page_title: James Clapper
section_title: Military career
hierarchical_section_title: James Clapper / Military career
caption_attribution_description: English: James R. Clapper, a lieutenant general in the U.S. Air Force and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
context_page_description: James Robert Clapper Jr. is a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and is the former Director of National Intelligence. Clapper has held several key positions within the United States Intelligence Community. He served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1992 until 1995. He was the first director of defense intelligence within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and simultaneously the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. He served as the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from September 2001 until June 2006.
  On June 5, 2010, President Barack Obama nominated Clapper to replace Dennis C. Blair as United States Director of National Intelligence. Clapper was unanimously confirmed by the Senate for the position on August 5, 2010.
  Following the June 2013 leak of documents detailing the NSA practice of collecting telephone metadata on millions of Americans' telephone calls, Clapper was accused of perjury for telling a congressional committee hearing that the NSA does not collect any type of data on millions of Americans earlier that year.
context_section_description: After a brief enlistment in the United States Marine Corps Reserve, where Clapper served as a rifleman and attended the junior course of  Platoon Leader Course he transferred to the U.S. Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps program. In 1963, he graduated as a distinguished military graduate from the University of Maryland and was commissioned as an Air Force second lieutenant. He served two tours of duty in Southeast Asia where he commanded a signals intelligence detachment based at a listening post in Thailand's Udon Thani Province, and flew 73 combat support missions in EC-47s, including some over Laos and Cambodia. Later, he commanded a signals intelligence (SIGINT) wing at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, and the Air Force Technical Applications Center, Patrick Air Force Base, Florida. During the Persian Gulf War, Clapper served as Chief of Air Force Intelligence.
  Clapper became Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in November 1991 under George H. W. Bush. While serving as DIA director, he oversaw the transformation of the National Military Intelligence Center into the National Military Joint Intelligence Center.  He also launched an initiative to reorganize intelligence analysis by specialists in enemy weapons rather than specialists in countries and regions.  The initiative failed because it created functional stovepipes which "reduced the coherence of the analytic effort", whereupon Clapper decided to restore the original organizational structure using strong regional elements.  Clapper retired from active duty as a lieutenant general after thirty-two years of service in September 1995. In 1996, alongside General Wayne Downing, he was a member of the investigatory inquiry into the Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 20 people, including 19 American servicemen.
  He then spent six years in private industry, including two years as president of the Security Affairs Support Association, an organization of intelligence contractors. In August 2001, he was named as the director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (later renamed National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) where he served until June 2006.
caption: Clapper as a USAF lieutenant general in the mid-1990s
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