Jim Taiclet and the space between the machines

The airplane was on the ground. Jim Taiclet had finished his checklist. He was sitting in the cockpit, waiting for the rest of the crew to unload, when his evaluator pointed out a small problem with this arrangement: the leader had stopped working before the team had. Taiclet was told to get out of the cockpit and help.

Years later, he recalled the episode as the best business advice he had received. “You can’t lead from the sidelines.” It is an appealingly unceremonious origin for an executive philosophy. The advice arrived with an immediate opportunity to put it into practice at the back of the airplane.

Today, Taiclet is chairman, president and chief executive of Lockheed Martin. Between that cockpit and the corner office lies a career that wandered through aircraft engines, consulting and nearly two decades of cell towers. The telecom chapter makes the route unusual. It also helps explain why someone responsible for fighter jets spends so much time talking about connections.

Before the tower, a transport

Taiclet graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1982, studying engineering and international relations. A master’s degree in public affairs at Princeton followed. The combination put machinery and the decisions governments make about machinery on the same educational itinerary.

His flying career supplied a less abstract education. He logged more than 5,000 hours, primarily in the Lockheed C-141B Starlifter, serving as an aircraft commander and instructor pilot. During Operation Desert Shield, he flew transport missions supporting the movement of U.S. forces. His assignments also included the Joint Staff and Air Staff at the Pentagon.

The Starlifter gave him an early acquaintance with the manufacturer whose successor company he would eventually lead. Recalling flights from Kathmandu to Egypt, he emphasized the aircraft’s ability to handle difficult conditions: “we flew those airplanes nonstop.” His first relationship with Lockheed was that of a user depending on its equipment.

After the Air Force came McKinsey, where he worked on telecommunications and aerospace strategy and operations. Then came engine services at Pratt & Whitney and the aerospace services business at AlliedSignal, subsequently Honeywell. These were businesses concerned with keeping expensive equipment useful. Repair and overhaul rarely receive the glamour allotted to a new aircraft. They do, however, have the considerable advantage of being necessary.

The business underneath the signal

Taiclet joined American Tower in September 2001 as president and chief operating officer. His account places his arrival on September 10. The following day, the company lost 13 employees in the attacks on the World Trade Center. The telecommunications downturn added a separate business crisis, and the company came close to losing its stock-exchange listing.

He became CEO in October 2003, succeeding founder Steven Dodge, and chairman in February 2004. That distinction matters: Taiclet took over and developed an existing enterprise. His part in the story was the long job of operating and expanding it.

American Tower’s product was easy to overlook while using it. Mobile customers wanted a connection; they seldom spent much time admiring the infrastructure that made one possible. The company owned and operated communications sites used by wireless providers. Sharing those sites allowed carriers to use infrastructure without each building an entirely separate estate.

Over his leadership tenure, American Tower’s market capitalization grew from roughly $2 billion to more than $100 billion, and its footprint reached 19 countries. Those are company outcomes across many years and many people’s work. They nevertheless explain why a defense board might be interested in a tower executive.

More useful than the valuation alone is the business logic: an asset can serve several users; a common foundation can support competing services; the network can improve without replacing everything attached to it. For Taiclet’s later arguments about defense, the tower years supplied a practical precedent.

A defense chief at the phone show

Taiclet joined Lockheed Martin’s board in January 2018. He became president and CEO on June 15, 2020, succeeding Marillyn Hewson, and added the chairmanship in March 2021. Hewson recommended him as her successor. The appointment brought an aviation veteran back into aerospace with a substantial telecom education in his luggage.

In February 2023, he appeared at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. A defense chief might look like an unusual guest at a gathering associated with mobile phones. Taiclet told the audience he was in the right place. He wanted technology and telecommunications companies, including newer entrants, to work with Lockheed Martin on defense applications.

The underlying argument is straightforward. An aircraft, a ship or a sensor has its own capabilities. Connecting those systems can let information gathered in one place become useful somewhere else. Commercial companies have invested heavily in communications, computing and artificial intelligence. Taiclet wants defense to make better use of that work.

