The MITRE Corporation is a public-interest not-for-profit organization that manages three Federally Funded Research & Development (R&D) Centers (FFRDCs): one for the Department of Defense (DoD) (known as the DoD Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (DoD C3I) FFRDC), one for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) (the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD), and one for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) (the Center for Enterprise Modernization (CEM)). MITRE also has its own independent R&D program that explores new technologies and new uses of technologies to solve their sponsors' problems in the near-term and in the future. MITRE was formed in 1958, under the leadership of C. W. Halligan, to provide overall direction to the numerous companies and workers involved in the US Air Force's SAGE project. Most of the early employees transferred in from Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where SAGE was being developed. In April 1959, a site was purchased in Bedford, Massachusetts, to develop into MITRE's own center, which they occupied in September. After SAGE wound down in the early 1960s, MITRE won a contract in 1963 to develop a similar system for the Federal Aviation Administration, to produce an automated air traffic control system. The result, the National Airspace System (NAS), is still in use today largely in its original form, though with most of its components modernized at one time or another since the 1960s. To support the NAS project and due to their continual operations with the DoD at the Pentagon, a second "main office" was opened in McLean, Virginia. MITRE also operates a large number of branch offices around the world, most of them co-located at major Air Force or other military bases. Through the 1960s, MITRE was mostly involved in military command, control and communications (C3I) projects, working on, among other things, AWACS. They also worked on a number of projects with ARPA, including the work that would lead to the ARPANET. Since then, most early warning and communications projects have been developed by or supported by MITRE, including JTIDS and Joint STARS. One of their more recent projects is to provide a modernization plan for the Internal Revenue Service, which started in 1998. With the slowing of continued military research after the end of the Cold War, the federal government set up several "Centers of Excellence" (COEs) research teams funded at a low level to ensure that the teams stayed together in the future. On January 29, 1996, MITRE’s board of trustees elected to divide the corporation into two entities. MITRE was to focus its operations on its FFRDCs for DoD and FAA, while a new company, named Mitretek Systems, now called Noblis, took over the non-FFRDC work for a number of government agencies. Today MITRE operates three COEs, each based on one of their major projects. The Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) continues to work on the NAS, the Center for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) supports a broad and diverse set of sponsors within the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, and the Center for Enterprise Modernization (CEM) is dedicated to the IRS. MITRE is led by President and CEO Al Grasso. The company has dual headquarters: one in Bedford, Massachusetts and another in McLean, Virginia. The domain mitre.org was the first .org domain ever registered in July 1985.
