Service first: the twelve CISOs whose careers began in uniform

Twelve of the 51 security leaders profiled here at launch served in the armed forces before or alongside their security careers, and the split across branches is exactly even: three came from the Marine Corps, three from the Air Force, three from the Army and three from the Navy. That symmetry is a coincidence of a small sample, but the differences in what they did while serving are not, and they map onto how each person eventually reached the chief security job.

The Marines: three routes into business

Jerry R. Geisler III is described by Walmart simply as a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who went on to degrees in criminology, organizational management, ethics and leadership. Brian Fricke spent five years as a Marine sergeant, according to a 2019 BBVA announcement, before security and audit work at two federal agencies and a series of bank CISO jobs that led, in 2026, to AutoNation. Brian Harrell also has Marine Corps service in his biography, then took a longer public-sector detour through the Department of Homeland Security and CISA before becoming chief security officer at FirstEnergy in April 2026.

All three now run security for companies that sell to the public: a retailer, an auto dealer group and an electric utility.

The Air Force: investigators, analysts and engineers

The three Air Force veterans entered through three different doors. CJ Moses was a computer crime investigator for the service in 1997 and an Office of Special Investigations special agent, then moved to the FBI before joining AWS in 2007. Justin Henkel served as an Air Force intelligence officer from 2001 to 2025, while building a civilian specialty in cyber threat intelligence at CME Group and iSIGHT Partners in parallel. David Soto started as a systems and network engineer in the Air Force, according to Trellix, and later built an infrastructure security program at Amazon before becoming Trellix's CISO.

Henkel's case is worth separating out. His twenty-four years of service overlapped with his private-sector jobs rather than preceding them, and his SolarWinds announcement does not explain how the two were combined.

The Army: long careers and a teaching post

The Army group served longest. David Raymond is a retired Army officer with 26 years of service who taught electrical engineering and computer science at West Point before joining Virginia Tech's security office in 2015. Bertrum Carroll spent 27 years in the Army before retiring as a lieutenant colonel, according to StateScoop, and held a vice president and CISO post at the insurer Employers before Nevada hired him as state CISO in March 2026. Philip Martin served for a decade as an Army counterintelligence agent and Arabic linguist, then built incident response and security engineering teams at Palantir before leading security at Coinbase from April 2016 and, in 2026, the top security job at Uber.

The Navy: from watch standing to the CISO chair

The Navy group spans the widest range of documented roles, from watch standing to command. Rich Baich studied at the Naval Academy and served 20 years, including as commanding officer of the Navy Information Operations Center, before CISO posts at the CIA, AIG, Wells Fargo and AT&T. Jeff Lyon was a Navy petty officer for more than nine years, GeekWire reported, before security roles at Amazon Web Services, Robinhood and Coinbase and then the CISO job at Remitly. Alan Rosa told IT Brew his entry point was as a Navy watch guard, followed by general technology work at Boeing's defense unit; it was about ten years before he held a formal security role.

Three bridges out of uniform

Across the twelve, the profiles show three distinct ways out of military service and into a civilian security chair.

The first is a federal bridge. Moses went through the FBI, Baich through the FBI's infrastructure protection center and the CIA, Harrell through DHS and CISA, and Fricke through two federal agencies and a Defense Department sealift command. For these four, government security work sat between the uniform and the private sector.

The second is a technical bridge. Soto's engineering start, Martin's work at Palantir and Amazon's A9, Lyon's infrastructure roles at cloud and fintech companies, and Rosa's decade of general technology work all put hands-on technical jobs between service and the executive seat.

The third is a direct move into a single long civilian career, the pattern of Geisler at Walmart and Raymond at Virginia Tech, where the security leadership grew inside one employer after service ended.

Limits of the count

Military service appears in these profiles only when an official biography, a company announcement or a trade-press report states it. Some profiled leaders may have served without any source saying so, and none of the twelve profiles records specialty, rank or dates in a uniform way. The branch symmetry, in particular, should be read as a feature of this first set of 51 profiles rather than a finding about the profession.