Sticking around for the last session, the first day of the Citi Industrial Conference. I'm Jason Gursky, the firm's aerospace and defense analyst. I have the pleasure today of introducing the management team from CACI. We have John and Jeff here, the CEO and CFO, respectively. Appreciate both of you guys joining us today. I'm not sure if you want to say a safe harbor kind of thing. You don't have to, but I just wanted to make sure I give you the opportunity.
Some of you may hear us make forward-looking statements, and I'm sure you all know that we're under no obligation to keep them current, and that you should read our filings for more color around those.
Perfect.
I'll tell Bill Koegel when I get home. He'll be happy.
General Counsel.
And now you can't say we didn't include you in the conversation. We'll include him.
We'll include him. Oh, yeah.
I think the best place to start, and where I've been starting with all these conversations today, is the transition that we have going on in DC. We've got a new administration in town. This one seems, at least from our perspective, maybe to be a little bit different than what we've seen in the past. But I just want to get your sense of, is this truly different? Are you getting the sense that it's truly different, and how the company is reacting to that?
Yeah. Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having us. And yeah, this administration, like any administration change, comes in with their own priorities. We can debate whether this has been a pretty active one year and one month.
But at the end of the day, we're a 64-year-old company. We've seen a lot of administrative changes. They all come in with a lot of goals. I think this administration, from many of the past, is more structured and more organized around what they're looking to see and what they're looking to push at. At a macro level, it's tough to debate that they are looking for efficiency. We have just a lot of pan-government priorities that need to be addressed, and there's only so many dollars. So it's not unusual to want to poke at things like fraud, waste, and abuse. It's not unusual to say that the Commander in Chief wants everyone working in the office. That's a decision that person gets to make. They'd like to provide stronger protection of this nation's borders. Whether you'd agree with that or not, that's what the government's priority is.
They would like to see efficiencies brought in to the federal government. So there's a lot of things that the administration is looking to do, looking to root out fraud, waste, and abuse, which there's been commissions since President Nixon that have been looking at that. So at a macro level, high level, it's tough as a taxpayer to want to have long, deep-throated debates on those. It makes sense to us. I think it's good business. All of our investors look at our G&A and our overhead rates and ask us every quarter, how thinly are you able to run this company? Are you running it cost-effectively? So I don't think it's an extraordinarily bizarre question or focus for this government. And as we've seen in the first 30 days, there have been a lot of questions asked, right? And we're going to continue to see more.
We'll talk about it during the next talk. That's what we see, and the government also wants more efficient networks. They want networks to connect. They want them to be better protected, so a lot of the things the administration is looking at are actually positive upsides to a company such as ours because we are an enterprise IT. We are a network modernization. We are delivering software in a completely different manner and have been for a long number of years, and I think the last area is. I think it's okay that people who are given funds to spend are auditing themselves and being able to tell us where that money has been spent, so at a macro level, it doesn't sound that extraordinary.
Now, when you add the press and you add a lot of other daily briefings to it, it may sound a little bit crazy at times, but at the fundamental point, which as the CEO of a publicly traded company I have to get beyond all that noise and get to the signal, those five or six focus areas make really good sense to us.
You brought up the word efficiency a few times in your opening remarks there, so I want to double-click on that just for a second and try to bring it down to the industry level. There's efficiency, I suspect, that'll be on the customer side of things, right, and what they can do, I mean, to themselves more efficiently and layers of bureaucracy inside the building, but from your perspective, what does that mean for the industrial base?
Obviously, you run your company hopefully as lean as you possibly can. But in your relationship with the customer, what does efficiency mean when it goes from the building down to you? What are they going to be looking for from you?
Yeah.
This is my 32nd year in this, serving the federal government in a publicly traded company. So a long number of years watching this. For us today, with all the noise that's in the system, we haven't received one change notice. We haven't had one program canceled. We haven't had one person stop. We haven't stopped running the company the way we always ran it. At the strategic level, at the tactical level, at the daily level, everything inside the company is exactly the way it always was. Okay. One is we continue to drive growth within this company just as we were pre- and amid the administration change. I think things that would help our customer is, look, for the 32 years I've been doing this, probably 38 years, we've never had a full-year budget. Okay.
