When Quill Ferguson went into the Army, a political science major straight out of N.C. A&T, the Army turned him into a communications engineer. And then for 30 years they put him up against one of the military’s most intractable foes: the uncertainty, the fog, that has plagued commanders everywhere armies have fought.

He started out with weapons like radio tubes and microwave equipment. By the time he retired, satellite communications, unmanned aerial vehicles and other advancements were providing unprecedented capabilities for giving commanders clarity on the battlefield.

Those capabilities make technology a necessity everywhere the Army goes. In Afghanistan, for example, Ferguson was NATO’s chief of communications and information systems management, tasked with the establishment of the alliance’s C4ISR network – command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Aside from the hazards of deploying advanced technology in a war zone, Ferguson faced an entirely different type of communications challenge with a staff that came from up to 20 different nations.

“That made it very interesting. Culturally, there’s a challenge,” he says. In the end, for both the technology and the human factor, “it was a great lesson in interoperability in a coalition environment.”

Challenges like that “made the 30 years go by very quickly,” he says.

Even though he retired in 2011, he’s still taking on those challenges. He’s now president of Obera LLC, a private firm with a broad range of capabilities that often come down to finding the right equipment for a military mission and making it all work together.

“That’s the key: How do you tie all this in?” Ferguson says. “You have the command, control, communications, and computers. Now you need the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance piece to complement those things. That’s how commanders and the intel community get the right information at the right time through the right means, the right sources, whether it’s satellites, unmanned vehicles and that type of thing.”

Like Ferguson, most of his staff has experience with the Department of Defense, some in the military and some as civilians.

“Our niche has been in the counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism area,” he says. “Under contract to the U.S. Central Command and the government, we’ve been over to Tajikistan, one of the boarder nations with Afghanistan. We’ve improved their capabilities along the border to help them with the trafficking of narcotics out of Afghanistan.”

For that particular project, Ferguson spent 90 days in Tajikistan, assessing the border, mountainous and remote, with border guards, forces from the Ministry of the Interior, the police and special drug units. “It was about as challenging if not more than when I was on active duty,” he says.

That’s not the kind of thing you find most CEOs doing. “When you have the expertise and it’s a small company, it’s all hands,” he says.

It’s also not the kind of work Ferguson was necessarily looking for when he came to A&T.

He arrived in 1977 as a freshman on an athletic scholarship. He had been a track star running the 400 and 800 meters at an American high school in Naples, Italy, where his father was stationed in the Air Force. While he says longtime coach Murray Neely “took a chance on me,” it was one that paid off well. Ferguson was the A&T athlete of the year in 1981, his senior year.

He received his first lesson in military science almost as soon as he arrived as a freshman. The subject was how to talk to an officer.

“I was registering for classes in Moore Gymnasium, and the professor of military science saw me and said, ‘Young man, you like you’d make a great Army officer.’ And I said, ‘No thank you, I’m here for sports.’ And he commenced to chewing me out and giving me a lesson on academics.

“It was the way I said it. Athletics was paying my way. The next day he convinced me to take the freshman military science class for one credit hour.”

That modest beginning led to four years in the ROTC cadet corps. As graduation neared, the Army asked him for his top five choices for duty. He put in for three different combat roles, or intelligence or military police. The Army responded: Signal Corps.

“It turned out to be the best branch selection I could have been given,” he says. “It dominates everything we do now.”

He started out with the 82nd Airborne Division as a platoon leader and battalion communications officer. As he rose through the ranks, he saw his share of action.

In 1993, for example, he was in Mogadishu, Somalia, during the unsuccessful operation depicted in the book and film “Black Hawk Down.” As the operation’s communications officer, he was one of four soldiers in the command and control helicopter during the battle.

Ferguson received some impressive postings, including the Strategic Air Command, by virtue of his knowledge of satellite communications management; the Pentagon’s joint staff under Gen. Colin Powell; and special operations.

“I’ve done a little bit of everything, and I enjoyed all of it. Maybe not when you’re doing it so much, but when you look back, you can say you contributed to significant events.”

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