The Architect Behind Modern Missile Defense
William Cook is one of the few engineers in U.S. defense history whose authored system functional architectures still define how American and allied air & missile defense forces evaluate missile & air threat attacks, determine ID and object types, and develop target engagement assignment and executions in real time.
A West Point graduate and former U.S. Army officer, William spent four decades leading the engineering of advanced missile defense command-and-control systems—including personally conceiving of and defining the original functional architectures for THAAD BM/C3I, MEADS BM/C4I, and IBCS. He led the Patriot C3 software modernization at Raytheon in the late 1980s, creating key capabilities used in Desert Storm, and served as Chief Engineer of the THAAD Battle Management System at Litton Data Systems development throughout the 1990s awarded Litton’s highest lifetime achievement award for Leadership & Technical Excellence.
As founder and Chief Engineer of ISR, William personally defined most of the IBCS functional architecture himself and led the multi-company SE&I engineering effort that created the project and whose architecture definition guided the next phases being developed by Northrop Grumman. William guided the development of ISR’s distributed battle management technology IRAD effort meant to realize his vision for air & missile defense of the future, including their distributed sensor fusion technologies based on the very functionality he pioneered—earning eight SBIR awards and many U.S. patent approvals in the process. With unmatched insight into the intersection of battlefield operations, software functionality and distributed system architectures, and national security systems, he now advises startups, investors, and defense innovators building what comes next.
