The Principle We Both Live By

There is a principle that both Major General David Glaser and I have arrived at independently through very different careers, one spent commanding tens of thousands of soldiers across some of the most complex military and law enforcement missions on earth, and one spent in police work, military service, and 33 years of building what I believe is the most important prevention framework this country has ever produced. The principle is this: the obstacle is the way.

It sounds simple, and in the way that all true things eventually sound simple once you have lived them, it is. A clear path offers very little. A path that costs you something, that demands discipline when motivation runs dry, that requires you to push through the moments when the easier option is right there within reach, that is the path that builds something real. The trial and the tribulation are not obstacles between you and success. They are the mechanism through which success actually happens. Every person who has ever built anything worth building already knows this. The question is whether they are willing to say it out loud and ask others to hold them to it.

I am saying it out loud, and Major General Glaser has been saying it for 36 years. And the reason this post exists is that two people who share that philosophy found each other, recognized what the other was building, and decided that the mission was too important not to work on together.

The photograph above was taken at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, where General Glaser now serves as Chief Strategy Officer on a clear day that felt, in the way a few moments in life actually do, like something worth remembering.

What Motivation and Discipline Are Really About

Here is something that nobody in the safety and prevention industry wants to say directly, so I will say it: motivation and discipline are eroding across nearly every facet of American life right now, and most organizations — including the ones responsible for keeping people safe are choosing to work around that erosion instead of addressing it. They build response plans that assume people will perform under stress without ever having been given a reason to care, a purpose to hold onto, or a moment of genuine preparation that made them feel capable rather than afraid.

The research on this is not complicated. If you give a person 99 genuine compliments and one piece of critical feedback, they will go home thinking about the one. That is not a character flaw; it is how human beings are wired. The brain prioritizes threat over reward because, for most of human history, that was the smart bet. But that same wiring, left unaddressed, means that training built on worst-case scenarios and fear-based messaging produces people who leave the room more anxious than when they walked in, and anxiety does not produce action. It produces paralysis.

The PRO Model was built on the opposite premise. Give a human being a genuine purpose not a slogan, not a liability waiver dressed up as training, but a real reason to care about the outcome show them that there is an opportunity to be better prepared and safer than they were before, and make that opportunity accessible in a way that does not require them to be a soldier or a law enforcement officer, and they will do whatever it takes to reach it. That is not optimism. That is a pattern that has held across hundreds of organizations, thousands of participants, and 33 years of watching human beings rise to a standard when the standard is set with respect rather than fear.

There is a third principle worth naming here, and it is the one that makes this biographical series more than a collection of photographs. When you challenge someone with an empty promise, they do nothing. When you challenge someone in a way that genuinely questions whether they are capable of rising to the moment, they will move mountains to prove that they are. That is the challenge this post is making to every organization in America that has been sitting on the sidelines waiting for someone else to take prevention seriously first.

Are you capable of being first? Because someone is going to be. And the organizations that move toward a genuine prevention culture right now, not after the next incident, not after the next internal review, but now, will be the ones that can honestly say they chose this before they were required to.

Who Is Major General David P. Glaser

David Glaser retired from the United States Army in 2021 after 36 years of distinguished service, his career spanning some of the most complex law enforcement, antiterrorism, and strategic leadership roles the Army has. He served as Provost Marshal General of the U.S. Army, the senior military police officer in the entire service, overseeing global policing and corrections operations across every theater where American soldiers serve. He commanded the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command. He served as Deputy Commanding General of U.S. Army North, the 5th U.S. Army, responsible for more than 13,000 Department of Defense service members and civilians. He served as Chief of Staff of U.S. Army Central, the 3rd U.S. Army.

He was the former Director of the Army’s Antiterrorism and Counterdrug Branches. He served on the National Joint Terrorism Task Force Executive Committee, the NATO Chiefs of Police Executive Board, and the International Police Policy Board. He was twice selected by Army leadership to serve as a Fellow with the Center for a New American Security, conducting strategic studies directly for the Chief of Staff of the Army. He has written and published on topics ranging from creating the Army Futures Command to combating international criminal organizations in the Western Hemisphere. He holds an MBA from the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree in finance from Xavier University.

The people who served under him describe him the same way, regardless of rank or year. He was a soldier’s general. He never made the moment about himself; he made it about the people around him. He walked into rooms full of his own accomplishments and found ways to make other people feel like they were the ones worth paying attention to. That kind of leadership does not happen by accident, and it does not fade when the uniform comes off.

