This is the Navy SEAL Google hired as its security chief

As corporate America recruits veterans who have led men and women under fire, Google has skimmed the cream of the crop to manage its global security.

Veteran Chris Rackow heads the team that protects the company's 80,000 employees, its offices and property, in more than 150 cities across almost 60 countries. Google tapped Rackow's experience just over a year ago, recognizing the value the former warrior would bring to the search powerhouse. He had spent years in two of the most elite military and paramilitary organizations in the world: the U.S. Navy SEALs and the FBI Hostage Rescue Team.

Rackow's leadership illustrates how corporate America has caught on to the resource created by veterans of U.S. foreign interventions. An ability to manage complex, risky, and dynamic problems, especially in the rapidly changing technology industry, carries a premium.

Google brought Rackow on board in September 2016 as vice president of global security. He is one of many veterans at Google, which does not disclose the number it hires, but says they're employed in every job category, including software engineering, sales, finance, and security.

Related: Fortune 500 CEOs who served in the military

"One of the highest values of veterans is leadership just because it is such a core element within the military, from junior-enlisted all the way up to senior officers," Rackow said. "Everybody's expected to exert some type of leadership, and that is baked into recruits from day one all the way through."

"It's a quality that I have seen to be slackening across the business world," Rackow said. "That's, I think, where veterans really can play a huge part - coming in and providing positive, respectful, and dignified leadership for organizations, especially multinationals."

Rackow's military career started in 1988 when he joined the SEALs, a Navy special forces unit known for its punishing selection program and high-stakes covert missions. He was a SEAL for nearly 23 years. He also spent 13 years in the FBI, for five years as a member of the Hostage Rescue Team, a counter-terrorism unit operating at home and abroad, and, like the SEALs, famed for its harsh induction and commando-style operations.

Now he works in an industry where the weapons of battle are code and silicon chips.

"I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room," Rackow said. "In fact, I'm probably at the very low end of the totem pole based on the amazing skills we have here at Google."

And for veterans, the corporate world has some significant differences from the armed services.

"The government and the military really are quite homogeneous. It really is not as truly diverse as a company is, and especially a global company," he said.

"You really are presented with 360 degrees of various belief systems and ideas and concepts. That's probably just the unique challenge for veterans, is to understand ... the larger landscape that they need to be able to understand and learn how to operate within."

Still, his service gave him deep expertise in areas where the skills needed for military operations overlap with those required in a global technology firm -- teamwork, for example.

"A team is really a group that understands that we are sacrificing a small part of our individuality, but we're coming together for a common good, a common goal," Rackow said. "Whether you call it a common goal or you call it a mission, it's all the same thing."

"True leadership really means there's no one model, and oftentimes within a team, let's say of 10 people, you might have to exercise 10 different leadership styles ... without it looking as if you're catering to individual needs," he said.

Along with his background in warfare, Rackow brought into the tech industry a solid civilian education - thanks to realizing during his time with the FBI that he was getting intellectually out-gunned.

"I was coming to the conclusion that I was going after people that were way smarter than I was, and I needed to go back to school," he said.

He spent two years getting two degrees simultaneously: an MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and a master's in global management from Arizona State's Thunderbird School of Global Management, the latter teaching him "how to be successful across different cultures and belief systems."

See Also: 20 private security contractors that hire vets with the skills

Rackow, married with a teenage daughter, has bounced around the world for decades, mostly in the Middle East and the western Pacific. Now, working at Google and living in Half Moon Bay, he's not so far from where he spent his formative years. Born in Los Angeles, he lived in Lake Tahoe from kindergarten through fourth grade.

When he was in fifth grade his family moved to San Diego. "I grew up pretty much a California water kid. I was always out in the water, surfing, sailing, diving. Surfing stuck with me - I go out when it's appropriate for my age," he said. "I'm not charging anything big anymore. But I love to go out and stand-up paddleboard, or go out and surf."

He considers his hiring by Google "a stroke of luck" that started with a call from one of the company's recruiters.

"It was of great interest to see if I could actually come and work and provide value here, and especially after doing the research on what Google believes and what they think they can do for the planet in general, I looked at it as another service-based environment," he said.

Google supports veterans through grants to an education group and scholarships. It also hosts a veterans' network among employees and resume-writing workshops pairing Google employees with veterans entering the civilian workforce, Rackow noted.

Though a commando for most of his career, he had prefaced his service with a bachelor's degree in engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy.

"I'm an engineer at heart," he said. "But as my counselor in college told me, I probably should never practice engineering."