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Tag: Booz Allen Hamilton

A smart defense

In late 2020, the Air Force made headlines when it announced that an artificial intelligence co-pilot, named ARTUµ, helped command and control a U.S. military spy plane for the first time in history.

If the name, pronounced R-2, sounds familiar, it is. Think R2-D2, or “Artoo,” Luke Skywalker’s lovable droid and X-Wing copilot from the “Star Wars” franchise. Except this was not a galaxy far away, but Beale Air Force Base in California.

ARTUµ controlled sensors and tactical navigation of a U-2 Dragon Lady on a reconnaissance training mission out of Beale on Dec. 15, 2020. It was charged with searching for enemy missile launchers while the plane’s human pilot, known only by the call sign “Vudu,” searched for enemy aircraft during a simulated missile strike.

The tech, developed by McLean-based Fortune 500 contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and Air Force researchers, modified an open-source gaming algorithm and ran more than 1 million training simulations in a lab — a “digital Dagobah,” Will Roper, who then served as the service’s assistant secretary for acquisition technology and logistics, wrote in an editorial for Popular Mechanics. ARTUµ was mission-ready in just over a month.

“Failing to realize AI’s full potential will mean ceding decision advantage to our adversaries,” Roper said at the time. 

Fast-forward four years and AI’s technological advancements have continued, transforming lives and — controversially — livelihoods as it becomes more entrenched in the workplace. At the same time, the military has continued to cite how critical AI will remain in helping the U.S. outpace its adversaries. Even as the Pentagon faces ongoing tensions in the Middle East amid the conflict between Israel and Hamas, and in Europe with Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine, military leaders are refocusing for the potential of a wide-ranging battle with China in the Pacific that would most likely unfold across sea, air, land, space and cyberspace.

Virginia’s defense contractors are at the cusp of that work, with a hand in some of the largest and most transformative AI projects on behalf of the military. Those range from warfighting tools like unmanned vehicles to generative AI software to perform mundane business support tasks like military personnel record searches. That’s work that could be game changing for the military at a time when budgets and manpower are tight and harnessing data could be key to maintaining the upper hand against an adversary.

“We try to focus on mission meets
innovation,” says Holly Levanto, who is overseeing delivery of AI and digital solutions for Booz Allen Hamilton’s defense clients. Photo by Shannon Ayres

“I think that the eye is on the prize … when it comes to [the Department of Defense] right now, from the perspective of this is something we have to do from a national security point of view based on threats that we see from other nation states,” says Jason Payne, chief technology officer for Arlington County-based Microsoft Federal, which currently has a contract worth as much as $21.9 billion to produce more than 100,000 AI-enhanced goggles for the Army. “We know that near-peer competitors are investing heavily in this technology.”

Crunching data

The Pentagon is also investing heavily in AI technology. Its fiscal 2025 budget request, which totals $850 billion and was released in March, includes $1.8 billion for AI spending as well as an additional $1.4 billion for the department’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control project, an ambitious departmentwide effort to connect “sensors to shooters to targets” globally.

But those dollar figures, the Pentagon admits, don’t likely tell the full story. With AI involved in so many programs, the Pentagon’s comptroller has acknowledged it’s difficult to provide a detailed breakdown of its AI investments. Even pinning down the exact number of AI defense projects is challenging. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that the DOD had at least 685 ongoing AI projects spanning the military service — a figure based on procurement and research and development dollars.

While those numbers may not offer a ton of clarity on the scope to which the Pentagon is looking toward AI, they do underscore the importance of it for the military, and Virginia contractors are benefiting from that desire.

Booz Allen Hamilton bills itself as the largest supplier of AI services to the federal government, with more than 300 active projects involving AI, according to Holly Levanto, a vice president overseeing the delivery of AI and digital solutions for Booz Allen’s U.S. defense clients.

“We try to focus on mission meets innovation,” Levanto says.

That work has included some of the Pentagon’s largest AI projects to date, including an $800 million, five-year task order awarded in 2020 to integrate and develop AI for the warfighter in the Alliant 2 Joint Warfighter Task Order, as well as a $885 million, five-year task order awarded in 2018 to help the DOD sift through its enormous amount of reconnaissance data — a project called Enterprise Machine Learning Analytics and Persistent Services, or eMAPS — through the deployment of AI and neural and deep neural networks. Booz Allen won a $1.5 billion recompete for the project in 2022.

Focusing on those mission areas has meant incorporating AI in ways to parse data faster. As an example, the Navy gathers vast amounts of data from its ships, Levanto says. Booz Allen has turned raw naval message traffic into tabular data that can be more easily and quickly analyzed to pinpoint trends. 

“We can send AI models to the edge at the point of data collection,” says Levanto, a former naval surface warfare officer. “And so, we have some real-world scenarios where we’ve done that in points on the battlefield.”

