My Story

My father instilled in me a deep love of history. Some of my earliest and most formative memories are of walking with him across the battlefields of Gettysburg—learning not only about tactics and timelines but also about the sacrifice required to build a more perfect union. His family carried a complicated legacy of war: eight of my great-grandfather's brothers perished in the trenches of World War I, victims of the brutal machinery of industrialized conflict. In the generations that followed, the men in my father's family registered as conscientious objectors. Yet my father also believed that conscience can demand resistance. “If Gandhi had lived in Nazi Germany,” he once told me, “we would never have known his name. He would have been killed immediately .” Sometimes, he taught me, resisting evil requires force—not out of vengeance but out of moral responsibility. Those experiences and conversations impressed upon me that war is a terrible evil, but that there are moments when the responsible use of force is necessary.

On a freezing January morning in 2013, I stood at the Military Entrance Processing Station in Louisville, Kentucky, ready to enlist. I was twenty-four, older than most recruits, and had already finished college and spent several years in jobs I hated; I was ready for an adventure. After completing training as a human intelligence collector, I deployed from Fort Hood to Kandahar, Afghanistan. It was there that I first saw the devastating consequences of failed institutions and absent governance. Growing up in the United States, I had taken freedom and security for granted. But in Kandahar, the absence of those foundations—security, infrastructure, and the rule of law—was unmistakable. That experience sparked a deep and enduring conviction: stable, principled institutions are worth defending, and without order, people cannot flourish.

After returning from Afghanistan, I transitioned from active duty enlisted service through the Army's Green to Gold Scholarship Program. I attended the Bush School at Texas A&M University and was commissioned as a cyber warfare officer in the U.S. Army. Over the next several years, I led defensive cyber operations, translated national security strategy into operational orders, and supported trilateral partnerships. I often worked at the intersection of two worlds—technical operators and senior decision-makers—bridging communication gaps and aligning priorities. Over time, however, that work also exposed me to persistent institutional shortcomings.

I ultimately left the Army not because I had lost faith in its mission, but because I had become frustrated by how poorly the institution was organized to pursue it. I witnessed firsthand a profound mismatch between the Army’s conventional personnel system—designed to generate forces for episodic conflict—and the demands of cyberspace, an operational environment characterized by continuous competition and exploitation. In 2024, I made the difficult decision to resign my commission and pursue doctoral studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

My life has also been shaped by profound spiritual transformation. I spent most of my adult life as an atheist and agnostic. Those years were marked by a growing disillusionment with the promises of modern secular life and by a deep sadness. Secular theories of human origins and purpose could not adequately ground either the dignity of every person or our moral obligations to one another.

Yet, the Lord who "is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit," drew near to me. He revived my contrite heart, brought me out of darkness, and gave me a living hope through Jesus Christ. I began seriously examining the evidence for theism found in the natural world, as well as the historical claims surrounding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and found them persuasive.

Faith did not end my intellectual life; it deepened it, giving me a fuller account of truth, human dignity, justice, stewardship, and the human longing for meaning. Today, my research lies at the intersection of national security, technology, and Christian ethics.

I study destructive cyber operations, military organization, and artificial intelligence, focusing on how institutions choose to wield technological power and how those choices affect human beings. Across these areas, I ask how emerging technologies shape human dignity, institutional responsibility, and the common good—and, ultimately, how we should steward power in a world in which every person is made in the image of God.