Summary
Dr. Jeffry Heggemeier has spent his adult life at the intersection of the laboratory and the battlefield. A colonel in the New Mexico Air National Guard and Vice President and General Manager – Delivery Vehicle Programs at Oshkosh Defense, he built the MAX POWER electromagnetic IED-defeat system during some of the bloodiest years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He deployed it to Helmand Province himself, watched the rules of engagement cost a Marine his feet, and went to work for the company that built the truck he’d trusted his life to. What connects the Air Force Research Lab in Kirtland, New Mexico, to the design floors of Oshkosh Defense is not a career pivot. It’s one continuous mission.
The roof of the container unit at Camp Leatherneck was the wrong place to be standing in September 2012.
Jeff Heggemeier was one week in-country when the Taliban launched a coordinated attack on the base. Apache helicopters were firing into the perimeter. Fuel depots along the flight line were exploding in sequence. Sirens were going. He stood on that roof and watched eight aircraft get destroyed while the smell of burning fuel moved through the dark.
Three years earlier he’d been in a laboratory in New Mexico, trying to convince somebody to give him twenty million dollars to build a weapon that would stop IEDs from killing Marines. Now he was on a roof in Helmand watching the base he’d just arrived at take direct fire.
He didn’t come home from that roof. He went to work.
The Flight Line
Some people discover service. Jeff Heggemeier was raised inside it.
His father was an Air Force officer, and some of his earliest memories are standing on the flight line as a small boy, watching aircraft take off and land. Not as a spectator. As a kid who was already being shaped by proximity to something larger than himself. “That definitely had a pretty profound impact on me growing up,” he says. “It created this sense of service, this sense of giving back to our country.” He has a long family history of military service running through his relatives and his ancestors. His great-uncle, Paul Heggemeier, served in the Army Air Corps in the Philippines in 1941. When the Japanese invaded, Paul fought back. He survived the Bataan Death March. He died in a POW camp. His name carried forward anyway. Paul became a middle name passed down through three generations: to his great-nephew, then to his great-nephew’s father, and then to his firstborn son. By the time he arrived in college, already enrolled in ROTC with the Air Force paying his tuition, the question was never whether he’d serve. It was for how long.
The answer turned out to be across all three components of the U.S. Air Force. Four years of active duty. Eight years in the Reserves. Then the Air National Guard, where he serves today as a Colonel and Deputy Wing Commander for the 150th Special Operations Wing in New Mexico. He’s approaching 24 years of continuous service. He has a wife and four kids. He flies himself to Albuquerque once a month on his own ticket. Nobody reimburses him for it.
“It’s hard,�� he says. “It’s hard to balance both of those. It’s also hard to balance that and make sure that I’m spending the time with my family that I know I need to spend with them. Two of my kids are still in middle school.”
“I look at the unit that I’m in, and my ability to continue to contribute to that. That’s why I continue to do it. I know there’s still a role for me there.”
He flies to Albuquerque on his own ticket. Nobody sends him. Nobody pays him back. He could step away entirely and nobody could say he hadn’t already given enough.
He pauses before he answers why. “But I look at the unit that I’m in, and my ability to continue to contribute to that. That’s why I continue to do it. I know there’s still a role for me there.”
He doesn’t make much money in the Guard anymore. That detail is not incidental. He puts it out there himself, almost as a way of closing a question before you can ask it. He’s not there for the money. He never was.
The parallel track was the science. He studied physics at the University of St. Thomas and then pursued a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota, not after his military career was established but during it. Most people choose one or the other. Heggemeier shrugs at the question of how. “I knew those two little letters in front of your name open doors,” he says. “Not that it makes you smarter or more capable. It just opens doors.” He wanted the doors. He took the coursework. He kept showing up in uniform. He did both.
He’ll also tell you, if you ask, that he didn’t start out thinking of himself as a leader. He liked the lab. He liked the technical work. “I didn’t really feel like the leadership path was for me,” he says. “But as I grew and matured, I found that I had a natural affinity for leading people.” He learned that the skill set was different from anything science had taught him, that it required understanding people in ways he had to actively work at, and that once he had it, it helped him accomplish things the lab alone never could have.