Booz Allen also launched a venture capital fund in 2022 to sharpen its tech capabilities. It has now invested in 10 companies, eight of which are AI-focused, Levanto says. That included an investment in Wisconsin-based RAIC Labs, which developed a model- generating platform using unstructured data. In 2023, RAIC made headlines when its tech was used to track a Chinese intelligence balloon that traveled over the U.S. before being shot down by a military jet off the coast of South Carolina.

“Our ultimate goal is to get the Department of Defense to be able to utilize these leading commercial technologies … and so we need to help bridge that,” Levanto says.

Falls Church-based General Dynamics Information Technology, a subsidiary of Reston-based Fortune Global 500 aerospace and defense contractor General Dynamics, is also no stranger to big defense contracts involving AI, or those that involve wrangling large sets of data.

In March, GDIT received a $922 million contract to modernize enterprise IT infrastructure for U.S. Central Command, which directs and enables U.S. and allied military operations across the Middle East and a portion of Africa.

Data is the biggest barrier to AI, says GDIT’s Brandon Bean, the AI and machine learning leader for the company’s defense division. That includes data quality and integrity as well as accessing old, siloed IT architectures. Where it used to be that applications were built to create data as a byproduct, the paradigm has shifted. Now, data “is what the application is built to support,” Bean says. “The data comes first.”

At a September conference hosted by GDIT at Amazon’s HQ2 headquarters, John Hale, chief of cloud services for the Defense Information Systems Agency, discussed how DOD is working with contractors to update antiquated computer code with AI.

“We’re using AI capabilities to … modernize legacy code that all the people who ever wrote it are long gone,” Hale said. “And you know, it’s not perfect, but it gets us like 85 to 90% of the way there, and then we’re able to manually fill in that last 10 to 15% to bring these applications into the 21st century.”

For CENTCOM, GDIT is tasked with creating data analytical services to support decision-making across nearly 20 networks and building data centricity and literacy across the command. By leveraging AI, including incorporating data tagging, what has previously required a more tedious process of manual data sampling of mountains of records can be extrapolated much faster, giving commanders the potential to better evaluate what worked during missions, or develop trainings based on lessons learned. It could also help service members to prove justifications for injuries that may not have been recorded in their medical records, Bean says.

AI in the cockpit

While AI is helping the Defense Department wrangle large amounts of data for higher level decision-making, the Pentagon is also incorporating AI in weapons systems and for operational use by warfighters. And that tech is getting increasingly advanced.

In May, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who has advocated for the military’s use of AI, rode in an F-16 Fighting Falcon that was controlled by AI in a dogfight exercise against another F-16 flown by a human. Relying on sensors, California-based Shield AI developed the program used by the Air Force during the flight. In March, Arlington County-based Boeing announced a collaboration with Shield AI to develop autonomous and AI technologies for defense programs. Boeing declined to comment for this story.

With AI in the cockpit, the technology shows no signs of slowing down, including in a variety of unmanned vehicles, which will be a key component in future battles, with several drone initiatives underway by the Pentagon and military branches.

At Newport News-based Huntington Ingalls Industries, Virginia’s largest industrial employer and the nation’s only builder of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, computer vision and recognition technologies have improved to the point where autonomous undersea vehicles like the company’s REMUS platform can be used to hunt for targets, gather intelligence and respond to findings without having to report back to the surface, says Andrew Howard, senior director of unmanned surface vehicles and autonomy programs within HII’s Mission Technologies division.

“Based on … customer comfort with things, different use cases, they could either update its survey pattern based on that information, or they could use that as the cue to pass information back to a surface operator to … take action based on that,” Howard says. “So, it’s really kind of made the information a bit more actionable than it used to be.”

The Navy in December 2023 announced that it had successfully launched and recovered a REMUS “Yellow Moray” drone via torpedo tubes on the USS Delaware, a Virginia-class attack submarine commissioned in 2022 and built by HII in partnership with General Dynamics’ Connecticut-based Electric Boat subsidiary. The Navy has said it could field the program for its submarine fleet later this year.

Meanwhile, the Marine Corps has been testing similar surface-level technology for its Long-Range Unmanned Surface Vessel (LRUSV) program using technology developed by HII that uses cameras and machine learning to identify and classify targets for maritime domain awareness, Howard adds. The drone’s tech passes intelligence to an operations center for action. Based on that feedback, the drone can then update its mission and shadow an intended target if called upon to act.

Gathering intelligence with less risk to warfighters can help save lives. Making that information more readily available can make work easier, too.

Reston-based Fortune 1000 contractor CACI International offers the DarkBlue Intelligence Suite, a tool that incorporates various AI techniques, including computer vision and image processing, to help analysts in dark web investigations and tracking. The company received a $239 million six-year task order in August to provide intelligence analysis and operations, including the DarkBlue suite, to the Army’s Europe and Africa command.

