Salute is delighted to announce the appointment of J. David Britt as Executive Vice President, Federal. This strategic leadership move comes as Salute expands its capabilities to serve defense, intelligence, and federal clients.
David brings over 25 years of military service and extensive experience bridging operational defense requirements with commercial innovation. Most recently serving as Chief Technical Officer, Defense at ManTech, David is uniquely positioned to lead Salute’s Federal Division as government program offices are seeking non-traditional partners who can deliver at scale and speed.
A 1992 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, David spent 25 years flying P-3 Orion reconnaissance aircraft for the Navy. His deployments across the globe from Japan to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean gave him firsthand experience with data collection, exploitation and dissemination challenges that continues to challenge federal operations at all levels.
That operational experience resulted in a passion drives David’s work still to this day. “We collected so much mission data in flight we literally ran out of storage to hold it on the aircraft, and we probably missed important data trends,” he explains. “Now, with so many more data sources, we collect so much data that we can’t put enough human eyeballs on it to exploit properly for decision makers. . Autonomous tooling supported by what I call ‘AI factories’ are incredibly important for making sense of the massive amount of data that our Government collects so decision makers can process, exploit and ultimately act.”
His credits his final tour in uniform as the Navy’s Secure Cloud Pilot Program Director for giving him commercial technical experience, helping his transition to industry. Upon his retirement from the Navy in 2017, David helped to develop a FINTECH application company that was ultimately acquired by Wisdom Tree in 2019 He then joined ManTech where he managed innovation and technology solution delivery across all Defense service branches.
David’s decision to join Salute was driven by more than professional opportunity. “What really resonated with me about Salute is that in its heritage, it was a company that hired veterans to do important work,” he explains. “I want to continue to carry that flag hiring veterans to do work for our federal clients. I can still feel like I’m in the fight with my fellow service members.”
Central to David’s strategy is delivering commercial services to federal clients through innovative approaches. His experience carefully considers how Salute must engage differently with federal versus commercial partners, particularly around sensitive security requirements for the Federal client “We will deliver commercial services and products with a cleared workforce into very sensitive data infrastructure that very well could also be classified and compartmented spaces,” David notes.
David sees significant opportunities in strategic partnerships with traditional systems integrators, non-traditional firms, and original equipment manufacturers who build defense systems but don’t want to maintain infrastructure. “We fit into that niche of being able to provide operation, maintenance, and technical refresh solutions that they may not have the experience to do themselves,” he says.
With David’s deep understanding of federal operational challenges and his proven track record of translating commercial innovation into government solutions, Salute is well-positioned to deliver in the Federal market
Please join us in welcoming David to the team!