Military Career
Blum received his commission from Officer Candidate School on August 28, 1971, graduating with honors. Since then, he has commanded at every level, including a Special Forces Operational Detachment-A, a Light Infantry Battalion, an Infantry Brigade, a Division Support Command, and twice as the Commanding General of the 29th Infantry Division (Light), MNG. Prior to this, Blum also served as Assistant Adjutant General for the Maryland Army National Guard, and Assistant Division Commander (Support), for the 29th ID. General Blum also served as the Commanding General for Multinational Division (North) Stabilization Force 10 in Operation Joint Forge, Bosnia Herzegovina in 2001.
During his tenure at SFOR, Blum received high marks for his military and diplomatic ability to command and coordinate multiple units of various nations. In his last work, To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, the late historian Steven Ambrose compared Blum favorably to Dwight Eisenhower in 1945 when the latter was also 55 years old.
Following his retirement, Blum took up a position as managing director and group practice leader of the Sitrick Brincko Group in 2010.
Read more about this topic: H. Steven Blum
Famous quotes containing the words military and/or career:
“Nothing changes my twenty-six years in the military. I continue to love it and everything it stands for and everything I was able to accomplish in it. To put up a wall against the military because of one regulation would be doing the same thing that the regulation does in terms of negating people.”
—Margarethe Cammermeyer (b. 1942)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)