Talk about being an acquisition official or somebody in the Pentagon or an intelligence agency. Most years, you've got four months of your upcoming year of funds to spend. And then we wonder why things aren't modernized at a rate. That starts with the Hill. That starts with Congress. Okay. They ultimately appropriate funds. And when there's not a budget, everybody is held under a continuing resolution. Imagine meeting those leaders two, three, four, eight, 11, 12 years in a row where we start a fiscal year under a continuing resolution, so no new starts. This year, if there's anything different, we're in February. We still don't have a fully appropriated four budgets. We're at 2024 fiscal year spend levels. One thing that would be helpful is to pass the budget.
The second thing is that providing one-year money in a DOD and intelligence and a DHS community as my focus because we're very focused on national security. When the threats continually change, we need to be a little more tolerant of them being able to spend money across a couple of fiscal years. So allow the fiscal policy of people spending money to be a little more forgiving because the pace of the threat is changing very, very quickly. So those are a couple of areas that I think would be very helpful as we go forward. Layers of bureaucracy. Yes, bureaucracy, like in any company, comes with a number of people. Right. We're blessed, and we actually are very, very private.
In a company of 25,000 people, five of us can get into a room in a half hour, make a material decision about where the company's going and they're going to go. I'm not sure that's the efficiency that a lot of our customers experience. So that would be helpful as well. But they're the best experts of knowing what they need to do their job best. But from having served them and being able to develop, provide expertise and technology to them, there's areas I think that would be helpful writ large, whether you're an aerospace and defense company or government services company. I think all of us who supply the federal government today would see some of those common things as being very beneficial as we go forward.
Yeah. So those are the reforms that they might be able to make. If we were to have your customer sitting here, what might they say about the industrial base, and how could the industrial base be more efficient?
Yeah. I mean, we enjoy the word efficiency. It's what we focus on. If you look at the enterprise IT solutions we're looking at, we've been asked three of the largest enterprise IT programs across the federal government have been asked to take airmen out of the roles of running IT networks and allow them to go back to do an airman's job. So we turn them to the job they initially started on versus keeping networks upgraded and keeping IT infrastructure going. I think that our customers have been asking us on network modernization. We've got seven of the largest network modernization jobs that we're active on today. If the requisite funding was there in the right period of time, they could deliver more nodes and get these networks deployed faster. So it comes down to funding and color of funding.
I think if they were sitting here, they would definitely stomp that. But what we deliver is all around efficiency, right? How do we deliver more for less? How do we get more work done? Bringing AI, bringing machine learning into all of the geospatial information and every asset that the United States has. We process around 6%-8% of all the overhead imagery data that is collected on an average day. 6 to 8. So if we could use AI and machine learning and spend money there, could we process more? Absolutely so. Would we be better informed? Absolutely so. They'd be asking to spend more money there as well. So there's a number of areas where CACI is very deep onto the efficiency side of being able to deliver more with less. The last area is around software development.
There's this large story at the federal government campaign by software development. What the federal government finds themselves doing is buying contracted labor to upgrade digital applications in their agency. We have the three largest Agile software development programs across the federal government where we put a contractual structure in place. But if you have 140 applications, you want them updated four or five times each year. That's called spiral development. That's called Agile software development. A lot of those are commercial terms. Two years ago, we trained over 2,000 software engineers inside of CACI to be able to deliver Agile software development to our federal government customer. That's what drives a large Department of Homeland Security program and also led to the large NASA win. So there is a way that the customer can spend less.
We're going to make more because we've shifted more of the risk to us. And the fact that we're willing to sign up to outcome-based delivery models, which says I'm taking on more risk, which means the margin profile should be greater for us than somebody delivering labor hours. And that's good for all parties. And again, we run the three largest Agile software development programs across the federal government. So very much about agility, very much about velocity, quality, and efficiency. There's a lot of agencies out there that are working very, very hard to achieve that.
Okay. Great. I appreciate that. I'm thinking if you want to do a little tour around the world and talk about your business in various geographies and the missions that you're supporting in different geographies, maybe starting with Europe that was in the news quite a bit over this past long weekend. I'm kind of characterizing it as perhaps the United States is beginning to de-emphasize Europe and turning our attention more wholesomely to the homeland as well as the Indo-Pacific Command. So why don't we first talk about what's going on in Europe? What are you doing to support your domestic customer in Europe today? Is there any risk to that business? And then on the flip side, if we're going to de-emphasize that, the Europeans are ramping up spending, is there an opportunity for you to do more work to support our allied nations in Europe?