The doctorate. The uniform. The leadership he had to earn instead of inherit. These things built each other.
Two and a Half Years
By the early 2000s, two-thirds of all American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were being caused by improvised explosive devices. More than 3,100 dead. Thirty-three thousand wounded. Jeff Heggemeier was sitting in a laboratory at the Air Force Research Lab in Kirtland, New Mexico, and he believed he had something that could change those numbers.
Nobody would give him the money to build it.
“It took me two and a half years to convince somebody,” he says. “Two and a half years of a lot of traveling around the country, a lot of time in DC, trying to convince people that this would work.” The casualty counts kept climbing while he made his case. He understands, in retrospect, why it was so hard. There was serious money flowing into the IED-defeat space at the time, which meant there were people selling technologies and making promises, and the officials making decisions couldn’t always separate what was real from what was noise. “There was probably some reluctance,” he says, “because you can have the best technology in the world, but if you can’t actually use it in the operational environment, it’s worthless.”
He kept going. He understood the operational environment because he’d been in it. He’d worn the uniform. He could talk about how a system would actually function in combat, not just in theory, and that mattered because most scientists who brought technology proposals to the Pentagon couldn’t. “It’s both the technology and the ability to use it in that environment,” he says, “that make it valuable.”
In 2007, the worst year for American casualties in the entire war, JIEDDO, the Joint IED Defeat Organization, gave him twenty million dollars.
“When we got the money, that’s when it all really started. And that was when the casualties were at their highest.”
He had spent two and a half years being told no while the numbers climbed. The grant wasn’t a finish line. It was a starting gun on the worst possible timeline.
“When we got the money, that’s when it all really started,” he says. “And that was when the casualties were at their highest.” There is nothing triumphant in the way he says it. He got the grant on the bloodiest timeline possible. The clock was not hypothetical.
A Sawzall at Midnight
They called it MAX POWER, and in the summer of 2007, after weeks of 18-hour days and four million dollars invested, it was producing nothing.
Heggemeier had fired up the magnetrons, the core components of the system, and gotten zero power output. The equipment was sophisticated, expensive, and completely inert. The team had been treating it the way scientists treat things that cost four million dollars: carefully, methodically, with deep respect for the hardware. They were analyzing it. They were studying it. None of it was working.
“It was a little scary that we’d invested this much money and it wasn’t doing what we thought it would do,” he says. “But it was also a challenge. And I like solving problems.”
He read the data. The data said the system needed to be physically opened. Not disassembled by engineers with proper tools and proper procedure. Cut open by a machinist with a Sawzall. In the middle of the night, specifically so the scientists who might panic at watching four million dollars worth of equipment get cut apart wouldn’t be standing there watching it.
“The data showed that we needed to cut the thing apart. I didn’t want everybody else to watch and freak out about it.”
He didn’t call a meeting. He didn’t run it up the chain. He called a machinist.
He called a machinist named Guill Marez. “The data showed that we needed to cut the thing apart,” he says. “I didn’t want everybody else to watch and freak out about it.” So he had Marez do it at night. The machinist cut it open. The fix worked.
There is something in that decision that defines Jeff Heggemeier entirely, and it isn’t the boldness. It’s the clarity. He didn’t do it to be a cowboy. He did it because the data pointed there and he followed the data, and he understood intuitively that a machinist with a Sawzall at 2 a.m. was the right tool for what the data was describing. The PhD physicist who trusts a machinist over a committee is not reckless. He’s just paying attention.
Two more weeks of 18-hour days after that, and MAX POWER was alive. The real work was about to begin.
Dover
The plane carrying Dr. Heggemeier and his team made a stop at Dover Air Force Base before continuing to Afghanistan. Another plane was on the tarmac.
It was carrying two U.S. Army Rangers. The transfer cases came off draped in flags. The families were there. The uniformed escorts stood at attention. The ceremony was quiet and precise in the way military ceremony is always quiet and precise, a formality that contains enormous grief and demands that grief remain composed. Heggemeier walked out and stood there and watched all of it.
Then he got back on his plane and flew to Afghanistan.
“It really hit the whole team that what we were doing was real.”
