Chief Administrative Officer (CAO)

Fern Sumpter Winbush was selected to serve as the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), USO, effective March 23, 2026. As the CAO, she serves as an enterprise integrator of critical enabling functions that support mission delivery across the more than 260 locations in the U.S. and abroad where the USO serves service members and their families. In this role she provides strategic leadership and operational oversight of Human Resources, Information Technology, Strategic Planning, and Government Relations.

Prior to joining the USO team, from 2015 to 2026, she served as the Principal Deputy Director for the newly formed Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) where she led the staff in the formulation of policy, business development, and outreach to achieve the Agency’s honorable and solemn mission of providing families and the Nation with the fullest possible accounting of those still unaccounted for from WWII, Cold War, Korean War, Vietnam War, Iraq War, and other conflicts.

Fern hails from Boston, Massachusetts where she was a 1989 honor graduate of the University of Massachusetts and a distinguished military graduate of the Suffolk University Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program in Boston. She began her military career as a Private First Class in the Army Reserves in 1983 and her service continued upon her transfer to the Massachusetts Army National Guard until her active-duty appointment as a Military Intelligence Second Lieutenant in 1990. Over the next 25 years of active-duty service, she held numerous command and staff positions of increased responsibility in Germany, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Korea, and the Netherlands culminating with a deployment to Operation Enduring Freedom in Kabul, Afghanistan, and subsequently as the Commander of Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia. Fern retired from the Army after 31 years of military service in January 2015.

Her education includes a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in Business Management and Information Systems from the University of Massachusetts and a Master of Science degree in National Resource Strategy from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

She and her husband have one son and a granddaughter.