business loans, how to do zoning and all that kind of stuff. That is a growth sector for us because not only do we want business here in San Antonio, not only do we want significant military missions, but we also want to thrive and better the community because it is a great, stable aspect of our population.
You mentioned Joint Base San Antonio and keeping the missions. This past year has brought a lot of change for the Joint Base, with the loss of Army North and Army South. How involved is your office in bringing new initiatives to keep the military sector alive?
The job of the of our department is to be that go between, or the liaison, between the military components, be it on Fort Sam Houston or at Lackland or even off campus, and the city and the chambers. We speak the language, we understand the basing process, we understand programming, so we translate the speak of DOW into something that fits over here.
So the Defense Health Agency relocation started years ago. We’re getting to a really good place on it. We’ve got commitments now from the city and the county to assist in the renovation of what they call the South Beach Annex, which will house 500-ish plus DHA relocation jobs. So the intention is to take DHA as a nationwide agency with facilities in lots of different cities, not just Washington D.C., and to consolidate some of those and bring them here. You’ll hear talk in the papers about the 16th Air Force’s new headquarters, which is an ongoing effort. Department of War has already issued a request for proposal on that to give them a better facility. We’re early in the process about where that’s going to land, so that’s ongoing.
The METC dorms, there’s now a workable solution on the table that’s being implemented to make sure that gets taken care of for our service members. Then, just solidifying then the medical footprint with these new facilities. There’s some other military relocations that are a little smaller in scale that we’re looking at across the joint force right now to see if they can come in San Antonio. When you think of JBSA, you think of military medicine, cyber intelligence, advanced operation skills, aviation and aeronautics with Randolph and the pilot schools. So, if we can leverage these five core competencies of Fort Sam Houston and Randolph and Lackland, and then tie that back to the economic footprint, that’s how you keep that flywheel spinning.
You and Commissioner Grant Moody and Councilwoman Misty Spears were in D.C. this past week. What were you working on? Are there any new initiatives that you’ll be bringing back to San Antonio?
The key to success in all these things is just continual engagement. There’s lots of things going on in Washington D.C. and you don’t want people to lose sight of what needs to get done. The purpose of the trip was simply that maintain engagement, maintain awareness of what we have going on. We spent some time in the Pentagon, really talking about the issues. We’ve already talked to DHA and some other defense equity type stuff. The Veterans Hospital was another big topic. We spent some time with the Department of Veterans Affairs, talking about the way ahead for the hospital and the Audie Murphy replacement. The $30 million land acquisition is already currently written into the House appropriations. That is a wonderful sign. It’s a multi-year project, but you have got to keep beating the drum, making people aware of it, and it’s paying off.
San Antonio has a growing women veteran population and a growing group of younger veterans. How are you working to support these veterans?
Dr. [Julianne] Flynn at the VA, absolute amazing hero. She’s tracking these two trends. We have a growing percentage of women veterans, and so the VA was formed coming out of World War II when the military population was majority male. It didn’t have a whole lot of support for female medicine built in the VA, but now you need women-specific medical treatment, and so you’ve got to build out those resources. Dr. Flynn is acutely aware of it, and Audie Murphy has you know some capacity there, but the future builds will have greater capacity to support.
The under 65 metric is really about a long term capacity driver. Back in the day, the VA population was older, more geriatric. The care focused more on older men. Now you have all these younger men and women coming to the VA healthcare system, which means they’re probably going to be in the system for longer. And so now you’ve got a capacity and a residual funding piece you have to think through as well.
Some of these injuries that are bringing these younger people in are more traumatic. If you go over to the Audio Murphy, you’ll see the Polytrauma Center. That’s a great resource to address some of the more systemic or holistic concerns for healthcare, as opposed to just getting old.
Right now the Audie Murphy system is not included as part of the psychedelic trials. In talking to Dr. Flynn, it really has to do kind of with their current capacities. When we asked about it, she’s like, ‘We’d love to do it. We’d have to grow a little bit.’ But it’s something that the mayor is interested in, and I think everybody is keenly aware of getting whatever we need, anything we need for our veterans. That’s what we should be asking for, even if it means we’ve got to grow a little bit.
The San Antonio Report’s military and veterans coverage is supported by Report for America.
