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General Sir Michael Jackson, KCB, CBE, DSO, ADC Gen (born 21 March 1944) is a British army officer, former commander of KFor in Kosovo as well as UNPROFOR (see Timeline of UN peacekeeping missions) commander in Bosnia.
Jackson's father was in the army. Jackson was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps aged 19 in 1963, specialising in the threat from the Soviet Union. He transferred to the Parachute Regiment in 1970 and served in Northern Ireland, rising to become the commanding officer of 1 Para in 1989.
In the 1990s, Jackson served in the NATO chain of command as a deputy to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Wesley Clark. In this capacity, he is best known for refusing to block the runways of the Russian-occupied Pristina Airport, to isolate the Russian troops there. Had he complied with General Clark's order, there was a chance the British troops under his command could have come into armed conflict with the Russians; doing this without prior orders from Britain would have led to his dismissal for gross insubordination. On the other hand, defying Clark would have meant disobeying a direct order from a superior NATO officer (Clark was a four-star general; Jackson only a three-star). Jackson ultimately chose the latter course of action, though the point became irrelevant when the American government prevailed upon the Hungarians, Romanians, and Bulgarians to prevent the Russians from using their airspace to fly reinforcements in. As a result, he was dubbed "Macho Jacko" by the British tabloid press.
During the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, Jackson, as Chief of the General Staff, ordered an inquiry into pictures released by the British tabloid The Daily Mirror that depicted alleged torture of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers. The Daily Mirror's editor Piers Morgan was later fired by the newspaper, after the newspaper was unable to prove the provenance of the pictures.
Jackson had bags under his eyes surgically removed. He refuses to be photographed in a suit, preferring military uniform instead, with the famous red beret of the Parachute Regiment.
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