Steve Escaravage, president of the Defense Technology Group at Booz Allen, shares how the company builds defense technology, creating advantage for our warfighters.

A mathematician and computer scientist by training, Escaravage leads the business unit focused on delivering products and solutions to the Department of War.

He offers insights about Booz Allen's laser-focus on advancing defense technology through real-time R&D/engineering labs, strategic partnerships, and AI.

1. First things first: What should people know about how Booz Allen is building defense tech that supports national missions?

Escaravage: Our obsession is the mission challenge — what the operator has to deal with on the battlefield.

We build our own defense products in engineering facilities and partner with commercial companies to build technology solutions that are secure, adaptable, and compatible with new and existing systems.

Booz Allen focuses on a set of challenges we believe are not well solved, including autonomy, battle management, and electronic warfare. We approach this challenge with PhD-level engineering talent and distinguished veterans who have lived the mission in uniform.

We also uniquely do not need to adhere to a rigid business model. For example…

• If we need to build software into our products and solutions, we will write software.
• If we need to bend metal and build hardware, we will bend metal and build hardware.
• If we need to provide engineering support in the field where our products and solutions are used, we'll be there.

Put simply, we look to fill technology gaps to be able to do something on the battlefield that we cannot do today.

2. The challenge: What are some challenges you face when building or delivering advanced technology directly to the warfighter?

Escaravage: If it doesn't work in the field, we aren't accomplishing the mission.

We ask ourselves:

❓ Can the technology work where it needs to work with other systems it needs to work with, and can the user use it effectively?

❓ Once that's accomplished, can you sustain the technology, the impact it creates, and can you do that at scale?

In this environment, we see a lot of minimum viable products (MVPs). I do not care much for MVPs because they perform well in marketing settings and do not perform well where you need them in the environment. Many things work in a laboratory that just do not function on the battlefield, because it is a different operational security environment.

3. The strategy: How do your engineering and R&D facilities help speed up the process of emerging defense technology?

Escaravage: We have 20+ engineering, manufacturing and R&D facilities nationwide that provide the physical foundation for building cutting-edge technology to empower America's warfighter.

These facilities feature…

• Rapid prototyping.
• Industrial testing.
• Scalable production lines.
• Infrastructure to enable long-term sustainment of complex defense systems.

Our engineers reduce timelines, lower costs and bring advanced capabilities to the mission faster.

We can chase novel solutions to challenges because we are self-sufficient. You've got to attack these problems at a first-principles physics-based level, and you've got to have space and the tools to do that.

That's why we're investing in these facilities.

4. How it's done: Are you collecting real-time feedback from warfighters in the field?

Escaravage: Yes.

The reason we know the complexities of the mission is that our products and solutions need to work where they are, today. When they do, we get feedback directly from the warfighters who say, "Here's what I'm doing now. Here's what else I want to be doing. Make that happen."

That becomes part of our challenge. It's this race against time of how can we continue to update our systems to do things that warfighters realize they need to do — that maybe they didn't realize before — and how quickly can we make that happen?

5. The proof: Booz Allen has several strategic defense tech partnerships. What's your mindset behind selecting commercial partnerships?

Escaravage: I think about it in two ways…

⏰ Reducing time: We're leveraging investments and insights partners have gained — and combining that with our own.

💡 Novelty:When you work with partners who come from slightly different angles, they bring different hypotheses and ideas.

6. Some examples: Can you share the details about a few recent partnerships you're excited about?

Escaravage: Here are three examples.

1️⃣ In 2024, we began working with L3Harris on how to build edge nodes to manage the operational and tactical level of warfighting activities. They're leaders in software-defined radios, datalink terminals, and gateways. We partnered with them to leverage their commercial components in a product that we delivered to the Air Force that has provided significant operational impact.

They not only helped us save time to mission impact — they brought fundamentally novel ways of solving the component-level problems that changed how we approached the whole system.

2️⃣ For the last 11 years, Shield AI has been obsessed with perfecting how to autonomously control platforms using software.

Shield AI provides this incredible, industry-leading Hivemind Enterprise platform to create autonomy. But, as we know, there are always specific scenarios or what we call "edge cases" that are not part of the training of any autonomous or AI system, because they're somewhat novel.

That's where we're partnering with them.

We build through and extend their core software to enable unique circumstances, novel circumstances or to optimize these autonomous platforms specifically for certain missions. We believe this is the future of bringing autonomy to U.S. warfighting missions.

3️⃣ Carnegie Robotics has been an excellent partner. Their CardShark™ technology, a military-grade body-worn compute device, fundamentally changes what you can do and where you can do it.

The compute capacity, the storage, the networking capability that you can put on body-worn devices today would've seemed completely inconceivable even a decade ago.

We want to work with people who bring deep expertise in the manufacturing science of how to build capability that not only has excellent compute and storage, but is also designed to operate in the environment where it's needed.

7. Looking ahead: What role do AI and autonomous systems play in the defense space?

Escaravage: Autonomy and autonomous systems are the future of defense. It's the future of warfighting operations.

It is inevitable, in my point of view, that autonomy becomes one of — if not the most — important things to win on the future battlefield.

8. The takeaway: What is one key shift the defense community must embrace to ensure the U.S. stays ahead in the tech race?

Escaravage: One key shift is this concept of the economics of accomplishing military objectives on the battlefield: this idea that the way we execute missions using technology needs to be affordable at scale.

There's a lot of talk about:

• Attritable assets.
• Imposing costs on our adversary.
• Not incurring significant costs to achieve our military objectives.

That sort of economic envelope in which military operations take place is probably the biggest shift in mindset that's still underway.

The biggest takeaway for me though is the urgency. We are in a race against time. Our adversaries are coming together, and they intend to challenge our place in the world and our way of life.

This stuff needs to work — and we need to get it in the hands of the warfighters now.

Learn more about Booz Allen's commitment to speeding delivery to the warfighter.