John Priddy

Mr. John Priddy graduated from the Senior Executive Service Development Program at the American University’s Department of Homeland Security. He is currently the Executive Director of the Southeast Region for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Air and Marine Operations (AMO). As a senior executive responsible for operations throughout the Southeast Region, his duties include planning requirements, assessing the effectiveness of air and marine forces, and organizing operations with military officers and senior executives from federal, state, and local agencies to combat transnational criminal activity and prepare for and respond to national contingencies.

In 1994, Executive Director Priddy attended Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning and was commissioned in the U.S. Army as a Second Lieutenant. He completed flight school at Fort Rucker. From 1999 to 2000, he was stationed in the Balkans, where he served as a platoon leader for aeromedical evacuation. He served in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2004 as a company commander of an attack helicopter company.

Executive Director Priddy began his federal law enforcement career at the former U.S. Customs Service in the September of 2004 as a pilot in Tucson, Arizona. While there, he flew UH-60 Black Hawks and was eventually assigned to the Foreign Operations Group where he flew Cessna Citation interceptors on air interdiction missions.

In October of 2008, Executive Director Priddy was promoted to Air Interdiction Supervisory Agent and selected to open the new National Air Security Operations Center – Grand Forks (NASOC – GF) in North Dakota. In 2009, he was selected as the Deputy Director of NASOC-GF and subsequently promoted to director in January of 2010. Executive Director Priddy focused on turning NASOC-GF into the first MQ-9 training center outside the Department of Defense and emphasized the unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to external stakeholders, particularly during the Red River flooding recovery efforts between 2008 and 2011. Additionally, he served as an incident sub-commander for Super Bowl XLVI, led the first deployment of the UAS Guardian in the Dominican Republic, and played a pivotal role in AMO’s testing of the “Harvester” radiological collection capsules. In July of 2012, he was selected as the new UAS Operations Director at AMO headquarters in Washington, DC.