Since St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer took office in April, she’s doubled down on hiring military veterans for key roles at City Hall, bringing in not one but two Air Force colonels to head city operations.
The first, and most high-profile, of those hires was Colonel Ben Jonsson, who came to municipal government in May after 25 years in the Air Force. In the past seven months he’s sought to bring a level of rigor to city operations where that kind of discipline hasn’t exactly been the norm.
Jonsson, 48, has flown massive transport planes and logged more than 900 hours of combat missions. In diplomatic roles, he once simultaneously impressed the leaders of the Air Force in both the U.S. and the nation of Jordan by greeting the latter in one of the three dialects of Arabic in which Jonsson is fluent. Last year, Jonsson was the chief of staff of Air Mobility Command at Scott Air Force Base and had been in line to be made a brigadier general…