Since retiring, General Glaser has brought that same standard to Sam Houston State University, where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer and a member of the President’s Cabinet, leading the university’s strategic planning with a focus on student success, institutional excellence, and expanding SHSU’s service to the state of Texas and beyond. He sits on the Babel Street Board of Advisors and continues his work with the International Association of Chiefs of Police Homeland Security Policy Committee. He has been honored internationally, most recently receiving the highest institutional award from the University for Business and Technology in Kosovo for his contributions to peace, security, and global cooperation.

And he is the Senior Principal Advisor to the Active Shooter Prevention Project, LLC not because he was asked to lend his name to something, but because he looked at the PRO Model, looked at the mission, and decided that this was exactly the kind of national standard worth fighting for.

A National Standard Waiting to Be Claimed

The rest of the world focuses almost entirely on response. How fast can law enforcement arrive? How quickly can a building be locked down? How many people can be evacuated in a given number of minutes? These are not irrelevant questions, but they are the wrong first question, and the fact that they have dominated the national conversation about active shooter events for two decades is precisely why the problem has not improved the way it should have.

Response happens after something has already gone wrong. Prevention is the discipline of making sure it never does. The fire code did not wait for the next fire. The seatbelt law did not wait for the next crash. The aviation industry did not keep accepting the same failure rates because response teams were getting faster. It built a culture of prevention so rigorous and so embedded that flying became the safest form of transportation in human history. America can do the same thing for targeted violence, and the PRO Model(TM) is the architecture for how that happens.

The PRO Model(TM) Prevention, Response, and Options has already been adopted by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Defense. It is already a national standard. What it has not yet become is THE national standard the default expectation for every school, every hospital, every house of worship, every office building, every law firm, every consulting company, and every public space in America. That gap between a national standard and THE national standard is the obstacle. And if you have been paying attention, you already know what the obstacle is for.

General Glaser joined this mission because he understands, better than most, what it takes to build something at scale and make it stick. You do not do it with a boutique offering or a one-time seminar. You do it by building a genuine community of experts, by creating training that meets people where they are, by making the solution affordable and accessible from the smallest neighborhood church to the largest law firm in the country, and by refusing to let the urgency of the problem be weaponized into fear that paralyzes rather than prepares. You do it by giving people a purpose, showing them the path, and then challenging them to take it.

That is what the Active Shooter Prevention Project does. Physical security assessments that identify real vulnerabilities before someone else does. Prevention training seminars where people leave feeling more capable and more confident than when they walked in. Keynote sessions that reframe the entire conversation from fear to empowerment. Soft-style walk-through training with zero stress and maximum retention. A Community of Experts with 130 professionals and 750-plus years of combined experience across law enforcement, behavioral science, military special operations, emergency response, and advanced technology. Two nonprofits. An ethics and moral compass that has never wavered. And a destination that every one of those efforts is pointed directly toward.

That destination is “#NEVERHERE(TM)” — in every sense of what those words mean. The place where targeted violence never arrives because the culture, the training, and the awareness were already there. Not because someone responded well after the fact. Because someone had prepared well before anything happened at all.

What Having This Man Beside Me Means

I want to be direct about something before this post closes, because directness is a principle I will not compromise on regardless of how the rest of the world chooses to communicate.

I have spent 33 years building something that I believe in completely. I have done it as a Marine, as a police officer, as a researcher, as an expert witness, as a Senate and Congressional testifier, as a media contributor across every major national and international outlet, and as the architect of a framework that the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense decided was worth adopting. I have done it through surgeries and setbacks and every variety of obstacle that life places in front of someone who refuses to stop. I have done it because the alternative — a country where organizations keep responding to tragedies that were preventable — is not acceptable to me.

Having Major General David Glaser beside me in this mission is not a credential I am collecting. It is a reflection of what this mission has always been and what it will continue to be: a genuine, principled, ethics-first effort to move America from a country that responds well to a country that consistently prevents. He brings 36 years of building exactly that kind of standard at the highest levels of military and law enforcement leadership. He brings the same belief that the obstacle is the way and that the right kind of hard work, done with integrity, is what makes a standard worth having.

There is no greater honor than working alongside someone who chose to be here because they believed in the mission, not because it was convenient or comfortable or without cost. And I want to be clear that this is one of several extraordinary people who have made that choice and who will be featured in this series, each one a reflection of the same standard, each connection a reminder that the work we are doing together is bigger than any one of us.

The destination is “#NEVERHERE(TM).” The road there runs directly through a national standard that every community in America deserves to have access to. And the people walking that road with me are the kind of people who make you believe, even on the hardest days, that it is worth every step.

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