A Conversation with Jim LaCroix from Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII)
UTIC Intersections–Conversations with Ocean and Undersea Tech Leaders: Conversations with influential leaders in the undersea technology community, soliciting their industry input, guidance and mentorship.
Jim LaCroix began his career in undersea systems early as a college intern at NUWC. After receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from UMass Dartmouth, he went full time with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport, first working on torpedoes, moving to a line supervisor for unmanned undersea vehicles, and ultimately helping support torpedo acquisition efforts for the Navy’s Undersea Weapons Program Office. Jim moved to HII in 2019 and is now the corporate director of their Advanced Technology Office in Newport.
We asked Jim for his thoughts on some important undersea technology questions:
From the perspective of a technical and business leader, what undersea tech innovations are, or will be, game changers, and why?
There are so many recent advancements in undersea tech. One innovation I am very excited about is seabed recharging for unmanned undersea vehicles (UUV). The tech innovations driving this capability create an environment where UUVs can work covertly over long periods of time in a threat environment providing crucial data. This advancement allows UUVs to carry more of the mission workload, helping limit the risk to highly capable manned ships/submarines.
As a life-long tech leader, what resources do you use when you want to keep current on undersea tech research, technology, and commercialization?
I work to stay current on in undersea tech through many tools including research and publications, but my go-to resource is the interactions and learnings I get from the key technical conferences and events I attend. Here are a few of my favorites:
- The Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space annual conference—a leading meet-up of industry and military leaders that explores innovative solutions to strengthen and secure the future of the sea and undersea services.
- The Submarine Technology Symposium hosted by the Naval Submarine League—this classified conference gets into detailed exchanges about undersea innovation with the leaders using that tech today.
- The many NDIA regional, topical and national conferences and events offer great opportunities to learn from experts and network with my peers inside government in and the contracting world.
- Of course, SENEDIA’s annual Defense Innovation Days, and UTIC’s Industry Days are crucial to stay up-to-date on all naval and undersea tech!
In your view, what does it take to build a successful partnership to advance undersea technology?
On this, my advice is straightforward. In short, a partnership in undersea tech needs to have two essential elements in order to be successful. First, a partnership must have a funded mission use case, meaning that the government not only has a stated need but has put at least some seed research funding behind it. Second, that use case needs to have mutual buy-in and benefit to the two or more partner parties involved to create the foundations of success. With mission, money and buy-in a partnership is off to a good start!
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