From the day Kelley W. Crooks entered U.S. Air Force officer training school and over the next 27 years, he was at the forefront of the military’s rapid transformation of communications and computers.

“By the time of his retirement, Col. Crooks . . . had changed forever various aspects of national defense, communications infrastructure, and even national policy,” wrote Dr. K. Anderson Crooks in a nomination letter on his brother’s behalf.

Crooks studied computerized communications at Ohio State when the field was in its infancy. Offered a choice of career paths in either computer technology or communications, he studied both and went on to graduate with distinction from officer training school and with top honors from both technical schools.

Crooks began his career as a systems analyst and test director responsible for ensuring that the new Automatic Digital Network message-processing system was ready to be installed worldwide. His work earned him a medal for achievement and selection as his command’s Officer of the Year.

Crooks was then chosen to earn an advanced degree in teleprocessing science from the University of Southern Mississippi and to complete an advanced communications-computer course. He earned top honors in both before moving on to the North American Aerospace Defense, where he managed a mission to enable the U.S. to instantly detect air and space threats to the continent. During the Cold War, his systems and staff met every challenge of helping the president decide whether a “space anomaly” was a Soviet attack or a meteorite barrage.

Next, Crooks was selected as a commander to oversee installation of the underground infrastructure of an extensive command and control network in Alaska. Pentagon officials then brought him to Washington, D.C., to manage communications including issues surrounding the first Gulf War, establishing policy for bringing Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to justice, and even resolving problems related to weather phenomena.

Crooks then served at the White House for a number of years, directing or commanding communication units in the Clinton administration and leading presidential support teams for international meetings.

Crooks next took command of the only radar evaluation squadron in the U.S. government, where his engineers developed a way to integrate multiple types of radar data into one flight picture. He then became a leader at U.S. Southern Command, helping Argentina develop a cybersecurity policy and revamping the systems at U.S. facilities in the Caribbean.

Crooks’s next command was of the Defense Information Systems Agency office in Norfolk, Va., where he led a bandwidth expansion that enhanced international communications and cooperation between military and government agencies and with personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, resulting in an increase of unmanned aerial vehicle support to soldiers in the field.

“This, as we now know, was perhaps the leading technological breakthrough of the struggles in these far-flung wars,” Kerry Crooks wrote.

Today, Crooks is senior director of services for SecureInfo Corp. in San Antonio, Tex., where he leads a team of cybersecurity specialists in protecting military networks around the globe.