Jack Jacobs was born in Brooklyn, New York. He holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Rutgers University and entered the U.S. Army in 1966 as a Second Lieutenant through the ROTC program. He served as a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division, executive officer of an infantry battalion in the 7th Infantry Division, and commanded the 4th Battalion 10th Infantry in Panama. A member of the faculty of the U.S. Military Academy, Jacobs taught international relations and comparative politics, and he was a member of the faculty of the National War College in Washington, DC.

He was in Vietnam twice, both times as an advisor to Vietnamese infantry battalions, earning three Bronze Stars, two Silver Stars and the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest combat decoration. Jacobs retired as a Colonel.

He was a founder and Chief Operating Officer of AutoFinance Group Inc, one of the firms to pioneer the securitization of debt instruments; the firm was subsequently sold to Key Bank. He was a Managing Director of Bankers Trust, where he ran foreign exchange options worldwide and was a partner in the institutional hedge fund business. Jacobs subsequently founded a similar business for Lehman Brothers and then retired again.

He is a principal of The Fitzroy Group, a firm that specializes in the development of residential real estate in London and invests both for its own account and in joint ventures with other institutions, and he is the Director of Veterans’ Advancement at the New York Film Academy. He serves on a number of charitable boards of directors and is a Director Emeritus of the World War II Museum.

Jacobs is the Senior Fellow in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy and is the Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rutgers. An on-air analyst for NBC News, he was a member of the team that produced the 2011 Murrow Award-winning Nightly News segment “Iraq: The Long Way Out.” Colonel Jacobs is also the co-author of the memoir, If Not Now, When?, published by Penguin and winner of the Colby Award. His second work of non-fiction is Basic, released by St. Martin’s Press in 2012, and he is an Executive Producer of the series Ten Weeks, which will air on Hulu.