David Heist

David Heist is the Chief Strategy Officer  for GALT Aerospace and is continually searching for opportunities to help our customers communications and command and control needs. He has vast experience across the Joint defense sphere and across the commercial defense industry. David “SAL” Heist began his career as an Air Force Air Battle Manager. During his 22-year career he was an operator and leader on the US Air Force’s JSTARS and AWACS aircraft. In addition, he has vast staff management experience across NATO, COCOMs and the Headquarters Air Force. David also has extensive test and evaluation and program management experience with JSTARS and the AOC WS as well as excelled as a NATO C2ISR Think Tank lead. He developed the initial concepts of operations for JSTARS employment and then later commanded a JSTARS flying squadron. In addition, he managed the entire Joint Force’s AOC Enterprise across the 5 geographic and 6 functional AOCs. His last assignment in the Air Force was to lead the Future Operations Cell of USNORTHCOM. In this capacity, he led a team of 35 members in real-world defense support to civil authorities for events ranging from Super Bowls to support to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Previously, for the past 3.5 years, as the Director of Growth and Business Development for GALT, David led our Business Development efforts and managed the relationships across the Joint Force, Interagency and corporate partners growing our company from $4M to $12M in annual revenue.

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Education:

M.S.I. National Defense Intelligence University, Strategic Intelligence

M.S. Embry Riddle University, Aviation Management       

B.A. University of Arizona, Human Geography