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Everready Glass
Sales Reps Administrative & Professional
Jorgensen Brooks Group
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Tucson Urban League
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RANCHO RESORT
MAINTANANCE POSITION Mechanical
Komatsu Equipment Co
Resident Field Mechanic

Tucson-based Ionatron Inc., a defense contractor that develops directed-energy weapons, is one of the Old Pueblo's few publicly traded companies.

The price of the company's shares, traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange, closed Friday at $2.94 per share, near the 52-week low of $2.65.

The company's headquarters is near East Ajo Way and South Alvernon Way, where it has about 85 employees. Earlier this month, President and CEO Dana Marshall was appointed chairman of the board.

Here are condensed excerpts from an interview with Marshall on Friday.

Q What is Ionatron's significance to Tucson?

A Ionatron is working in the area of advanced- energy systems for defense and security applications. It's a spinoff of optics-development work that has been ongoing with advanced lasers — and, of course, Tucson is a major optical center. It's a very, very strong center for optics and laser technologies.

A: Ionatron was, when I came in, a development-stage company working in a very challenging, technical field. We have a lot of very bright physicists and engineers, and my main challenge was making sure that we were communicating and building relationships with our customers in the U.S. government.

Technical people are a very creative group of folks. And sometimes the difficult part of working with creative people is deciding what you're going to not do because the technical people, and the physicists at Ionatron especially, they see the world as a lot of surmountable challenges. Everything's an opportunity, but as a development-stage company we have to remain very narrowly focused on our core business.

A: The challenge of the military for the last century has been nations fighting against nations on major battlefields. We see that the future use of the military is going to be much more in dealing in urban environments where you're fighting against non-state actors — terrorists and insurgents that are commingling themselves with the civilian population. And we have what the U.S. military terms a "dilemma of force" — that is, that the military has nothing in between yelling at someone and shooting them. There's this step-wise increase in violence that we're tooled-up to operate within the military.

The directed-energy technologies that we're working with are able to fill that gap with very rapid engagement so that we have the ability to operate without a lot of collateral damage, without injuring the civilian populations and without major damage to urban environments. It's a very, very different type of war; it requires a very different type of weapons technology.

A: With the military, unlike any other customer, lives are literally at stake in the performance of the product. And so they're rightfully very cautious about making changes. They want to make sure that the technology (works) reliably and that they can trust their lives to it. So we don't begrudge their caution as they look to new technologies.

I think from our standpoint, the directed-energy technology we're working in has applications for the roadside-bomb and IED (improvised explosive device) problem. This is a very urgent problem for the U.S. military. . . . We're letting the mission draw the technology into the field rather than push that technology.

AzStarBiz Spotlight: Every Monday, catch an interview here with a Tucson business leader. Hear the interview with Ionatron's Dana Marshall online at www.AzStarBiz.com.