Yeah. Yeah. A week of some pretty interesting quotes, right? I'm not sure if we're supportive of Europe or not today. I haven't caught the latest week. But at a macro-rational level, are we going to abandon every European country and not deliver defense goods to them? Highly unlikely that's going to happen. So we deliver software-defined technology to the Five Eyes countries today. We deliver to other nations out there. Some we can talk about, a lot we can't because of the nature of what it is and what we do. I think that the biggest threat still remains and has been in the demand signal for what we do is really in Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, those folks who are closer to the current issues in the Ukraine now.
That will continue to be that way where you're selling goods through the federal government or directly through value-added resellers. Now, doing international business is not cheap. So I've talked to them over the last four to six quarters that over time we'll look and put that infrastructure in place. And as we see Europe spending more, there's a lot of coalition forces that do a lot with our Special Operations Command and our Green Army. Are those opportunities for us to sell software-defined technology to those agencies? Absolutely so. And we will continue to do that. They got us a whatever last Thursday's quote was. So in Europe, we're very large, largely engaged across all of the combatant commands today. We have folks there. We kit there.
We have counter-counter UAS systems in the thousands delivered all over this globe to make sure that we prosecute the right kinetic and non-kinetic effects to take the threat of overhead drones away, whether you're in CENTCOM or EUCOM or Indo-PACOM. And soon we'll probably be talking about Iron Dome what we can do within the U.S. as well. So a lot of great kit, a lot of great solutions for us. And yeah, we do deliver it in the European theater. And I strongly believe that in the next three years, we will continue to deliver it regardless of what comes out in another week or so.
Do you need to, in a way, kind of become a domestic provider in Europe or at least from the customer's eyes, become more of a domestic provider? Because I know the Europeans are importing quite a bit today. I think they'd like to stand up an industrial base over there.
Yeah. I think at the scale that we're talking about, most likely not. We've got some surveys in the U.K. and in Australia. So we're able to do software development. We're able to make kit changes that are country-specific there, which, yes, is where countries on the international front would much rather have that work done. So we're able to support that. Again, but we're talking a very de minimis level of revenue today. In the future, if we look at something like Spectral, which is a major Navy surface ship, signals warfare package, there's a lot of surface ships that the U.S. has delivered to many, many nations and some of your larger space and defense companies. Tell about FMS orders where they're able to take the kit they supply the U.S.
I think that market opens up to us in another couple of years once we get to full-rate production. The United States and 80 other countries already that we're speaking with about having us move that technology to them. Again, coalition forces, coalition using the same systems make it easier to go to war or fight that, but there's still a couple of years off.
In a place like Europe, I know you're suggesting it's pretty de minimis today, but do you have a business development team in the region? Is it more you're following your customer and the lead of the FMS?
A lot of it's following the customer, and some of it is VARs. It's the fact that we sell software-defined technology. It's easier for us to sell that to a value-added reseller. We have some kit in Poland. Poland seems to be the centroid for folks that I mentioned earlier. So we will have representations and kit in Poland, and that then sells it to other countries.
Okay. Let's bring it back to this side of the Atlantic and talk a little bit about homeland. So that's another thing that kind of came out here over the last week, less than a week, I guess, is that we're really going to emphasize the homeland. That, of course, starts with the border. That gets brought up quite a bit, I think. And then you mentioned it earlier, Iron Dome. So as you think about, we've got maritime borders. We've got land borders. We've got, I guess, the skies that we're going to be protecting. Just talk a little bit about what you all are doing today and whether you began to see budgets flowing in those directions, whether you will benefit from monies that flow in that direction.
Yeah, so I think if we look at the continental U.S., I believe you'll see NORTHCOM play a much heavier role as it pertains to air defense. We provide counter-UAS systems numbered in the thousands, either platform-based or ground-based or mobile-based. And often lost fact is when you talk about drones, there's Class 1 through 5s. There are Class 1s that are really simple ones. There are the commercial variants all the way up through nation-state Class 5s. We detect all five classes of drones. We provide kinetic and non-kinetic feeds to know all the effects of those drones. And we do that around the globe. We do it in the continental U.S. as well. The difference in the U.S. is there's different laws and regulations and authorities that need to be turned on and off to allow us to protect the continental U.S.
