Colonel Everett Keith Couch, USMC (Ret.) is the Chief Executive Officer at Special Support Technologies. In academic year 2019 to 2020, Col Couch served as the senior US Marine Corps fellow with the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.

A former aviation officer with twenty-six years of leadership experience and service, Colonel Couch has amassed over 2200 flight hours piloting the AV-8B Harrier, F-5N Tiger II, C-12F and four additional type/model/series aircraft. Prior to his Atlantic Council assignment, he served as the commanding officer headquarters and service battalion, Headquarters Marine Corps, Henderson Hall in Arlington, VA, where he commanded over two thousand Marines and two hundred civilians in the national capital region and around the globe. Keith’s other recent assignments include chief of staff, Plans for 3^rd Marine Expeditionary Force (2015-2017), national security fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (2014-2015), strategic analyst and lead writer for the 35^th Commandant of the Marine Corps (2012-2014), the commanding officer of headquarters squadron for the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, AZ, and adversary flight instructor for the VMFT-401 (2010-2012). Colonel Couch received a bachelor’s of science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Kentucky in 1993, a master’s of science degree in project management from Boston University in 2009, and he is a graduate of the National Security Fellowship program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2015, where his focus of study was national security policy, specifically creating an interagency framework directed at countering violent extremism. In addition to his military duties, Colonel Couch is an advisory board member to the Statecraft Foundation and is currently pursuing graduate credentials at Harvard Business School—his areas of study focus on business analytics, economics, and finance.