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MITRE History
Overview In July of 1958, MITRE was founded as a private, not-for-profit corporation to provide engineering and technical services to the federal government. In doing so, it fulfilled a request by Secretary of the Air Force James Douglas for a specialized services group to provide the system engineering and ongoing support for the massive, multi-billion dollar, continental air defense system called SAGE. SAGE, or Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, was developed for the United States Air Force from 1950 to 1957 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Digital Computer Laboratory, the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory, and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. MITRE was incorporated one month following the installation of the first of 23 national SAGE centers at McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey. MITRE first settled in the Boston area. The company's first president was C.W. "Hap" Halligan (1958-1966), formerly of Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories and responsible for the development of SAGE's vast telephone communications network. "MITRE's mission," announced Halligan, "is to provide the objectivity and high technical competence necessary in the long-range planning, integration and design of electronic command and control systems." Less than a year after its founding, the need to locate near the Pentagon dictated the establishment of an office in Virginia. MITRE expanded again in 1963 after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave the company system engineering responsibility for the National Airspace System (NAS). As our work program continued to grow, MITRE established two principal locations, one in Bedford, Massachusetts, and one in McLean, Virginia. MITRE also began moving staff to sites around the world in an effort to work closely with our customers. We have 7,000 employees supporting hundreds of projects for numerous government organizations. During the five decades since its founding, MITRE has earned an international reputation for technical excellence and innovation. MITRE manages four Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs): one for the Department of Defense (known as the DoD Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence FFRDC); one for the Federal Aviation Administration (the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development); one for the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (the Center for Enterprise Modernization); and one for the Department of Homeland Security (known as the Homeland Security Systems Engineering and Development Institute). MITRE also has its own independent research and development program that explores new technologies and new uses of technologies to solve our sponsors' problems in the near-term and in the future. Related Information
Page last updated: March 18, 2009 | Top of page |
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