I'm sure when we start talking about Iron Dome, whether it's MDA, United States Air Force, and other folks, and NORTHCOM is potentially the lead agent, we'll be talking about how we work through those authorities to make sure we can better protect borders. There's a lot of unmanned Xs that are uncrewed vehicles out there, whether they're sea-based or air-based or land-based, that at times have. We've all listened to the New Jersey hysteria. Okay. Not everything is most likely false. Probably at least one would be true. It really only takes one event. But we have to recognize in this nation that the attacks are not outside of our borders any longer. And that's not threatening people. That's a fact. Is that there's a lot of incursions that happen in the U.S. with a lot of question marks. I believe that those need to be worked in.
We're that company who provides counter-UAS systems proven for all five classes. So I think the lay down in the U.S. is going to be different. I do think we have a lot of layered defenses today. We have intercontinental ballistic missile force. We talk about the nuclear triad. There's a lot of pieces to this solution. And maybe it's the integration of all of these layers that we're trying to protect that the Iron Dome concept starts to take shape. But don't be mistaken. We will have a role in that because we are in that role today.
Right. For all those that live in New Jersey, I think you should definitely lose some sleep tonight based on what I just heard.
Yeah.
Let's talk a little bit about countermeasures on UAVs because you've brought it up a number of times here. So you seem to be open to talking about it. I think there's maybe some fair amount of confusion in the investment world because we're all relatively laypeople when it comes to this kind of technology. And we hear soundbites all over the place, right? The future of warfare is drones. Hard stuff like manned aircraft are the thing of the past. They're going the way of the dodo. So I would love to get your thoughts on the countermeasures that are available to us today and whether from your perspective, the future of war is necessarily drones. We do have countermeasures. Are we all going to be fighting all of our battles with drones or not if we have these effective countermeasures?
Yeah.
Yeah. That's a mouthful of a question. Let's take them in a couple of smaller pieces.
Great. Unmanned vehicles by their nature are at times a higher threat because there's no onboard pilot. There's no human being on them, right? So different decisions can easily be made. And I'm not advocating one manned versus unmanned. I really don't care. I don't build drones. I don't build fighter jets. So it doesn't really matter to me.
Yeah.
Okay.
What matters to me is when things that are unmanned, uncrewed come into a space and an area of responsibility, how well do we detect them? How far out can we detect them? And then what courses of action do we give to either the base commander or the command commander or the brigade combat team lead to let them know, "Here's what's getting ready to overfly you. And here's kinetic, missile, and then non-kinetic electronic measures that can defeat those drones." For this audience, we're sort of in the wrong room to talk about how many countermeasures the United States has. But it's safe to say we have a plethora of non-kinetic ways that we can defeat drones. So how do we integrate that with kinetic means and providing a bigger ring of coverage that allows us more time to deal with them?
Because they also come en masse. By thousands of these coming at you. When's the last time we fought a thousand fighter jets at the same time? Perhaps never, so there are systems in place. We have solutions for that. It's why we talk about it a lot to the extent that we can, but I do think that the uncrewed vehicle threat is extremely large to us, whether it's an international forward operating base or whether it's here in the domestic U.S., and we have those capabilities fixed, mobile, and on many, many platforms. It's driven by software. It's driven by us talking about electromagnetic spectrum. Everything you have emits a signal, and believe me, when I say there's plenty of systems out there that we deliver that can find every signal there is, and once I hear that signal twice, I know what creates that signal.
And based on that, we understand time and distance and direction of where those are. So a lot of these can't be found by traditional radar. A lot of these can't be found by EO/IR sensors. You've got to have a multitude of different sensors. And you have to be able to handle class one through five because the class ones are not the biggest threat. Two through five are some of the strongest threats we have.
Also significant, I think, to note that none of these systems exist, weapons exist in a vacuum. I mean, these are not, it's not like I'm going to use this instead of that. It makes a really cool soundbite, but it doesn't work that way. The other thing that I think is interesting, if you look back historically, often doctrine and engagement techniques will lag technology by a conflict or two.
Yeah.
