BUILD ON YOUR SKILLS
Early in his career, Daniel Smith focused on standing out and completing tasks quickly and efficiently, an approach that served him well as he settled into new roles and learned the ropes. Since then, he’s learned that, more often than not, achieving and pursu- ing new goals for the long term requires building a common understanding and skills among team members.
DANIEL R. SMITH
COMMAND/ORGANIZATION: Joint Program Executive Office for Armaments and Ammunition, Directorate of Integration
TITLE: Alternative sources of positioning, navi- gation and timing area lead
YEARS OF SERVICE IN WORKFORCE: 14
DAWIA CERTIFICATIONS: Practitioner in engineering
EDUCATION: M.E. in electrical engineer- ing, Stevens Institute of Technology; B.S. in electrical and computer engineering, Lafayette College
AWARDS: Project Manager Combat Am- munition Systems, Engineer of the Year Award (2019)
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” Smith said. “I am now trying to make a conscious effort to share knowledge and tasking to build not only my own skills but the skills and capabilities of teammates.” For example, he explained, he led a team in developing the Navigation Simulation Tool for Precision Guided Muni- tions (NavSim-P), an all-digital navigation simulation tool that enables the evaluation of plug and play of sensor simulators (i.e., global positioning system receivers, inertial measurement units, magnetometers, altimeters, etc.) and selectable Kalman Filter archi- tectures (i.e., extended and unscented Kalman filters), enabling trade study evaluation and performance predictions for precision-guided munitions programs. After the first version was up and running, there were only two people (Smith and one other) who knew how to fully use the tool.
At first, he said, there were only a few requests for trade studies and analysis (decision- making activities used to identify the most acceptable technical solution among a set of proposed solutions), which they were able to quickly handle. But once news of the tool’s capabilities began to spread, a few requests almost immediately turned into many requests and they became overwhelmed.
“Instead of the two of us working as fast as we could to complete the requests, we spent many hours not only teaching other engineers how to use the toolset but also about the inner workings and code within the toolset. Now that more engineers are involved, we not only keep up with the requests to run the tool but also actively develop more features. If we had just focused on completing tasking, we would have never been able to increase simulation capability.”
In his role as the alternative sources of positioning, navigation and timing area lead under the Joint Program Executive Office for Armaments and Ammunition, Directorate of Integration, Smith aids in the maturation, demonstration and transition of Assured Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) technologies into multiple precision weapon and munition programs of record and their respective firing platforms.
Accurate positioning, navigation and timing is necessary for the functioning of many critical infrastructure sectors. Smith is specifically focused on developing multi-source/ multi-mode software-defined PNT receivers for rockets, missiles and cannon-based artillery. Tis development is aimed at outpacing the increasingly complex electromag- netic warfare threat. “Maintaining unencumbered access to trusted PNT is a crucial enabler for precision-guided munitions that rely on a PNT solution to traverse towards a target,” he said. “Its importance provides motivation and satisfaction.”
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Army AL&T Magazine
Summer 2025
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