AI is also helping the Marines step into the metaverse. In October 2023, Fairfax’s CGI Federal, the U.S.-based arm of the Canadian professional services and consultancy, announced that it successfully completed a $34 million pilot to digitally twin the Florida-based Marine Corps Platform Integration Center’s assets into a virtual world by tagging its inventory and helping the service track its assets in real time. Being able to keep up with equipment like tanks as they travel the world could be of huge importance in a distributed battle across the Pacific, where troops could set up on airfields constructed on austere island chains. It could also help the service track maintenance needs and predict trends across vehicle fleets, says CGI Vice President Stephanie Ackman, who leads the company’s technology practice for defense, space and intelligence clients. 

“When the rubber meets the road … [does a taxpayer] care about where the stuff is?” Ackman asks. “Yes, but they care more so about the safety of the individuals that are down range.”  

‘A culture of caring’

Speaking to an audience of more than 20,000 human resources professionals gathered in Las Vegas for his organization’s June 14 annual conference and expo, Society for Human Resource Management President and CEO Johnny C. Taylor Jr. said that HR execs are ready to meet the array of challenges created by the “new abnormal” of post-pandemic workplaces, where “everything is new again.”

In this new abnormal, some adverse effects of COVID have lingered. The job market may be strong, but angst about the economy is widespread. The line between work and personal lives that got blurred during lockdown still has not become clear, even as return-to-office mandates have people scrambling to adjust. And some workers are now worried about the potential of losing their jobs to artificial intelligence.

Add to these concerns the existential burden of living in a society in which political, social and racial tensions seem to ratchet up daily, and the result is a workforce experiencing high levels of depression and burnout.

In an April poll about mental health conducted by the American Psychological Association, 77% of 2,515 employed adults polled nationwide reported experiencing job-related stress within the previous month. About a quarter of those respondents blamed that stress on being subjected to a toxic workplace, which, the APA says, can include dealing with excessive demands, micromanagement, job insecurity, discrimination and poor communication. Women and people with disabilities tend to suffer most from such working environments, the APA found.

Good mental health is not just a cause for private concern anymore, but a matter of dollars and common sense for businesses, because burnt-out and unhappy workers are generally less productive and can be harmful to workplace culture.

Symptoms of burnout can include coming in late and leaving early, insomnia and substance abuse, says Ben Madden, board president of Northern Virginia SHRM and owner of Arlington-based human resources consultancy HR Action. “Quiet quitting” and “slow working” are terms that have entered our vocabulary for a reason, he adds.

HR professionals need to be experts on people, as well as business and culture, Taylor said in his June speech. “HR must be that person everyone can trust and that person who can predict how humans — a company’s workers — will respond to action and behaviors,” he said. “We need to understand our people at the deepest levels.”

Last year, the World Health Organization reported that 12 billion working days are lost to depression globally every year, and it estimates that the annual cost in reduced productivity to the U.S. economy is $1 trillion. Those statistics highlight one of the major points of Taylor’s June speech — that human capital is the most valuable form of business capital and that companies that expect to be successful must take better care of their employees’ mental health.

Most businesses still have some room for improvement on that front, however. The APA survey found that just 43% of employees surveyed said they have access to on-the-job insurance that covers mental health and substance abuse disorders. An equal number of those surveyed said that they fear repercussions if they were honest with their employers about their mental state.

But “that narrative is shifting,” says Scott Snell, the Frank M. Sands Sr. professor of business administration at the University of Virginia and co-author of co-author of the textbook “Managing Human Resources.”  “Most organizations,” he says, “are at least aware of the issue and are acting on it in good ways.”

The largest companies with the most resources are leading the way. Alex Alonso, chief knowledge officer for SHRM, says that businesses with more than 5,000 employees have begun offering “a boatload more” of materials and resources to aid employees with challenges in their personal lives, as well as more flexible scheduling and “more talk space.”

Three of the commonwealth’s largest employers — Sentara Health, General Dynamics Information Technology, and Booz Allen Hamilton — are exemplars of this change.

Healing the healers

Norfolk-based health system Sentara Health has 31,000 employees working at more than 100 sites across Virginia and North Carolina. Although every sector of the economy was impacted in some fashion by the pandemic, front-line health care workers took the brunt. Yet, says Becky Sawyer, Sentara’s executive vice president and chief people officer, in some ways, employee stress was easier to manage then than it is now.

During the COVID pandemic, health care personnel were in crisis mode and were able to stay resilient knowing that the burdens placed on them by the crisis eventually would lift. However, they’ve since transitioned “from crisis burnout to a state of uncertainty,” Sawyer says, and “the new way of the world is creating moral distress.” Sentara’s response has been to roll out many more resources to support its workers’ mental health.

Another order of business has been to make its worksites safer. Workers in public-facing sectors, ranging from retail and health care to transportation, have experienced unprecedented levels of hostility in recent years, with almost a quarter of those surveyed by the APA reporting they were verbally abused in the prior month. The U.S. Surgeon General lists protection from harm as the first essential to workplace mental health, and safety is a huge issue in the health care field, Sawyer says. (Workplace violence is four times more likely to occur in a health care setting than in other industries, according to a 2021 study by the Cleveland Clinic.)

