David S.C. Chu

Defense
David S.C. Chu
Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness

Few federal executives hold a portfolio as varied as David Chu's. He is the senior policy adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on recruitment, career development, and pay and benefits for the department's 3.4 million active-duty, reserve and civilian personnel. He also oversees the $15 billion Defense health program; the nation's largest equal opportunity training program; the Defense education system; and the commissary and exchange program, which has about $15 billion in annual sales.

The pressures on Defense resulting from military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan fall heavily on Chu, who is charged with managing the all-volunteer military force through what has proved to be one of the most difficult Army recruiting periods in recent history. Not only is he working with the Army to craft new incentives aimed at attracting and keeping quality personnel, he also must shape what remains a largely Cold War force structure to meet emerging security requirements.

Chu clearly doesn't shy from challenges. Four years after graduating magna cum laude from Yale with a bachelor's degree in economics and mathematics in 1964, he was commissioned as an Army officer. Following a tour in Vietnam, Capt. Chu left the Army in 1970 to return to Yale for his doctorate in economics.

From 1978 to 1981, when the military services were suffering from low morale, equipment shortages and poor training, he was the assistant director for national security and international affairs at the Congressional Budget Office, advising Congress on a range of security issues. Then from 1981 to 1993, he served as assistant secretary of Defense for program analysis and evaluation, where he felt the rising and falling fortunes of Defense through the

Reagan-era expansion of military capabilities through the post-Cold War cuts.