MG Dee A. McWilliams, US Army, Retired, served as the US Army Women’s Foundation president from 2008-2016
In a career spanning 29 years, MG McWilliams held a variety of Human Relations positions, including command of four companies, a training battalion, and a personnel brigade.
MG McWilliams was the first woman officer to have served in the following command and senior staff positions: Commander, 9th Personnel Services Company, Fort Lewis, WA; Commander, 42nd AG Battalion, Fort Dix, NJ; Commander, 3rd Personnel Group, Fort Hood, TX; DA Secretariat and later Director, Enlisted Personnel Management Directorate, Total Army Personnel Command, Alexandria, VA; and Director of Military Personnel Management, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, The Pentagon, Washington, DC. As Director, Military Personnel Management for Department of the Army, MG McWilliams developed policy and strategy for staffing, salary compensation, and training for over 1 million soldiers, to include recruitment of more than 100,000 annually. She also served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel and Installation Management in Europe where she provided human resource and quality of life support to soldiers in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, Greece, and Egypt.
MG McWilliams retired from the Army in 2003 and later joined the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She retired in 2010 as Director of the Lessons Learned Center. MG McWilliams holds degrees from Lon Morris College, Stephen F. Austin University where she was named a distinguished alumnus, Texas Woman’s University, and the National War College.
She serves on the advisory boards of the Army Historical Foundation. In 2007, MG McWilliams joined the board of directors for the Women In Military Service For America Memorial Foundation, assuming the position of Vice Chair in 2014. She was the 2013 recipient of the Lillian K. Keil Award for outstanding contributions to women’s service in the United States military and was named a Trailblazer by Women Veterans Interactive.
All her military accomplishments were remarkable but perhaps most significant and everlasting will be the effort she put into ensuring that the Women in Military Service for America Memorial would survive. She ensured that the service of military women would continue to be honored, that the public could be educated on that service, that new generations would be empowered to consider serving, and that military women who sacrificed so much in order to serve would be remembered.
