All right, everybody. Thank you, thank you for your attention here. We've got the management team of CACI, Jeff and Jason, here with us today. I'm very excited to have you. For those of you that don't know me, my name is John Godyn. I'm the Aerospace and Defense Analyst at Citi. And we've got a good list of topics here to dig into, so I think we'll just hit it. Great. The number one question I've been getting lately is just about the volatility in defense services. And normally we won't ask, you know, a company about short-term volume of stock or in the group. It doesn't really come up as much. But in this case, I think it's kind of, you know, interesting because you guys have spent so much time and effort trying to differentiate yourselves from the rest of the peers, and we see that so clearly in the fundamentals, in your growth rate, in your margin profile, even some of the capital allocation that you're doing recently. Maybe a good place to kick off is just to give you the opportunity to dig into that and maybe revisit and explain to the audience all of the ways that CACI is different from the peers. Yeah. Thank you, John. Nice to be here this afternoon. It's an interesting question. You know, part of the answer, and I'll start with the fact that we spend a lot of time explaining questions like this or some flavor of that question, by saying that we're increasingly compared to people with whom we don't feel like we have much in common. And I think I appreciate you acknowledging some of the differentiation that we've been doing and the work around that. But I think broadly, the reflective reaction is still to sort of treat our sector as being somewhat homogeneous, even though increasingly it's not. Many of you who have followed us for some time will know that at the crux of that differentiation are a couple of things that we undertook, some of them as much as a decade ago. Opportunities to differentiate ourselves by applying technology, rather than sort of the classic expertise model that had been the practice, in the government IT services sector. And to put ourselves in a position where we were bidding fewer number of larger jobs, places where we could apply technology, places where we could shape relationships with customers. And the operational reality of that is that we've been quite successful, we think. Along with that, we've been focusing on software as being at the core of the solutions, being the only way that we could evolve as a nation to the changing nature of threats. Again, we feel like we've done a pretty good job of that, although I think in times of, you know, I'll say alarm or sudden market pulses, you know, we seem to still sort of fall into the same group. So, I don't know what to do except keep doing what we're doing and, you know, look for more. I appreciate that. There's another layer to what's going on just recently in defense services. I get a lot of questions about AI, AI exposure, has AI disruption. As you mentioned, you guys have, you know, certain software exposures. I'm sure the topic of AI is coming up. Can you just give us a sense, you know, AI, good thing, bad thing for defense services, for you specifically, and how are you positioned? Yeah, a good thing is the short answer. And Jason is our CTO, he'll want to expand on some of the summary comments I'll make here. But I would observe, first of all, our increased technology content, which is really focused on delivering outcomes. And if you're in the business of focusing and selling output, then, you know, it goes from being a threat to being an opportunity. And the second thing is, in those areas where we are still in an expertise mode, where we're supplying input, we've increasingly managed that part of the portfolio to be focused on areas where we have great efficiency opportunities. So think about, think about things like intelligence analysis, where a relatively small percentage of material gets analyzed, and the opportunity to use AI tools to, you know, to increase that efficiency and, and focus on the important things, and do more work and better work rather than, rather than less work. But I don't know. I'll let you, I'll let you expand or- Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Jeff. So, you know, at CACI, we've been using AI for a long time. For over two decades, we've applied AI across the board, right? And that comes to computer vision, to analytics, to transformative-based technologies. Generative AI, which is really what's popped up in the last, you know, several years, that's the transformative across business, right? But it's in our blood to take advantage of disruptive technologies to enable efficiencies in our business. So when we think about, you know, expertise and technology, both aspects of that are working with AI under the hood to be able to accelerate outcomes. We're not interested in selling you someone to write code for you. What we're interested in is giving you the outcome that's gonna help your mission, right? That's gonna go directly to the warfighter. So the process that we take along the way to produce the outcome, we're all about cutting, cutting, the inefficiencies out of that process. So when AI comes along and says, "Hey, we can write code for you," that's great. Write the code for us so we can focus on the outcome and the algorithms. Let's just produce more outcomes, and, and then it's the force multiplier for us, right? That's really the key, is AI is a multiplier on our output, and there's an infinite amount of outcomes that are needed in the national security space. So there's always more work to do there. Yeah. No, that's a real helpful overview. I wanna talk a bit about organic growth. A