General Motors [GM] earlier this month appointed a new chief for the company’s fledgling defense unit, David Albritton, a long time communications and media relations professional in the Navy and defense industry, who is taking on his first line responsibility.

Albritton, who has spent the past three years as the communications lead for GM’s Global Products Group, became president of GM Defense LLC on Dec. 4, several months after retired Army Gen. John Charlton took the job but then left.

David Albritton, President, GM Defense LLC. Photo: GM

Albritton spent 10 years with the Navy in various public affairs roles, including as the media action officer on the Navy News Desk in the Pentagon, and then transitioned to industry in various communications and media relations roles with Sears, Hewlett Packard, a small PR firm called the Caraway Group, Raytheon [RTN], ITT’s defense business that became Exelis, and then GM.

When ITT spun out its defense business to create Exelis, Albritton was the senior communications officer and part of the senior management team for the new publicly traded company, a perch that allowed him to participate in key decisions. The business was led by Dave Melcher, a retired Army lieutenant general. who led ITT defense and then Exelis until it was acquired by Harris Corp. [HRS] in 2015.

“I learned a lot” from working with and for Melcher, who is “one of the best business guys I’ve ever come across in my career,” Albritton told Defense Daily in a Dec. 13 interview. He said he was “part of all strategic conversations and all decisions we made as a company over the 3.5 years that we operated it and I picked up a lot…and really became a key business partner.”

In his new role, Albritton said he’ll leverage and take advantage of the knowledge he gained at ITT and Exelis and the relationships he has developed and maintained across the industry in “different stakeholder groups.”

“In my mind, any good leader gets the best people he can around him, enables them to be successful and gets out of their way,” he said. “And that’s how I’m looking at this.”

Albritton has been with GM for three years and said he’s learned how to “navigate” the large company, which is important as GM Defense is relying on the company’s design, engineering and development talent in its quest to re-enter the defense market. He said his relationships with the Global Products Group, which houses the company’s 34,000 engineers worldwide, will be important given the services and products GM Defense will be offering.

GM largely exited the defense business in the mid-1990s. In 2017, the company stood up GM Defense LLC, to help it put a keener focus on some of the work it has been recently doing with DoD in the areas of hydrogen fuel cell technology, electric vehicles, and autonomous vehicles. At the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington D.C., GM the past two years has been exhibiting mid- and full-size pickup trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells and its Silent Utility Rover Universal Superstructure, a modular chassis that is also hydrogen fuel cell-powered.

Albritton reports to Pam Fletcher, vice president of Innovation, who reports to GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra.

“The innovation piece is really the hub for all innovative businesses outside of our core,” he said.

GM Defense is basically a “start up,” and metrics for the unit’s success are still under development, Albritton said. The business doesn’t have many employees but in the coming months there will be more staff in key positions, including business development, and the unit will be better integrated within GM and will have greater customer contact to understand their needs and what the opportunities are for GM Defense, he said.

The goal is to be able to react nimbly to customer needs with “affordable solutions,” he said.

Albritton sees “tremendous opportunities” for GM’s defense products for the Defense Department and international customers. In addition to the fuel cell technology, he highlighted GM’s work developing and producing lithium ion batteries used in electric vehicles, semi-autonomous and autonomous technologies, including the company’s work on manned-unmanned follower capabilities, and cyber security.

GM does cyber security “at scale,” he said. The company has 20 million customers through its OnStar remote advisor and security network for vehicles, and most new vehicles have at least 10 million lines of software code.

GM has to protect a number of entry points into a vehicle from a cyber security perspective, Albritton said. GM can extend these cyber security capabilities into the military, he said.

Albritton also pointed to GM’s long history of manufacturing capabilities, including for the defense market that can be brought to bear for GM Defense.