To keep employees safer, Sentara has begun issuing badges to visitors and has installed weapons detection systems. Employees are being trained in how to defuse potentially violent situations, and each of Sentara’s divisions now has its own workplace violence prevention committee.

The health care system has extended its free resources for emotional and mental health to 40,000 medical providers and has added on-site mental health counselors to supplement its in-house employee assistance programs. Such counselors remain a rarity among businesses. The APA found that just 12% of survey respondents said their workplace has anyone on site with mental health training.

“General anxiety is higher than what we’ve seen in the past,” says Daphne Gillie, Booz Allen Hamilton’s global wellbeing program manager. Photo by Will Schermerhorn

Two other elements needed for a healthy workforce are employees who feel that they matter and that their work matters, according to the surgeon general. As “a mission-oriented organization that every colleague aligns around,” Sentara’s approach to decision-making is deliberately inclusive, Sawyer says. Sentara wants its employees to know that their voices are heard and that their opinions are considered. Yearly employee surveys, which have an 85% participation rate, she says, help leaders get a grip on what issues matter most to their workers.

“Burnout was a real and present concern long before COVID,” Sawyer says, “but we can take more meaningful approaches now.” 

Defending defense workers

Like health care workers, national defense workers at two of Virginia’s largest government contractors, Reston-based General Dynamics Information Technology and McLean-based Booz Allen Hamilton, faced intensely stressful situations during the pandemic. Many had to continue to work on-site at clients’ facilities despite general lockdowns, while the work itself intensified. “COVID brought out some of our adversaries,” says GDIT President Amy Gilliland.

The security clearances that many employees of both contractors must have to perform their jobs also piled on the stress. These clearances became more difficult and time-consuming to obtain during COVID, and, although Gilliland says that only 1% of clearances are revoked or denied because of mental health issues, the belief persists in the industry that any perception of mental vulnerability will result in losing clearance. That widespread, if mistaken, notion continues to make people reluctant to seek help even when they find themselves spiraling downward.

Last year, GDIT got a rough wake-up call about the threats to its employees’ mental health when it logged a 3% increase in suicides among its 30,000-plus workforce. That grim statistic led to “real discussions about the elephant in the room,” Gilliland says.

These days, GDIT wants its employees to know that “it’s OK not to be OK,” and that the company is there to help. In 2021, Gilliland launched the “How are you, really?” campaign within GDIT to destigmatize mental health issues and encourage employees in need to seek help. GDIT supports an employee’s need to step back or even take a leave of absence, and it has instituted or beefed up a slew of mental health support programs, including:

  • A partnership with a health care insurer to provide alcohol-abuse treatment;
  • A website to provide information and links to mental health support networks and care providers;
  • A concierge tool, Wellthy, to assist employees in navigating family care options;
  • Talkspace, a program allowing employees to chat with counselors and therapists by text, phone or video;
  • And a speaker program to call attention to mental health challenges such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, a big concern for a company that employs many veterans. “It caught on like wildfire,” Gilliland says.

GDIT also is training its managers “to lean in with empathy,” she says. “We’ve learned that we can be more flexible and that rigidity is not necessary. Take care of the people, and they can take care of the mission. Our national security imperative is to deliver well employees.”

Like GDIT, Booz Allen Hamilton also has 30,000-plus employees and its mission-driven work binds employees together, but that dedication can also lead to burnout, says Daphne Gillie, Booz Allen’s global wellbeing program manager. “General anxiety,” she says, “is higher than what we’ve seen in the past.”

Booz Allen’s response has been to take a holistic approach to the problem through its employee assistance program, a confidential resource that employees can access for free. The program offers coaching to manage stress and counseling services for employees and their family members. Diversity, equity and inclusion ambassadors also have been deployed in each of Booz Allen’s business sectors, along with wellness champions who are conversant on available wellness benefits and can help educate and influence their colleagues to tap into available resources.

Booz Allen is dedicated to creating “a culture of caring,” Gillie says, but “bridging the gap between the knowing and the doing takes work.”

As companies such as Sentara, GDIT and Booz Allen are taking the mental health of their employees much more seriously than ever before, smaller companies also have begun to follow suit. A 2022 SHRM survey of 3,129 human resources professionals found that 78% said their organizations — some with as few as 10 employees — offered mental health resources or planned to do so within the next year. 

These employers, whatever their size, are coming to recognize that the new abnormal is here to stay and that with it comes a new bottom line. Mental health services are no longer just a nice-to-have benefit, but essential.

U.Va.’s Snell sums it up, saying, “Taking care of employees is a business issue.”  

Professional Services 2023: HORACIO D. ROZANSKI

Rozanski joined the Fortune 500 global management, technology, engineering and consulting firm Booz Allen in 1991 as an intern in Buenos Aires, ultimately rising to CEO in 2015 after holding other leadership positions such as chief operating officer.