good segue into that is just plugging into all of the tailwinds and themes that are out there. We have this moniker, we talk about mega trends affecting defense right now. Maybe you can talk about what you're most excited in from a growth outlook. Yeah Perspective, and just sort of set the stage. So there are a couple of areas here. We, as part of the earlier strategy shift that I talked about, we developed a couple of convictions around that that are turning out to have been very, very good calls. I talked about the fact that software was important to be able to move at the speed of advancing threats. But we've also built some really interesting capabilities in some areas that we could see were going to be important, and in fact, they're proving to be important. Counter-UAS is an area of particular strength, again, which Jason will be able to talk to you a little bit about some of the things we're doing there and, specifically around our Merlin system, which we delivered, or which we've developed, on our own investment dollar and, and have sort of in different demo phases. That's an important part of this. I would also say around network modernization, we've got some really interesting large projects underway that will form some bedrock capabilities that the government needs to be able to, to sort of move to the next level here of threat response and, moving with some agility. But the Counter-UAS area is one of particular interest that I think most people would be eager to know a little bit more about in our Merlin system. Yeah, so to kind of Jeff's point there, electromagnetic spectrum is a huge area of investment in our company. We continue to build that part of our portfolio through investments. Their Counter- UAS is a huge part of that, right? So being able to kind of detect the wireless world around us, detect drones, that are being used for nefarious purposes, and we've been in that space for over two decades, from the national level all the way down to the tactical edge. We have over 300 systems deployed, specifically focused on Counter- UAS across the globe. We've got thousands of electromagnetic sensor systems deployed across the globe, and we've taken that knowledge and that expertise and invested in bringing, creating a capability called Merlin, which kind of brings the best of all of that across those two decades together, in a commercial product that we can then offer to our customers. And we've taken it and been successful in two field exercises with it and are now working with customers to deploy to specific locations in the world. So it's been a big success for us, story for us. Yeah, that's. Those are some great data points. We also hear a lot about electronic warfare, enterprise technology. Every conference call, those come up. Could you dig a little bit into those businesses and what the outlook is there? Yeah. This is again an area where Jason will probably have a little bit more insight to add. Enterprise technology has become sort of a catch-all phrase that is pretty widely pretty wide in its definition and the things that are swept up in that net. The areas that are of particular interest to us are areas that are deeply important to mission and areas where we can use our skill to bring those to bear. The network modernization item, the second part of your question, is also an item of particular interest in an area where we have several large engineering several large programs underway, including the ability to use CSfC, Commercial Solutions for Classified, where we have a proprietary Archon product that we're using in a, in the Army's SIPRNet modernization program. So very, very important, very important places where we're happy to be quite busy. I don't know if you want to say anything else. I mean, you did a great job. You keep bounce passing it to me, I just bounce pass it back to you, right? But no, I... Look, when it comes to network modernization, enterprise IT services, people come to me and say, "Jason, you work for SAIC, an IT company," and I cringe a little bit, right? Because, yeah, you know, maybe in the past. Today, that's not who this company is. Today, this company, we're about modernization, right? I like to tell people, "We don't, we don't care if your lights are blinking in the closet, we're not gonna check to make sure your lights stay on in the closet. What we will do is we will rearchitect your entire network for the modern data flow, right? We will find ways to increase your platform to be able to bring AI into your system, so that you can enable your workflows and accelerate them." That's the type of modernization. Jeff mentioned CSfC, Commercial Solutions for Classified. It's transformative in the way that our military accesses classified data remotely. Before CSfC, it took years to be able to get classified information at a specific edge place. Now, with that, we're bringing that to the front right now, right? And so that's the kind of work that we have transitioned our portfolio to, that distinctive modernization. Got it. That's, that's very helpful. Another big theme out there, international growth opportunities. I feel like on the conference calls, you guys have flagged a bit more and more in that, in that respect. Counter- UAS is something that's come up a little bit, in, in some of the things that you've done with, with Canada. Can you talk about the portfolio, international growth opportunities, and is there more there? Yeah. The, you know, commercial opportunities in a couple of areas are particularly appealing and attractive to us. Counter- UAS happens to be one in particular. You know, we have a large total addressable market today and are focused primarily on our domestic