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By John Higgins, PEO IEW&S Public Affairs
Col. Joseph Dupont closed the military chapter of his life on Dec. 20 in a retirement ceremony on Aberdeen Proving Ground. Standing well over six feet tall, Dupont passed the baton to his nephew, 2nd Lt. Christopher Lesco, a symbol of not only a changing of responsibility, but recognition of the next.
Lesco, a US Army Ranger who Dupont had the honor of commissioning at his retirement, will likely benefit from the many systems and technologies that Dupont has developed and over seen in his 27 year career.
Dupont commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in May of 1988. His career runs the gamut, including Operations Desert Shield and Storm, state side command of a company, and the lead for the Army’s Field Assistance in Science and Technology in Germany.
“You never know where life is going to lead you,” the soon-to-be Col. with the (ret) in print, Dupont said, “There are so many choices, so many different paths that you can take and at the end of the day you just gotta make that choice and it’s going to be part of that overall journey.”
One of Dupont’s choices brought him to the Program Executive Office Intelligence Electronic Warfare & Sensors (PEO IEW&S), as the Project Manager Electronic Warfare (PM EW). He and his team laid the foundations for everything PM EW would become through a dogged pursuit of solutions and improvements.
“There were just a lot of things that weren’t established; things weren’t ‘well oiled.’” Dupont said of the organization in 2012. Part of his roles were to change that, “It wasn’t so much a struggle because; what I had to get people to understand is: in my position I’m there to help them. I’m keeping the …heat off the Product Managers so they can go do what they need to do and I’ll take care of the rest. So, if you’re having a funding issues … let me fight the funding issue, you guys do what you need to do.”
Dupont is no stranger to obstacles, and before he took his current role as Trail Boss, his development of a key PM EW program was an involved process. The Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool program, one of Dupont’s more notable projects, faced a rocky road, from funding decisions to a series of contract protests. However, it will be fielded in the coming months, a crowning achievement in Dupont’s career in technology.
That achievement, among many others, is something Dupont admits he would have never imagined in his days in the desert decades ago. “A lot of the things I’ve been working on weren’t even a consideration in Desert Storm. ‘Networking the Battle field… a digitized Army…what the heck is that?” Dupont admitted.
Dupont also worked with our allies, among them, the countries that have joined the United States as part of the Five Eyes Treaty: Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. He found solidarity with these global partners, witnessing them having the same issues he had faced.
“The challenges that the U.S. Army was having with electronic warfare were not common to just the U.S. Army. Our allies were having the same problems. When I say problems I’m really talking about, you know, funding issues and what their countries were willing to invest and how important Electronic Warfare (EW) was or wasn’t.” I also learned that when it came to EW, technology was never an issue, the capability was there it really just boiled down to our government having the interest to invest.”
Dupont plans to use his abundant experience in a new civilian job soon after his official retirement. Before starting that new job however, Dupont will be attending the wedding of his nephew Lesco, followed by island vacation, in Florida.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]