So if you think about things like the tank, which was designed and first deployed in World War I to be used as a defensive close quarters trench warfare kind of weapon system. Potential was not really realized until the Germans figured out how to use it in a Blitzkrieg type scenario in the next conflict. So I think there's a lot of evolution and a lot of thinking that has to happen about how we advance the state of unmanned systems, how they relate to other weapon systems, other sensors, and it's a pretty exciting time for us to be in the middle of it.
Yeah. Yeah. And maybe a strong, it's a tough connection, right? What's a government services company talking about counter-drone, right? That's clear indication that we're not a traditional government services contractor, right? 55% of our weapons are driven by delivering outcomes, delivering technology. We can hire a lot of smart people. We can work through this. Software is our superpower. A lot of this works with software. Why is software very important? Because eight years ago, we looked at this company that was 55 years old at the time and said, "Where's this company go next?" Okay. The threat model is going to change by the month, by the day, by the hour, by the sets of four hours.
When the enemy can change their tactics every four hours, does another aircraft carrier built with the same mentality that I'm going to have five or six months to deal with the next threat really hit today's need where drone technology changes every four hours? Highly unlikely. Okay. So how do I get surface ships and tanks and platoon leaders, everybody to get a software over-the-air update similar to your iPhone? Okay. The iPhone model is so overused, but it's the only thing that helps everybody get on a common sheet of paper. Okay. And I often say, when you're at the airport and you're boarding United flight and you go through your boarding pass, you either scan their app. Do you give it 15 seconds or do you give it 15 days to download the next app? You have a tolerance for about 15 seconds. Okay.
That is the pace, and that's the speed at which we can deliver software upgrades to a counter-UAS fight. There's a lot of companies out there, old and new. They're talking about how they've got the greatest solution in the world. But thousands of systems proven is what really makes the difference because you've got to find all of them. You can't find 60% of them. Okay. When you're building a communication system, nobody's going to tolerate, "Please call back later." It has to be resilient. It has to work all the time. So what we've done is taken the best of aerospace and defense companies, process and precision, taken the best of commercial companies, software developments, environments, and how you deliver things in a much more quicker manner, and put that into a company that's got a 62-year track record, understands the mission. It can quickly adapt to that.
That's what the United States government needs. That's what things from DOGE to the new administration are all starting to talk on, is that the other warfare's changes being very, very fast-paced and budgets that are too slow and technology that is too old-fashioned is not going to protect this nation against threats. And that's the summary model that we've been able to do over a number of years. That's what's driven record growth within our company. That's what's allowed us to be resilient regardless of administration changes or Thursday afternoon talks about dropping Europe or Friday morning talks about whatever that happens to be. That's noise in the system. The actual signal is there's a wicked threat out there. And we're one of those few companies that have been on it for a number of years. And they've proven that by the growth that we have experienced.
Yeah. So that's a great segue into the next region of the world, which is the Indo-PACOM, which is where we feel the pacing threat is. So it sounds like in Europe, there's some growth opportunity, particularly on the eastern flank here quite a bit to help protect the homeland, Iron Dome, borders, UAVs. Let's go to Asia-Pacific now and talk a little bit about what you're doing to support your customer there.
It's still another space where we have to characterize the electromagnetic spectrum and understand how do we find things. You can't site radars and you can't site a lot of things on chains of islands. Some countries that we have relationships with, a lot of them that we don't. Some that Chinese have already invested in and we're slightly behind that. How do we get the right relationships there? The one thing that's amazing about electromagnetic spectrum is you can pick up signals from far away. You don't have to have something right there, right? It's not like somebody has a set of binoculars and a set of headphones, right? How do you characterize the threat there? The other threat in Indo-PACOM is going to be satellite-based, right?
So how do you—what happens when countries today can fly a drone by a joystick and tomorrow they feed it the coordinates so it's "dark" the entire time it's flying? What if they feed it with a satellite signal? Then how do we get into that link and how do we disrupt that? It's the tyranny of distance in the Indo-PACOM region. It's a massively large area for us to cover. So we're working with all the combatant commands, including Indo-PACOM. We'll talk about where do we site some of these? How do we build the most resilient networks, Navy, Air Force networks, both enterprise IT ones and those that carry everything from unclassified data to top secret data? How do we provide resilient networks either over land or over undersea cable or satellite-wise? How do we build these networks so that resiliently we get information out?
