Charles Lyons-Burt
As executive director and board member at SciTec, Jim Bower oversees organizational business development for the company’s remote sensing military mission applications, as well as strategy, marketing and client engagement. Bower has been with SciTec since 2021 full-time, but he’s partnered with the Princeton, New Jersey-based company in some capacity for the last decade. He was previously president and founder of consulting firm 5VSolutions, and before that, held a series of leadership roles at Riverside Research over the course of more than a decade and a half.
We talked to the Air Force veteran in a Spotlight interview about how SciTec is supporting the U.S. Space Force, Air Force and Missile Defense Agency in this especially tense time for the contested space domain.
Want to know more about the space domain and how GovCons can support the above agencies? Come to the Potomac Officers Club’s 2025 Air and Space Summit on July 31 for keynote addresses by Missile Defense Agency Director Lt. Gen. Heath Collins and Golden Dome leader Gen. Michael Guetlein of U.S. Space Force, where they’ll relay crucial information about industry partnerships and future initiatives. Save your seat before it’s too late!
ExecutiveBiz: Tell me about SciTec’s culture. What aspects of the company do you think are contributing most to its success while helping to attract and retain top-level talent?
Jim Bower: When we’re asked by senior leaders what makes SciTec successful, how are we able to deliver complex software solutions on schedule, cost, and performance when others haven’t, our answer is relentless mission focus. That focus on delivering for the warfighter permeates our culture. Our scientists, engineers and developers understand the criticality of what we do and embrace the challenge. It’s an attractive draw for new talent who look to see their work really matter, to be part of a committed team working together to deliver solutions for national security missions.
Experience is another factor in our successes. We’ve got 45-plus-years working hard problems for the Department of Defense and intelligence community. We’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. We work side by side with operators to quickly adapt to the evolving threat environment and leverage the latest technologies. And our employees freely share their experiences among the team, making us an attractive draw for new staff.
A final factor in our success and staff growth is empowerment. We challenge our staff, yes, but we also empower them to make decisions, challenge convention and grow to their potential. We strongly believe in building leadership from within the company.
EBiz: What are SciTec’s core values? How do you think these values translate into continued success and growth in the GovCon market?
Bower: Our core values are centered around delivering for the warfighter:
Warfighter value is our measure of success. Delivering mission solutions for the warfighter is the reason for what we do and paramount in our execution.
Speed to ops. Getting new capabilities into operations quickly is essential in today’s contested adversary environment. We strive to deliver software solutions into warfighters’ hands through use of best commercial practices; get that MVP into operations and then iteratively build upon that initial capability through continuous customer engagement.
Government owns the baseline. Our warfighter solutions have to be interoperable, sustainable and extensible to new threats and missions. That’s hard and expensive to do with proprietary, vendor-locked approaches. So when SciTec delivers a mission software solution into a program of record as prime contractor, we do that with unlimited rights. And not just the rights to the code, but all of the supporting tech and test products that enable the government to fully own the capability.
EBiz: What are our biggest threats in space, and how are we addressing those threats to maintain our space superiority, especially during this era of increasing competition?
Bower: The Defense Intelligence Agency’s recently released infographic on Golden Dome for America: Current and Future Missile Threats to the U.S. Homeland really covers the range of threats SciTec’s products address — from conventional ballistic missiles, to the advanced hypersonic, maneuvering threats and fractional orbital bombardments systems, or FOBS.
We’re getting after those threats through our modernization of the Space Force’s missile warning/missile tracking ground system (the FORGE program), delivering multi-source track data fusion for U.S. Strategic Command, support to emerging proliferated sensor constellations being procured by the Space Development Agency and Space Systems Command, and our ongoing efforts to bring space layer data into the Missile Defense Agency’s battle management systems.
Improving battle management command and control capabilities is key to achieving dynamic space operations. We need to integrate our current stovepiped systems and networks into an interconnected whole to get after the threats with resilient, low-latency, AI-enabled autonomy. SciTec is getting after this challenge in ground systems and on-board processors with software solutions in dynamic cueing, track fusion and threat characterization.
Go in-depth on what Space Force agencies such as SDA and SSC need from industry to address these challenges at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2025 Air and Space Summit on July 31! Hear a keynote address from Missile Defense Agency Lt. Gen. Heath Collins and make lasting professional connections with colleagues from across the air and space defense industries. Register today for this first-rate GovCon conference!
EBiz: How do you think the proliferation of commercial entrants in space is changing the domain? What trends or shifts can we expect to see from that going forward?
Bower: SciTec prides itself as an innovative, non-traditional defense contractor akin to all the new commercial entrants in the space market. There is dynamism and sense of urgency that permeates the space and defense market, fueled by the threat and enabled by changes in the government’s buying practices. The use of other transaction contracting for rapid prototyping and software acquisition pathways, mid-tier acquisition and commercial solution opportunity programs provide numerous opportunities for industry to engage and deliver for the warfighter.
Going forward, we see an opportunity to bring the investment and innovation of the commercial market together with the mission expertise and inherent resources of the more traditional defense industry to deliver warfighter solutions.
We’re doing this on the FORGE Enterprise OPIR System—a.k.a. EOS—program where we have teammates spanning traditional primes (General Dynamics Mission Systems, Lockheed Martin, SMX-Outside Analytics), non-traditional commercial companies (Palantir, Red Hat, Dell) and multiple small business partners (Epoch Concepts, DeNOVO Solutions, Centil). The country needs the best and brightest across our defense industry to defend the future.
