Col. Bernard Gruber Farewell Perspective, GPS Program

摘要

I first met just-pinned-on, shiny and bright, Captain Bernard Gruber, U.S. Air Force in 1992. Bemie had just arrived at the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) at Los Angeles Air Force Base in California, where he would hold several important positions. SMC, which began in 1954, is the nation's center of technical expertise for military space acquisition, with more than 5,000 employees nationwide and an annual budget of $10 billion. Bernie's first association with GPS at SMC was as the chief of User Equipment Production at the then NAVSTAR Global Positioning System Joint Program Office (GPS-JPO). He went on to serve as the program manager for Foreign Military Sales (FMS), working with our allies, and then as the program manager for Advanced Military Devices, which is a euphemism for things we can't discuss in this venue. All this in a 40-month time frame, almost as long as he has served in his current capacity as director of the GPS Directorate, 21 years later.