This series follows one machine: how a small cleared government contractor gets built, sold, and rolled into something larger, and how the people and private equity firms around it get paid. It grew into thirty-five pieces, all sourced to public records, and this is the map. Read it top to bottom for the full arc, or jump to the part you need. Every article stands on its own.
Start here: the playbook
- Built to Be Bought. The whole thesis in one essay: the "book of business" a buyer actually pays for, the roll-up math, the second bite of the apple, the tax treatment, and why the smart founders keep their equity compounding instead of cashing out. If you read only one, read this.
For a founder starting out
- One Playbook, Many Starting Hands. How a founder of any background gets onto the first rung: a cleared non-veteran, a veteran, a service-disabled minority veteran, a woman owner, a tribal-owned firm, and a U.S. citizen with no experience at all. The certifications and how they stack, the free help through APEX Accelerators, the Mentor-Protege Program, reverse mentorship, the other avenues like SBIR and the GSA Schedule, and the rules that quietly decide who wins.
The people who run it: the operating-partner bench
These are the twelve operating partners and advisors a defense private equity firm keeps on hand, and the specific credential that earned each one the seat. They sort into three doors.
The founders who built a company and sold it:
- Thomas Churbuck built a turbine-parts company and sold it twice.
- Wayne Garrett co-founded that same company as its finance chief.
- Les Daniels, the financier who has been the firm's aerospace co-investor for twenty years.
The executives who ran a very large business:
- Peter Cannito tripled Polaris Alpha, sold it, and now runs Redwire.
- Marc Duvall ran a five-billion-dollar aerospace division.
- Mano Nazar ran a nuclear fleet.
- Bill Boisture ran Gulfstream, NetJets, and Hawker Beechcraft.
- Paul Fulchino grew Aviall and sold it to Boeing.
- Gary Mercer spent thirty-six years engineering GE's jet engines.
The leaders who held the top of a command:
- Jim McConville, the Army's fortieth Chief of Staff.
- Andy Boyd, the former director of the CIA's cyber center.
How they get paid, and where the money lives
- How a Defense PE Firm Gets Paid. The equity stakes, read straight from the SEC filings of BigBear.ai, Redwire, and Firefly: the fund's controlling positions, the director shares, the tell that firm-employed directors assign their pay back to the firm, and the related-party deal a firm ran between two companies it owned.
- The Plumbing: The Funds, LPs, and Holding Companies Behind the Deals. Where the money actually lives: the management company, the general partner, and the fund limited partnership full of pension money, plus the chain of holding shells that houses each deal, and the rival firms (Veritas, Arlington, Carlyle) that run the identical structure.
The whole machine in one company
- York Space Systems: From a Billion-Dollar Buyout to a $4.75 Billion IPO. A single company that shows the entire arc in three years, bought at about one billion, grown into the Space Development Agency's largest satellite supplier, and taken public at nearly five, with the firm still holding a quarter of it.
Where the capital sits
- Why a National-Security Investor Sits in Boca Raton, Not the Beltway. Almost everything in government contracting points at Washington, so why does one of the busiest national-security investors run its portfolio from Florida? The GE roots, the tax math, and the Beltway office it opened anyway.
The company profiles: how ownership actually works
The series widened from the private equity machine into a set of standalone company profiles, each a different answer to who ends up owning the asset that compounds.
The explainer beneath all of them:
- Government Contract Vehicles, Explained. What an IDIQ, a GWAC, a GSA Schedule, and a set-aside vehicle actually are, and why a seat on one is a small contractor's real asset.
The public and private-equity giants:
- Maximus. A twelve-thousand-dollar home business that went public in 1997 and compounded into a 5.4-billion-dollar operator of the government's safety net.
- Amentum. A castoff services arm that private equity bought, bolted onto, and took public through a tax-free Reverse Morris Trust instead of an IPO.
The founder-owned and employee-owned:
- PeopleTec. Founders who sold to their own employees through a 100 percent ESOP instead of to a buyer.
- AVUM. A founder who launched in 1991 and still owns the shop, surviving on the right contract vehicles.
- BecTech. A ManTech senior executive who spun out in 1997 and has held her Navy combat-systems firm independent for twenty-nine years.
The set-aside climbers who teamed their way up:
- Noetic Strategies. A woman-owned firm that stacked four certifications and teamed with PeopleTec to win far above its size.
- Mobius Consulting. A woman-owned shop that took majority control of a 567-million-dollar missile-defense contract by teaming with Parsons.
The tribal and Alaska Native models:
- Tribalco. A tribal 8(a) launchpad that graduated and built more than two billion dollars in federal work, and never sold.
- The Tatitlek Corporation. An Alaska Native village that owns its contractor outright and recycles the profits to its shareholders in perpetuity.
Built to stay independent, and the machine on the other side
The newest profiles set the companies engineered to resist a sale against the private equity machinery built to do the buying.
- Anduril. A venture-funded prime that raised more than 11 billion dollars, became the acquirer instead of the acquired, and says it will go public only on its own terms.
- Torch Technologies. An employee-owned contractor whose owners voted, by nearly a 90 percent supermajority, to write that ownership into the charter as a public benefit corporation.
- Sierra Nevada Corporation. The family firm that mortgaged a house to buy a dying shop in 1994, won a 13 billion dollar Air Force contract three decades later, and still will not sell.
- Arcfield. The buyer's side up close, a systems-engineering business that the private equity firm Veritas carved out of its own prime and set loose on a fresh roll-up.
- Shield AI. Anduril's venture-funded rival in autonomy, raising its way to a 12.7 billion dollar valuation and building toward a public listing rather than a sale, even as its AI pilot flies on Anduril's fighter.
- Castellum. The same roll-up as Arcfield, run in public, buying small contractors with its own listed stock and disclosing every dilutive step.
The sale and the refusal, on the record
- Cubic Corporation. The family-founded NYSE company whose board took 75 dollars a share from Veritas and Elliott while a rival bid of 78 sat on the table, put its reasoning in a public filing, and watched the company get broken into pieces afterward. Roughly 94 million dollars of shareholder value, and the cleanest published account of what a national-security discount costs.
- Radiance Technologies. The Huntsville employee-owned firm whose ownership you can actually verify, because the Department of Labor filings date the plan to 2008, nine years after the founders wrote down that they wanted it. The counterweight to every company that says it is employee-owned and asks you to take its word.
What to take from it
The through line under all thirty-five is the lesson this site keeps finding: there are three ways to be paid, and they are not equal. A salary pays you for your time. Owning a company pays you for the business, once. Holding equity in something larger, a platform, a fund, a share of the carry, pays you for value that other people create, and it compounds. The whole series is that single idea, followed through the cleared, documented, and very well-plumbed world of people who happen to hold a security clearance.
This series is informational and journalistic, describing publicly reported companies, people, programs, and transactions. It is not investment, tax, legal, or M&A advice. All third parties are discussed from public records and their own published statements as nominative fair use, with no affiliation implied and nothing endorsed by them.