Nobody spoke on the walk back to the plane. There wasn’t anything to say. The tarmac had said it.
“It really hit the whole team,” he says. “What we were doing was real.” Guill Marez had been on two combat deployments before this one. He knew what he was walking into. For the rest of them, this was a first deployment, and they thought they understood the stakes until they were standing on that tarmac with those families, and then they understood differently. The weight of what they were carrying on that plane, the years of work, the twenty million dollars, the magnetrons that almost failed, all of it, settled into something new. Not pressure. Responsibility.
“It was definitely a turning point,” Heggemeier says. “Not just in terms of what potential impact we could have. But also what the risk was that we were taking.” He had spent three years building something specifically designed to prevent the ceremony he’d just watched. He was carrying it on that plane. There were more families like those behind him. He didn’t know yet how many roads he’d drive. He knew he wasn’t getting off the plane.
Helmand
He went on thirteen missions with frontline Marine units during those hundred days in Helmand. On every single mission where MAX POWER was deployed and fully engaged, not a single IED detonated.
The problem with that kind of success is that it produces silence, and silence doesn’t survive a Pentagon briefing. “Dead IEDs are silent,” Heggemeier says. “The more uneventful the mission, the more likely the weapon had worked.” He and Marez would later estimate they’d neutralized nearly forty bombs. None of them made a sound. “It was hard to convince people that this was still worthwhile,” he says, “when there was no direct evidence that it was doing anything positive, except just the negative of: nobody got hurt when it was working.”
The science of proving a negative is one of the hardest problems in the discipline. He had done enough testing to know the system was working. He knew they were going where the IED concentrations were heaviest. He knew the math. He just couldn’t point to an explosion that hadn’t happened and call it evidence.
“Marez said it best: it’s all the ones that didn’t go off that make the hair on his arms stand up.”
Success in Helmand had no sound. No smoke. No debris. The weapon worked when nothing happened, which meant the proof lived only in the silence between what did and what didn’t.
Marez put it best. “It’s all the ones that didn’t go off that make the hair on my arms stand up,” he said. Heggemeier carries the same feeling, even now, years later, sitting in a design review at Oshkosh. The absence of explosions. All the things that didn’t happen.
But there was one mission that wasn’t uneventful.
A convoy was moving through a stretch of road. A motorcycle appeared coming the other direction. Under the rules of engagement at the time, Heggemeier was required to deactivate MAX POWER while the motorcycle passed. He turned it off. The motorcycle passed. Then the IED detonated. A Marine truck commander had his feet shredded by the blast. Heggemeier knew, standing there in the aftermath, that if MAX POWER had been active the whole time, that bomb would have failed. He had been right there. He could not use it.
“There’s certainly regret about many things I could have done differently. At the moment, it made me go fight the rules of engagement. And I got them changed.”
He stood in the aftermath of that blast knowing exactly what had happened and why. The system was on the vehicle. The system worked. The rules required him to turn it off. He did. The bomb detonated.
“There’s certainly regret about many things I could have done differently,” he says. He talks about it slowly, the way people talk about things that don’t leave. “At the moment, it made me go fight the rules of engagement. And I got them changed.” The immediate response was action. But action isn’t the same as release. “That one has had a lasting impact on me,” he says. He doesn’t reach for anything softer.
After the mission, the lieutenant came back to him. Not to debrief. To ask one question: how soon can we get this operational?
“Lieutenant knew he was gonna have to go back out there again,” Heggemeier says. “And he knew that we could help him. And he knew that even when you do everything right in that environment, things still go wrong.” That was one of the things Afghanistan taught him that no laboratory could. He could build the best system in the world. He could do everything right. And sometimes it still didn’t matter. The gap between a working weapon and a saved life had variables he could not engineer away.
He came within 100 yards of five IED blasts during those hundred days. He was not infantry. Nobody assigned him to the front. He chose to be there because he needed to know from the inside whether the technology he’d spent three years building actually worked, and there was only one way to find out.
