By Bret Frederick
When I was a young Marine, I worked as a systems administrator on the Marine Corp’s air battle planning system. It was part of a complex command-and-control network that connected four major systems: one for future operations and planning, one for intelligence, one for air control, and one for assessing how each mission performed.
We would use the platform to plan the next air tasking order — which missions would be executed, which aircraft would be involved, and how intel from previous operations fed back into the next cycle. It was a full loop: gather intel, plan, execute, assess, repeat.
The Importance of Seeing the Full Picture
I’ll never forget one exercise in Korea. It was freezing cold, everything coated in frost, and our colonel was frustrated. He couldn’t see the full picture. He wanted to know: What’s the intel look like? What’s being planned? What’s happening right now?
Each answer lived in a different database, managed by a different team. To get an update, he had to go cell to cell, pulling fragments of data and trying to piece together what was going on.
He was right. There was no single view. No dashboard. Just fragments of data.
At the time, I had just come out of UNIX school, and HTTP, HTML, and NCSA MOSAIC (remember those days?) was brand new. So, I decided to build something with the tools I had at my disposal. I pulled together data from those four systems and created a simple web page — nothing fancy, just tables and text. But it showed the full picture on one screen.
We hooked it up to big TVs in the operations center, and for the first time, we could see everything at once, including future plans, current operations, and assessments all in one place. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.
The colonel was thrilled. It gave him a capability he’d never had before — situational awareness at a glance.
And for me, that moment stuck. I realized how powerful it was to build something that directly impacted the mission, using whatever tools were available.
The Lesson: Innovation Must Serve the Mission
That experience shaped my philosophy on technology: innovation only matters if it drives mission outcomes. That belief is at the core of how we approach every project at PVM today.
Working with platforms like Palantir Foundry, I see that same spirit of innovation, the ability to connect data, eliminate silos, and give decision-makers real-time visibility to move the mission forward.
Back then, it took me days of manual scripting and HTML to stitch systems together. Now, we can deliver that same kind of capability — and more — in minutes.
How PVM Carries That Forward
That’s what excites me most about what we do today. The mission hasn’t changed — it’s still about clarity, speed, and impact, helping leaders see the full picture so they can act with confidence.
Our job isn’t to chase innovation for its own sake. It’s to harness platforms like Palantir Foundry to deliver the same kind of clarity and speed I was trying to build in that freezing tent in Korea, just now at scale, across entire missions and agencies.
That’s the continuity — from a young Marine writing his first dashboard to deploying AI-enabled solutions that drive decisions today. The technology has evolved, but the purpose hasn’t: use innovation to serve the mission, not the other way around.
Bret Frederick