The tyranny of distance and we're down the logistics chain as to how do we get logistically through all those islands and how do we get attack ships through a lot of these waterways that are very easily monitorable from space, so how do we work on some of those counter issues as well, so a very difficult problem, and it's an area we believe that counter-UAS is going to be needed, and any way to software-wise assess the electromagnetic spectrum, make certain that we own that space.
And that obviously also makes it an ideal environment for our Spectral system and the great success we're having there and our recent acquisition of Azure Summit, which you're aware of, where we've really proceeded ahead of schedule in the integration and the program acceleration that it's been able to bring. It's really been a great story. Financially and strategically, a really important advance for us in the last couple of quarters.
Right. Right. Okay. Great. I'm going to open up the floor, open it up to the floor in just a minute. I want to get one more question in, and then we'll go to the floor, and I'll come back and have one last question. I think that we'll have enough time to do all of that in nine minutes.
The evolving ecosystem that we have in the industry, we've got venture capitalists that have decided that defense is cool, and there have been a lot of companies that have received some decent funding. We've got some companies that are having some commercial success, right? Winning some decent-sized contracts. Just kind of curious how you view the ecosystem and the evolution of it and whether some of these VC-backed companies represent potential competition partners, potential acquisition targets.
I'm just kind of curious how you are viewing this evolving system and your capital deployment decisions that go along with that?
Yeah. So I don't know. You all may know this. 10, 12, 14, 18, 20 thousand companies do business with the federal government. So would an extra couple of them help? Most likely, yes. Can we debate the usefulness of whoever comes into marketplace? Absolutely so. A lot of companies that are out there, we are competitive mates with. Sometimes we compete, sometimes we mate, and we partner, right, based on what the customer is asking for. We enjoy investing ahead of a customer need because we've been in the market for so long to help customers understand the art of the possible. Because there are many customer sectors that ask for things the way they ask for them because they don't know the art of the possible. Okay.
We invest a lot of our own dollars ahead of need, not only to build a relationship, but actually technologically tell them, "Here's the art of the possible." I don't think there's anything that can defeat drones. There actually is. Here's the systems. This is a classification level you need to have to understand how those work. Here's another customer you should go meeting with that usually connects to reuse across the federal government and some pretty eye-watering technology that supports some of those markets. We're the fair market system. We're in a democracy. There should be companies that want to enter any market. Is it alarming for us? No. Does it happen every week? Yes. Does the customer change their mind a lot? Yes. Have we already built a company now within the last eight years out of our 64-year history that's very resilient?
It's picked the best from what aerospace and defense and commercial companies offer with a strong six-decade understanding of mission? Yeah. So there's not so much new, new out there we have to go create. That's probably different than the audio track is. It usually is. Like we're leaving Europe next Wednesday, and we're never going to come back and work with them again. But at the end of the day, is an industry better with more companies or less? I would say more. It pushes out everybody, right? The only difference people have to recognize is there's not the new DIB and the old DIB. There's a compliant DIB, and there's a non-compliant DIB. There's a lot of people who've delivered decades and understand what it means to not have a signal dropped, okay?
It's either DIB or it was a defense industrial.
Defense industrial base. I think you got it.
I mean, there's a lot of people who understand what the mission is. So when the customer says, "This can never fail," that is not a commercial term. That is a military life-or-death defense term. Not to fight anybody, but if your son or daughter or niece or nephew is out there and they've got one shot to get a call to get out of where they're at, a busy signal is not an alternative. It's not a funny event. It's not a financial hit event. It's a life-or-death event. So we can keep talking through this and having these great, wonderful discussions. At the end of the day, has a company delivered in thousands and in mass things that already work, have the relativity of the mission, understand all the mission requirements? Perhaps so.
And if so, we would love that, right? And I think any company coming new into the space would like to have relationships as well. So there's a magical moment we're in where we seem to be talking at a very small subset of companies. I think it's great that additional money's coming in. The nation needs it. We all live under the same flag. So is that a threat? No. Is it an additional promise? Yes. Is there plenty of market share to go around to deliver more efficient means to the federal government? We're one of those companies that have been talking about that for eight years now, that there should be a more effective way for our customer. Most of that starts on the Hill as to how funds are appropriated and to what legal limits combatant commanders can go and get things funded.
