Context

The Common Missile Warning System is an aircraft-survivability system designed to detect, classify, and track infrared missile threats, provide warning of hostile gunfire, and automatically initiate defensive countermeasures while providing aircrews with threat and countermeasure-status information.

I joined the program as an integration-and-test engineer and ultimately assumed responsibility for leading the Integration, Verification and Validation and system-testing effort across component testing, integrated laboratory environments, dynamic motion testing, live-fire field testing, and formal government verification.

Challenge

Verification required demonstrating correct integrated-system behavior across realistic threat signatures, aircraft motion, changing engagement conditions, multiple threats, aircraft-state inputs, and boundary cases. This included verifying the logic governing automatic countermeasure deployment and safety interlocks.

An apparently correct response, however, did not necessarily demonstrate correct internal processing. A threat could produce the expected behavior while being routed through a generic fallback algorithm rather than the intended threat-specific processing path. Verification therefore required visibility into both external system response and internal classification and processing decisions.

Engineering Response

Working with the broader integration-and-test team, I helped develop and execute a layered verification strategy spanning laboratory, dynamic-motion, automated SIL, and live-fire testing.

We designed and fabricated a custom threat-generation system to reproduce representative missile signatures. The pulse generator produced the time-varying profiles associated with missile events, providing controlled, repeatable threat stimuli for system-level testing.

I also participated in integrated testing of the Advanced Threat Infrared Countermeasures (ATIRCM) system, verifying the handoff between systems.

To make internal threat-processing decisions observable, I worked with the software team to instrument the implementation so SIL testing could identify the processing path selected for each injected threat signature. This allowed known stimuli to be correlated with the system's classification and selected algorithm, distinguishing correct threat-specific processing from apparently successful behavior produced through a fallback path.

I also developed Linux, Bash, and Python-based automation to configure and execute large simulation campaigns unattended overnight and across weekends. Operating across as many as eight System Integration Laboratories, the capability enabled thousands of scenarios to be evaluated without competing for prime laboratory time.

Controlled laboratory and dynamic-motion testing were supplemented by live-fire testing at Dugway Proving Ground.

Outcome

Boundary-condition and edge-case testing exposed system and software behavior that nominal testing had not revealed. I advocated for additional testing despite initial resistance, and the resulting evidence supported software corrections before production.

Following internal verification, government representatives inspected and approved the test procedures and witnessed their execution and results in real time. Successful completion resulted in formal government sign-off, allowing the system to proceed into production and delivery.

Context

The Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program, now known as Sentinel, was established to replace the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile system while maintaining compatibility with the existing Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications environment.

Evaluating that transition required a technically credible way to reproduce the behavior of legacy strategic communications equipment. Representative hardware was not available, and the knowledge needed to understand the complete message path was fragmented across technical documentation and specialists who each understood only portions of the system.

Challenge

The modernization effort required more than a simplified representation of message content. Engineers needed to determine whether proposed replacement equipment could receive, interpret, route, process, and respond to realistic legacy communications across multiple pathways, each with its own message structures, formatting, coding, timing, interfaces, electrical characteristics, error conditions, and expected responses.

The verification environment therefore had to reproduce those communications with sufficient fidelity to generate realistic physical-interface signals and connect them to an executable representation of the receiving system.

Engineering Response

Working with a highly capable early-career engineer, I led the reconstruction of the legacy strategic communications process through detailed technical-document review, subject-matter-expert interviews, system modeling, and analysis of the message formats, communications pathways, and physical interfaces.

Together, we developed a high-fidelity digital communications emulator spanning a remarkably diverse set of Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications pathways. The capability represented communications supporting both the land-based ICBM mission and the ballistic-missile submarine force, including the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), both E-6B missions — Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) and the Airborne Launch Control System (ALCS) — and satellite communications involving AFSATCOM, Milstar, UHF Follow-On (UFO), and the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS). Collectively, the represented communications spanned from VLF through EHF, including Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) protected satellite communications, and encompassed fundamentally different communications architectures, message structures, interfaces, timing, and signal characteristics.

