Please join the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security for a public conversation on “Digital design in defense,” featuring the president of Raytheon Missiles and Defense Wesley D. Kremer. This latest event in Forward Defense’s Captains of Industry Series will take place on Thursday, October 28, 2021 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ET, and will be held online via Zoom. To receive the Zoom link, please click the REGISTER button above.

In 2011, Silicon Valley icon Marc Andreessen famously declared, “Software is eating the world,” a cheeky caption with which he marked “a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.” A decade later, defense is not a sector of the economy dominated by software companies, but software does now drive innovation and productivity in defense systems. Software not only controls the performance of those systems, it is transforming the design, development, and production of them as well. If software is now eating the defense world too, what are the implications for defense contractors when it comes to acquisition management and the need to deliver innovative capabilities in shorter timelines to pace advanced threats?

To answer these and other questions about the cutting edge of defense innovation, we will be joined by the president of Raytheon Missiles and Defense, one of the leading suppliers of precision guided munitions, missile defense systems, radars, and other key military capabilities to the US military. Wesley Kremer has decades of executive experience in the aerospace and defense industries, and now leads thirty thousand Raytheon employees with responsibility for a broad portfolio of defense technologies. Prior to joining Raytheon, Kremer served as a weapons systems officer in the US Air Force and flew more than 90 combat sorties in Iraq and Bosnia.

Featuring

Wesley D. Kremer

President, Raytheon Missiles & Defense

With introductory remarks by

Amb. Barbara Barrett

Board Director, Atlantic Council; Former Secretary, US Air Force

Moderated by

Steven Grundman

Senior Fellow, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, The Atlantic Council

The Captains of Industry Series is a platform for senior defense executives to address the public interests their companies serve and the public policies that shape their markets. By engaging the perspective of business leaders about issues at the interface of defense ministries and industries, the series aims to cultivate a constituency for practical solutions to these challenges.

Past speakers have included Siemens Government Technologies CEO Tina Dolph and Applied Research Associates CEO Robert Sues on the modern government services company, Anduril Industries CEO Brian Schimpf and Maxar Technologies CEO Daniel Jablonsky on innovating the business model of defense, and SAIC CEO Nazzic Keene on redefining leadership.

Forward Defense

Forward Defense, housed within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, generates ideas and connects stakeholders in the defense ecosystem to promote an enduring military advantage for the United States, its allies, and partners. Our work identifies the defense strategies, capabilities, and resources the United States needs to deter and, if necessary, prevail in future conflict.