PICATINNY ARSENAL, N.J. – As a young civilian engineer for the U.S. Army, Donald E. Carlucci was feeling puzzled and disheartened. His structural analysis of an experimental artillery projectile predicted that it would fail and break apart during testing. Yet it wasn’t happening.
Carlucci sought out someone with more experience. “I went to one of my mentors, Bill DeMassi, and said, ‘Bill, I don't know what's happening, but something must be wrong. I'm showing the projectile breaking up in my analysis and yet we're firing and everything's working well.’ "
Wait a few weeks, DeMassi replied, and the analysis will prove true. “Sure enough, in about a month or so, we started to have failures, and we started to see it fail in just the way the model was predicting,” Carlucci recalls. “His point was that the conditions just weren't exactly what I had modeled. I was predicting something that was possibly going to happen, but the stars didn't line up like my analysis.”
Over the years, Carlucci was able to pass on to young engineers that lesson and many more that he absorbed as he moved up the management ladder. Today, Carlucci has achieved some significant career milestones, placing him in a unique position to help shape the development and education of engineers at one of the U.S. Army’s vital research facilities.
The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Armaments Center plays a unique role in the research and development of armaments. It provides the technology for more than 90 percent of the Army’s lethality, with a focus on advanced weapons, ammunition, and fire-control systems.
“It's just amazing, historically, what innovations have come out of this place and what's coming out of it now every day,” Carlucci said. “It never ceases to amaze me.”
The mission of the DEVCOM Armaments Center, which is focuses on addressing current and future battlefield needs, take on an added significance at a time of rapid technological changes, shifting geopolitical challenges and the need for greater battlefield agility.
Carlucci currently serves as Senior Research Scientist for Computational Structural Modeling at the Armaments Center. The federal civil service designation for such a senior level scientific professional is known as an ST.
The ST designation covers non-executive positions above the GS-15 level, and it is reserved for technical personnel who perform high-level research and developmental work in the physical, biological, medical or engineering sciences. Many of the federal government's most renowned scientists and engineers serve in ST positions.
Among his duties, Carlucci serves as the U.S. Army’s chief scientist for the modeling of all gun and projectile systems at the Armaments Center. He is the Army's foremost expert in computational modeling of gun-launched structures and plays a role in technological decisions on Army investments from basic research through production and fielding.
In fiscal year 2022, Carlucci was named a recipient of the Presidential Rank Award, a prestigious award presented to a distinct group of federal executives and senior professionals for their extraordinary work over an extended number of years.
“It is really easy to excel at your job when you love it,” Carlucci said shortly after the award recipients were named. ”I love my job. I get to work with amazingly talented people on cutting edge projects that protect our Soldiers. No two days are the same and the challenges keep coming.”
MECHANICAL DRAWING AS SPRINGBOARD
Carlucci grew up in the Northern New Jersey community of Towaco, where his father’s machine shop gave him a familiarity and solid grounding on how to make things.
“I have always been interested in engineering and military equipment since I was a child,” he said. “I would spend hours in my parent’s basement either building models of ships, tanks, planes, whatever, or playing wargames. I was an absolute geek.”
In high school, Carlucci had a strong interest in mechanical drawing and took classes for four years. Over the years, he was able to leverage that attraction and skill into various jobs, while also keeping pace as technology evolved in the form of computer-aided design and drafting tools, such as AutoCAD.
“Since I was really into drafting, in my senior year my drafting teacher in high school got me a job as a draftsman at a company in Fairfield, New Jersey, called Titanium Industries. I worked there my senior year and the summer before I went off to New Jersey Institute of Technology.”
As a student at NJIT, Carlucci worked multiple part-time jobs, such as designing slide bearings, inspecting aircraft instruments, and working in the quality assurance department at Hoyt Corp. “Hoyt hired me full time and I finished up my undergraduate degree at night. After graduation, I worked at Hoyt for a year and learned AutoCAD.
”The work I was doing at Hoyt did not really excite me and my old boss from Titanium Industries called me and said that they were transitioning from the drafting tables to CAD. He offered me a position there, so I went,” Carlucci said. ”I worked there designing pressure vessels, which was fun but it settled into a routine. I was there for a little more than a year when the opportunity came up to work here at Picatinny.”
At a Picatinny Arsenal job fair, managers Bob Reisman and Carmine Spinelli offered Carlucci a job. “I jumped on it and never looked back,” he said. ”So coming here, and all the rest that happened was, I guess, meant to be.”
Carlucci’s first assignment was working on the Sense and Destroy Armor (SADARM) program. SADARM is a "smart" artillery submunition designed for precision engagement of self-propelled howitzers as well as other lightly armored vehicles. Carlucci was the lead for the submunition.
“During the SADARM program an interesting problem came up where the submunitions were colliding upon exit from the projectile,” Carlucci remembers. “This was so interesting. I decided to look into it and do a Ph.D. dissertation. The program was very supportive, but it was still a lot of work.
“There were times when I didn’t think I was going to finish. It was my wife, Peggie, who kicked me in the rear end and made me keep going. I am so happy that I did it. It opened many doors for me.”
While working on SADARM, Carlucci persuaded a manager to purchase a SGI Silicon Graphics workstation for the division as a way to get on board with the growing transition into computer-aided design. He remembers that many of the newly hired college grads lacked any experience in manufacturing. “And so I taught a bunch of them what to do in an engineering sense,” Carlucci said. “We eventually all ended up sharing the machine.”
Over time, a core group of people learned to perform structural modeling, which evolved into a branch and then a division of which Carlucci would become its chief. After SADARM, structural modeling was also used to support a program called Excalibur, a longer-range alternative to conventional artillery shells with GPS guidance for improved accuracy.
