Pat Host 
- Josh Jackson believes the future belongs to firms that quickly integrated trusted capability
- He’s pursuing an organic growth strategy focused on accelerating customer readiness
- He sat down with EBiz to talk integration and risk barriers that slow defense innovation
As the defense industry races to deliver advanced capabilities at greater speed and scale, Josh Jackson believes the future belongs to companies that can bridge the gap between innovation and operational readiness. Since becoming CEO of Valkyrie in February 2026, Jackson has taken over the mantle of leading a strategic transformation intended to position the company as a mission engineering and integration leader for the Department of War and its allies.
A veteran defense executive with more than two decades of experience supporting national security missions and a two-time Wash100 Award winner, Jackson previously led defense businesses at SAIC. At Valkyrie, he is pursuing an ambitious organic growth strategy developed in partnership with DC Capital Partners. The strategy centers on a simple test: everything the company does should accelerate the readiness of its customers’ missions
Jackson’s commitment to national security is deeply personal. One of his grandfathers served as a combat medic with the 88th Infantry Division during World War II, while the other served in an engineer battalion.
Their experiences taught him enduring lessons about sacrifice, discipline, patriotism and ingenuity: values that continue to shape his approach to leadership and mission execution.
In his latest Executive Spotlight, Jackson discusses the integration and risk barriers that slow defense innovation, Valkyrie’s investments in shared test infrastructure and higher-fidelity training, the company’s approach to fleet readiness and why the next generation of defense companies will be defined not by how much technology they own, but by how quickly they can integrate it into trusted, fieldable capability.
Check out Jackson’s perspectives on tech acceleration and talent in his previous Spotlight from September.
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ExecutiveBiz: You became CEO during a period of significant change across the defense industry. How do you see the market evolving, and where does Valkyrie fit?
Josh Jackson: The defense industry is experiencing one of its most consequential transformations in decades. Threats are evolving rapidly and the DOW is rightly demanding that industry deliver useful capability to the warfighter faster.
Readiness is no longer measured only by inventories or force structure. It is also measured by how quickly we can move an innovative technology from concept to prototype, integrate it with existing systems, prove it in a relevant environment and place it into operational use. I believe industry has both an extraordinary opportunity and a responsibility to shorten that path.
We need more opportunities to experiment in the field under lower-risk conditions, learn from actual use and then scale what works. At the same time, experimentation cannot become an excuse to ignore scalability. A prototype may perform well in a limited demonstration and still be impractical to produce, integrate, operate or sustain. Our philosophy is to start small enough to learn quickly, but design from the beginning for mission scale.
Valkyrie is demonstrating what that model can achieve. In one case, our team took a tactical intelligence system from an urgent operational requirement through prototype development, testing and fielding in eight months. That is what accelerating readiness means to me: moving from a capability gap to a tested, fielded solution on an operationally relevant timeline.
Every investment must pass the same test: does it accelerate the readiness of our customer’s mission? Does it shorten the path to fielding, increase operational availability, reduce mission risk or help a capability adapt as the threat changes? If it does none of those things, we should question why we are doing it. Our mission is simple: accelerating readiness through innovation.
EBiz: Private equity ownership sometimes creates the perception that companies become focused primarily on short-term financial performance. How has working with DC Capital Partners shaped Valkyrie’s strategy?
Jackson: We’re focused on long term value. DC Capital has a 30-year history of successfully investing in the government marketplace and is focused on building durable capability and long-term value. Every portfolio company at DC Capital develops a strategic plan, so the way DC Capital creates value is consistent across their portfolio. They expect disciplined execution and measurable results, while also supporting investments that can create long-term mission and enterprise value as part of that strategic plan.
One example at Valkyrie is the internal research and development funding and capital we are committing to create a novel shared test infrastructure offered as-a-service. The objective is to give government and industry customers faster access to specialized infrastructure used to test and evaluate advanced weapons systems, including hypersonic capabilities.
Access to test capacity can become a constraint on development. Long waits for specialized infrastructure limit the number of test events a program can conduct and slow the development cycle. Our shared model is intended to reduce costs while enabling more test events, creating more data and faster iteration on guidance and control algorithms as programs adapt to novel threats. DC Capital’s willingness to support that effort, and others like it, demonstrates a long-term investment mindset.
