Our Missiles Have Never Been More Inclusive

Every fall, I get to share my favorite document of the year: our Belonging Report. I’m Paige, Chief Belonging Officer at Halcyon Defense Systems, and I’m so proud to say that 2026 was our most inclusive year yet.

When I joined Halcyon six years ago, the only women on our production floor were on the safety posters. Today, our floor looks like America.

By the numbers

• 41% of our guidance engineers are women or nonbinary, up from 12% in 2019.

• Our munitions division is led by a Black woman for the first time in our history.

• Our targeting team is majority first-generation college graduates.

• 100% of our people managers have completed anti-bias training.

Representation matters, and it doesn’t stop at the loading dock. Every product that leaves our building carries the fingerprints of a team that looks like America, and wherever it ends up, it brings that diversity with it.

Belonging is also good business. Diverse teams make better decisions, and better decisions win contracts. This year our order backlog grew by $4.1 billion. My bonus is tied to that number, so each new hire gives me a personal reason to stay close to our recruitment goals.

Names matter

This year we also took a hard look at what we call things. For decades, our industry named its products after predators, storms, and, in the case of some older aircraft, Native nations, which we now recognize was not okay.

So our naming committee, which is 60% women, went back to our values. Our new precision glide bomb is called Allyship. Its cluster variant is called Community, because it leaves no one out.

Our people

Belonging is something you build, and our employee resource groups build it every day: Women in Munitions, Queer Engineers for Precision, Black Excellence in Targeting, and Parents in Propulsion.

This year we opened lactation rooms in every one of our facilities, because nobody should have to choose between their family and a career in ordnance.

And in June, for the first time, our drones flew with rainbow decals for Pride. We put them on the underside, where people can actually see them.

Listening, even when it’s hard

In March, we received a letter from a family in a country I can’t name for contractual reasons. It was about one of our products. I won’t go into the details, but it was hard to read, and I think it was meant to be.

I read it aloud at our All Hands, and then I brought it to our Belonging Council. We sat with it for a full ninety minutes.

The council recommended a change in language: our reports now say “unintended community impact” where the old template said “collateral damage.” We added that phrase to the next production review and left the product specifications in place. Several council members have since joined the hiring panel, where they can influence who gets to build the next shipment.

What’s next

In 2027 we’re launching Future Builders, a mentorship program for middle schoolers from underserved communities. Every student gets to assemble a small drone and take it home. Some of these kids come from neighborhoods that have never had a drone.

To the protesters outside our Arlington campus every Friday: we see you, we hear you, and we’d love to talk. Several of you would be a great fit for our Belonging team.

Paid subscribers get the full 2026 Belonging Report, with our supplier diversity data and a demographic breakdown of our customers. Several are now led by women.