What Happened?
Huntsville, AL-based United States Army - Strategic Military Defense Comand has Promoted Steve F. Pierce as Chief Technology Officer
About the Company
The SMDC/ARSTRAT is built upon a lengthy history of achievement in space and missile defense. Since 1957, when the Army created the first program office for ballistic missile defense, the command has dedicated itself to missile defense research, development and deployment. In December 1962, the command made history with the first successful intercept of an ICBM reentry vehicle with the Nike-Zeus. History was repeated in the 1980s with a new non-nuclear technology. The kinetic energy concept of “hitting a bullet with a bullet” was first proven in June 1984 with the intercept of an ICBM warhead in the Homing Overlay Experiment. In 1987, the Flexible Lightweight Agile Guided Experiment confirmed the concept against shorter-range tactical missiles. Nearly a decade later, the command demonstrated the missile defense applications of directed energy systems. In February 1996, the Mid Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser destroyed a short-range rocket in flight.
About the Person
Steve Pierce has spent the majority of his adult life in service to his country -- first as a career Army officer and after retirement, as a Department of the Army civilian. Most recently he served as the director, Decision Support Directorate, or DSD, of the Future Warfare Center where he successfully changed the focus of SMDC's analysis, modeling and simulation, and high performance computing from organizationally centered to focusing upon impacting decisions at Army and higher levels. Dr. Pierce has extensive knowledge of the decision support tools needed to enable informed space, missile defense, and high altitude materiel and concept of operations decisions, which best support the Warfighter. Pierce served in the Army as a field artillery officer and operations research and systems analysis officer from 1977 to 1997, when he retired as a colonel. He arrived at SMDC in April 2001 as a senior military analyst for the command's Future Warfare Center and was promoted to division chief in 2002. There, Pierce led key Army and joint studies to include three operational missile defense studies for combatant commanders and a homeland defense study. Pierce was assigned as the director of the DSD in February 2008. The DSD includes the command's Studies and Analysis Division, Models and Simulations Division, the Information and Computational Engineering Division and the Cyberspace Support Branch. Pierce was selected as the 2005 SMDC Civilian of the Year, and subsequently selected as the 2005 Department of the Army Civilian of the Year-Redstone Huntsville Chapter. Pierce earned a Bachelor of Science from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., a Master of Science in industrial engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a master's degree in business finance from Long Island University and a doctorate in philosophy in systems engineering with a minor in statistics from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His dissertation was nominated by UAH as best dissertation in 2007 and recognized as the second place dissertation nationally by the American Society for Engineering Management. Pierce also graduated from the first Defense Acquisition University Senior Service College, Huntsville, in 2007.
Info Source
News
Short Profile