McCreary retired from the Navy in 2006 after 27 years of service, then served as the Strategic Communication Director of the U.S. Special Operations Command and the National Counterterrorism Center.

McCreary spent the first two years of his PAO tour in the Navy Office of Information in Atlanta, handling regional media issues in Florida, Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Among other events, he dealt with media after 19 U.S. military service personnel were killed in the Khobar Towers bombing of 1996 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

[1] McCreary was serving as a Special Assistant to the 14th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Hugh Shelton at the Pentagon when it was attacked on September 11.

[1][2] McCreary was part of the public affairs team that pushed to embed journalists in military units, insisting that the face of war should be the troops and that the reality of the danger would lead to more accurate media coverage.

He was responsible for creating the Mass Communication Specialist (MC) rating for Navy personnel, combining the skills sets of photographers, journalists, lithographers and illustrator-draftsmen.

He also helped lead an overhaul of the Navy's website, revamping its structure and content, and adding new technologies such as podcasts and RSS feeds.

He then served as the Director of Communication for the National Counterterrorism Center and U.S. Special Operations Command before becoming the president of Military.com (Military Advantage) in December 2008.