Overall, I describe our approach as a “virtuous cycle of growth.” The customer gains faster access to critical test capability. Our employees work on consequential technical problems and develop new skills. Valkyrie creates a repeatable solution that can generate value across multiple programs.
Financial performance matters because it enables continued investment in our people, technologies and customers; those priorities reinforce one another. The partnership with DC Capital has been invaluable as we continue to build the Valkyrie business and help our customers execute their mission more efficiently. Far from placing too much emphasis on short-term financial results, DC Capital builds enduring businesses and takes a long-term view of value creation.
Over the next three years, I expect Valkyrie’s mission-oriented product revenue to double organically. We intend to achieve that through IRAD, by converting successful prototypes into repeatable offerings and by scaling integrated solutions across additional customers and missions. The expected growth is concentrated in three priority domains: electronic warfare, offensive and defensive missile systems, and fleet readiness.
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EBiz: Your career spans more than two decades in the defense industry. How has that experience influenced your leadership philosophy?
Jackson: My leadership philosophy was shaped long before I became an executive. Both of my grandfathers served during World War II—one as a combat medic with the 88th Infantry Division and the other in an engineer battalion. Their experiences taught me about sacrifice, discipline and patriotism, but also ingenuity. They served in environments where people had to solve difficult problems with limited resources and where the consequences of their decisions were real.
That perspective has stayed with me throughout my career. It reminds me that our work is ultimately about the people who depend on the capabilities we help deliver. It also shapes how I lead: establish a clear mission, build a disciplined team and give talented people the trust and freedom to solve problems creatively.
When I was first introduced to Valkyrie, I recognized that DC Capital and the Valkyrie team had assembled a unique group of assets and capabilities. The opportunity is to harness those capabilities to build enduring value. One of my first priorities at Valkyrie was making our strategy understandable throughout the company.
Leaders often underestimate how many times a message must be communicated before it becomes part of how an organization thinks and acts. Repetition is not redundancy during a leadership change; it creates clarity and alignment. The message I repeat most often is simple: everything we do should accelerate the readiness of our customers’ missions. A strategy becomes valuable only when people can apply it without waiting for direction from the CEO.
That is what is so useful about DC Capital’s strategic plan, whether someone is evaluating an investment, designing a system, supporting a program or improving an internal process, they should be able to explain how the work fits into the strategic plan and helps a customer become ready faster or remain ready longer. At the end of the day, leadership is about creating an environment where talented people can accomplish together what none of us could achieve individually.
EBiz: Looking ahead five years, what excites you most about the future of defense technology, and what do you hope customers, employees and partners will say about Valkyrie?
Jackson: What excites me most is not a single emerging technology. It is the opportunity to remove specific constraints on warfighting readiness. The assets DC Capital accumulated at Valkyrie lines up well against the DOW’s highest-priority mission needs and we have concentrated our investment in three areas where we believe Valkyrie can make a material difference: accelerating hypersonic weapons development and testing, creating more robust training environments, and addressing corrosion that reduces fleet operational availability.
In training, we are using IRAD funding this year to develop a higher-fidelity solution designed for use in large-scale exercises. Future missions will involve U.S. forces working with multinational partners, advanced systems and emerging technologies against sophisticated and rapidly changing threats. Training environments must reproduce that complexity.
Our corrosion work provides another example of how integration creates readiness. Valkyrie designed the solution architecture, identified and qualified the right partners, integrated their products and services, managed implementation and delivered the end-to-end solution. That approach reduced corrosion-mitigation timelines from weeks to days, helping return fleet assets to service sooner.
Five years from now, I want customers, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world, to describe Valkyrie as the company they call when they face a difficult capability gap and an unforgiving timeline. We want to be known as the team that turns an idea into a tested, fieldable and sustainable solution.
I also want our employees to say Valkyrie is a cutting-edge defense company solving some of our nation’s and partner nation’s most important problems, and that they had a meaningful role in building it. They should be able to say, “I helped create that capability. I saw it move from an idea to the field, and I understand how it strengthened the mission.”
I also want our partners to say, simply, “Valkyrie moves fast.” We make decisions quickly, establish clear paths for integrating strong technologies and stay focused on getting useful capability into testing and into the field.
The future will not be won by the companies that own the most technology. It will be won by the companies that can integrate the right technologies into trusted operational capability faster than anyone else. That is the company we are building.