Carlucci was brought into the Excalibur program as the Chief Scientist. Later, he became chief of the Analysis and Evaluation Technology Division in Fuze and Precision Armaments Directorate.
“We ended up getting really good at it,” Carlucci said of the computational modeling work at the Armaments Center. “And over time, when Joe Lannon became the director here, he said, ‘I think we need an ST for computational structural modeling, so we're going to put in for it.’"
When the new position was approved, Carlucci applied for the job. His ardent enthusiasm for drafting, dating back to high school, and later its digital equivalent, paid off when he landed the position. ”All the people I had trained in my old division now are running all over the place at the Armaments Center,” he said. “I'm really pleased that a lot of them have made their way up the ladder.”
ESTEEMED MENTORS
Looking back on his early career, Carlucci acknowledges that he had much to learn himself, and was fortunate to receive the wisdom and guidance of seasoned leaders.
“I never had a supervisor that was not supportive. Everyone I had exhibited an awesome balance of technical prowess and supervisory skills,” Carlucci said. “I really think that it is difficult to be a good supervisor of engineers if you don’t exhibit both.”
One of his early errors as a supervisor, Carlucci said, was expecting people to do things the way that he would have done them. “If they didn’t, I would correct things. I would tell them about it and next time they did it the same as I would have.
“But one of my mentors, Bob Pellen, pointed two things out to me: I was doing their work for them when I should have been spending my time doing more important stuff. Also, I was robbing them of the opportunity to learn. So I adjusted to providing broad guidance only, and just being there for them when they had questions that they couldn’t answer.
“Since then, I now listen quietly more and only speak when it is necessary to inform people of why a proposed course of action might not work, or offer suggestions as to what might be improved.”
Carlucci places considerable value on the ability to listen deeply, pondering other viewpoints, evaluating their implications.
“You can always learn something from anybody, no matter what their position, rank, or years of experience. We work with other human beings, so always be respectful, even if you have radically different views. Listen. You may think that you know it all, but there are people here who either see, or have seen things, that you have not. Take in what they are saying and either prove or disprove it by some analytic means. It will save you from headaches.”
To engineers early in their careers, Carlucci offers simple advice. “This will sound corny but just do what is right. If you can go home every day knowing that you did the best that you could for the Soldier and the country, it was a good day.Another thing is not be afraid to call out something that is wrong.
“Dissenting opinions give decision makers the full picture and help guide the good leaders to the proper course of action,” Carlucci said. “Don’t ever think that your view doesn’t matter. You may see something that others don’t. Some of the best leaders I’ve known always listened to what everyone had to say and then made a decision. If it went against someone’s advice or opinion, they explained their reasoning.”
Throughout his career, Carlucci has been involved in and observed many projects, thus shaping his perspective on the drawbacks of attempting to deliver products before they are ready to be fielded widely.
“When a program is driven solely by schedule, it is doomed to fail,” he said. “Schedule is very important, and we should do things as fast as possible, but pausing to think and make sure that we are not overlooking anything is vitally important. Doing calculations and reviewing them is cheap compared to failure in tests. Starting with an unrealistic schedule just because someone wants it that way never, ever works. If we are realistic, not conservative mind you, but realistic, things always work out.”
CREATING A UNIQUE SCHOOL
In 2010, Carlucci was summoned to the office John Hedderich, then director of the Munitions Engineering and Technology Center (METC). He shared his vision of a school that would provide specialized education in armaments engineering, not only way to bolter academic knowledge, but also as a resource to capture existing and valuable employee knowledge.
Hedderich was also concerned that, with retirements and other losses to the workforce, valuable expertise was slipping away at a faster rate than it took to fully train replacements. Also, the top subject-matter experts remaining at the Armaments Center, a vast reservoir of knowledge, didn’t have the time each day to train people.
“I suggested developing a highly specialized curriculum along the lines of the Navy’s Nuclear Power School, where we would have a rigorous program and our graduates would be the best engineers of armaments in the world,” Carlucci remembers. “John agreed and we set out building it.”
What followed were internal surveys seeking a suggested curriculum for such a school, along with “sensing” sessions with groups that included supervisors, new employees and senior leaders. “We rolled it all up,” Carlucci remembers. “At that point, Dr. Kenneth Short came onboard. Together, we gathered a faculty and had them refine and further develop the curriculum.
“We discovered that we could not make specialized curricula for things like a warheads engineer, so we decided to offer one, generalized Armaments Engineering degree,” he added. “It probably was the best decision we ever made.”
Along with Carlucci, others such as Short, Joe Shiposh and Donna Sampson set about learning how to get the school recognized by the Army, which not only supported the idea but also helped to further the school’s existence by persuading Congress to pass a bill authorizing the school.
“The title of Chancellor was given to me when the bill got passed and Dr. Short became the Provost right afterwards,” Carlucci said. To date, the Armament Graduate School has produced two graduates with Ph.Ds and 40 with master’s degrees.
The school also serves to ensure that the Army has a steady growing base of employees with advanced knowledge in the vital field of armaments engineering and development. For several years, the school has been seeking accreditation and is getting increasingly closer to that goal.
By all measures, Carlucci has enjoyed a fruitful and rewarding career, yet he would do certain things differently if he could turn back the clock.
“I would have probably done less business travel,” he said. “When I was younger and my kids were growing up, I missed a lot of baseball games, cub scout trips—things like that. So I always try to encourage people ‘not to do what I did’ in that regard.
“Dedication to the job is one thing, but there is such a thing as too much. It was extra hard for me because I enjoy this work so much. I am looking forward to ‘making up for it’ when I have grandchildren Here’s hoping!”
Carlucci will have an opportunity to adjust his focus to allow for more time with family. He has a new granddaughter, who will celebrate her first birthday in April.
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