Booz Allen employs 10,707 people in Virginia and 31,925 worldwide and reported fiscal year 2022 earnings of $9.26 billion. Rozanski is credited with playing a central role in strategic initiatives like Vision 2020, which expanded engineering and systems delivery, and the formation of Booz Allen’s $100 million venture capital arm in 2022.

In May, the Defense Department awarded Booz Allen a five-year contract valued at $919 million for Army combat support. In July, the company agreed to pay the U.S. government $377.4 million to settle allegations of improperly billing commercial and international costs to its government contracts, according to the Justice Department. Booz Allen did not admit liability in the agreement, which it said it had entered into to avoid protracted litigation.

Rozanski chairs the Children’s National Medical Center’s board and is a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience. He was a 2022 recipient of the Horatio Alger Award.

Federal Contractors | Technology 2023: JUDI DOTSON

With more than 30 years working for the Fortune 500 global management consultant, Dotson leads Booz Allen Hamilton’s national security and global defense business. In 2022, Dotson succeeded Karen Dahut, who now serves as CEO of Google’s public sector organization.

Under Dotson’s leadership, Booz Allen has performed work for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the IRS, military branches and other federal agencies. Dotson previously led Booz Allen’s National Security Sector teams and its Joint Combatant Command account, with a portfolio of clients throughout the Department of Defense.

In October 2022, Booz Allen increased its position in the growing national security market by acquiring EverWatch, a classified software and analytics developer. And in May, the company was awarded a $919 million research and development contract in support of several DoD agencies, including Army commands. Booz Allen also announced a partnership in 2022 with Armaments Research Company to demonstrate ARC’s 5G-powered weapons-sensing and data-sharing system in Booz Allen’s battlefield extended reality project for soldiers.

A University of Maryland graduate, Dotson was named this year to Executive Mosaic’s Wash100 list of top government contracting executives.

Under the radar

Considering that four of the world’s five largest defense contractors are headquartered in Northern Virginia and that Hampton Roads is home to the world’s largest naval base, it isn’t surprising that Virginia was ranked the top state in the nation for defense spending in 2021.

But what many observers may not know is that quiet, academic Charlottesville has a booming defense industry that’s been growing for decades.

In Charlottesville, the total direct and indirect regional economic impacts from defense spending accounted for $1.2 billion in 2021, according to a study exclusively released to Virginia Business by the University of Virginia and the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Conducted by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at U.Va., the study found that the defense industry in Charlottesville and surrounding Albemarle and Greene counties directly accounted for 3,972 jobs, $421 million in labor income, $501 million in value-added income and $642 million in economic output in 2021. When including indirect impacts from the defense industry in the Charlottesville region, the total economic impact in 2021 included 7,347 jobs, $618 million in labor income, $831 million in value-added income and $1.2 billion in economic output.

This makes defense the second largest industry in Charlottesville behind only higher education. (U.Va.’s annual economic impact is nearly $6 billion, according to the university.)

Defense is “a quiet sector in our community,” says Deborah van Eersel, the U.Va. Foundation’s chief administrative officer and director of marketing. “People don’t really know how much it contributes to the community’s well-being.”

The Weldon Cooper study, which cost roughly $20,000, was conducted at the request of the Defense Affairs Committee (DAC) of the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce and funded by Albemarle County, the U.Va. Foundation and the city of Charlottesville.

‘Secret Squirrel’

National defense spending has increased steadily since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, having grown from $320.09 billion in 2000 to $800.67 billion by 2021, with $62.7 billion going to Virginia alone that year.

Previous economic impact studies focused on defense have looked at all of Virginia or at the robust defense spending in Hampton Roads or Northern Virginia. But those reports don’t often capture the whole story of the defense industry’s impact in Virginia, especially in the Charlottesville region, which is home to Rivanna Station, an Albemarle County sub-installation of Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County. Three of the top military intelligence gathering agencies — the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) and the Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA) — have a presence at Rivanna Station.

“A lot of what we have [in the Charlottesville region] is what I call ‘Secret Squirrel’ stuff, mostly intelligence units and elements and people. They don’t and can’t really speak to what they do,” explains retired U.S. Army Col. Lettie Bien, who is the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce’s inaugural defense affairs program manager. “Hence, this community did not see how robust the defense community was here in the Charlottesville/Albemarle region.”

Working with van Eersel, the chamber and university decided that for the community to “really get behind and support the defense space, they really needed to understand and know the true economic value that it brings to our area,” Bien says. “That became the impetus for having the report.”

While the defense sector has largely started growing nationally during the past two decades, the industry really arrived in Charlottesville in the late 1960s, explains Chris Engel, director of economic development for the city of Charlottesville. This is when NGIC was known as the U.S. Army Foreign Science and Technology Center (FSTC). Created in the mid-’90s from the merger of FSTC and the U.S. Army Foreign Science and Technology Center, NGIC was once located just off the downtown mall in Charlottesville, but it outgrew that space and moved to Rivanna Station in Albemarle, Engel says.

