Brigadier General Kristen K. French graduated from the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, in 1986 and was commissioned into the Regular Army as a Second Lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps. She retired from military service in November 2015. During her 29+ years in uniform, Kristin commanded at all levels, from company, battalion, and brigade thru two commanding general assignments. Her military service includes deployments in support of Operation Joint Endeavor (NATO’s Bosnia-Herzegovina support effort) and Operation Desert Fox (in Kuwait) and combat deployments as the first female squadron commander and the senior logistician in western Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom as well as the first female Commanding General for Joint Sustainment Command-Afghanistan, and senior operational logistician in Afghanistan.

After retirement, Kristin was selected for Senior Executive Government Service as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and served for sixteen consecutive months as the Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Logistics and Materiel Readiness. She then transitioned to the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), where she has served since 2018, first as the Agency’s Chief of Staff and currently as the Deputy Director of Logistics Operations (J3), where she is responsible for the end-to-end supply chain management of DLA’s eight supply chains, providing logistics and materiel process management policy, guidance, oversight, and monitoring of supply chain performance.