business. Some of the international opportunities that are presenting themselves to us are obviously interesting, and we're taking advantage of them. We're really tightly focused at this point on the Five Eyes countries and on NATO and on following government policy rather than, you know, broad-based international business development type activities. So we're certainly aware of a number of opportunities there, and we're pursuing them, but you won't see us move into international probably the way you would for airplanes or missiles. I mean, it's a different sort of dynamic in our market segment. Okay, sure. But an area of some promise. Sure. And, you know, one of the things that's interesting about CACI and, and what you report, you report technology versus expertise, revenue. Technology's been growing for some time, outgrowing the rest of the business. Just help us understand the importance of that, as a leading growth driver and what it means for the organization. Yeah. So this is really at the core of our, the core of our strategy. When we started the strategic evolution I talked about in my first, in my first response, John, we were starting from a place where we had a number of very long-standing expertise relationships with customers, that we had a lot of history, a lot of mission knowledge, a lot of familiarity. And the starting point for adding the technology dimension to our business portfolio was to leverage those relationships and the mission knowledge that came from that long, those long associations. So, what we've been able to do is take the expertise part of the business, we've refined this in the ensuing, you know, eight or 10 years. Take the expertise part of the business and use that privileged access to inform opportunities to apply technology to the problems we saw in those expertise relationships. So what do I mean by that? We have about 1,400 employees that are embedded in combatant commands all over the world. They're working with warfighters, you know, at the table, constantly monitoring, making decisions. The warfighters obviously are making the decisions, but with our technical support and intelligence analysis. And we have been able to use that to present better options and better support to warfighters in the execution of their responsibilities. So that cycle becomes particularly important to our basic investment thesis, which is that those areas of expertise that are well-defined and important, where we have good credibility and great insight, enrich the technology business in a way that you couldn't if you just showed up to sell technology. And, you know, in some places, you know, there are some providers that have similar sorts of models, and they present that as kind of being forward-deployed engineers or people that are out at the edge. The difference for us is that it started the other way around, and we're building on that access and that insight and that mission knowledge to provide better technology. That, that's great color. And, you know, another data point we get out of you guys quite often is you're the prime on 90% + of your contracts. Can you talk about the strategic importance of that? Yeah. I mean, basically, it's customer relationships and the proximity and connectedness to the customer. I mean, if you have a prime in between you and a customer, you, by definition, have a layer of insulation that changes the nature of that relationship. An exception to that, to what I just said, is, particularly on our optical communications terminal, but in some areas where we produce some pretty important and pretty cool space subsystems that we sell sometimes directly to ultimate customers and sometimes to satellite primes. But in those cases, we sort of don't have necessarily a classic prime sub relationship. There's a level of customer access and program involvement that is slightly different. But being a prime and the proximity to the customer and being able to see and deal with those needs as they're evolving and changing is a critical part of the broader thesis. That's fantastic. And when we put it all together, and when I think of CACI, I think of predictable organic revenue growth. You guys have shown that now for a number of years. It sounds like based on everything we're talking about, that's gonna continue. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, that growth engine, what drives the predictability and whether for the next number of years we should expect the same. Yeah. So an important part of this transition has also been the fact that it has led us to bid fewer larger programs. And that's put us in a really nice position of, I think we have about 3.7 years of revenue in backlog now. The average duration of a program that we have put into backlog, that we've won over the last couple of years, has been six years. So what that does is give us sort of a bedrock of programs that we can see and manage and sort of understand how they're gonna develop and how we're prosecuting them. So we're not winning things. We don't need to win anything today for revenue in June, for instance. I mean, we very much moved away from the traditional expertise sort of model, which is a little bit more hand to mouth, and into longer duration programs, you know, with good visibility and good horizons. Which led us, I guess now, a year and a half or so ago, at our Investor Day, for the first time, issue three-year targets, which we had not done before. That increased visibility lets us understand the business better, lets it communicate it better to investors as well, because we have a good, solid, high confidence sort of idea of where we're going. Yeah. No, that's very helpful. Maybe we could just talk a