
archer tactical
disruptive innovation

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Former Naval Special Warfare
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DEVGRU
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Former NECC - ETC
Nik Renz | Director of Security & SO
"War Panda"
Richard “Nik” Renz retired from the U.S. Navy after 20 years distinguished service. The majority of his career was in Naval Special Warfare (SEAL) and Navy Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC). For two decades, from Operation Desert Storm to Operations Enduring /Iraqi Freedom Nik has been “boots on ground” in almost every US conflict as part of an elite highly-classified NSW unit. Additionally, he personally led or executed deployment of NECC teams to world-wide pre-conflict locations.
Nik began his career in the demanding but little heralded community of Special Warfare Boat Units (SBU). He was quickly identified as extraordinary even within the Special Operations Community and was soon assigned to Navy Special Warfare Development Group (DevGru). Though most of his career and achievements remain classified, he distinguished himself through his performance in Direct Action (DA), Counter Insurgency (COIN), Foreign Internal Defense (FID) and Security Force Assistance (SFA) missions.
While at DEVGRU, Nik was handpicked to assist in the establishment of a groundbreaking new NECC command, Expeditionary Training Command (ETC), created with the goal of unifying allied nations in protecting their coasts against terrorism through training. With ETC’s historical mission of becoming the Navy’s first conventional force SFA command and the Navy’s only command tasked with SFA as a primary mission, Nik’s mix of Special Operations and Conventional Force background and SFA talents were, in the words of ETC’s first commanding officer, “literally essential to the command’s creation”. Though initially assigned as the Weapons and Tactics Team Officer in Charge, Nik quickly moved up to the Operations Officer for the Command.
With no existing standard operating procedures, Nik developed the procedures for recruiting and training SFA Advisors, validating and standardizing curricula including translation to and delivery in foreign languages, planning official foreign travel, deploying and supporting small self-contained training teams including capture of lessons learned to maximize follow on training value for the customer countries. Moreover, all of this was accomplished concurrently with deploying teams in answer to Secretary of Defense level tasking, with 80 missions accomplished in the first year and growing to a 220 mission per year sustained operational tempo. U.S. Embassies in customer countries regularly singled out ETC teams as more professional, responsive, operationally effective and cost effective than corresponding contract teams; a testament to Nik and his team’s success.