Heather Armentrout

Heather Armentrout is a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense program of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. She has thirty years of experience at the intersection of technology, innovation, industry, and policy, and has advised three US presidents, cabinet officials, and military and foreign leaders.

From January 2024 to October 2026, Armentrout served as the first president and general manager of Kongsberg US, a subsidiary start-up of Norwegian-based Kongsberg. During her tenure, the US portfolio grew into a profitable enterprise and delivered more than one billion dollars in revenue through its space-to-seabed portfolio. Before leading Kongsberg US, Armentrout was a global growth executive at Northrop Grumman for twelve years, shaping the company’s growth and performance while leading the profit and loss, global strategy, government relations, technical, and business development teams. Armentrout joined Northrop Grumman following a distinguished career at the Central Intelligence Agency, where she earned multiple exceptional performance awards for her contributions to the mission at home and abroad, including leadership of the country’s first National Strategy to Combat Terrorist Travel. During her appointment as the Intelligence Community’s visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Armentrout co-authored the National Academy of Sciences study that led to the professionalization of university-level national security curriculum in the United States. Armentrout completed her joint duty assignment as a congressional fellow in the US Senate.

In July 2026, Armentrout was appointed to the Marine Corps commandant’s Advisory Council on Innovation, AI and Emerging Technology, convened by the Marine Corps University Foundation. She is chairwoman of the Norwegian-American Defense Industry Council, serves on the board of the National Defense Industrial Association and the World Trade Center Institute, is a Council on Foreign Relations lifetime member, and serves in various capacities to support Georgetown University and its mission to foster discourse among people of all beliefs and cultures to promote understanding. Armentrout holds a BS in foreign service and a MA in security studies, both from Georgetown University