The Python-based application reproduced the message processing and communications-path behavior while providing detailed, synchronized visualization of the resulting signals. To validate the emulator against a real satellite communications path, test messages were relayed through AFSATCOM, received through actual communications hardware, and recorded on a multichannel analyzer for direct comparison with emulator output.

Independently, I developed the executable Cameo architecture representing the receiving system, including more than 2,200 modeled electrical pins and the physical and logical interfaces required to accept, route, and process the emulated communications. The emulator and Cameo architecture were then integrated into a single end-to-end digital verification environment.

How It Worked

The emulator provided an operator interface representative of the legacy command environment. A user could construct or enter a supported message and observe its transformation through the applicable processing and communications path, including path-specific formatting, coding, framing, timing, interface, and signal-level behavior.

For multi-conductor interfaces, the emulator displayed every channel in precise synchronization. Engineers could navigate the complete transmission, scroll anywhere in its history, and zoom from the full waveform to individual bits. At the most detailed level, they could inspect signal amplitude, timing, transitions, and rise-and-fall behavior for each logical state—effectively providing a synchronized multi-channel digital oscilloscope of the exact signals presented at the system interface.

Those outputs could then enter the executable Cameo architecture through the appropriate modeled interfaces and propagate to the system elements responsible for subsequent processing. Engineers could therefore evaluate not only whether communications had been generated correctly, but whether the modeled replacement system received, routed, interpreted, and processed them as intended.

Because manually constructing and maintaining an interface architecture containing more than 2,200 electrical pins would have been slow, difficult to verify, and highly susceptible to modeling errors, I developed reusable automation methods to generate cables, connectors, pins, and relationships programmatically from externally defined node, interface, and relationship data. That work later contributed to broader research and publication on automated interface and model generation.

Outcome

The resulting capability provided an end-to-end digital verification environment spanning strategic message entry, legacy processing, diverse NC3 communications pathways, synchronized electrical and bit-level signals, detailed receiving interfaces, and executable system processing.

It provided a practical substitute for unavailable legacy hardware while consolidating fragmented system knowledge into an inspectable, executable, and reusable engineering capability. Proposed modernization solutions could be evaluated against realistic legacy communications behavior at both the message and physical-interface levels, supporting coexistence, interoperability, verification planning, and technical decision-making for GBSD/Sentinel.

The work also produced reusable digital-engineering methods for constructing and managing large interface architectures, extending its value beyond the immediate program.

Context

The Air Force acquisition enterprise depends upon extensive communications and coordination among Program Executive Offices and the many organizations with which those offices interact. Those relationships extend several levels beyond the formal PEO structure, creating a complex network whose operational dependencies are difficult to understand from conventional organizational diagrams.

As part of a multi-person MITRE research effort, I helped develop an analytical approach intended to characterize the cyber attack surface created by those communications relationships.

Challenge

The problem was not simply identifying which organizations communicated with one another. The larger question was whether the structure of those relationships created concentrations of dependency or vulnerability within the enterprise.

A conventional hierarchical representation could show organizational structure, but it could not readily expose which organizations occupied disproportionately important positions within the communications network or how disruption of an individual organization might affect connectivity across the larger system.

Engineering Response

We represented the enterprise using graph theory, modeling individual offices and organizations as nodes and their communications relationships as edges.

The network was implemented using Neo4j and NeoVis, providing both a graph-database representation and an interactive visualization of the resulting organizational communications structure.

Graph-theoretic measures, including node centrality, were used to identify organizations occupying structurally significant positions within the network.

How It Worked

The interactive visualization allowed individual organizations and their nearest relationships to be examined within the much larger enterprise network rather than as isolated elements of an organizational hierarchy.

We also performed disruption analyses by removing or isolating communications associated with selected nodes and examining the resulting effects on the rest of the network. This made it possible to evaluate how loss of communications at an individual organization could propagate through the enterprise and reveal dependencies that were not readily apparent from the underlying organizational structure alone.

