The Lioness Program

Executive protection is not standing beside a client. It is access, trust, and adaptability. Cultural customs, religious traditions, and social expectations limit where a male operator can go, and across portions of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia those limits are absolute. A female operator lets a family keep its customs without trading away security. Lioness operators accompany spouses, daughters, executives, diplomats, and family members through international travel, medical appointments, public appearances, private events, residential coverage, and family movements. They run advance work and protective surveillance. Their presence creates access that would otherwise not exist.

Force is the last option and the rarest one. Information is the first. The operators who prevent incidents are the ones who notice the detail that does not fit, read a room accurately, and hold the conversation that surfaces a concern before it becomes a threat. Communication, observation, rapport, and behavioral assessment are operational skills, and Lioness operators are selected and trained for them. Most of this work is invisible. That is the point. An assignment that ends without incident is an assignment that went correctly.

The name is not ours. During operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, selected female service members formed Lioness Teams and went where male personnel could not. They searched female civilians, gathered intelligence, and built trust with local families, producing results no other unit could. What those teams proved still holds: the strongest protective asset is not the largest or the most imposing. It is the professional who gains access, earns trust, reads behavior, and completes the mission. Praetorian does not recreate military operations. We carry the principles forward into executive protection: professionalism, discipline, adaptability, service.

The program is not for every woman. It is for women willing to become exceptional. Operators develop continuously across executive protection, protective intelligence, threat assessment, medical response, defensive tactics, firearms, communications, behavioral detection, surveillance awareness, physical fitness, professional conduct, and leadership. Humility and discretion are requirements, not preferences. Clients are not hiring a personality. They are trusting a professional with their life.

To build the most respected female executive protection program in the industry, by developing women whose judgment, professionalism, and operational capability earn the trust of families, executives, and organizations worldwide.Quiet Professionals. Exceptional Standards. Mission First.

Kearstin Woods is the Director of the Lioness Program. She leads the development, recruitment, and growth of Praetorian's female operational teams, and her mandate is to raise the standard for women in this industry: set the professional bar, develop operators who clear it, and prepare them for what clients actually need. Her background includes supporting the Department of Defense in roles focused on human behavior, behavioral assessment, and information collection. Combined with her work in health, fitness, and human performance, it produces an approach built on situational awareness, sound judgment, proactive risk assessment, and the ability to build trust in dynamic environments. She is building a community of professional female operators defined by integrity, adaptability, operational excellence, and a client-first mindset.