Katherine Ziesing | Canberra

Lockheed Martin made the announcement yesterday that serving local chief executive Raydon Gates is stepping down after six years in the job. He will leave the organisation in December and Vince De Pietro, who retired from the RAN earlier this year after a 40-year career, will take his place.

ADM can also exclusively confirm that former Chief of Air Force Air Marshal (Retd) Geoff Brown has joined the Lockheed Martin Australia board as a non-executive member from August 1.

"Gates was keen to highlight the importance of the Australian market to the company."

ADM spoke with both gentlemen yesterday about the transition in leadership and also the changes the local business is going through.

“As our global CEO Marylyn Hewson said, we’ve got a focus on international growth with a target of 30 per cent,” Gates said. “Our purchase of Sikorksy and Sikorsky Helitech in Australia means that our headcount of roughly 1,100 people will be maintained in the coming 12 months as the IS&GS business becomes Leidos.”

Gates was also keen to highlight the importance of the Australian market to the company, as Australia has the second largest local footprint outside the US after the UK. This was highlighted this week with the announcement of the $13 million Science Technology Engineering Leadership and Research Laboratory (STELaR Lab) will be the first multi-disciplinary facility to be established by Lockheed Martin outside of the US.

STELaR Lab will constitute Lockheed Martin’s national R&D operations centre for its current research portfolio in Australia, and undertake additional internal R&D programs.

Scheduled to open in early 2017, STELaR Lab researchers will explore several fields, including hypersonics, autonomy, robotics and command, control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Gates confirmed that the Australian business competed internally for the lab amongst the Lockheed Martin international community, aiming to have about 20 researchers, drawn from university partnerships, on the books within three years.

One of Australia’s pre-eminent defence scientists and current chief of DST Group’s National Security and Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Division, Dr Tony Lindsay, has been appointed as the inaugural director of the lab.