Colonel (Retired) William “Wil” Zemp is a 25-year U.S. Army officer, diplomat, two-time college and university president, and founder and CEO in education and defense tech. He has taken ventures from start-up to acquisition and held global P&L authority across 180 markets. He converted a $97 million state appropriation into a governed education technology enterprise, standing up from nothing. His doctoral and postdoctoral research in National Security Affairs produced the Strategic Power Dynamic Framework, drawn from more than 900 conflict cases, a predictive model of how power gets sequenced to compel outcomes that is now taught, cited, and applied to problems well outside national security. He now serves as founding Executive Director of Executive and Professional Education at The Citadel, building the enterprise from a standing start and bringing The Citadel’s tradition of principled leadership to executives and their teams across industries.
That career began in the ranks. Col. Zemp enlisted in the South Carolina Army National Guard infantry in 1987 at age 17 and was commissioned into the Regular Army as a Field Artillery officer from The Citadel in 1992. Over 25 years he served across Europe, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, with nearly ten years of foreign service and more than six years deployed to combat operations. He commanded Task Force Red Knight, a battalion task force of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), in combat in Iraq at the height of the surge, and later a brigade-level Combined and Joint Special Operations Fires Task Force in Afghanistan. Between those commands he served as a strategist at the most senior levels: selected intern to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the Army, and Senior Policy Advisor to the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force, serving across multiple administrations. He helped design and launch the Chief of Staff’s Strategic Leadership Program for general officers and colonels. As Director of Joint and Army Future Concepts, he led the concept development and experimentation behind the Army’s capstone future force design and wrote the original Strategic Landpower white paper.
His national security service extended beyond the military. He served as Special Assistant to the President on the National Security Council staff, Military Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State, and senior policy officer in the Department of State’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. Holding diplomatic credentials, he represented the United States on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Council and the United Nations Security Council, where he negotiated alliance policy and defense technology transfer, and worked the release of allied and American prisoners and the repatriation of U.S. service members’ remains.
After retiring from the Army, Col. Zemp was appointed President of Daniel Webster College to lead the institution through a board-directed closure. He designed and executed a teach-out that preserved four concurrent accreditations, satisfied federal, state, and accreditor oversight, and protected every enrolled student’s path to a degree. Southern New Hampshire University brought him in next, where he served as Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer and President of the Manchester campus, as the university grew into one of the largest nonprofit universities in the country. From there, he moved to Amazon Web Services as Global Director for Education to Workforce, leading programs that reached more than 1 million learners across 80 countries. He returned to higher education as Founding President and Chief Executive Officer of Project Kitty Hawk, building an enterprise to serve the University of North Carolina System, and then joined Educational Testing Service as General Manager for Global Higher Education, holding strategy and profit-and-loss authority for the business across 180 markets. Across that span, he founded and led three ventures in education and defense technology. All three were acquired, and all three still operate.
He currently serves on the advisory councils of the AI 2030 Institute and the United Nations Working Group on the Ethical Application of AI to Learning Environments, and as National Security Advisor to Libélula Integrated Solutions. He has served on the boards of University of Maryland Global Campus Ventures, the Lone Star Workforce of the Future Fund, and the Armed Services YMCA.
He writes and speaks on strategy under uncertainty, the governance of artificial intelligence, the design of workforce and learning systems, and leading at the executive level by, with, and beyond AI. His work is with executives facing problems large enough that getting them wrong costs something, and his argument is that managing constraints and driving results are different jobs. Institutions default to the first because it is measurable and safe. The second is what leadership is for.
Col. Zemp was a Bradley Fellow in public policy at Georgetown University, selected by the Army for a year-long industry fellowship at Google, a Senior Executive Fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School, and an Advanced Strategic Art Program Fellow at the U.S. Army War College. He held the Chair and Senior Fellowship in Strategic Policy and Planning at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute and served as an Olmsted exchange officer with the German Army. He earned his bachelor’s degree from The Citadel in 1992 and holds advanced degrees in international affairs, military studies, strategic studies, and national security affairs.
Col. Zemp’s civilian leadership has been recognized with the Richard Goodman Award for Strategic Planning, the Eduventures Innovation Award, and the Institute for the Future Distinguished Social Tech Award. His diplomatic honors include the NATO Meritorious Service Medal and the U.S. Department of State Superior and Distinguished Honor Awards. His military honors include four Bronze Star Medals and two Purple Hearts, and units under his command received three Valorous Unit Awards for extraordinary heroism in combat.