Ambassador John Estrada
15th Sergeant Major of the U.S. Marine Corps, the highest ranking enlisted Marine. Former U.S. Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago.
Military, Diplomatic and Leadership Consultant. Washington, D.C.
Senior Advisor, ASPP™ Community of Experts
John Estrada serves as a Senior Advisor to the ASPP™ Community of Experts.
Ambassador Estrada is the former U.S. Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, a Presidentially appointed Commissioner on the American Battle Monuments Commission, and the 15th Sergeant Major of the U.S. Marine Corps. He advises on leadership, preparedness, organizational resilience, and service. ASPP™ was founded by Chris Grollnek, an active shooter expert whose P.R.O. Model™ the Department of Justice selected as “A” national standard for the Assistant United States Attorneys and across the department, and which is in use at some installations and commands across the Department of Defense.
He held the office of Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007, the senior enlisted position in the United States Marine Corps, and retired after 34 years of service. He was later appointed a Commissioner of the American Battle Monuments Commission.
The record behind the title
There have been fifteen Sergeants Major of the Marine Corps. The billet is the senior enlisted position in the entire service, adviser to the Commandant, and the Marine who speaks for every enlisted Marine in it. John L. Estrada held it from June 2003 to April 2007, through the hardest years of two wars, and retired in 2007 after more than thirty years in uniform with the Navy Distinguished Service Medal.
He arrived in the United States from Trinidad and Tobago at the age of fourteen.
In February 2016 the United States Senate confirmed him as American Ambassador to that same country, and he presented credentials in April. A boy who emigrated at fourteen returned as the ambassador of the nation that took him in. He has since served as a Presidentially appointed Commissioner on the American Battle Monuments Commission, the agency responsible for American military cemeteries and memorials overseas.
Why an ambassador sits on a prevention advisory board
The ASPP™ Special Advisors are chosen deliberately from outside the security industry. None of them sells what we assess, which means none of them has a commercial reason to tell us a recommendation is stronger than it is.
What Ambassador Estrada brings is harder to buy than expertise. He spent a career responsible for the readiness and welfare of hundreds of thousands of Marines, and then a diplomatic posting where the tools were persuasion and relationships rather than authority. Prevention work runs on exactly that combination. An assessment finding only matters if somebody with standing carries it into a room and convinces people to act on it before anything happens.
He advises on leadership, preparedness, organizational resilience, and service. Those are not soft words in this context. They are the four things that determine whether a plan on paper becomes a plan people actually follow.
We are grateful to have Ambassador Estrada as a Senior Advisor to the Active Shooter Prevention Project (ASPP™), LLC Community of Experts, and we are all on the path to Destination #NEVERHERE™
