Ms. Adele Ratcliff is currently the Director of the Industrial Base Analysis & Sustainment Program (IBAS) Program within the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Policy (IndPol). During her tenure in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, she has focused on building strong interagency partnerships to address broad transition of manufacturing issues, such as manufacturing readiness and the Advanced Manufacturing Enterprise. Her current position uses the broad authorities of the IBAS program element to enable a modern Industrial Base that integrates traditional and emerging sectors to be able to respond at will to National Security Requirements. Most recently, as the Director of the DoD Manufacturing Technology (ManTech) Program, Ms. Ratcliff led the effort in establishing the DoD’s national Manufacturing Innovation Institutes (MIIs), now known as Manufacturing USA Institutes, outlined in the President’s 2013 State of the Union address.

Ms. Ratcliff’s long acquisition career has included serving as Program Manager for the congressionally mandated Defense Acquisition Challenge Program, Deputy Program Manager for the Foreign Comparative Test Program, and more than eleven years in Air Force Test and Evaluation at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. As Test Manager, she guided the Air Force’s Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser test program (better known as WCMD), from prototype through the production and deployment phase of the Platform, earning her the Air Force Materiel Command Test Engineer of the Year Award. More importantly, her efforts transitioned this Platform to support the Warfighter in the initial phases of Operation Enduring Freedom. She is a proud alumnus of the Mississippi State University Bulldogs, earning a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 1988. In 2011 she graduated from the U.S. Army War College (in-residence) earning a MS in Strategic Art and graduated from the Department of Defense’s Defense Senior Leadership Development Program (DSLDP). She received the SECDEF Award for Excellence for her support of the Pilot Institute for Additive Manufacturing in March 2013.