In My Own Words

Thomas J. Cassidy, Jr.
President and Chief Executive Officer, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.

I joined the Navy because I wanted to be a pilot. I went in as an aviation cadet, went through flight training and got into fighters right away. And I was lucky to have been able to do it.

I was first deployed to Vietnam about the time [President Ngo Dinh] Diem was assassinated, in 1961, as the commanding officer of an F-4 fighter squadron. Later, I ended up in Vietnam again as a captain for operations and plans for the carrier striking force as we evacuated Vietnam.

So I was there when Vietnam started and was there when it ended — it went on entirely too long.

I came back to Washington on two tours on the chief of naval operation’s (CNO’s) staff. I went to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the CNO’s representative to the chairman during the Iranian hostage crisis, where I coordinated the attack air support for that.

When I went back to the CNO’s staff, I was director of tactical readiness. The CNO had just started tactical readiness and was trying to improve the readiness of carrier battle groups. We got to the Naval War College to modify their curriculum somewhat by having former squadron commanders and ship captains going back to the college to impart their knowledge to the college. So the whole idea was to get a more formal approach to training for people to go out and fight wars from carrier battle groups.

When I retired in 1985, I went to work with General Atomics, which was a nuclear-based company at the time. They were trying to get more into the defense arena, so the owner brought me into the business development area of the company.

I had lunch with the chairman and owner of General Atomics several times. He kept talking about getting into the unmanned systems business. Up until this point, I never gave it a thought. I knew they had some type of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over in Vietnam, but I never heard anything good about them. So I never paid any attention.

I started a little organization that built a small, lethal UAV, one that went some distance and crashed into a target like a cruise missile. But the U.S. government didn’t want that because they had very sophisticated cruise missiles and we couldn’t export it. We let that rest for a while until we saw the opportunity to acquire the assets of a company from Hughes Aircraft. We bought a warehouse of what was left of this company and hired five people. I formed a division within General Atomics called Aeronautical Systems Division, and we began marketing the first airplane we had. That was really the predecessor to most of the products we make now, including the Predator.

We now have about 1,300 people working at Aeronautical Systems. We’re very selective about who we bring in. We really look to get the best people possible and we strive for good morale. There’s no liberty unless the morale’s good. That’s the basic thing in the Navy and we carry it out in this company.