I spent 20 years in the United States Air Force. Enlisted to officer. E-1 through O-3.

I started at Barksdale AFB on cruise missile instrumentation — telemetry payloads for ACC's Nuclear Weapon Systems Evaluation Program. I instrumented a $25M ACM/ALCM test system for the first successful triple launch in over a decade.

From there I went to Osan AB in South Korea, where I controlled maintenance on $110M worth of communications equipment supporting 7th Air Force, 51st Fighter Wing, and 41 associate units — briefing leadership on real-time status across 50 major systems and over 7,500 communication items.

At Ramstein, I maintained deployment readiness for 77 transmission system UTCs valued at over $58M. I deployed 186 days to Africa for an AFRICOM operation, providing sole C4I for a vital ISR mission that enabled 123 UAV sorties and 17,000 data points to reduce Somali pirate presence. Then back to Osan as RF Transmissions Supervisor, managing tactical transceivers and running the public address system for 125,000 guests at Air Power Day.

MacDill AFB is where things scaled up. I directed maintenance on a $17M satellite terminal and led 38 Airmen through 24 Joint Service missions. I stood up the Base Radio Work Center from scratch — revitalizing Land Mobile Radios, the Installation Notification Warning System, and repairing four Giant Voice stacks to restore base-wide warning coverage for 19,000 people. I led 26 Airmen providing nuclear-hardened satellite communications for CENTCOM and the 6th Air Mobility Wing Command Post, saving $500K coordinating terminal transfers with Air Force Wideband Enterprise. As Section Chief for RF Transmissions, I led 36 Airmen delivering 24/7 operations of $67M in radio frequency systems supporting CENTCOM. Then as Section Chief for Network Integration, I managed the $77M voice and data network supporting CENTCOM, SOCOM, and 33 mission partners — uncovering $340K in undocumented IT assets and resolving SOCOM voice systems timing drift along the way.

Then I commissioned and went cyber.

At AFCERT, I led up to 228 operators defending the Air Force Information Network — 950,000 systems across 385 sites on a $14.2 billion enterprise. My team collaborated with Air Force Research Lab to field automated analysis capabilities on classified networks. We closed over 4,000 investigations and eliminated 9 admin-level intrusions in a single reporting period.

I deployed to the Combined Air Operations Center and led cyber planning across a 20-nation coalition — 34 named operations, non-kinetic targeting for CENTCOM, and enabling 160 C-17 taskings during the Afghanistan retrograde. My teams mitigated critical vulnerabilities across 119 investigations and 23,000 man-hours and developed defense TTPs that were adopted by joint services. We revamped case management and automated weapon system workflows, cutting incident response time from two hours to twenty minutes.

Then I led the team that built the Air Force's first network attack simulator — a self-contained training environment with real-world malware replication, deployed to 100 operators across 4 wings. We shortened spin-up time from 20 hours to 6. That project is the closest thing in my military career to what I'm building now.

I finished as Executive Officer to the Commander of the Air Force's largest training wing — 37th Training Wing, $1 billion in assets, 64,000 students a year. I deployed AI tools to re-engineer workflows and cut unnecessary reporting by 79%. My Wing Commander's assessment: proven change leader, ready for civilian executive roles.

After deployment in 2021, my mental health deteriorated. I was struggling and I used CBD while depressed. A THC test result came back so low it was gone the next day. What followed was 803 days of administrative hell — treated like a criminal over something that shouldn't have ended a career.

They pulled my clearance. No mission. No responsibility. No path forward.

If you want to break a leader, take away everything they're responsible for and tell them to wait.

Forty-four people wrote character letters on my behalf. A Board of Inquiry retained me — three colonels who barely needed to deliberate. I retired as a Captain with honor.

The system that was supposed to protect me didn't. And that's the point.

Don't trust the system to protect your data, your network, your family. Protect it yourself.

During recovery I found Warriors Heart in Bandera, Texas — a program for veterans and first responders. That's where I met my wife Sarah. She's a medic and a veteran. We have a daughter, dogs, and a 100-year-old farmhouse in West Branch, Michigan on a hilltop under oak trees older than the Air Force itself.

I built Directive4 because I spent 20 years watching what happens when systems fail the people inside them — and I spent the last five watching big tech do the same thing to everyone else.

Here's the problem: every smart home device, every security camera, every voice assistant — it all runs through the cloud. Your data leaves your house the moment you turn it on. If something is already on your network, the cloud can't help you. Your data is already gone. And every prompt you type into a cloud AI is training a model to replace you.

My teams built malware simulators. We automated threat analysis on classified networks. We cut response times by 90%. I wrote the playbooks that joint services used. I know what a SOC looks like when it works.

Directive4 is that — for your home.

An on-premise AI agent that defends your network, controls your smart home, and keeps your data where it belongs — on your hardware, under your control. No Siri. No Google. No Alexa. When you lose internet, you don't lose control of your house. When the grid goes down, your system runs on a solar panel and a battery.

Our proprietary Differential Inference Engine — patent pending — runs multiple models locally and uses a voting system to catch what a single model would miss. If something anomalous hits your network, your agent can isolate it and assess the damage before a single byte leaves your premises. No cloud dependency. No data exfiltration. No one training on your ideas.

We're currently testing across three generations of AMD RDNA, two generations of Nvidia, and two generations of Apple Silicon — because the right hardware depends on the customer and the price point, not a single vendor's roadmap. The goal is an agent that runs on what you already own or can afford, not what a corporation tells you to buy.

If you need backup beyond what your local agent can handle, it opens a secure pipe — not the open internet, a direct encrypted connection — to our operations center. That's the only time your data leaves your house, and only when you say so.

The future isn't giving your data away for free. It's owning it, protecting it, and choosing who gets access. The corporations have their own Directive 4 — protecting the people at the top.

This one protects you.