CJ Scrapper, VP of Decision Dominance

I’m excited to announce that I have joined Smack Technologies as the VP of Decision Dominance. 

After decades in the Department of War, I’ve learned that the most important companies in defense technology share two key characteristics: an unrelenting focus on mission, and the proven ability to deliver meaningful innovation to warfighters. 

This is why I decided to join Smack. Andy and Clint, the company’s co-founders and two former MARSOC, understand that joint C2 is one of the hardest unsolved problems in modern defense. It must be able to make effective decisions at pace and scale in peer competition, and achieving that will require both distributed battle management across theaters and the ability to fuse, analyze, and exchange information across echelons and forces in real time.

These capabilities do not exist within today’s fragmented architecture. Decisions at the command level often take weeks or even months to plan. And at the edge, where forces operate without reliable communications or reachback, the problem of making timely decisions based on campaign-informed equities remains largely unsolved.

I have spent a large part of my career working on this problem, including building autonomous systems for the Marine Corps and serving as the first embedded PM at DARPA on Assault Breaker II. Most recently, I worked as Technical Manager for JFN and Navy's SSTM for Joint Mission Integration and Experimentation (JMIE), where I led JFN’s transition from concept to program of record in two years.

The most capable teams are the ones who understand the operational environment from the ground up, can build the frontier technology required to serve it, and deliver when the mission demands it. 

That’s what drew me to Smack. The team is building decision-support tools aligned to the joint planning and execution process and extending those capabilities from the command center to warfighters at the tactical edge. Perhaps most importantly, they’re focused on the people doing the work rather than giving senior leaders yet another data visualization layer.

As VP of Decision Dominance, I will be driving the strategy across Omega, Alpha, and the broader product roadmap. This includes Smack's approach for grounding AI in both the physics of war and expert human priors in order to deliver Decision Dominance that’s specific to the needs of the U.S. DoW, its allies, and partners.

My career continues to focus on one question: what does it actually take to get critical capability into the hands of the warfighter, at speed, in environments where failure is not abstract. Smack has the answer. That's why I'm here.