Maj. Patrik Liljegard is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School. With 25 years of active-duty service and over 10 global deployments—including missions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Chad, Congo, Mali, and Iraq—he brings a wealth of operational experience to his studies. He has served in multiple leadership roles, including as commander of an intelligence section, a combat support squadron, and a saber squadron. His academic and professional focus lies in maritime warfare, where he seeks to integrate strategic insight with operational innovation.
Lt. Cmdr. Leutermann was commissioned through the Texas A&M University NROTC program in May 2013 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and a minor in Mathematics. He holds a Master of Engineering Management from Old Dominion University, completed Joint Professional Military Education at the Air Force Command and Staff College, and is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Systems Engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School.
At sea, Leutermann served aboard USS OLYMPIA (SSN 717) and PCU DELAWARE (SSN 791) in engineering, weapons, and navigation/operations departments, serving as Ship’s Engineer and Combat Systems Officer. During these tours, he participated in a Dry-Docking Selected Restricted Availability, oversaw new construction and initial reactor criticality testing, completed two Submarine Command Courses, and deployed to both the Eastern and Western Pacific. Following his submarine tours, he transitioned to the Engineering Duty Officer community in 2022, serving as Lead Ship Coordinator for USS HYMAN G. RICKOVER (SSN 795) at Supervisor of Shipbuilding, Groton, Connecticut.
Ashore, Leutermann served as an Associate Professor of Naval Science at Texas A&M University and as an Advanced Tactical Training Instructor at the Naval Submarine School.
Outside of naval service, he is a licensed Professional Engineer in Texas and a Course Director with the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. An avid technical rebreather diver, he volunteers as a public safety and swift-water diving instructor and trains veterans to become scuba instructors.
Getting to work on a truly multi-disciplinary project with people from all over the world has been the most rewarding part of the NPS experience. Everyone brings different experiences to the table, and we can actually focus on solving the problem instead of fighting through the usual bureaucratic minefield. That’s rare in our lines of work.
We had a class last semester where the assignment was basically, “here’s an impossible problem, good luck.” After the class ended, we decided to keep going and turn it into our thesis. It was either that, or go back to writing papers no one outside NPS would ever read. This felt like the better option.
The multidisciplinary side isn’t just helpful—it’s essential. You can’t solve cUAS with one field of expertise. Having a mix of engineers, operators, AI folks, and an international team gives us both broader knowledge and access to companies we wouldn’t otherwise reach. It keeps the project grounded in reality rather than theory.
JIFX is where good ideas get stress-tested—and sometimes broken. You can make all the models you want in a classroom, but until you’ve strapped your system into the back of a pickup, powered it off cigarette lighters in 105-degree heat, and watched it shake itself silly on dirt roads, you don’t really know what you’ve got. Industry partnerships save us from reinventing the wheel. We’re tying together proven sensors from DroneShield, Silvus, Mara, Trakka, Dspnor, and others, then fusing their data in new ways. The mix of rough field testing and industry integration keeps us moving fast.
SOF units don’t live in a one-vendor world. On deployment you’ll see a mix of gear from different countries, sometimes brand-new kit, sometimes no kit at all except a credit card. Working with multiple industry partners means we’re building a system that’s modular, brand-agnostic, and export-compliant. That makes it something allies can actually adopt and use together, not a bespoke science project that only works for one flag.
It gives us the essentials we need to keep pushing: high-end GPUs and ruggedized computing to handle real-time fusion, contracted design help when we hit snags, mounting hardware for BOMA, plus the ability to cover travel, emergent repairs, and field fixes. Basically, the stuff you don’t think about until you need it yesterday.
Small drones are cheap, everywhere, and already being used against maritime forces. A passive, AI-enabled system gives SOF teams early warning without blowing their cover or stealing their attention. The autonomous features mean it can replace what normally takes a dedicated Direct Support Element (DSE), while simultaneously not adding more workload or bandwidth demands on the current operators. For the U.S., it closes a widening operational gap. For our allies, it’s exportable and interoperable—something they can field together. And outside the military, the same tech scales to convoy protection, counter-piracy, point defense, or lightweight early-warning gear for small teams who just need to stay hidden.
