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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/07/02 issue

Where are they now...

Emmett Paige Jr.

By Nancy Ferris, Special to GCN

Retired Lt. Gen. Emmett Paige Jr. has had two notable Defense careers and is prospering in his third career, in the private sector.

Paige, who joined the Army as a private in 1947, became a signals specialist. He moved up in the ranks rapidly and was commissioned an officer. He worked for the Army Communications R&D Command, the Electronics R&D Command and the old Defense Communications Agency, among other assignments. He was promoted to lieutenant general when he took command of the Army Information Systems Command at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in 1984.

His second military career came after he retired from the Army in 1988 and worked in the private sector. He was appointed by President Clinton as the assistant secretary of Defense for C3I and served from 1993 to 1997. Over his office door in the Pentagon he posted a sign, “Thank goodness it’s Monday.”

Before and since his Pentagon post, he was the president and chief operating officer of OAO Corp., a systems integrator in Greenbelt, Md. When Lockheed Martin Corp. acquired OAO in 2001, Paige became vice president of Lockheed Martin’s IT unit, responsible for the unit’s Defense business. He says he’s likely to retire from Lockheed Martin in the next couple of years, but he will continue to work as a consultant.

Paige’s thoughts: “We’ve come a long way in the last 20 years. If any single thing has influenced where we’re headed, it’s probably the PC. It’s hard to remember how far the technology has come in a relatively short time. And the speed of technological progress is accelerating.

Every six to 12 months there’s a rollover in speed, power and the size of components, as well as their price. Look at what it costs you today as opposed to what it cost two years ago. And we haven’t even scratched the surface yet in exploiting the technology.

“This readily available technology will help us and it will help other nations, including those that are our enemies. Anybody who wants to do us harm can do that today at very little cost—except for the brainpower. And we don’t have a lock on brainpower. In our graduate schools, people who are not from America are earning more of the advanced degrees than Americans are.

“When I worked in defense R&D programs, we were developing technology that clearly made a difference. There was no question that we led industry and everyone else. Today, government no longer spends a lot of money doing research. The commercial technology, especially the PC, will permit us to do things today we didn’t dream of doing even 10 years ago.”
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