Charlottesville’s defense sector boomed following 9/11.

“We had significant growth here related to Rivanna Station after 9/11,” van Eersel says. “Then the country went to war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and they brought personnel down to work out of the station and brought contractors then to help support their mission in those places.”

Proximity to D.C.

Another reason the defense industry in Charlottesville has largely remained under wraps is that many of its workers are civilians performing intelligence or government contracting work.

Contractors with a presence in the area include McLean-based Fortune 500 firm Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., which employs more than 150 people at its Charlottesville office, where it primarily does contract work for defense and intelligence community clients, says Bryan Shrader, senior vice president at Booz Allen. Work includes designing, developing and implementing digital, cloud-based, advanced analytics and other technologies for defense and intelligence clients.

“Charlottesville is a great location for Booz Allen and our clients,” he says. “It has a strong base of highly technical talent, reasonable proximity to the National Capital Region (NCR) and wonderful culture and charm — all of which draws people to the area.”

Roughly 100 miles from the nation’s capital, Charlottesville is a desirable location for the defense and intelligence industry, say Bien and van Eersel.

“One of the things that the government has wanted to do is to not have all of its assets located within a hundred-mile radius of … D.C., the capital region,” van Eersel explains. “The idea is that if we had a strike, they want to be far enough away so that their assets could not be damaged by a bomb or some sort of a terrorist attack.”

Booz Allen largely hires locally or employs workers who are planning to relocate to the Charlottesville region. “This often makes our job hiring top technical talent a bit easier than some of the other non-NCR geographies where Booz Allen and our clients operate,” Shrader says.

Falls Church-based Fortune 500 defense giant Northrop Grumman Corp., the world’s fourth largest defense contractor, also maintains a significant presence in Charlottesville. Northrop Grumman employs almost 500 people in the Charlottesville region in engineering, manufacturing, finance and program management jobs supporting contracts with the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard. The company’s work in the region largely focuses on electronic mission systems as well as machinery control and bridge systems, explains Rudy Fernandez, an operating unit director and Charlottesville site lead with Northrop Grumman.

“Charlottesville has a diverse workforce, from touch labor to high-end engineering; that aligns well with the needs of our business,” he says, adding that “Charlottesville’s proximity to the government customer located in the D.C. area is beneficial to both the customer and the business.”

Deep talent pool

Northrop Grumman and Booz Allen, as well as other Charlottesville-region defense contractors, are focused on hiring veterans. About 10% to 20% of Northrop Grumman’s workforce in Albemarle are former service members, Fernandez says. Companywide, veterans comprise nearly 28% of Booz Allen’s total workforce, Shrader says.

“Frankly, people who retire out of the military — particularly if they’re in Northern Virginia — find that this is a great place for them to come and [eventually retire],” Bien adds. “For those who are just getting out [of the military], they find that Charlottesville is also a great place to start a business, particularly if it’s going to be in the defense space.”

Defense sector jobs are attractive to veterans and civilians alike. As of 2020, the average wage for defense sector workers in the Charlottesville region was more than $104,000, according to the Central Virginia Partnership for Economic Development (CVPED).

“A lot of the folks are very well-educated and have a high level of skill,” says CVPED President Helen Cauthen, adding that her organization is also working to retain area veterans. “We’ve had some success with that, where the folks get down here … and realize they really like Central Virginia and they end up living here and potentially taking other jobs here because it’s a great workforce.”

While most of the defense industry in Charlottesville is related to Rivanna Station, the region’s surrounding counties also are working to attract more defense contractors. In August 2020, the Greene County Board of Supervisors approved a defense production zoning overlay across the whole county, a state designation that provides incentives such as tax reductions and permitting fee grants to defense contractors.

“The defense industry as a whole has had a positive impact — I don’t want to say [a] significant impact because it’s still a growing impact in Greene,” says Alan Yost, the county’s director of economic development and tourism. “With the Rivanna Station only being a few miles from our border, there are several defense companies that have settled into the Greene County area.”

Since the county implemented the defense production zoning, a few defense businesses have examined relocating to Greene, Yost says. “They ended up not coming here for different reasons, but it’s bringing more and more attention to our county’s designation as a defense production zone,” he says. “Rivanna Station is bringing a lot of defense contractors into the area, but it’s not just Rivanna Station. It’s the energy that they create that brings other defense industry partners here for different reasons.”

Having access to a nearby major academic institution also helps the defense sector in Charlottesville.  

“The talent pool coming out of the university is really high quality,” van Eersel says, adding that there are pre-grad internship opportunities for U.Va. students.

For example, students from the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy often have internships or field study experiences with national security groups and defense contractors in the Charlottesville region.

Defense is also one of the top industries for internships for U.Va. engineering students, second only to internet and software jobs. Engineering students — both undergraduate and graduate — are in demand from the local defense industry, with new hires earning an average of $70,000 to $85,000 per year after graduation performing engineering, research and data analytics jobs, according to U.Va. Some of the top defense recruiters at U.Va. include DIA, BWXT, Naval Air Systems Command, Leidos, Battelle and Booz Allen.

