Mitre Corporation

For the religious headgear, see Mitre.

The Mitre Corporation

File:MITRE logo.PNG
Company type	Private, not-for-profit
Founded	1958
Headquarters	Bedford, MA and McLean, VA , U.S.
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Alfred Grasso (President) & (CEO)
Revenue	770,000,000 United States dollar (2016)

The Mitre Corporation is a public-interest not-for-profit organization based in the United States.

It manages three Federally Funded Research & Development (R&D) Centers (FFRDCs): one for the Department of Defense (DoD) (known as the DoD Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (DoD C3I) FFRDC), one for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) (the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD), and one for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) (the Center for Enterprise Modernization (CEM)). Mitre also has its own internal R&D program, that explores new technologies and new uses of technologies to solve problems of national interest.

Under the leadership of C. W. Halligan, Mitre was formed in 1958 to provide overall direction to the numerous companies and workers involved in the US Air Force SAGE project. Most of the early employees transferred to Mitre from the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where SAGE was being developed. In April 1959, a site was purchased in Bedford, Massachusetts near Hanscom Air Force Base (AFB), to develop a new Mitre laboratory, which Mitre occupied in September 1959.

After the SAGE project ended in the early 1960s, Mitre was awarded a contract in 1963 to develop a similar system for the FAA, to produce an automated air traffic control (ATC) system. The result of the project formed the National Airspace System (NAS), which is still in use today. The NAS is still largely in its original form, although most of its components have been modernized at one time or another since the 1960s. To support the NAS project and continual operations with the DoD at the Pentagon, a second "main office" was opened in McLean, Virginia. Mitre also operates a large number of branch offices around the world, most of them co-located at major Air Force or other military bases.

Through the 1960s, Mitre was mostly involved in military Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I) projects, working on, among other things, the Airborne Warning and Control System AWACS. Mitre also worked on a number of projects with ARPA, including the work that would lead to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network ARPANET. Since the 1960s, most DoD early warning and communications projects have been developed by or supported by Mitre, including the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System JTIDS and the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System JSTARS. One of the more recent centers at Mitre is providing a modernization plan for the Internal Revenue Service, which started in 1998.

With the slowing of continued DoD research after the end of the Cold War, the federal government set up several "Centers of Excellence" (COEs) research teams funded at a low level to ensure that the teams stayed together in the future. On January 29, 1996, the Mitre Board of Trustees elected to divide the corporation into two entities. The Mitre Corporation was to focus its operations on its FFRDCs for DoD and FAA, while a new company, named Mitretek Systems, now called Noblis, took over the non-FFRDC work for a number of US Government agencies.

Today Mitre operates three COEs, each based on one of their major projects. The Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) continues to work on the NAS, the Center for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) supports a broad and diverse set of sponsors within the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Intelligence Community (IC), and the Center for Enterprise Modernization (CEM) is dedicated to the IRS.

Mitre is led by President and CEO Al Grasso. The company continues to operate dual headquarters; one located in Bedford, Massachusetts and another in McLean, Virginia.

Interesting facts

The domain mitre.org was the first .org domain ever registered in July 1985.

Mitre has been implicated in a variety of conspiracy theories due to the nature of its work with the government, in particular, conspiracy theories related to the 9/11 attacks often involve Mitre. As outlandish as these stories are, they serve to highlight the importance of this organization which is relatively unknown to the public.

See also

• RAND Corporation

External links

Notations

• Mitre Corporation
• SourceWatch - Mitre Corporation profile