Lieutenant General Pat O’Reilly is a nonresident senior fellow with the Forward Defense practice within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security where he focuses on strategic policies affecting business innovation, emerging technologies, missile defense, and deterrence challenges. O’Reilly is a vice president at L3Harris Technologies, Inc. focusing on venture-capital investments in start-up technology companies. He was also previously a general manager at L3Harris Technologies, corporate vice president of engineering at L3 Technologies, and senior vice president at Alphabet Energy, a renewable energy start-up in Silicon Valley. He is on the board of advisors of IP3 Corporation, a consortium of nuclear power, electrical distribution, systems engineering, and security companies.

O’Reilly retired from the US Army in 2013 after a thirty-five-year career highlighted by managing unprecedented missile, radar, power, vehicle, construction engineering, watercraft, and logistic research and acquisition programs, culminating in his becoming director of the US Missile Defense Agency. O’Reilly led the government integration of engineering teams across the aerospace industry and worked with all levels of the executive branch, Congress, industry, and the leadership of forty-two countries. A West Point graduate, O’Reilly was an associate professor of physics at West Point with master’s degrees in physics, national security and strategic studies, and management.  

O’Reilly has been deployed to multiple hurricane and other natural disaster sites as a disaster relief associate for the American Red Cross.