Athenix Special Missions (ASM) is an industry leader when it comes to supporting the nation’s intelligence and defense forces. “It’s the bread and butter of what we do,” said Lee Hudson, President of Athenix Special Missions.
For the last 20 years, Athenix has been a go-to partner for SOF operational planning, Special Forces training, exercise support and mission support. “We are a partner of choice when it comes to training and exercise support in those two areas in particular. We are very experienced and 90% + of our people are former or retired military,” explained Hudson.
Lee G. Hudson, a veteran of the U.S Army and USSOCOM understands the value and importance that experience brings when it comes to supporting USSOCOM’s mission, and attributes Athenix’s success to the veterans that run it.
“If you’ve ever served in or been part of a military organization, you understand mission and people. You know what it takes to get the mission accomplished. And so that understanding of skill and speed matters, understanding the complexities of a given mission, what resources need to be brought to bear to accomplish that mission,” he said.
Specifically in the special operation space, speed is imperative. “Industry partners must be able to keep pace because SOCOM is the force of choice for the most vexing challenges whether you are talking about global operations, counterterrorism or hostage rescue.” explained Hudson.
Athenix has the capability, the redundancy, operational reach and the ability to meet SOCOM’s emergent requirements, and has a 20 year track record to prove it.
“Special Operations commands and components want to know first and foremost that you can get the job done. The second thing they want to know is that you’ve got sufficient redundancy of that capability to meet emergent requirements that invariably occur, that your combined team is big enough and capable enough to respond to SOCOM’s ever-changing operational environs,” Hudson said.
Athenix holds the same values that special operations hold close, including the SOF Truth “that people are more important than hardware.”
“This is a people business at the end of the day… Our people at Athenix are our most important asset. An organization can have the best hardware in the world, but if you don’t have the right people, you are just not going to be successful,” said Hudson.
While Athenix has an optimized staff to support special operations, they are expanding their services offerings to meet the needs of the service components, the Organic Industrial Base and other customers.
“We are investing to evolve so that we can provide more effective support to the Department of Defense, SOCOM and the Interagency,” said Hudson.
According to Hudson “ASM is part of our parent company, Athenix Solutions Group (ASG). Under that umbrella, Athenix has broad core competencies, via Athenix Cyber & SIGINT (ACS) in IT Services, Cyber/Defensive Cyber, and intelligence support across the service components, JSOC, Interagency, and the wider Intel community. We fight well above our weight class.”
ASM’s key leadership has over 100 years of Army Special Operations, Intel Community, Interagency and organic industrial base logistics experience. “Trust is born out of relationships, which come from experience over time, so that is what allowed for the integration to happen…. You’ve served in uniform together with people that you’re supporting, all of that matters, in terms of your ability to execute and understand what it is that in this case the client wants us to do.” explained Hudson.