He talks about Jimmy Doolittle when you ask him about the risk. Most people know Doolittle for the 1942 raid on Tokyo, which he led as a lieutenant colonel. Fewer know that he was also the first person to earn a PhD in aerospace engineering from MIT, which made him, in Heggemeier’s words, “kind of like me.” Doolittle believed in calculated risk: understanding precisely what you’re gambling with, and deciding whether it’s worth it. “That’s a lot of how I look at the world,” Heggemeier says. “Is it worth it? The answer was always yes.”
The Truck That Carried Everything
MAX POWER was mounted on a Marine LVSR, a Logistics Vehicle System Replacement, one of the biggest, most capable tactical vehicles in the U.S. military’s fleet. It hauled the system through Helmand. It held.
Oshkosh Defense builds those trucks.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s the connective tissue of this entire story.
When Heggemeier left the Air Force Research Lab and came to Oshkosh, the pull wasn’t compensation or title. It was what he describes, carefully and without performance, as purpose. “In my time in the Air Force, I’ve worked with all sorts of different defense contractors, all the big names you’ve ever heard of,” he says. “And there are certainly pockets of folks within those companies that have that sense of purpose. But at Oshkosh, it’s ubiquitous. That really intrigued me.”
Ask him what Oshkosh actually makes, and he pauses the way people pause when they’re reaching for something true instead of something easy.
“It’s not baby clothes. But it wraps someone’s baby and keeps them safe.”
He doesn’t reach for the corporate answer. He doesn’t say vehicles or defense platforms or mission-critical systems. He goes somewhere else entirely.
“Well, it’s not baby clothes,” he says. And then he stops. And then: “But it wraps someone’s baby and keeps them safe.”
His connection to that product isn’t abstract. It’s physical. “I had much more of a connection with the Oshkosh LVSR than I did with anything else,” he says. “That’s the truck that carried MAX POWER. That’s the truck that carried us.” Oshkosh doesn’t build LVSRs anymore. The Marines got what they needed years ago. But the JLTV, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, is the current flagship, and Heggemeier sees it through eyes that most engineers in this industry never develop.
“On the hood of the JLTV, it says ‘no step’ in big letters,” he says. He almost smiles. “Do you think soldiers and Marines follow that? They don’t. Not at all. Some of my engineers have a hard time thinking, how could they do that? It says right there, don’t step on it.” The gap between what the manual says and what happens on the ground in full battle rattle isn’t a design flaw. It’s information. He brings that information into every room he walks into at Oshkosh.
What does it feel like to get in and out of the truck in full kit? What happens to your grip on the door handle when your hands are cold? What does a guy actually do when he has to get out fast? These questions don’t come from a spec sheet. They come from a man who spent thirteen missions in Helmand, came within 100 yards of five blasts, and still has to think about the Marine whose feet were shredded on a road he was driving on.
“The consequences for failure are huge. That gives you a different perspective on it.”
He’s not speaking theoretically. He’s speaking from a convoy in Helmand, from a Marine who lost his feet, from a roof he stood on while the base burned around him.
“The consequences for failure,” he says, and then he pauses. “Huge. That gives you a different perspective on it.” The sentence doesn’t need to be finished. Anyone who has ever trusted their life to a machine someone else built already knows what he means.
He was called a cowboy when he was adapting MAX POWER on the fly in Afghanistan, telling Marez to rip off a $2.5 million antenna and start over while Air Force officials watching from the sidelines questioned whether the Air Force should even be involved. He kept going. “Persistence,” he says when asked what that experience taught him. “Not just stubbornness. Persistence to see things through to the logical conclusion. My decision to rip the antenna off was based on the data.” He didn’t invent a new way of thinking at Oshkosh. He brought the old one with him.
The Standard
There is a version of Jeff Heggemeier that most defense executives would recognize and feel comfortable around. The VP title. The doctorate. The clean resume that runs from ROTC through active duty through the reserves through the Guard and lands, finally, at an Oshkosh office where he oversees one of the company’s largest programs. That version is real. It just isn’t the whole thing.
What veterans bring to technical teams at Oshkosh isn’t reducible to a line on a resume, and Heggemeier knows this from both sides of the relationship. He’s been the warfighter who depended on the vehicle. He’s now the executive who oversees building it. The thing that transfers, he says, isn’t a skill set you can train for. It’s a relationship to consequence.
