Featured Industry Partner: Rite Solutions

OCTOBER 31 2021 | Dave Medeiros, Senior Strategic Defense Analyst for Rite Solutions, has been a strong advocate for growing and unifying the region’s undersea warfare capabilities. “I think Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had it exactly right when he called Southeastern New England ‘the Silicon Valley of undersea warfare’”, said Medeiros. “I believed my work with supporting NIUVT’s concept development and innovation efforts would help strengthen and grow NIUVT and help them more quickly and effectively integrate into our region’s innovation system.

Medeiros first learned about NIUVT through his warfare analysis support work to General Dynamics Electric Boat’s Concept Formulation (CONORM) team. “Over the last several years I have been providing support to E.B.’s CONFORM team in their efforts to explore the future and its potential implications for undersea force capability needs. A critically important step in helping inform senior Navy leadership and in ensuring that Electric Boat is ready with the requisite tools, knowledge, and workforce to support our Navy in developing these capabilities,” explained Medeiros. “As a founding partner of NIUVT, EB’s collaboration with university faculty is essential in supporting our Navy’s undersea force – and workforce – evolution. Leveraging EB CONFORM’s future exploration work to help simulate and guide NIUVT’s concept development and innovation efforts has become an important part of this collaboration. My role has been to expand my warfare analysis support efforts to include NIUVT and help them conduct concept exploration events.”

Medeiros sees value in NIUVT with solving problems in the undersea technology ecosystem. “One of the most daunting defense challenges is to prepare for the future,” said Medeiros. “Given the ever-accelerating pace of technology, that can be used by us or against us, the future and the capabilities our undersea forces will need to be successful in that future is highly uncertain. To ensure continued US dominance in the future undersea domain, I believe we need to bring the collective expertise, experience, and innovation of our scientists, engineers, warfighters, analysts, and technologists together to discuss the future, its challenges and opportunities, and to explore and develop concepts.”