We didn't come from nowhere
Stator is a young company with an old inheritance. The conviction that built it — that the hardest, most consequential systems in national defense deserve real engineering discipline, and that a company can be built to do that work for generations rather than for a quarter — runs directly back to a firm founded in Texas in 1970: Electrospace Systems, Inc.
One of its four founders, Milton Holcombe, is family to the people who founded Stator. The facility he later built still runs today, in the same county where we work. This is that story.
Electrospace Systems, Inc.
In 1970, four engineers left Collins Radio's Dallas operations to start their own firm in Richardson, Texas: James Lightner, Dr. Robert Carrel, Milton Holcombe, and Richard Fenwick. Several had already worked on the systems integration behind the EC-135 airborne command post — the airborne nuclear command infrastructure of the Cold War — and they founded Electrospace to pursue exactly that kind of work: communications for Strategic Air Command's airborne command posts, the Navy's TACAMO relay to its ballistic-missile submarines, and the specialized antennas those missions demanded.
By the company's own history, the Navy awarded ESI a contract to support TACAMO within three months of its founding. It was the start of a quarter-century run.
Through the 1970s and early 1980s, ESI grew on airborne command-post communications, secure switching, antennas, and satellite communications. By 1984 it employed roughly 1,400 people, served around 150 government customers — every branch of the armed forces, the NSA, NASA, the FAA, the Coast Guard — and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The phones on the President's desk
ESI is best remembered for one thing above all: it built the secure telephone systems at the center of American nuclear command and control.
For the Defense Red Switch Network — the dedicated network carrying the most sensitive secure voice traffic between the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs, and combatant commanders worldwide — ESI designed and manufactured both the switching systems and the telephone instruments themselves: the Multi-Line Phone series and the Integrated Services Telephone. That switching technology grew out of the secure airborne voice equipment ESI had already built for the E-4B Nightwatch and EC-135 command-post aircraft.
ESI delivered the first Secure Digital Switch to CENTCOM at MacDill Air Force Base in 1983, going from development to a working system in under a year. The Red Switch went on to military command centers around the world, and ESI-built phones sat in the Oval Office, the Pentagon, the NSA, and the State Department from the early 1980s well into the 2000s.
Alongside that, ESI did communications work across the airborne command-post fleet — the E-4B, the EC-135 Looking Glass — the TACAMO submarine relay, and presidential aircraft.
Waco
In 1984, ESI established an aircraft-modification facility at the former James Connally Air Force Base in Waco. Its first hangar was large enough to hold a KC-135, and was the largest tilt-up-wall structure built in McLennan County at the time.
When Chrysler acquired ESI in 1987, it formed a Waco-based aircraft-modification company from that division — and named Milton Holcombe its president. Under his leadership the Waco facility modified military, commercial, and head-of-state aircraft, from range-instrumentation platforms to the Japanese Prime Minister's 747.
That facility never stopped. Raytheon acquired the business in 1996; the Waco operation later passed to L-3 Communications and runs today as part of L3Harris — having modified more than ninety-five types of aircraft across more than thirty-five years of continuous work, in the same county as Stator.
What it has to do with us
Milton Holcombe's name is on the electrical-and-computer-engineering department at Clemson. The company he helped found wired the secure backbone of American nuclear command. The hangar he built still turns out modified aircraft a short drive from our door. That lineage is family to Stator — not a credential to borrow, but a standard to hold.
ESI built systems where failure was not an option, documented why they worked, and made sure they kept working — for decades, under the most demanding customer there is. We started Stator to do that again, for the problems of our own era.
Sources
This account draws on contemporary press coverage, public records, and a company history of Electrospace Systems.