Engineering, capital, and policy judgment for companies building in aerospace and defense.
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Three practices, one account
We staff engineering, capital, and policy against the same problem, so the technical answer, the financial case, and the path to a government buyer are built to agree with each other rather than assembled separately.
Technical
Harvey Mudd engineers who have flown the hardware, not just read about it.
Finance
Capital strategy joined to federal contract pipeline analysis, run on primary data.
Policy
How the customer actually buys, from doctrine through procurement.
Modeled in a recent engagement
$635K
Modeled cost reduction per survey
90%+
Inspection time removed
7
Use cases scoped and specified
3
Practices on one account
Companies we have worked with
Scope
Your engineers are booked on production-critical work, and the useful but not urgent items never reach the top of the list: a legacy process audit, a speculative idea nobody can justify senior hours on, a landscape scan, a question the team stopped seeing years ago. That is what we take. We are not trying to out-engineer anyone, and we do not take on classified work, controlled technical data, or anything inside an export control boundary.
Scoping costs you one call. We will tell you plainly whether it is something we can help with.
Capabilities
CADA is a student consulting group of Claremont McKenna College and Harvey Mudd College that gives aerospace and defense companies engineering, financial, and policy analysis from a single team.
Technical
Harvey Mudd engineers who have flown the hardware, not just read about it.
Finance
Capital strategy joined to federal contract pipeline analysis, run on primary data.
Policy
How the customer actually buys, from doctrine through procurement.
How an engagement works
We ask what the actual gap is before proposing anything, and we ask what is off limits at the start rather than discovering it later.
Scope
A short call to find the actual gap. We ask what is off limits from the start, including anything export controlled or classified, before proposing anything.
Team
Three to five analysts, drawn from whichever practices the problem needs and led by a practice lead. A hardware question pulls the Harvey Mudd engineers, a capital or contract question pulls the finance practice, and most engagements draw on at least two.
Cadence
Engagements run on the academic semester, roughly twelve weeks, with a standing check-in every two weeks and a working session at the midpoint. Longer relationships continue across semesters as a new scope rather than an open retainer.
Deliverable
A written analysis with the model or dataset underneath it, and a presentation to whoever has to act on it. Interim material goes over as it is produced rather than being held back to the end.
Engagements
Each entry says which practices worked the account and what they produced.
A full three-practice engagement: where the platform creates value, what that value is worth in dollars, and who is permitted to buy it.
Technical
Scoped seven confined-space inspection cases across ballast tanks, cargo holds, storage tanks, exhaust stacks, hull structures, offshore rigs, and cofferdams. Specified payload configurations pairing ultrasonic thickness measurement with LiDAR geometry capture, and mapped each case to its failure modes and survey requirements.
Finance
Built an ROI model against conventional scaffolded survey methods on deliberately conservative assumptions. Direct cost per major survey fell from roughly $660K to $25K, with duration compressing from five to seven days to one or two.
Policy
Mapped the buyer landscape across shipowners, classification societies, port authorities, defense agencies, and system integrators, each with its own purchase drivers, and traced the regulatory requirements that set inspection frequency.
Chariot builds modular power storage and distribution for the tactical edge, replacing fuel generators with quieter, lower-signature systems that already reach the Army through the Defense Innovation Unit. The work centred on where that platform sits in the Army's power modernisation path and what it is worth to the units buying it.
Finance
Sized the addressable tactical power market from federal procurement records, tracing what the services have historically spent on generators, batteries, and vehicle power, and which programs are the realistic near-term routes to a program of record.
Policy
Mapped the procurement path from Defense Innovation Unit prototype work through to a program of record, and the requirements and testing gates a power system has to clear on the way.
Seeing Systems builds inexpensive autonomous strike drones and has early traction with the UK Ministry of Defence and other NATO forces. The question was what it takes to sell the same platform into the United States, where the buyer, the rules, and the competition are all different.
Policy
Set out what a non-US manufacturer faces selling into the American defense market: export control on both sides, the sourcing rules that govern drone components for US government buyers, and which of them bind at what stage.
Finance
Read the competitive field from federal contract records, identifying who is already winning small unmanned systems awards, at what scale, and through which contracting routes a new entrant can realistically compete.
10 members · Claremont McKenna College · Harvey Mudd College
Grouped by practice. Select anyone to read their background.
Technical
Can it be built?
4
Finance
Can it be funded, and can it win contracts?
4
Policy
Can it be sold to the government?
2
Join CADA
Three practices, one intake. You apply to CADA, not to a track, and we place you where your background actually helps.
Timeline
To be determined.
Eligibility
Open to every class year at Claremont McKenna and Harvey Mudd. No prior defense background is expected. What matters is that you can pick up an unfamiliar technical or regulatory subject quickly and write about it clearly.
Process
A short written application, then a conversation with two members about something you have built or analysed, then a final round working through a live problem of the kind CADA actually takes on.
Training
New analysts are trained on the federal data sources the work actually runs on: USAspending, FPDS, SEC EDGAR, and the procurement records underneath them. You learn to find what a company has won, from whom, and on what terms, which is a skill almost nobody graduates with.
Who we look for
Ready to apply
Applications are handled through the contact form. Tell us which practice interests you and what you have built or analysed.
Get in touchContact
Send the problem rather than a job description. The first call is a scoping conversation: we ask what is off limits from the start, including anything export controlled or classified, before proposing any work.