The Answer Man

From T-shirts to technology, Barry Dillon provides the solutions Marines need.

Barry Dillon is an Air Force brat who has put his electrical engineering talents to use for more than 35 years helping the Navy and Marine Corps build military surveillance systems and equipment. Early in his government career, Dillon managed the Defense Department's then-fledgling (and Top Secret) unmanned aerial vehicles program. In the mid-1990s, surveillance data collected from the Predator UAV was presented to the United Nations, and helped encourage the opposing parties to participate in the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which officially ended the war in Bosnia. "It was an accident that I got into electrical engineering," says Dillon, who credits his father with sparking his interest in the field. "I was always taking things apart, but was not good at fixing them, or putting them back together," he chuckles.

As the deputy commander for the Marine Corps Systems Command since 2003, Dillon is responsible for providing Marines with everything from T-shirts to sophisticated command-and-control systems. "It's really an unbelievable spectrum of things," says Dillon, who at 58 is past retirement for his years of government service, but stays on because he believes strongly in his agency's mission and people. "I think the Marine Corps, because of its [small] size, is closer to the problems, and closer to the solutions, when they occur."

The technology and equipment Dillon has managed over the years have been used to solve problems outside of warfare. In 1998, a Swiss International Air Lines jet crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia, killing all aboard. At the time, Dillon led the research, science and technology department at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, Fla.

Weather conditions and the depth of the plane wreckage prohibited divers from participating in the recovery mission, so Dillon offered the operation his agency's ship-towed vehicles and underwater sensors, and assembled a team to travel to Canada and help with the investigation. The mission successfully located the aircraft and determined the cause of the crash. Dillon says it was exciting for him and his team to see firsthand how defense technology could be applied to such a different, but equally critical, mission.

Dillon is familiar with adapting to unfamiliar places and situations. Because of his father's career in the Air Force, he lived all over the world growing up, from France to Nebraska. "I moved 22 or 23 times by the time I was 21 years old," says the graduate of the University of Missouri. But for most of his government career, Dillon has been based in Washington and Quantico, Va. "I kind of like not moving."