little bit about the budget outlook and what it means for you guys. You know, there's some big numbers being floated out there, and we'll see what's real and what's not. Generally speaking, the investors that I talk to expect there to be some sort of, you know, upward slope acceleration in the budget, whether it's through reconciliation, whether it's the $1.5 trillion. You know, I think people are a little skeptical of that, but generally the outlook is positive. In that world, how do you think about CACI's exposures, how they map to various budget priorities, and how you see that shaping up from here? Yeah. So those of you that have followed us for a little while, know that we, regularly say, in response to some flavor of that question, that the total budget is not generally terribly important to us. Part of the strategy, again, I'm gonna come back to my early response. Part of that strategy was to start with a few basic convictions about things that were going to have durable demand, and were going to be widely appreciated and valued and needed, even in occasional volatile budget environments. So if you think about electronic warfare broadly, and you think about things like Counter- UAS, which is a dimension of EW, you think about some of the other things we're doing related to cyber, you think about space broadly, some of which is EW and some of which is more than EW. Those things are not going away. If you think about the things that get debated, you know, it may be the rate of submarine builds, it may be the size of the next F-35 buy, it may be, you know, any one of a number of things. No one is saying we don't need a Counter- UAS strategy. You know, so- Right. So the size of our TAM, at about $300 billion, and our revenue this year, about $9.5 billion, gives us plenty of headroom in those areas that we've identified as being particularly important and the areas in which we're distinguishing ourselves. Yeah. And if the outlook did play out the way that some hope, it does sound like you think CACI would have a lot of upside leverage to that world because you're so well aligned with- Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one of the areas that is not in our three-year targets or, or in our guidance in any meaningful way that Jason will want to expand on, is related to Golden Dome, where we have, I think some very interesting positioning and capabilities, where as that program becomes better defined and starts to evolve, I think we have a, a meaningful opportunity here to, to sort of play an important role in that. Yeah, and as Jeff kind of mentioned, as our strategy has shifted towards these kind of enduring missions, which lets us kind of ride lumpiness a little bit, right? It also means that our investments stay relevant over the long, long-term game. That connection down to the mission expertise. You mentioned we've got about 1,400 people deployed across the world that are living and breathing mission right now as we're sitting in these chairs, right? Those people are constantly testing the market for us, for our investments, to make sure that they're relevant. So, a large part of our portfolio is very relevant to the threats that are currently developing and evolving. I'm answering your question about Golden Dome, because Golden Dome is an answer to the threats that have been evolving in the world around us with our nation state peers. And our investments have already been on the trajectory to answer that, answer the mail on that front, because we have people deployed all over the world that have been watching those threats develop, right? So when it comes to left-of-launch capability, make sure that we can take advantage of our cyber techniques that we could deploy, of monitoring the movement of threats, try to take advantage of non-kinetic effects that happen before the missile actually launches in the early phases. All of those are part of our portfolio and are very relevant to the overall strategy to protect the homeland. As those threats are starting to be able to migrate over here, our investments have been in the long game for that to begin with. That's great. Maybe we can change gears a little bit, talk about margins. I think one of the features of the CACI story is not just organic growth, performance, but also consistent margin gains. Maybe you can give us a bit of a, you know, backstory to what's been driving the margins higher, and do you see that continuing? Sure. I think the margin question- Yeah, you can take that one. That's, that's back. So there are a couple factors at play here. The growing technology content is part of it. The average technology margins are, and this average, I have to stress, because there's a wide range here, but average technology margins might be 300 basis points higher than expertise. The other thing that I would, that I'd add to that thought, is that we really are focused primarily, foundationally, on free cash flow per share. Mm-hmm. So, I think I said on our last earnings call, I didn't plan it this way, I think I referred to it as our North Star, which I've now had, like, five people comment on the North Star. So maybe that means it was a good way to talk about it. But free cash flow per share is, at its core, how we make decisions. And so if you think about investment, and you think about opportunities, and you think about margin, we solve those three variables, solve the balance around those, for free cash flow per share. So if we can invest more and grow a little bit more quickly and, you know, maintain margin within that reasonable sort of range that we've been operating and generate more dollars of free cash flow, we will make that decision. Conversely, if the