SpyFaces in the Crowd: Lt. Gen. Michelle Bredenkamp, Military Intelligence Star

Trump’s nominee to run the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is a career MI officer who won awards for valor in Afghanistan

Michele H. Bredenkamp, then-commanding general, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, during a 207th Military Intelligence Brigade change of command ceremony in May 2023. (US Army photo by 1st. Lt. Katherine Sibilla).

SHE’S JUMPED OUT OF AIRPLANES, and so has her husband, a fellow Army general and veteran paratroops commander. But Michele Bredenkamp’s next job, should she be confirmed, will be mostly looking upward toward the heavens, where the agency she’ll run operates countless spy satellites. And that’s where the nominee to run the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency will be right at home.

Military intelligence has been the lifeblood of Bredenkamp’s career ever since she graduated in 1990 from tiny Jesuit-run Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala. with a ROTC commission and, soon after, attended the MI Officer Basic Course at Ft. Huachuka, Arizona. Over the decades she’s had extended deployments in South Korea, Iraq, combat jumps in Afghanistan, won multiple Bronze Star and other infantry awards and managed the Army’s top intelligence command.

But amid the current political environment, what might be her most important bonafides has been her ability to work harmoniously as chief military advisor to the controversial Director of National Intelligence and Trump loyalist, Tulsi Gabbard.