“They can begin to be recruited by the government, and then their security clearances are worked on. By the time they graduate from university, they’re ready to go,” van Eersel says.

U.Va. also is home to the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, commonly called the JAG School. Located on campus, the federal service academy operates independently of U.Va. and educates military and civilian personnel to become military lawyers.

U.Va. itself also benefits directly from defense spending, Bien adds, in the form of Department of Defense research grants, contract spending, GI Bill student tuition spending, household incomes of DoD personnel enrolled at the university, ROTC program spending and university startups resulting from DoD-sponsored funds.

Located in Charlottesville, too, is the Federal Executive Institute, an executive management development and training center for federal government workers. “It’s where the government sends its senior civilians for leadership and government training,” Bien says. “People within the defense [industry] always know what the Executive Institute is. That adds to the mystique of why Charlottesville is so great for [the defense industry].” 

Keswick Hall. Photo courtesy Virginia Tourism Corp.

Charlottesville at a glance

Widely known as home to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate and the University of Virginia, the Charlottesville region is located about 65 miles west of Virginia’s state capital. The city was founded in 1762, with the Jefferson-designed U.Va. campus founded 57 years later. The city and surrounding counties are also popular for vineyards and breweries as well as access to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The largest industries in Charlottesville include higher education, health care, defense, and hospitality and tourism.

Population

Charlottesville: 45,672

Albemarle County: 113,535

Greene County: 20,552

Top employers

University of Virginia/UVA Health

Sentara Healthcare

U.S. Department of Defense

Northrop Grumman Corp.

Crutchfield Corp.

CFA Institute

Major attractions

Monticello, the home of America’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that draws visitors from around the globe. You can see the distinctive Jefferson-designed Rotunda at the University of Virginia. Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall is a good place to visit for eating, shopping and socializing. Take in the natural beauty of the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains along Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway and at Shenandoah National Park. Hikers will savor the Instagram-worthy views from Spy Rock and Humpback Rocks. Take a break from picking apples and peaches at Carter Mountain Orchard by listening to live music and eating apple cider doughnuts. Or take a tasting tour through area vineyards like Jefferson Vineyards, Trump Winery, Blenheim Vineyards and Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyard.

Top convention hotel

Boar’s Head Resort
175 guest rooms
22,000 square feet
of meeting space

Boutique/luxury hotels

Kimpton The Forum Hotel

Albemarle Estate at Trump Winery

The Graduate Charlottesville

Keswick Hall

Quirk Hotel Charlottesville

Oakhurst Inn

The Draftsman

Notable restaurants

Ivy Inn
American
 ivyinnrestaurant.com

C&O
French
 candorestaurant.com

Orzo Kitchen & Wine Bar
Mediterranean
 orzokitchen.com

The Ridley
Southern
 ridleyva.com

Google Public Sector taps Booz Allen exec as CEO

Karen Dahut will be the CEO of Google Public Sector, Google LLC’s subsidiary focused on government and educational contracting work.

Dahut starts Oct. 31 and will be based out of Google’s Washington, D.C., and Reston offices, according to a news release. She takes the place of Will Grannis, Google Public Sector’s founding CEO, who is returning to his role as chief technology officer of Google Cloud.

Google Public Sector was formed in June and is focused on bringing Google Cloud technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, to federal, state and local government customers and educational institutions. Google Public Sector has a separate board from Google LLC and its operations includes specialized sales, customer engineering, support, channel and partner programs, and security operations.

Dahut will leave her role as a sector president at Booz Allen Hamilton, where she led the company’s $4 billion global defense business. Before joining Booz Allen, Dahut served in the Navy for six years, reaching the rank of lieutenant and serving at the Navy Medical Research Institute, a facility in Bethesda, Maryland, that was closed in 1998. As a civilian, she worked for 11 years for the Logistics Management Institute, a Tysons-based nonprofit federal contractor, before going to Booz Allen. She earned her bachelor’s degree in business finance from Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, and a master’s degree from the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California.

 

 

Booz Allen Hamilton launches $100M VC fund

Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. has formed a $100 million corporate venture capital arm, the McLean-based Fortune 500 global management consultancy announced Wednesday.

Named Booz Allen Ventures LLC, the arm will invest in early-stage companies and technologies across four categories: defense, artificial intelligence/machine learning, cybersecurity and deep technology.

“We are proud and excited to continue our work with the best startups to support our U.S. government clients,” Booz Allen Chief Technology Officer Susan Penfield said in a statement. “The ability to navigate bigger, faster technology waves and identify the right emerging technologies for their mission needs, as well as our own, is vital to enabling growth and mission speed.”

Booz Allen Ventures will help the company expand its tech scouting program, sourcing and recommending tech investments focused on mission-specific applications, according to a news release.