growth of the opportunities to grow the top line were to become constrained or a few of them were to be somewhat smaller, that would command less investment and, you know, would generate more cash flow per share, by having higher margins. So I said to someone recently that if you, if you saw our margins, like, take a sudden spike up, you actually might have a follow-up question of, like, "What's the matter? Yeah. You know, because if we found ourselves in an opportunity-constrained environment, that would be one of the ways that it might show up. But happily, happily, relative to our three-year targets for our Investor Day, I think we said on our last call, that we expected to definitively beat the $1.6 billion of free cash flow that we expect to generate in those three years, and we're about 2/3 of the way through year two of those three years. And so, you know, we feel good about where we are and feel good about the array of opportunities, both programs to win and investments to make, feel good about, you know, where we're situated. Just unpacking that, in an opportunity-rich backdrop, it sounds like what you're saying, you know, flattish margins, but accelerating organic growth is a trade-off that you would be happy to make? Yes. Let me hasten to add that's sort of in what we've been telling you, so we're not making any new announcements today, about guidance or expectations. Yeah. But in general, we see, we see an opportunity-rich environment and opportunities to invest, to deliver what we've laid out and articulated to everyone at this point. Got it. Well, we've got just a little over 10 minutes left, and I really wanted to focus on ARKA Okay. For a bit. I mean, this is obviously a transformational deal. Really enhances the presence in space. You had some pre-existing, you know, exposure in space, but this obviously is a game changer in that regard. Just for the benefit of the audience, anybody that's new to the story or not current on what's happening with ARKA, maybe you could just recap the rationale for the deal and the transaction a bit and why it's such an exciting platform. Yeah, this is gonna be mostly a Jason question. But space is a very important part of our strategy and a place where we see great growth opportunities. And ARKA brings us some really complementary capabilities in a customer set we know, in a world we understand, and that we think can further leverage and improve our utility to our customers by combining some of the things we do today with some of the things that will come with ARKA. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, pre-ARKA, we have, like I said earlier, thousands of systems deployed across the globe, collecting electromagnetic spectrum, doing electromagnetics, doing sensing, doing attacks, all those kind of things, right? This, a lot of times you associate that in the signals intelligence space, right? That's on water, on land, and air, right? Sensors all over there. With ARKA, now we have sensors in space, so we now truly become an all-domain sensing provider... sensors all over the domains, right? At all, even cyber. So if that expands our ability to collect data and then process and produce actionable intelligence for the warfighter. Heavy in the SIGINT space, we're known for that in the domain there. Okay, ARKA brings in the GEO Intelligence. They bring in the imagery, right? So now we have another intelligence that comes into the picture, and we can process that to produce a Multi-INT actionable intelligence. So now we are a shop that does Multi-Intelligence to give that to the warfighter to help them make battlefield decisions that are informed, right? Ultimately, to save lives and to give ourselves a competitive advantage on the battlefield, right? So ARKA gives us that sensing up in space, and, and they're not just any sensor up in space. We could. A lot of people you could buy just to say you have sensors in space, right? These, these are a national asset, right? They've been doing this for decades upon decades, right? Back in the Cold War days is when they, when they started doing this kind of stuff, right? High barrier to entry, really mission-critical stuff, which is right along the strategy of what we want our portfolio to be, right? It's that distinctive mission-critical expertise and technology combined together to provide valuable outcome to the warfighter, and ARKA completely augments that. It's a great cultural fit for us. Yeah, and financially, we're looking at an asset that has a great growth rate, but also a high margin. And you're already a company that has a great growth rate and a relatively high margin, but you're mixing up. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So ARKA will be accretive to our growth rate and our EBITDA margins immediately, will be earnings per share neutral in the first full year and accretive in the second. Those statistics that I just gave you don't presume any synergies, either revenue or cost, and we expect to realize some of both. So I have every expectation that we will deliver or over-deliver on what we've articulated. At $2.6 billion, it is the largest acquisition that we have done to date. It will take our leverage at closing to about 4.3x trailing 12 months EBITDA. We have been in the low fours before, once or twice. We have a very well-established track record of delevering quickly. The core business, legacy business, generates a fair amount of cash, as many of you will know, and we expect to be back to about three or just over 3x in about six quarters. So we will fund the $2.6, about half with the existing cash and credit capacity on our revolver, and the other half, the other $1.3, with a high-yield bond and