Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall is a retired British Army officer and a Middle East adviser at the Ministry of Defence. He is Colonel of his Regiment, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, a senior adviser with Greenhill, a global financial advisory firm, and Director of Sandcrest Consulting. He was operations officer for 1st Armoured Division in the first Gulf War and then completed a Defence Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, studying Turkish security policy. He became Commanding Officer of 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards in 1997. He was Deputy Commanding General in Baghdad in 2006–07, was appointed Assistant Chief of the General Staff in 2007 and, in 2009, became Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Operations). He received the American Legion of Honour in 2008, was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in 2010, and a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2014.