This Fort Worth company won the most prestigious security honor in the United States

A major Fort Worth employer received an award that less than 1% of U.S. contractors are selected for each year.

Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth won the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency’s most prestigious honor, the James S. Cogswell Outstanding Industrial Security Achievement Award. The DCSA is the largest security agency in the U.S. government.

The Fort Worth location was one of 19 across the U.S. to receive the award in early June out of more than 13,000 eligible contractors.

The Texas A&M University System in College Station also received the award. Last week, the two announced a partnership for A&M’s upcoming Fort Worth campus.

Ken Ross, a Lockheed Martin spokesperson, said the win benefits the greater Fort Worth community by demonstrating the strength of the business.

“When we look at the community, we’ve looked at businesses that are here, and they have a foundation, they’re strong and they’re going to continue to support the community and provide jobs to the community,” Ross said. “I think what it does is it provides confidence that this is a business that has staying power and the things that we need to do to the customers we serve.”

The Fort Worth Lockheed Martin plant employs 18,200 people and produces a payroll of $2 billion, according to the company. More than 56,600 jobs in Fort Worth are directly and indirectly supported by the aerospace company.

Lockheed leaders said the award sets the company apart when competing for contracts and customers, which helps sustain existing jobs in the business.

Ross attributed the win to sustained high performance and growth in the number of classified programs at the Fort Worth plant.

Russell McQuiston, director of Lockheed Martin’s security and emergency services, said Lockheed Martin has received superior ratings in Fort Worth for the last four years in a row. The DCSA evaluates sites based on their complexity, McQuiston said, and the Fort Worth plant is the epicenter of the F-35 program.

“We’ve got close to 20,000 people here,” McQuiston said. “The F-35 is the flagship to national defense, the largest defense contractor in the world. We’re producing that here in Fort Worth, and so a big focus is on the protection of those critical items, critical assets associated with that.”

McQuiston also said the award shows the business has high national security standards.

“When the government or customers come to us with a highly-classified mission or need, we can show that we protect that information and how we protect it going forward,” McQuiston said. “So, we look at it as a business discriminator, kind of bragging rights so much as to say we’ve got a very strong security foundation all the way up to our executive leadership.”

But the DCSA’s evaluation is more than just bragging rights. Compliance ratings can have great stakes for defense programs and failure to perform well could mean a plant gets shut down and thousands of jobs are lost for a community.

“They could shut all the processes down,” McQuiston said. “Which would come to a screeching halt for the F-35 production and affect our business greatly. So we’re obviously conscious of that.”

To avoid such a result, Lockheed Martin brings in teams from its other sites across the country to conduct internal peer reviews.

“We’ve got people in there that are going to look at things that maybe the person closest to it misses,” McQuiston said. “We engage with other eyes on it, so we get those assessments prior to the inspection, and it’s really set us apart, I think, in preparing. It also creates a lot of networking opportunities for our team.”

Success in the process takes a village, McQuiston said.

First created in 1966, the Cogswell Award rewards the protection of classified programs, information and materials and emphasizes the importance of government and industry partnership.

Winning the award is based on evaluation of a facility’s overall security program, senior management support, classified material controls and security education and awareness. The DCSA also conducts physical- and cyber-security vulnerability assessments and considers the experience of security staff.

Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plan won the Cogswell Award in 2018, 2000, 1970 and 1967. The company’s Sikorsky plant in Stratford, Connecticut, also received the award this year.