an additional Term Loan B. And we're on track to close on the timeline that we outlined on December 22nd in our call, which is probably sort of mid-third week of March, sometime late in our third quarter, which ends in March. And we're ticking along. Great, um- Yes. The U.S. seems very good at sensing western space in terms of the accuracy and speed of sensing, let's say, China and Russia. So in that context, what are those sensors really sense? Like, what's the... It is a large amount, but I'm sure you don't kind of require or you talking about, but do they have different types of stuff? Yeah, I’m not sure I can give you a very satisfying answer to your question. I don't think there is another imaging capability of this sort in space. I’m not sure I can- Yeah. You know, if you have a thought, you should ask here. Yeah, so the question was around, you know, what type of kind of exquisite sensing do we have in space? Because there's a worry that we're not keeping up with the national threat- Ah. That's there, right? And there are lots of sensing phenomenology, different types of sensing that we need to do, that we as a nation need to do, that we need to improve on up there. One of those is imagery, and that's what ARKA brings to the table. So they're not the entire sensing portfolio. There's a lot that we need to expand on in there, but they're one really key critical aspect of it, and that's being able to do very high exquisite sensing on the ground, and they're doing that very well today, and that's where they shine. But to your point, there's a lot more sensing modalities that we need to expand up in space today. Can we, if we could circle back to the commentary about synergies. You mentioned that a lot of the comments that you were offering were excluding synergies. There may be, you know, some upside to synergies. You know, Jason, when you were talking about the capabilities that are unlocked, I mean, that was very positive. Maybe we could just talk a little bit about, you know, how quickly synergies can roll on, what form they take, and what the shape of that might look like. The revenue synergies or capabilities? Because he's going to talk to revenue synergies. Revenue synergies with- Yeah. I want to bring back to the math. I can start. Yeah. So in addition to the sensing that we talked about and the imaging, there is also a capability then to collect and process those images.... So they call the vocabulary here is sense making. So making sense of what you have sensed, and think about that, and turning it into actionable intelligence. One of the key areas here we see for collaboration and potential additions to revenue is related to is related to some agentic AI capabilities that they have that are I think is the only system that has authority to operate in classified environments. So ATO, Authority to Operate, sounds like a pretty simple thing. It isn't. It is a multi-agency, long, extended vetting process and approval item. It is a system that we'll be able to use not only in the imagery processing that they're doing today, but will also have applicability to some of our SIGINT processing. And additionally, to the development of what's called Multi-INT, which is the combination of the imagery and the signals intelligence. Yeah, and just to kind of augment a little bit of what Jeff said there, right? They're really one of the most long-standing agentic AI platforms that are on the high side today. They've been there for a long time. And the key there is that they're using real mission data to train the AI in those critical areas, right? Versus kind of just bringing foundational models like your bigger, your big, you know, Gemini and Anthropic, and all those guys that are bringing them down. They're training their AI on real data on the high side, and that's really a critical differentiator. That's something that we're going to be able to bring through to all of the processing that we do across our company as we engage, and that's just gonna ramp, ramp our capabilities up. Appreciate it. Looks like we've got, you know, time for maybe one more question here. I wanted to ask about, you know, completely changing gears, but just trying to ask all the defense companies about the executive order not long ago. This isn't really something that has been as topical with defense services, but of course, you guys are prime on many contracts. How do you think of the executive order, this focus on underperforming contractors? Do you believe you'll be subject to it? Anything you're willing to talk about or comment would be helpful. Yeah. So, we obviously are aware of the order. We are happily not on the underperforming contractor list. Our programs are functioning well and don't have issues in that regard. We do not pay a dividend. As a matter of policy, we have not in our 60-odd years of existence. We allocate capital to grow. And we've not-- we have done share buybacks in the past. We've not done any recently. And we also obviously have, as a point of strategy, which we've been talking about for a very long time, invest ahead of customer need and have a number of cases where we've developed programs in collaboration with customers using OTA contract mechanisms, which allow us to co-invest and develop programs in a collaborative way. So we actually are in a really good spot, I think, already being in the posture that the executive order posits they would like us all to be in. So we actually, I think, find ourselves in a really good spot relative to the EO. That's great. That's great to hear. We've hit time here. Jeff, Jason, pleasure to have you today. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you. I really appreciate it so much.