Craig Barres

Craig spent the 15 years of his career as a test and systems engineer on many of the United States most complex systems—Minuteman III, aerial refueling tankers,  Ares I First Stage, missile defense targets and ground-based interceptors. Witnessing first hand the challenges faced through the Government-imposed processes, and identifying how some companies addressed these challenges efficiently, he grasped an opportunity to provide advisory and assistance services to the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile System Program Office at Hill AFB, UT. As the US Air Force was planning the nuclear arsenal through 2075, he emerged as a system engineering and program management leader helping to eliminate the noise associated with “trends” in the industry and cut a strategic path to nuclear deterrence. His technical expertise for launch vehicles has allowed him to simultaneously perform the technical director’s role for the guidance, navigation, and control system and the total missile during the Material Solutions Analysis phase. His technical leadership supported the ICBM SPO in securing nearly $800M in RDT&E, which, following execution of the Analysis of Alternatives, funded the Technology Maturation & Risk Reduction phase of the current Sentinel program.

Managing a small team of systems engineers in support of the Sentinel program, his team has performed large-scale engineering tasks inexectuable by larger teams. During the recent Nunn-McCurdy efforts to get Sentinel back on track, Craig’s team developed a weapon system conceptual configuration that both met all critical performance requirements and can avoid greater than $20B in cost through well-structured and disciplined systems engineering processes. Under the leadership of the ICBM Directorate, his team is developing weapon system configurations that optimize performance and schedule vs cost, with the attempt to reduce the program cost by an additional 25%. The start system deployment well-ahead of the current schedule. Applying product-focused systems engineering processes to balance system performance, cost, and schedule as independent variables for defining a system outcome is Craig’s true passion.