"a rich history of doing IT services and IT modernization across government customers," Gabe Camarillo said — a careful, almost understated summation that frames how Peraton wants to be seen as it pushes deeper into defense engineering and AI-enabled program work.
Gabe Camarillo’s mandate at Peraton
Camarillo, the company’s new defense sector president and a former Army undersecretary, told Defense One this summer that his overall vision is for Peraton to become the “go-to provider to manage and modernize enterprise IT across the department.” He stepped into the role with explicit ambitions to expand Peraton’s footprint in defense prototyping and engineering while reshaping perceptions that the firm is “just an IT company.”
Peraton’s existing defense engineering footprint
Camarillo pointed to concrete examples of Peraton’s work beyond enterprise IT: “We do Tomahawk theater mission planning support for the Navy,” he said, along with “modeling and simulation for Aegis. Also, sonar analysis and acoustic analysis for the Navy at Carderock. And then we also provide engineering support to some Army programs, like, for example, those that do aircraft survivability equipment.” He argued those are areas “ripe for growth.”
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End the scrambleScaling FAA AI program management across government
Peraton is already applying AI-enabled program management to the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control overhaul under a $1.5 billion contract. Camarillo described that work as a blueprint: “One of the key aspects of that work that we're doing for the FAA is introducing AI-enabled program management, where it gives the leadership of the agency much better insight into how the program can be executed,” he said. He added that AI can “spot cyber risks and map out an organization’s modernization plan.”
He framed Peraton’s approach as applied, enterprise-level AI: “That kind of applied AI usage…[can] enable not just an end user to ask queries of an AI tool, but to really allow an enterprise to use the tool effectively for its own modernization. That’s where I think there's some secret sauce that Peraton has brought to the table, and we're looking to expand that across all of our customer sets, whether it's defense and non-defense.”
Tariff rhetoric and Golden Dome: potential ripples for U.S.-Canada defense ties
On a waterfront near Baltimore during a shipbuilding announcement, President Donald Trump reiterated his embrace of tariffs, saying: “Our drug industry is coming back. Our car industry is coming back. They're leaving Canada. They're leaving Mexico. They're leaving Japan, Germany, South Korea. We're building car plants,” and “It's all because of my favorite word, my fourth favorite…tariff.” The comments were presented as a reminder of simmering concerns about how U.S. trade relations with close allies could affect national security.
Those concerns surfaced in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Golden Dome, where lawmakers raised the possibility that an escalating trade dispute with Canada could spill into defense cooperation. Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., said, “They're a good ally. They're a good neighbor. They are modernizing NORAD right now…It's my understanding, though, that an agreement hasn't been reached with Canada yet on Golden Dome.” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told the committee that tensions had prompted “peacekeeping visits to Ottawa” and warned it was “unrealistic to expect that you can treat an ally badly in one domain, on the economy, but expect…to work cooperatively in terms of our defense.”
The piece noted that trade talks with Canada faltered in August, that a new batch of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs took hold this week, and that Canada has been reviewing its decision to buy 16 F-35As for months — details cited as context for Pentagon watchers concerned about a broader cooling in U.S.-Canada relations.
Personnel moves and notable contracts
- General Dynamics: President Danny Deep will take over as the company’s next CEO in 2027; CEO Phebe Novakovic will become executive chairman of the board.
- Peraton added two former Army officials as vice presidents: Jennifer Swanson and Danielle Moyer.
- The Army signed a $9.5 million deal to expand use of Reveal Technology’s intelligence platform Farsight with the service’s Nett Warrior system.
- Ursa Major named ex-Pentagon official David Rader as chief strategy officer.
- ACMI added Limitless Aeronautics to its Indiana campus.
- Kaizen landed a $49 million IDIQ deal, including $43 million of classified work for the Army.
- Auterion debuted a universal UAS launcher.
- Tiberius Aerospace secured a $500 million deal to build and distribute its Sceptre precision-guided missile as part of a U.S.-U.K. collaboration.
How defense program managers, the FAA, and U.S.-Canada defense cooperation will react
Defense program managers: They will be watching whether Peraton’s FAA-derived AI tools truly deliver “much better insight” into program execution and whether those tools speed test, evaluation, and risk identification the way Camarillo claims.
FAA leadership: The FAA is an existing customer under the $1.5 billion program; agency officials and program executives will measure success by whether AI-enabled program management reduces schedule, budget, and cyber risk across the air traffic control modernization.
U.S.-Canada defense cooperation: Senators flagged the Golden Dome modernization and the F-35A review as vulnerable to broader trade tensions; lawmakers and defense planners will track whether tariffs and reciprocal measures complicate agreement finalization or erode trust at programmatic levels.
Peraton is explicit about the path it intends to follow: take AI practices proven in a high-profile civilian modernization and replicate them across defense portfolios while expanding engineering work the company already performs for Navy and Army programs. The counterpoint in the same brief is political: rising tariff tensions that senators worry could bleed into bilateral defense projects like Golden Dome. Whether Peraton’s “secret sauce” scales and whether trade friction damages specific defense partnerships are the twin developments to watch next.
