
Major General Bruce K Scott, U.S. Army (retired), serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the George and Carol Olmsted Foundation, a position he has held since 2011. The Olmsted Foundation, established in 1959 by Major General George Olmsted, U.S. Army (retired), selects outstanding, elite officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard to attend graduate school at a foreign university. They must study and work in the foreign language specific to their respective countries. In the 63 years of the Olmsted Scholar Program, more than 700 officers have attended more than 200 universities in over 60 countries worldwide and studied in over 40 foreign languages. General Scott oversees a current Foundation endowment in excess of $44 million.
Major General Scott graduated from West Point in 1972 in which he finished in the top 5% of his class, and then for the next decade he served in a variety of assignments, during which time he also completed Airborne and Ranger training. After his own tour as an Olmsted Scholar in Freiburg, Germany, where he studied economics in German at the University of Freiburg, General Scott attended the JFK School of Government at Harvard and served as a White House Fellow in President Reagan’s administration, where he was selected as one of 12 chosen from a pool of more than 1,200 applicants nationwide. General Scott returned to Germany in the late 1980s where he served as an Executive Officer and Aide-de-Camp at U.S. Army 5 th Corps, commanded the 16 th Engineer Battalion (the first combat unit to cross the line of demarcation during Operation Desert Storm), commanded the Engineer Brigade of the 1 st Armored Division, and returned to the U.S. in 1993 where he served as the Executive Assistant to the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1994, General Scott commanded the South Pacific Division of the Army Corps of Engineers, and returned to Washington in 1996, where served in the Headquarters, U.S. Army, and finished his career as Commanding General of U.S. Army Security Assistance Command during the early days of the Global War on Terror. During this assignment, General Scott commanded a 1,400-person organization responsible for all Army Foreign Military Sales totaling in over $50 Billion of programs; General Scott spearheaded improvements to expedite contracts by more than two thirds, shortening the FMS writing time from six months to 28 days. This proved critical for U.S. national security as it ensured that coalition allies could be properly equipped to help prosecute the War on Terror.
Following his retirement from the Army in 2002, Major General Scott served as President, ITT Defense International and as Vice President, ITT Defense in McLean Virginia, in which he led the expansion of International Marketing Representatives from 42 in 2002 to more than 158 in 2010. General Scott also multiplied the ITT Defense international field offices nine-fold during his tenure and he increased the values of orders in international product sales from $76 million in 2002 to more than $750 million in 2010.
He was married to the former Mary Tallman for 47 years until she died of a Glioblastoma brain tumor in January 2022. He has six children, four of whom (two daughters & two sons) went to West Point, and all have served the nation in uniform, to include 13 one-year combat tours in Iraq & Afghanistan. One of his children is also an Army Chaplain and a Catholic Priest.