Norman Augustine

Norman Augustine served as a defense industry executive, government official, and policy thinker whose career uniquely bridged the Pentagon and the private sector. He served as Under Secretary of the Army during the Ford administration and returned to industry as president and later CEO of Martin Marietta, where he drove the company's focus on systems integration and space programs throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. His 1987 book, Augustine's Laws, offered a set of satirical but penetrating observations about defense acquisition inefficiency that have remained relevant across four decades and multiple acquisition reform efforts.

Norman Augustine was the chief architect of the 1995 merger between Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta that created Lockheed Martin Corporation, serving as the combined company's first Chairman and CEO. Born in 1935 in Denver, Colorado, Augustine earned a bachelor's and master's degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University before joining the Douglas Aircraft Company and subsequently the Department of Defense as a civilian official. His tenure at Martin Marietta, which began in 1977, transformed the company from a struggling aerospace and construction materials conglomerate into a focused defense and space systems integrator. Augustine's primary strategic insight — that the post-Cold War defense budget environment would require dramatic consolidation among American defense contractors — proved prescient and directly motivated the Lockheed-Martin Marietta merger. After retiring from Lockheed Martin's chairmanship in 1997, he served on numerous corporate boards and government advisory committees, including chairing the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee in 2009.