Will Roper

William B. Roper Jr. is an American physicist and foreign policy strategist who served as the 13th Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, overseeing procurement for the U.S. Air Force and Space Force from 2018 to 2021. Before taking office he served elsewhere within the Department of Defense as founder and director of the Strategic Capabilities Office, and prior as Ballistic Missile Defense System Architect at the Missile Defense Agency. He was also a member of the 2018 National Defense Strategy steering group. He is currently the CEO at Istari, as well as serving as senior advisor at McKinsey and Co., and teaching at Georgia Tech.

Education Roper earned a Bachelor of Science in physics and mathematics from Georgia Tech in 1998. He returned to Georgia Tech to earn Master of Physics degree the following year, graduating as a presidential scholar summa cum laude in 2002. During his doctoral program, he was selected for a National Defense Science and Engineering Fellowship.

While heading the Strategic Capabilities Office, Roper studied under Andrew Marshall, founder and director of the Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment from 1973 to 2015. He later became acting Ballistic Missile Defense System Architect at MDA from 2010 to 2012 while a part of Lincoln Lab. While in that role, he developed 11 new systems, including the current European Defense architecture, advanced drones, and several other classified programs. Under his tenure, the office achieved numerous success and accolades, and grew from an annual budget of $50 million to more than $1.5 billion as of 2018. He led the office to tackle new and diverse concepts including hypervelocity artillery, multi-purpose missiles, autonomous fast-boats, smartphone-navigating weapons, big-data-enabled sensing, 3D-printed systems, and fighter-dispersed swarming micro-drones which formed the world's then-largest swarm of 103 systems. thumb Roper reviewing a Joint Tactical Aerial Resupply Vehicle concept at Aberdeen Proving Ground in 2017. leftOne notable failure of the program under Roper's leadership came when employees at Google demanded the company abandon the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Function Team working on artificial intelligence solutions to information ingestion issues, better known as Project Maven because of objections to the militarization of technology. Roper then a leading position on addressing the issue, serving on the Cloud Executive Steering Group and Defense Modernization Team.

Assistant Secretary of the Air Force In 2018, Roper was tapped to become the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force (Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics) in charge of $40 billion and 465 discrete programs. Roper's tenure with the Department of Defense has been seen by many as transformative, and he has gained a reputation for aggressive, unconventional, forward looking approaches.

A primary goal for Roper in his tenure with the Air Force was the acceleration of the development and acquisition process. He has advocated the use of military investment funds to foster disruptive innovation through immediate funding to a growing pool of small contractors who rely on guaranteed cash to make concepts or programs feasible. For Roper, the main goal is "stealing time back from our adversaries." He argues that globalization means that the old Cold War ways of domestic government-led innovation are obsolete, replaced by a commercial driven future where everyone has access to the same resources and technological approaches, but must move quickly to capture the fleeting first-mover advantage - and then continually repeat the process as the window of advantage he believes has been permanently shortened. He has also worked with new prime contractors at a larger scale, particularly in continuing to foster competition which can benefit the Air Force between National Security Space Launch newcomer SpaceX and their more well established competitor United Launch Alliance, a partnership between industry giants Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security. That competition has raised eyebrows in an industry which has become heavily consolidated in recent years, as the Air Force, National Reconnaissance Office, Missile Defense Agency and fledgling Space Development Agency all describe a need for significant launch capacity in coming years. left Roper has attempted to turn the failures and delays of the long-beleaguered KC-46 Pegasus aerial refueling tanker project into an advantage by weaving fully autonomous operation capabilities into its redesign. He prioritized development of more effective multi-domain operation tools like Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and replacing JSTARS with the Advanced Battle Management System. He has also argued for the utility of disaggregated Low Earth Orbit constellations as a way to exploit more applications for space based technology beyond only high orbit or deep space craft.

In the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Roper has helped facilitate the use of the Defense Production Act with industry partners, supporting the defense industrial base in the pandemic-led recession and speeding up the production of life-saving medical equipment.

Since the creation of the United States Space Force in December 2019, Roper has assumed a role in two highly classified programs within the service to build so-called e-satellites, "a Toyota-like satellite" designed be a radically simplified, reliable, hard-wearing deployable craft eschewing traditional requirements like cleanrooms and expensive shielding, designed and engineered entirely within a digital environment before being produced in volume at low cost. The Biden administration did not retain Roper, and he resigned prior to the inauguration. In October 2022, the Biden administration brought Roper back on as an innovation advisor on the Defense Innovation Board.

National defense strategist

In 2018 Roper was appointed to the Department of Defense's 2018 National Defense Strategy steering group, helping to write the penultimate strategic assessment of U.S. posture and priorities. It is one of the first major U.S. strategy documents to accept plainly the return of great power competition. Following its publication, Roper told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission that he views competition with China as "one of the seminal challenges that we’re going to face in this century." He is married and has a young daughter. Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics Award for Excellence - Innovation. Truman Scholarship. Coca-Cola Scholarship. Georgia Tech Presidential Fellow.

Notable works There is No Spoon: _The New Digital Acquisition Reality. Will Roper, October 7, 2020.