Executive Spotlight: Paul Meyer, President of Department 22 with Raytheon Intelligence & Space

Paul Meyer, president of Department 22 with Raytheon Intelligence & Space recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz about the development of battle management solutions and tools that will improve the decision-making for joint forces as well as how the federal government is adapting to space systems, resilient communications and other emerging technologies.

In addition, Paul Meyer also discussed how DoD’s JADC2 Implementation Plan will leverage greater data connectivity to accelerate the process of information and tools for our warfighters during the latest Executive Spotlight interview.

“Our strength as a company lies within the talents of our people. Our RI&S team is backed by more than 17,000 engineers stemming from more than 34,500 employees worldwide. Combined with our Raytheon Technologies colleagues we are 174,000 strong, with customers that depend on us to achieve their missions and get home safely.”

You can read the full interview with Paul Meyer below:

ExecutiveBiz: How will DoD’s JADC2 Implementation Plan impact your defense customers and leverage greater data connectivity to accelerate the process of information and tools for our warfighters?

Paul Meyer: We’re starting to see with a lot more clarity that JADC2 is the Department of Defense’s (DoD) vision to codify governance as well as change their training and operating model across the military departments with key enabling capabilities.

Over recent years, we’ve responded to individual customers and program requirements, but there wasn’t a full integration of the process. It didn’t exist. The DoD’s JADC2 strategy documents change that. We now have a blueprint from DoD to operationalize JADC2.

Our customer has asked us to bring innovation to the market to bolster their competitive edge against peer threats in the close-in, multi-domain battlespace. Industry is fully committed to delivering on that vital mission need.

It’s why my business just introduced Department 22. We have been listening to our customers calling for partners to increase the speed of innovation and that is what Dept. 22 will do. Our small team is designed to go fast. You won’t find layers of bureaucracy here or overburdened processes. We’re focused on creating solutions – fast – and building the foundation for successful programs – from development to delivery.

ExecutiveBiz: How can industry help the federal government with the development of advanced capabilities in space systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools and resilient communications and other emerging technologies?

Paul Meyer: “RI&S and more broadly the tech sector has had a hand in building up DoD’s baseline of technology for JADC2. We’re all supporting efforts to cohesively link the foundational capabilities to bring JADC2 to fruition.

We’re applying DoD’s JADC2 strategy and implementation plan to mature our cross-domain technologies today. One area that we’re focused on with our government partners is finding a series of gateways or translators to communicate data between services as well as intelligence communities.

The emphasis of DoD’s JADC2 strategy on “sense, make sense and act” drives home the point that we need to rapidly harness data to inform military commanders’ decisions faster than ever before. We need to be able to provide that data and be able to process and communicate the information and maintain a high level of cybersecurity during that process.

Time is our enemy and we’re providing technology applications in artificial intelligence and machine learning. We have several projects in this critical area.

For example, the ARAKNID effort takes a large database and visualizes multiple courses of action in near real-time to provide a recommendation to the military commander. We put all the data into a computer model with smart algorithms to learn where to optimize and place our resources based on the presentation of the threat.”

ExecutiveBiz: How does Raytheon Intelligence & Space ensure long-term success for your workforce to drive value for your employees as the company faces the uphill challenge to recruit and retain the best talent in the federal marketplace?

Paul Meyer: “Hiring and retaining talent is critical to our business and critical to meeting our commitments. We have a number of initiatives underway and are putting in several accountability checkpoints to ensure we remain on track.

Our strength as a company lies within the talents of our people. Our RI&S team is backed by more than 17,000 engineers stemming from more than 34,500 employees worldwide. Combined with our Raytheon Technologies colleagues we are 174,000 strong, with customers that depend on us to achieve their missions and get home safely.

Every team member plays a crucial role in being inclusive, tackling the hardest problems, and meeting our commitments – all in a way that stays true to our values. Preparing for the battlespace of the future requires new skillsets to prosecute our global customers’ missions in new ways.

We are strengthening our engineering talent pipeline in two respects to ready our workforce for the development of next-generation, data-centric capabilities. First, model-based systems engineering is at the core of developing JADC2 solutions.

Second, software engineering will be critical. A lot of the upcoming dynamic changes needed for JADC2 will be software-based and leverage the significant amount of hardware that industry has developed for the DoD and the federal marketplace.

Overall, we need to recruit talent with deep expertise in data management – how to share, secure, process and manipulate it. Our team has data management expertise. We are focused on building our bench strength. We’re ramping up our understanding of data across every discipline to aid the U.S. and its allies and partners to deter and counter peer threats.”

ExecutiveBiz: What can you tell us about Raytheon Intelligence & Space’s development of battle management solutions and tools to improve the decision-making process for our joint force? Any thoughts on the equipment that JADC2 architects are going to need in the near future?

Paul Meyer: ”RI&S has cross-domain battle management solutions spanning space systems, resilient communications, sensors, mission software, and AI/ML. These areas directly align with DoD’s JADC2 strategy and implementation plan. This means we’re contributing to JADC2 and the services’ supporting initiatives with Advanced Battle Management System for the Air Force and Project Convergence for the Army.

We’re proposing TITAN for the U.S. Army to connect the future JADC2 network to plan and execute operations in a synchronized and streamlined manner. We’ll need data fusion solutions like TITAN to process the terabytes of data available to offer military commanders and operators critical situational awareness and operations information.

And, earlier this year at the Army Expeditionary Warfare Experiment, we demonstrated and evaluated swarm technologies developed for DARPA. During the exercise, a single soldier controlled successfully a swarm—composed of 50 drone platforms in both urban and rural environments.

Our software is smart enough to assign drones with the right capabilities to the appropriate set of tasks. Fulfilling the JADC2 vision depends on advances in AI-enabled autonomy, like in these drones, to achieve the speed needed to outpace threats in the modern fast-paced battlespace.”