His name for the broader approach is 21st Century Security. The phrase is corporate; the problem beneath it is concrete. Equipment developed by different organizations must exchange information reliably, and upgrades must reach users while the technology is still useful. Partnerships and shared technical standards are central to his proposed answer.

The public-policy side of his education has remained visible, too. He serves on the Council on Foreign Relations board and cochaired its 2025 economic-security task force with Gina Raimondo and Justin Muzinich. The group examined investment, supply chains and competition over foundational technologies. Its recommendations included expanding the National Defense Stockpile to cover critical minerals and supporting the skilled trades needed to build advanced systems. That work places the corporate strategy in a wider setting: the connections a company needs also run through suppliers, training institutions and government decisions.

That requires choices about ownership as well as engineering. Who supplies the software? Who maintains it? Who agrees on the interfaces? A diagram can connect two boxes with one neat line. Getting two institutions to agree on what travels along it can occupy rather more paper.

The invoice arrives, too

Taiclet’s enthusiasm for making existing equipment more capable acquired a memorable automotive comparison in April 2025. After Boeing won the Air Force’s next-generation fighter competition, he argued that technologies developed during Lockheed’s effort could improve the F-35. He called the prospect a “Ferrari” version of the aircraft.

He suggested an upgraded F-35 could offer 80 percent of the next-generation aircraft’s capability at half the cost. Those were his proposed economics, rather than a demonstrated performance result. The distinction is essential when the products are still being developed and much of the underlying technology is classified.

The same year supplied an expensive reminder of the difficulty. In July 2025, Lockheed Martin reported $1.6 billion in program losses and $169 million in other charges. Problems included a classified aircraft program and international helicopter programs. Analysts pressed executives about their confidence in the revised estimates. A persuasive strategy still has to survive engineering, schedules and contracts.

By July 2026, the company reported second-quarter sales of $20.1 billion and a $230 billion backlog, and raised its annual outlook. Those figures describe a different moment from the previous summer’s charges. A large order book establishes demand; converting that demand into dependable delivery remains the operating assignment. Both sets of numbers belong in an account of his tenure.

When the adversary is a wildfire

One of Taiclet’s more interesting proposed applications takes the same coordination problem out of military operations. Speaking with John Hamre in 2021, he described applying sensing, prediction, command and control, and deployable aircraft to wildfires. The equipment and expertise existed in different places. He wanted to consider a more integrated service.

There was a business-model question inside the proposal. A customer might need a response capability without owning every satellite, helicopter or computing system required to provide it. His experience financing shared telecom infrastructure made that arrangement familiar. The practical obstacles included who would pay, how contracts would work and whether the service could support its own investment.

In January 2026, Lockheed Martin, PG&E, Salesforce and Wells Fargo announced EMBERPOINT, a venture intended to bring together wildfire prevention, detection and response technologies. Its plans included artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and coordinated command and control. A launch establishes an organization and an intention. The intended benefits have to be demonstrated in use.

Another connection appeared that summer. In August, Lockheed announced a Miami-area demonstration with Verizon, NVIDIA, Keysight, ODC and Astris AI. The NetSense system used an existing 5G network to detect and track drones. Here the old telecom territory and the newer sensing work met quite literally, in the same infrastructure.

“You can’t lead from the sidelines.”

Jim Taiclet, recalling an Air Force lesson, 2017

Back to the unfinished work

There is a consistent question running through these episodes: what can equipment already in place do if it is connected and organized differently? At American Tower, that question concerned wireless infrastructure. At Lockheed, it concerns military capabilities, commercial partnerships and, increasingly, applications beyond defense.

It also makes Taiclet’s career harder to reduce to a tidy ascent through aerospace. The tower business occupies the middle because it gave him another industry’s way of arranging assets, investment and customers. Bringing that experience across is a proposition that must be tested, rather than a credential that settles the argument.

The most useful ending is still back at the airplane. The flight had succeeded. The checklist was complete. Work remained. In the telling Taiclet chose to preserve, authority came with an obligation to notice the people still doing it, get out of the seat and join them.