And the second thing I think this administration is trying to get their hands around is how many people does it take to approve something? Okay. And I do think in a public company, in a private company, the more people you have, the more layers you have, the tougher it is to get things done. So a commercial model and a corporate model of how the government could potentially work is worth some pretty good study. Okay. It sure is worth more study than a 140-year-old person getting an extra Social Security check. Okay. Great sound bite, I'm not sure that's what we're looking for, but we're looking at more efficient ways to protect this nation. So is there room for everybody in the marketplace? Yes. Do we welcome that? Absolutely.
Perfect. Good answer. Is it okay if I go to the floor?
Sure. Yeah. Want to leave?
Thanks for doing this really interesting conversation so far. Sure. Two quick questions. One, I'd like to go back to you for just a moment and to your comment about the signal versus the noise. It would seem to me that the signal is over the coming years, European defense spending is probably going up.
Correct.
There are things like tanks, which are potentially substitutable. Do I buy them here? Maybe not tanks as an example. There's a variety of things. Do I buy them from American companies? Do I buy them from European companies? When I think about what you guys do and the way and the products and services you sell, is there a differential competitive environment from some elements that might be able to say, "No, no, we want to buy that domestically," versus, "No, no, we have to go to these guys"?
Yeah. I think on a platform basis, you should see us as the mission systems provider. What solutions, what technology goes into those platforms that allows you to interoperate? And our specialty is electronic warfare. So if you're looking to fight a munition, you probably won't come to us. If you want to understand where that target is and it squeaks any bit of electricity at all, then you're probably going to want us to tell you exactly where to lock on target. So I think it depends what they're looking to buy that really puts us into that fight versus not. At the other level is on the coalition level of nations working and operating with each other. That's an area that we're very uniquely differentiate as to how we make certain we have systems that we can use in the U.S. and our soldiers can use it.
But in some areas, they can't be as advanced, but they have to also interoperate. That is why software and the government is so important in the national security space to be able to have the same hardware kit but have a different version of software so that some level you can interoperate. But then the U.S. force is probably going to have a couple more features with it that someone else's isn't. That's where the importance of why software as our superpower is very important. That's kind of the role we would have.
I think that you don't mind the second question. I think that there is obviously concern in the market about DOGE and the implications of spending on you guys. Just to flesh that out further, when you think about not just what a 140-year-old getting Social Security or whatever, but when we think about the next two, three, four years, are there places where you could legitimately see risk? Or is it really when you look at it, you're like, "Yes, I get it. I get that you want to save money, but this just isn't"? Are people just getting it wrong? Maybe is a better way to say it. With respect to you guys.
Yeah. With respect to us, I can confidently say that we haven't changed one strategy or one tactical operating measure within the company. Okay. We haven't seen one thing that would cause us to say, "Boy, that gives us pause. We ought to really look deeply at that." Because what's actually being said is fraud, waste, and abuse is bad. None of us disagree fraud, waste, and abuse is bad. It probably takes more than a couple of weeks to find it all. Okay. I think we're making a large deal out of some minor fines. Okay. And then we're debating who has the power to do this and that. We're already into the solve. I think it's unrealistic to think we spend $3-$4 trillion and not somewhere now to spend it on the right thing. So fully supportive of that.
Where we look forward to the positive side of this is if we can get even a fractional amount of fraud, waste, and abuse, or just things that government doesn't really need when they're asked, "Okay. If you could pick between five things, you can buy three. What are the most important three things?" I think that's healthy. I think that's a healthy way to do the same exact questions internally. And we see far more upside there because of what we deliver than what other people deliver. Okay. 45% of our revenue is delivering people. But when you break that down, the majority of that is not on time and material programs. It's on cost- plus and fixed unit price contracts. We're delivering high-end cyber expertise. We're delivering intelligence analysts who are bringing technology with them so we can process more information.
That's not providing 25 people to process student loans. Okay. Just the nature of those two different things are very, very different. And frankly, national security is a bipartisan event, right? It's highly supported by both parties. And that's why 90% of our revenue intentionally comes from national security missions because those are going to be much better funded as we go forward. That's what differentiates us.
Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah. One last question.
We have one over here.
Okay. Great.
