With the amount of money Jeff Bezos has donated to military foundations over the years, it would make sense for him to have been in the military, but was he?
Jeff Bezos has never been in the military. He has thrown his weight behind the United States Department of Defense a few times now. Bezos has also shown his support for military veterans through large donations to charities, as well as committing to creating jobs for veterans.
You can read more below about Jeff Bezos’ support for the United States Military and online security.
Interest in National Security
For years now, Bezos has made it clear that he has the United States national security among one of his top concerns. You may wonder why that is? Well, as the owner of a Big Tech company, Bezos has a huge stake in technological advances and improved online security. This is a service that he would like to offer to the United States Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In 2013, it appeared that Bezos had secured a $10 Billion deal with the CIA to move classified and unclassified information to the cloud. In order to provide this service to the government, Amazon Web Services created an entity known as GovCloud. On the GovCloud website it states that the service:
“Gives government customers and their partners the flexibility to architect secure cloud solutions that comply with the FedRAMP High baseline; the DOJ’s Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) Security Policy; U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR); Export Administration Regulations (EAR); Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG) for Impact Levels 2, 4 and 5; FIPS 140-2; IRS-1075; and other compliance regimes.”
The GovCloud is clearly a very extensive service that complies with all of the government regulations. However, at the end of 2019, the pentagon awarded the rumored $10 billion dollar deal to Microsoft instead of Amazon. This is a decision that Amazon is now challenging in court.
Despite employee protests towards the company’s involvement in national security, Bezos has stood behind his support for the Department of Defense. In an interview with The Reagan Foundation, Bezos even stated “We are going to support the Department of Defense. This country is important.”
You can watch the full interview on YouTube by following the below link.
Donations to Veteran Charities
Other than his involvement and continued support for United States national security, Jeff Bezos is also involved with verteran charities. It was in 2018 that Bezos made a $10 million donation to the nonpartisan political movement With Honor.
According to their website, “With Honor Action is a cross-partisan movement dedicated to promoting and advancing principled veteran leadership in elected public service.” The mission of With Honor is to eventually create less polarized American politics through veteran leadership. Their slogan is “principles before politics.” It makes sense that Bezos would donate to this cause because he has often put his own principles before anything else.
Creating Jobs for Veterans at Amazon
In 2016, Bezos made the pledge to create 25,000 jobs for veterans through the Joining Forces Initiative. This initiative was created in 2011 by Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden to have more companies commit to hiring military veterans and support military families.
Amazon was one of 40 different companies to make a pledge to the Joining Forces Initiative. Jeff Bezos actually went above and beyond what most companies offered by adding that he would commit to training 10,000 of those veterans in cloud computing. That commitment will allow these military veterans to gain the skills needed to move up within the company.
Although Bezos has never served in the military, he has made it very clear that he believes Big Tech companies have a duty to their country and should support the Department of Defense. He believes that this support will ensure a strong national defense system in the future.