Marc LeGare | A link to hostile environments

Marc LeGare, chief executive officer at Proactive Communications, learned tactical communications from practical experience during 20 years in the infantry. As a battalion commander he fielded the Army’s first digitized, mechanized infantry battalion before leaving the Army in 2001. He joined PCI as chief operating officer and operations manager in 2003 after a stint with TRW/Northrop Grumman. During his tenure as CEO, PCI has drawn lessons from providing satellite communications for U.S. military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

GCN: A lot of what you are offering is commodities — what technology and services are you providing that add value?
LeGare: What we do is take the bandwidth off the satellite, the managed services and the equipment and tie it together with personnel on the ground to provide a turnkey solution in austere and hostile environments. The customer can look to us to provide Internet access for all of their data devices, voice over IP, either secure or nonsecure.

GCN: What do you mean by austere and hostile environments, and what are their challenges?
LeGare: As a former infantryman, the word hostile means that there is a threat to life, limb or property. Most of our customers are U.S. government, and that term hostile is pretty narrowly defined that way. What we found in Iraq is that there are many companies that would prefer to remain in the States and subcontract the business out. That distance between the prime in the United States and the subcontractor in Iraq created a lot of problems for the paying customer. We are a prime contractor with personnel on the ground.