Defense and Aviation Roundtable

Captain Charles LaSota, Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center

I recently had the privilege of attending a roundtable discussion with top technology leaders, including Dennis Jarvi and John Sullivan, where our conversation turned to our industry’s greatest asset: our people.

It is clear we must attract the best and brightest students to the fields of mathematics and science to continue developing capable, reliable technology.  To do this, we’ve got to breathe life into our classrooms and increase student interest and enthusiasm in these areas.

Offering a variety of technology-based curriculum and providing a hands-on approach in the classroom is key to sparking passion in our youth.  I also believe if we partner with industry universities and Department of Defense activities with schools at any level, we can show students the remarkable ways technology is implemented.
 

Pete Bitar is the president and CEO of Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems.

The Defense and Aviation Industry Roundtable, held on Feb. 16, 2010, at the Conrad Indianapolis was a very enjoyable, insightful and educational experience for me. I found myself instantly comfortable with the others there, though many of them I had not yet met.

The breadth of experience represented at the table was vast. There were small and large businesses – prime and sub contractors, and a full range of views and experience which I believe fairly represented the industry as a whole, not just as it exists in our state of Indiana.

I was asked to bring up some of the challenges and opportunities facing small businesses in our industry sector. My answer to the challenges involved things like financing internal R&D as well as bank financing in general. It seems, from my experience, that banks in Indiana in particular, seem to shy away from industries they don’t understand, or simply lump industries together with broad strokes. We have seen as a company our pipeline grow, even as our banks have retracted financing, and not for any financially-driven reasons, but for the fact that they don’t understand the defense sector or that they lump it in generically with automotive, and therefore retract their financing. Small business is especially vulnerable to this. Fortunately, XADS has found other grant and “organic” financing, but it has slowed our ability to do our own R&D to grow forward ahead of customer demand. We are keeping pace, but the lack of financing is hampering our acceleration.

The opportunities I spoke of include the fact that we do indeed have similarities with the automotive and heavy manufacturing industries in the non-defense sector. That said, it seems that as we grow, we are able to tap into the under-utilized talent pool and rapidly retrain that great talent for our industry’s applications. Additionally, the fact that so many automotive-dependent companies have gone down has led to a surge in availability at auction and otherwise of very inexpensive equipment, which has immediate use in our industry. We are picking up tools and tooling for pennies on the dollar here in this State, and that is certainly an advantage – squeezing lemonade out of lemons, in a sense.

My final comments were that because we are in a cutting-edge industry, and that so many major technological leaps in our society over the past 70 years have come from Aerospace and Defense developments, that we have the ability, and I believe the responsibility, to inspire those around us. We can stir up excitement among youth to pursue science and math. We can inspire hope in our communities, and vision, and entrepreneurialism to push for and toward big things. We as an industry have great reach and can transform the Indiana economy, one contract and one job at a time.

I was also quite inspired myself by the others at the table. Their years of experience far outweigh my own, and their breadth of knowledge was humbling to me, but it stirred my heart to want to keep going, to keep fighting and to keep trying in this path I’ve found myself on.

It was my pleasure to be involved in the Defense and Aerospace Roundtable this year, and I look forward to future opportunities to collaborate and learn from the great folks in our industry in this fine state.

My sincere thanks go to Gerry and to Ice Miller for making this event such a success.