Top 10 Execs To Watch in National Security for the National Capital Region

Bobby Lentz, Northrop Grumman Corp.

Bobby Lentz is vice president of Global Cyber Solutions for Northrop Grumman Mission Systems. He has held leadership roles for over 10 years at Northrop Grumman and has a background in systems engineering.

Why watch: Northrop Grumman has a long history of developing cyber tools, intelligence analytics and information assurance products and services used by the military and national security agencies, and Lentz is in the thick of the effort to put those offerings to work.

“Since the dawn of digital networks, the battlefield in cyberspace has been continually growing and morphing,” Lentz said. “The range of threats continues to grow exponentially, and that upward trend will likely continue into the future. As noted by our leaders in government, this nation and its allies must overcome and counter the full range of cyberattacks, including those perpetrated by cybercriminals all the way up to state-sponsored actions. We cannot meet each of these threats one counteraction at a time.”

To that end, Northrop Grumman is developing “flexible, multidomain cyber and cognitive analytical tools that can respond to the full spectrum of threats,” he said, and the company continues to be an industry leader in embedded cyber resiliency.

Lentz’s global cyber solutions team includes nearly 1,000 employees across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

“Because of the nature of the business and the types of adversaries our customers face, much of the work we do is kept private,” Lentz said. “If we do our job right, many of our successes go unnoticed by the general public. But rest assured, Northrop Grumman is tackling the challenges that an increasingly interconnected digital globe presents.”

That includes providing scalable and agile software development, full-spectrum cyber tools, end-to-end data processing, real-time analytics of mission-critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data, threat knowledge databases and information management tools and biometric intelligence.

“We’re excited about new opportunities emerging in that space, such as Unified Platform and related programs,” he said.