“What we do is bigger than just going to work, and putting in hours, and making money,” he says, “which is what we have to do as a company, otherwise we won’t exist. But it’s more than that. It’s really the mission behind what we’re doing.” He’s not reading from a mission statement. He’s describing the thing that made him stand on a roof in Helmand watching fuel depots explode and not get on the next plane home.
“Making sure that what we’re building is effective, that it protects our soldiers and Marines. That’s the heart of everything we’re trying to do.”
He has stood in the places where that sentence is tested. He knows what it costs when the answer is no.
“Making sure that what we’re building is effective, that it protects our soldiers and Marines,” he says. “That’s the heart of everything we’re trying to do.” He says it without emphasis because it doesn’t need emphasis. It’s just true, and he’s been living by it long enough that the sentence doesn’t require decoration.
Still in Uniform
Ask him what the scientist standing on that roof at Camp Leatherneck in September 2012 would not have predicted about where he’d end up, and he takes it seriously.
He talks about his unit in New Mexico, the monthly flights he pays for himself, the four kids, the balance that’s always harder than he makes it sound. He talks about purpose the way people talk about it when they mean it, not as a value proposition but as a simple description of why they get out of bed.
“I’m still contributing,” he says. “I still feel like I’m giving back. That hasn’t changed since I was standing on a flight line watching aircraft take off with my father.”
Ask him what it’s like to share this story, to hand over the parts of it that still carry weight, Dover, the motorcycle, the Marine, the bombs that never went off and the one that did, and he doesn’t reach for distance or deflect into the professional.
“I appreciate having the opportunity to share it. Even though it’s painful.”
He doesn’t flinch from the word. He doesn’t explain it away or wrap it in something more comfortable. He just lets it sit there between the two of you.
“I appreciate having the opportunity to share it,” he says. “Even though it’s painful.” He doesn’t soften it or dress it up. He just says it plainly, the way you say something you’ve carried alone for a long time and are only now setting down in a room with another person. Painful. And still worth saying.
The success lives in the silence. In the missions that were uneventful. In the Marines who came home.
He built a weapon to save lives. He now builds the vehicles that carry the people whose lives need saving. He still flies to New Mexico on his own ticket. He’s still thinking about the Marine on the road. He’s still in uniform.
The thread doesn’t break because the mission doesn’t end.
Resources
Oshkosh Defense | oshkoshdefense.com
Builder of the JLTV, LVSR, and over a century of tactical vehicles protecting U.S. warfighters worldwide.
Air Force Research Laboratory | afrl.af.mil
The science and technology arm of the U.S. Air Force, where Heggemeier developed MAX POWER at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.
JIDA (Joint IED Defeat Organization) | jida.mil
The Department of Defense organization that funded MAX POWER and leads ongoing efforts to defeat improvised explosive devices.
150th Special Operations Wing | 150sow.ang.af.mil
The New Mexico Air National Guard unit where Colonel Heggemeier currently is Deputy Wing Commander of the 150th Special Operations Wing.
Doolittle Institute | doolittleinstitute.com
Research and development organization advancing Air Force technology, named for Jimmy Doolittle, the MIT-trained engineer and combat commander Heggemeier credits as a model for calculated risk.
Wounded Warrior Project | woundedwarriorproject.org
National nonprofit supporting veterans and service members who incurred physical or mental injuries during post-9/11 military service.
Veterans Crisis Line | Dial 988, then press 1 | veteranscrisisline.net
Free, confidential crisis support for veterans, service members, and their families.
About Dr. Jeffry Heggemeier
Dr. Jeffry Heggemeier is Vice President of Delivery Vehicle Programs at Oshkosh Defense and a Colonel in the New Mexico Air National Guard, where he is the Deputy Wing Commander for the 150th Special Operations Wing. He served nearly 24 years across all three components of the U.S. military, including a combat deployment to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, where he developed and field-tested the MAX POWER electromagnetic IED-defeat system. He holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota and a degree in physics from the University of St. Thomas. He is a graduate of Air Force ROTC and served on active duty, in the reserves, and in the National Guard across his career. He is based in the Midwest.
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