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Defense Industrialist

Dec 8, 2016

Negotiating with the deal-guy-in-chief

By James Hasik

On surviving those UCAs, finding that $125 billion, and becoming the monopsonist’s apprentice. The mood at the Aerospace Industries Association luncheon this week, Tony Bertuca reported for Inside Defense, was grim. As AIA CEO Dave Melcher put it, it’s a “relatively new phenomenon” for the president-elect to call out the country’s largest aerospace company on a big program like the new Air […]

Defense Industry Economy & Business

Defense Industrialist

Dec 6, 2016

Innovation before scale

By Steve Grundman, James Hasik

A better business model for transnational armaments cooperation The Royal United Services Institution has just published in RUSI Journal (vol. 161, no. 5, October–November 2016) the latest long essay of the Defense Industrialist project of the Atlantic Council. The abstract encapsulates our argument:     The traditional business model of transnational cooperation in armaments development and production is not […]

Defense Industry Economy & Business

Defense Industrialist

Nov 28, 2016

Advice to the Trump Administration on the evolution of war

By James Hasik

Technological developments and actual financial constraints demand top-to-bottom rethinking of the business of defense. As I wrote earlier this month, Donald Trump’s unpredicted electoral victory has brought the possibility for real change in the enterprise of national security. To borrow Paul Ryan’s phrase, thoroughly rethinking the business of defense could create a military that moves closer to […]

China Defense Industry

James Hasik was a nonresident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.

Over the past sixteen years, his advisory work has assisted defense contractors and defense ministries with their problems in business strategy, planning, and policy analysis. He has undertaken over fifty discrete advisory projects in sectors spanning armored vehicles, shipbuilding, armaments, ammunition, precision munitions, and training & simulation. His engagements have functionally included operations analysis, supply chain analysis, marketing, product development, competitive analysis, facilities management, portfolio strategy, business forecasting, privatization planning, organizational design, merger due diligence, and antitrust analysis.

Hasik previously worked as senior consultant at Booz & Company, a senior defense consultant at Charles River Associates, a procurement consultant at IBM, a logistician at Accenture, and a weapon systems analyst at ANSER. He began his career as a shipboard officer in the US Navy.

Hasik is the author Arms and Innovation: Entrepreneurship and Alliances in the Twenty-First Century Defense Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and the co-author of Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfighting (Naval Institute Press, 2002). He has authored a further five book chapters. His research has also been published in RUSI Journal, Defense and Security Analysis, Joint Force Quarterly, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Contemporary Security Policy, Defense Acquisition Research Journal, and Proceedings of the US Naval Institute.

Hasik earned his BA in history and physics at Duke University, his MBA in business economics at the University of Chicago, and his PhD in public policy at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation, MRAP: Marketing Military Innovation, investigated the processes by which Coalition ground forces came to adopt blast-resistant armored vehicles during the counterinsurgent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. His research investigated the marketing strategies, supply chains, political relationships, and manufacturing strategies of every significant armored vehicle manufacturer in North America, Western Europe, South Africa, and Australia.