Booz Allen employs approximately 29,500 workers globally, with about 10,000 employed in Virginia. For the 12 months ended March 31, Booz Allen reported revenue of $8.4 billion.

Booz Allen Hamilton promotes exec to COO

McLean-based Fortune 500 global management consultant Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. announced Friday that it had promoted executive Kristine Martin Anderson to chief operating officer, effective June 1.

Anderson is currently an executive vice president and president of the firm’s civil sector division.

“She has demonstrated the ability to grow and manage technology-first businesses, develop talented leaders, help senior clients transform and integrate acquisitions, all while consistently delivering strong financial results,” Booz Allen President and CEO Horacio Rozanski said in a statement. “As COO, Kristine will work closely with me as well as other leaders to drive operational performance, accelerate the execution of our strategy and help us gain efficiencies that lead to faster growth.”

Anderson has been with Booz Allen for more than 16 years. She has led the company’s civil sector business for the past four years and previously led Booz Allen’s health business. “Booz Allen has the benefit of both incredible leadership talent and strong market positioning across the entirety of government,” Anderson said in a statement. “As COO, I look forward to working with a broad group of those leaders to unlock the next level of performance.”

Before joining Booz Allen in 2006, Anderson was vice president for operations and strategy at CareScience, a Philadelphia-based software solutions company.

She serves on the board of directors for Executives for Health Innovation and is co-chair of the National Quality Forum’s Cost and Resource Use Standing Committee.

Anderson holds a bachelor’s degree in neurobiology from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Rich Crowe, an executive vice president serving as Booz Allen’s chief growth officer, will succeed Anderson as president of the firm’s civil sector. He has been with Booz Allen for 17 years.

Booz Allen employs approximately 29,500 workers globally, with about 10,000 employed in Virginia. For the 12 months ended March 31, 2021, Booz Allen reported revenues of $7.9 billion.

Booz Allen to sell Middle East/N. Africa biz

New York-based management consulting firm Oliver Wyman announced last week that it has entered an agreement to acquire McLean-based Fortune 500 global management consultant Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.’s business serving the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Financial terms of the transaction, which is expected to close this year, were not disclosed.

Oliver Wyman will add the acquired business to its India, Middle East and Africa (IMEA) practice.

“We’ve long admired Booz Allen Hamilton’s shared ethos of client excellence and deep sector expertise of the highest standards,” Pedro Oliveira, managing partner of Oliver Wyman IMEA, said in a statement. “Indeed, Oliver Wyman and Booz Allen already share a long history, with two former Booz Allen Hamilton partners having founded Oliver Wyman, and we are deeply pleased this culture of entrepreneurship and DNA of deep-seated values endures some four decades later.”

Souheil Moukaddem, Booz Allen’s MENA managing director and executive director, will join Oliver Wyman’s Management Leadership Council, led by Oliveira.

Booz Allen’s MENA-based management consulting business offers experience across energy, climate and sustainability, real estate and financial services, as well as a specialized cybersecurity offering. Booz Allen will continue to serve U.S. government clients requiring support within the region.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for our MENA-based management consulting business and talented workforce to grow in new ways,” Karen Dahut, Booz Allen’s global defense sector president, said in a statement. “Booz Allen has a proud, long-standing management consulting legacy in the MENA region and has become a true transformation leader. Oliver Wyman provides the management consulting focus, investment and culture that will allow our people and clients to thrive, while enabling Booz Allen to retain a core focus on serving U.S. government clients at the center of mission and technology.”

Booz Allen employs approximately 29,500 workers globally, with about 10,000 employed in Virginia. For the 12 months ended March 31, 2021, Booz Allen reported revenues of $7.9 billion.

A division of Marsh McLennan, Oliver Wyman has more than 5,500 employees worldwide focused on international management and strategic consulting.

Booz Allen to acquire Reston-based cyber firm

McLean-based global management consultant Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. announced Wednesday that it plans to acquire EverWatch, a Reston-based government solutions contractor. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The deal will allow Booz Allen to speed delivery of classified software development and analytics capabilities for national security clients and complements its artificial intelligence and cyber portfolio, the Fortune 500 company said in a news release.

It is expected to close in the first quarter of Booz Allen’s fiscal 2023, which runs from April 1, 2022, through June 30, 2023.

EverWatch provides intelligence, defense and mission solutions for national security agencies. It was founded in 2017 and is a portfolio company of private investment firm Enlightenment Capital, which provides capital and strategic support to companies in aerospace, defense, government and technology.

After the deal closes, EverWatch will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Booz Allen and work with its national security sector led by Judi Dotson, executive vice president of the firm’s national security business.

“U.S. national and economic security depends on secure, trusted and resilient technology, and in the most dynamic threat landscape of our time, delivering advanced solutions with speed and agility is essential for mission success,” Dotson said. “Combining Booz Allen’s mission experience and advanced technologies with EverWatch’s classified software development and analytics capabilities will help implement faster and more comprehensive solution delivery to help defense and intelligence agencies transform and stay ahead of threats.”