Outcome

The work established a graph-based method for examining enterprise interoperability and cyber attack-surface vulnerability across Air Force Program Executive Offices.

The resulting research was published as “Program Executive Office Business and Enterprise Systems Interoperability Analysis: Graph Theory Applied to Systems Interoperability” and presented at the Air Force Information Technology & Cyberpower Conference (AFITC) in 2019.

Because Dr. Will Roper, then Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, was unable to attend the scheduled conference presentation, he separately requested a private briefing of the work.

Wafer Fab Yield Improvement

A semiconductor fabrication process was experiencing recurring die damage and associated yield loss, but the source of the defects had not been identified through the available production data or conventional review methods.

I conducted direct observation within the manufacturing environment and used defect-location mapping to connect the physical damage pattern to specific handling activity. The analysis revealed that tweezers used during processing were producing scratches on the die.

Correcting the handling mechanism eliminated the recurring source of damage, increased foundry yield by approximately three percent, and produced more than $500,000 in annual savings.

Microbolometer Vacuum Resolution

A microbolometer focal-plane-array product was experiencing vacuum degradation that affected product performance, manufacturability, and production value. The potential causes crossed both product characteristics and manufacturing-process conditions, making a simple one-factor investigation insufficient.

I developed a two-phase Design of Experiments strategy to separate product-related variables from process-related variables. The first phase used a full-factorial design to identify significant factors and interactions. The second phase used response-surface methods to characterize the operating region more precisely and determine the combination of conditions required to resolve the degradation mechanism.

The investigation went beyond a conventional screening study. It required separating two classes of potential causes, identifying interactions among them, and refining the solution through a second experimental phase. The resulting changes resolved the vacuum-degradation problem and produced more than $4 million in annual value.

Night Vision Failure Review Board Leadership

Complex night vision system failures frequently crossed organizational and disciplinary boundaries, requiring coordination among systems, design, manufacturing, quality, test, and program stakeholders.

I led cross-functional failure review activity, ensuring that reported problems were clearly defined, technical investigations were supported by objective evidence, suspected causes were distinguished from verified causes, and corrective actions addressed the underlying failure mechanism rather than only the immediate symptom.

I maintained focus on accountable ownership and technical closure, driving open investigations, corrective actions, and verification evidence through the review process until the organization could demonstrate that the issue had been adequately resolved.

Context

The system integrates multiple vacuum processing, wafer-handling, metrology, control, and support elements with the facility infrastructure and utilities required to operate them as a coordinated semiconductor manufacturing capability.

The program needed a disciplined engineering framework capable of maintaining the relationships among requirements, system architecture, verification, and the technical reasoning behind key decisions as the design evolved.

Challenge

Requirements originated across multiple technical disciplines and sources, creating the risk that important relationships and engineering knowledge would remain fragmented or reside primarily with individual subject-matter experts.

The challenge was to establish a dependable system baseline that preserved both technical traceability and the engineering rationale behind it.

Engineering Response

I defined and developed the model-based engineering framework in Cameo Enterprise Architecture, establishing the architecture and methods used to structure and govern the system requirements, technical rationale, system architecture, interfaces, resources, relationships, and verification.

I normalized and imported the requirements baseline and incorporated the technical reasoning behind those requirements as governed engineering information, preserving not only what the system must do, but why those requirements exist.

I developed the verification architecture to maintain traceability from requirements to their intended verification methods and test cases, while model relationships establish how requirements are allocated and realized across the system architecture.

I also developed the reporting architecture used to generate the organization's formal system specification directly from the model. Requirements populate the specification body while their associated technical rationales are assembled into an appendix, keeping the formal document tied to the same governed engineering baseline.

Outcome

The framework has progressed through System Requirements Review and into PDR-oriented model maturation, providing a common technical baseline for architecture development, interface analysis, verification planning, technical reviews, and engineering decision-making.

It also established a repeatable model-to-document workflow that maintains alignment between the evolving engineering model and formal system specification.

The result is a controlled model-based engineering environment connecting what the system must do, why those requirements exist, how the system is structured, and how compliance will be demonstrated.