While companies often make a move like this when they need more room, HII is going in the opposite direction — but only in terms of needed space, not personnel.
HII has more than 500 Dayton-area employees, but many of them are physically located on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, said Eric Wright, HII vice president of operations for the company’s Cyber, Electronic Warfare and Space business.
“Actually we’re downsizing,” Wright said in an interview. “We’ve got excellent space down there where we’re at. But the reason for the move is to be closer to our customer and employees on base.”
HII should be in the new office by Nov. 1. More than 50 employees are expected to work there.
Meanwhile, on base, hundreds of HII employees work for various Air Force Research Laboratory offices, the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, the Air Force Institute of Technology and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.
Of those Air Force missions, only NASIC is located primarily on Wright-Patterson’s Area A. With so many employees working on Area B, HII’s new location is essentially across National Road from Wright-Patt’s gate 19B.
Area B is just a 15-minute drive from the company’s current office on Grange Hall. With this move, however, HII will be right next door to Wright-Patterson.
“You can actually see that main gate from the front of our (new) building,” Wright said.
The largest military shipbuilding company in the nation, Huntington Ingalls Industries completed its acquisition of Alion Science and Technology — a technology solutions business in McLean, Va., with Dayton-area employees — from Veritas Capital in August 2021. (If you recognize Wright’s name, he came from Alion).
HII’s Dayton-area presence is in its Mission Technologies division, not the shipbuilding division. Employees here are focused on electronic warfare, engineering and other areas.
The company has some 70 Dayton-area job openings at the moment. An HII spokeswoman said the business is looking for a “whole spectrum of applicants, from interns to entry-level, junior, mid-level, senior and late-career individuals.”
A bit of history: HII was spun out of Northrop Grumman in 2011. The business’ focus was building nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines in Virginia and Mississippi.
Wright’s divison was launched with acquistions of six high-tech companies by HII starting in 2014. C5OISR (Command, Control, Computers, Communications, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) is a big part of the company’s overall mission, Wright said.
“We have a plethora of engineers, scientists, and technicians, phyisicists, you name it, across our divison that does all of this work. Legacy McCauley Brown, for instance, is part of my organization,” Wright said.
Headquartered in Virginia, HII’s workforce is 43,000 strong in total.
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