General Tom Middendorp

Tom Middendorp retired after having been The Netherlands Chief of Defense for five and a half years and after 38 years of serving his country. As the Chief of Defense he was the most senior military advisor to the Minister of Defense, responsible for the readiness, the international cooperation and the modernization of the Dutch Armed Forces, as well as the planning and execution of its military deployments. He commanded soldiers on all levels, led a large multinational taskforce in the south of Afghanistan and was involved in over twenty different military missions as the Director of Operations. Tom has extensive operational and strategic experience of building unity of effort with different nations, governments, companies and many other stakeholders in order to deal with a wide range of security risks. He organized two large Future Forces Conferences where he introduced a ecosystems approach to security and offered Defense as a testbed for innovation, resulting in many promising new initiatives. His current occupation as an independent senior expert on defense and security allows him to continue his work on the impact of climate change on the security environment and on the role the military can play in addressing climate change.