When Chuck Eassa discusses defense innovation, he often begins with timelines. He said the Pentagon is working to shorten the time to develop and field new capabilities, and that this shift is influencing priorities across the Pentagon.

Eassa, Washington Field Office Manager for the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), focuses on strategic engagement and business intelligence. He said the Washington office’s role is to help all of GTRI anticipate sponsor needs, support leadership decision-making, and align GTRI’s capabilities with the Pentagon’s priorities.

“The DOW’s acquisition system is old and bureaucratic,” said Eassa. “It takes 15 years to develop a new fighter. It takes 20 years to develop a new missile type. Now they’re trying to do that in six months.”

One of Eassa’s main duties is to translate that shift in paradigm into action for GTRI: to anticipate what sponsors will need next, to help the Institute invest ahead of demand, and to ensure that GTRI’s technical strengths align with where the Pentagon is headed.

Eassa’s perspective and skills have been honed across two careers. After 30 years in the U.S. Army, Eassa joined Georgia Tech in 2016 and supported the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office, an organization built for speed, operational relevance, and prototyping solutions in compressed time frames. In 2024, he came to GTRI, bringing with him an insider’s view of how senior defense leaders are prioritizing technologies, building new operational capabilities, and pushing the system to deliver faster.

That blend of an operator mindset and the innovation process now informs how Eassa thinks about the Washington office’s mission and why it matters to the entire GTRI.

Eassa described the Washington office as deliberately positioned just above traditional business development. Capturing and delivering excellent work matters most in a bottom-up organization, but the larger goal is to detect the next wave early enough for GTRI to prepare, invest, and lead.

“The Washington office’s role is compliment business development, which is looking at capturing work and bringing it in,” he said. “How do I look beyond that? Where are we going to be in five years with autonomy? What skill sets does GTRI need to have that we don’t have now? What facilities do we need to start looking at and buying if we’re going to do autonomy for the Department of Defense at a large scale?”

According to Eassa, future requirements do not arrive as neat technical specifications. It arrives as an intent, often expressed in broad terms: a shift to autonomous forces, a contested communications environment, a new approach to air and missile defense, or a rethinking of how the joint force will fight at scale. The Washington office helps translate that intent into engineering attributes GTRI can design, prototype, and ultimately deliver.

“And future requirement does not equal an engineering requirement that somebody has to have,” he said. “It equals, hey, I know that I want to replace all my aircraft with autonomous drones. Okay, what does that look like? What is the engineering required in that? What are the attributes you need to have? How do you protect that from a cyberattack?”

This is also where Eassa sees the Washington office supporting senior leadership decision-making through business intelligence and strategic engagement. It helps GTRI understand not just what a sponsor, particularly the DoW, is developing today, but what the Pentagon is likely to need tomorrow.

He pointed to leaders with deep Pentagon experience as part of GTRI’s value proposition. Eassa made a point to mention Washington Office Director Gary Ashworth, who most recently served as Acting Secretary of the Air Force. Eassa lauded Ashworth’s ability to interpret how a massive enterprise moves, how decisions are made, and how priorities signal themselves before they show up as formal opportunities.

One of the most concrete examples Eassa offered for the defense enterprise’s transition is what he called the move from judging concepts by slides to judging them by models.

“So, in the past, somebody would bring a PowerPoint slide deck and say, ‘Hey, here is the concept for this new tank,’” he said. “And we would judge the tank by a bunch of PowerPoint slides.”

Eassa said the approach is being replaced by a rigor closer to engineering reality than to marketing narrative.

“Now what you want to be able to do is you want to be able to model before you even bend metal or do anything,” said Eassa. “You want different competitors to come in not with PowerPoint slide briefs, but with their system model, so that you can plug their tank into your scenario, and you can assess it in a physics-based model.”

In Eassa’s view, that is mission engineering in practice. Mission engineering involves comparing competing systems not only as standalone platforms but also within a modeled operational environment that includes threat terrain, communications, and constraints.

“So, what you’re trying to do is, before you even invest money, be able to go in an environment that’s realistic digitally, that this thing is going to do what you say it’s going to do,” he said. “Because instead of building something, taking it out, prototyping it, and seeing if it works, I’m going to build it in a model, and I’m going to see if it works digitally. If it doesn’t, I don’t have to waste money.”

Eassa also noted that the scale and fidelity required for these models are not trivial. “The problem with that is none of that exists right now at the scale and fidelity that the Pentagon needs,” he said, framing it as both a challenge and an opportunity for organizations with strong applied research capability.

For GTRI, Eassa sees this as a natural extension of what the Institute already does well: bringing technical discipline to messy real-world problems, validating claims with evidence, and building decision-ready engineering truth for sponsors who cannot afford to guess.

Eassa emphasized that modern war zones, such as Ukraine, act as proving grounds that shape how defense leaders think.

“I don’t call them lessons learned,” he said. “I call them insights because how you apply them is different.”

His point is not to treat the conflict as a checklist, but as a laboratory of adaptation, where tactics, countermeasures, and technologies evolve in weeks, not years. That environment, he argued, is forcing a rethink of how the U.S. tests and evaluates systems, especially in the electromagnetic spectrum.

“In Ukraine, you see a small laboratory that’s going on,” said Eassa. “The Ukrainians try something, and if it works, great. But two weeks later, the Russians have a counter.”

For the U.S., replicating that environment is constrained. That reality pushes the work back toward modeling and simulation.

“You have to start modeling things like the electromagnetic spectrum to be able to say, ‘Okay, I can build this airplane, but can this airplane talk to anybody?’” he said.

Eassa used a historical analogy to illustrate the danger of learning the wrong lesson. “The French built the Maginot Line,” he said. “They thought they were going to fight World War I again. But the Germans brought blitzkrieg, and they went around the Maginot Line.”

Eassa’s message is that if you optimize for the last fight, you may end up building the wrong solution.

That is why, in his view, the Washington office cannot be purely reactive. It has to help GTRI see around corners, connect operational signals to engineering investment, and guide the Institute in deciding where to build depth, facilities, and talent before demand arrives at full speed.

“GTRI is a national asset,” said Eassa.

“We want more and more contact at the lower level of the military to teach our engineers and our folks how they’re fighting,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of engineers that have never talked to a soldier.”

He cited initiatives designed to close that gap, such as the Military Graduate Research Program (MGRP).

Eassa stressed the idea that speed is not only a procurement problem. It is a people problem, a knowledge problem, and a relationship problem. The faster the threat evolves, the more vital it is to shorten the distance between the warfighter, the engineer, and the decision-maker.

“And that’s where GTRI, I think, has become the one that can actually validate, ‘yes, this company can do what it says,’” said Eassa. “Maybe this company has a quantum physicist, but do they have an engineer who can take this capability and actually put it into the field?”

Sponsors need trusted technical partners and thought leaders. That is GTRI’s advantage.

Writer: Christopher Weems
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia 

About the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)
The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 3,000 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $919 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.