Major General Charles Lombardo joins the IES advisory council

IES United States announced that Major General Charles Lombardo has joined its senior advisory council, lending decades of command experience to an organization run by students in grades nine through twelve.

The appointment reflects a founding premise of the Society: that ethical judgment is transmitted, not merely taught. Students can be given frameworks in a classroom. What they cannot be given, except by people who have carried them, is a sense of what those frameworks feel like under weight.

In his advisory role, MG Lombardo will counsel the national presidency on organizational standards and leadership development, and will participate in the practitioner dialogues that chapters are expected to host each year. Those sessions are structured around consequence rather than achievement — the decisions that were close, contested, and costly.

“Character under pressure is not improvised. It is the sum of every small decision made long before the pressure arrived.”

The advisory council serves as a check on student governance without displacing it. Advisors review national standards, counsel officers, and hold the presidency to the commitments it makes publicly, while leaving programmatic direction in student hands.

The council continues to grow as the American branch expands, with additional appointments drawn from education, public service, and the founding leadership of the IES Global Foundation.