Vincent Viola, a businessman who owns the Florida Panthers hockey team and served in the U.S. Army on active and reserve duty, has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be the Secretary of the Army. Reuters has more:
Viola is a West Point graduate and U.S. Army veteran who has founded companies, including the high-frequency trading firm Virtu Financial. He is a former chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where he began his financial services career, and is a leader in electronic trading, according to his company biography. “Whether it is his distinguished military service or highly impressive track record in the world of business, Vinnie has proved throughout his life that he knows how to be a leader and deliver major results in the face of any challenge,” Trump was quoted as saying in a statement from his transition team.
Viola was also instrumental in creating a program at his alma mater to train cadets in combatting terrorism. In 2007, Paul McLeary wrote about the program, and Viola’s role, in an article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Here’s an excerpt:
One of the West Point instructors taking a proactive view of this new environment is Lt. Col. Joe Felter. A 1987 West Point grad who spent the 1990s as a Special Forces operator, Felter has returned to his alma mater as director of the Combating Terrorism Center, a privately-funded think tank that offers valuable instruction to the corps of cadets about the enemy they’ll encounter once they march out of the academy’s Thayer Gate for the last time. Sitting in his office this past spring, Felter reflected on how the role of young officers has changed from when he graduated. In his day, “if you paid attention during your infantry basic course and your Ranger school you would have a good feel for what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “But these new lieutenants, they’re literally the mayors of towns. They have to work with multiple U.S. government agencies, international agencies, host nation folks, tribal leaders–the threat environment is really complex, and more than ever they need to be prepared for that.” Occupying a clutch of nondescript offices in Lincoln Hall, the Combating Terrorism Center’s modest accommodations don’t give much hint of the impact it is having on the Long War, but it does give the impression that the CTC is an arm of the military’s academic wing. It isn’t. Set up through private donations in 2003, the center’s twenty-odd civilian staff, fellows, and associates perform a dual role–instructing the academy’s cadets on the intellectual history of terrorism while producing original research, for public consumption, on contemporary terrorism structures, goals and ideology. Just as the fight against non-state actors often seems an ad hoc affair, the decision to embed CTC at West Point also owes much to circumstance. By the time darkness descended on the evening of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the nation was up against an enemy that it knew little, if anything, about. Into the breach stepped Vincent Viola, chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, who quickly set about putting the funding together to establish a center to study this new enemy. A class of ’77 West Point grad, Viola wanted the center based at his alma mater so that the young cadets could be at the vanguard of this research. He personally donated $2 million to the cause, while rounding up a small group of deep-pocketed private citizens that included Ross Perot to kick in the rest of the seed money needed to get the program off the ground.