Thank you. So switching from the DOGE to just federal government spending generally, which seems to be a different issue. If we went into an environment like we saw in the last few years of Obama's term, 2010 to 2012, would you still be as confident that your business would not be impacted?
Yeah. Let me tell you why. Because we did live through 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, right? That's where we all learned how to spell sequestration. We understood what it meant. Some customers thought it meant, "I'm not going to believe that. I got plenty of money to spend. I got to end of the year and have money," right? Other ones, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and then you get to spend as much, right? Everybody's learning as we're going along. But in this company, at the same time, we were coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan as well. So this company's individual position was that we had a lot of pass-through sales that were going to end. Okay. So not only did sequestration hit, also the war ended. So we needed better value-added revenue that we were going to add to this company.
Because we're a highly acquisitive company, we were able to build a technology bench sooner than most because we purchased 80 or 90 companies up to this point in the last 60 years. So we built a great technology base, and we used our past performance and the knowledge of customers knowing that when we put a bid on the table, we're going to support it, and we're going to deliver. And that plus delivery is something that's one or two degrees off from what we always have was highly regarded and quickly accepted. So that put us in a very different position. So if things go back to that, what else we did is about 30%. I'm sorry, 80% of our revenue was based on delivering labor hours. That's down to 45%. And that 45%, that is covered.
At least half of that is covered in very high-end, high-margin areas where we differentiate because there's not a lot of companies that do what it is we need to. So the protections that we put in place and the intentional moves that we've made to better position this company in a software-based world where the threats are going to change, we are exquisitely placed in the government services space to be successful. I just see so much upside when I hear about efficiency and delivering more with less.
Okay. Last one, really quick.
You mentioned the eight years ago and the things that you did. Let's talk about the next 10. And this is kind of like your opportunity to give the investment thesis, drop the mic off the stage kind of thing here. But what are the next 10? What are you doing now to position the company for the next 10 years? What gets you excited here for guys that are looking to invest for a five-year time horizon?
Yeah. We think the most ultimate financial measure is free cash flow and free cash flow per share. And that's what we're focused on. Some element of cash flow is in every one of our metrics, anybody in our bonus pool or in our long-term incentive comp plan. So we believe that's the ultimate financial metric, and that's what we're ultimately focused on. Flexible and opportunistic capital deployment. You should see much more flexibility and much more opportunistic spend. We were always an M&A long-term company always. And the last n number of years, 8 to 10 years, we've done 12 acquisitions and done 11 stock purchases, something like that. Is it going to be balanced? No. It shouldn't be balanced. It should be opportunistic and highly flexible. We'll be back to a nearly $600 share stock price. We're well on our way to our three-year estimate.
And oddly enough, through all of this discussion about DOGE and the administration and all, oddly that during both quarters, we were all being told about it. We raised guidance. We issued brand new three-year targets that were higher at our investor day just before the election. We didn't say, "Let's not do that. Let's wait for a year to the new administration." We're confident in the strategy we have that is very resilient because 90% of it is national security based. At the end of the day, what you hear in the press is different than how people actually act. It's a very bipartisan budget, and it will get passed.
Wherever we spend time today, we're going to have to go talking about potential $325 billion of additional spend in FY25 as part of some form of a reconciliation bill that puts $150 billion more towards defense than $175 billion. When I look at where the stock price has moved in the last 39 days, who's watching? I am. At the end of the day, you want us to focus on what strategically we need to do to continue to drive this company forward. The answer is we're doing exactly what we have done because that's what works. That's what drove a beat and raise in the first two quarters. It's going to drive a highly successful FY25. Our '26 starts on July 1. We're already doing planning. We've done every black swan event you can potentially imagine.
At the end of the day, the world's a dangerous place. It's going to continue to be a dangerous place. And that company in the government services space has differentiated itself year over year. Whether it's top-line growth or bottom-line margin improvement and driving free cash flow per share is the company that I'm extremely honored to be leading. And we're going to continue to do that. And we'll get through all the near-term noise and point the signals. And we'll continue to be there when this fight is moved on.
Our three-year high single-digit growth rate top line, mid-11s EBITDA margin, and $1.6 billion of free cash flow, none of which is reflected in those two metrics I said at the beginning of the sentence. We're very happy with where we are.
Yeah.
Awesome. Thank you all, particularly those sticking around in the audience for joining us today. Really appreciate it.