Margarita Howard was an area field manager in Florida when the Department of Defense rolled out Tricare in the 1990s, part of the military’s first attempt at managed health care. The transition met resistance. “There was a lot of debate and dissatisfaction in our area and across the country,” Howard recalls. “Nobody likes change. So, we had a lot of town hall meetings.”
Howard’s job put her at the center of that transition. She quickly advanced to regional director, overseeing Tricare implementation across seven Southeastern states. Part of her responsibility involved meeting with civilian providers to encourage them to accept the new military insurance program. She also delivered monthly briefings to military senior leadership at every installation in her region, tracking implementation progress.
Before Tricare, service members had Champus, a health care system that functioned like a basic insurance policy. The shift to managed care represented a fundamental change in how the military approached health benefits. Howard found herself managing that change across multiple stakeholder groups: military leadership, civilian providers, and the families depending on the system.
She didn’t know it then, but those years would shape how she later built HX5, the defense and aerospace contractor she founded in 2004. Particularly Margarita Howard’s approach to hiring veterans.
Today, veterans make up more than 30% of HX5’s workforce of roughly 1,000 employees. The company received the 2025 HIRE Vets Gold Medallion Award from the Department of Labor for its veteran hiring and retention practices. That percentage—more than four times the national average of 6% for private-sector veteran employment—reflects a hiring philosophy rooted in Howard’s own military background and government contracting experience.
Understanding Both Sides of the Table
The Tricare role gave Howard insight into how contractors and government agencies collaborate. “I was exposed to many different aspects of government contracting in the role that I was performing in,” she says. “Part of my job was working with various subcontractors. And so overall the experience was just very, very exciting.”
She learned the formal structure of military hierarchies. She navigated the complexity of civilian-military partnerships. She saw how decisions get made when federal dollars are involved.
When the Tricare contract ended and came up for rebid, Howard made a calculated decision. She took another government contracting position with a specific goal: learning enough to start her own business. “I just felt that I had seen the government contracting process from the ground up,” she says, “and I was in a good place to begin planning and taking steps toward starting my own business.”
The Translation Challenge
Howard’s Air Force service gave her direct knowledge of military culture and operations. Her Tricare years showed her how military experience translates into civilian contracting work and where gaps exist.
Service members often separate with technical skills and security clearances. Many have worked on advanced systems or in specialized roles. But they frequently lack civilian work experience that hiring managers outside government contracting immediately recognize.
This creates a translation problem. Military skills don’t always map cleanly to civilian job descriptions. The capabilities are there. The resume language often isn’t.
Howard understood this gap when she built HX5. The company operates across more than 20 states at over 70 government locations, supporting Department of Defense and NASA missions in engineering, information technology, research and development, and mission operations. Most positions require security clearances. Many demand familiarity with government operational environments.
“Experience in their respective fields, while supporting these agencies’ respective programs and missions, is very different from experience gained from working in the commercial world,” Howard explains.
Veterans who worked within military structures often understand these distinctions without extensive onboarding. They’ve already navigated government operational environments. They know classified information handling protocols, government reporting requirements, and how risk-averse military and NASA cultures operate.
For defense contractors where contracts demand rapid integration of qualified personnel into sensitive programs, that existing knowledge has immediate value.
Building for Veterans
HX5 holds a service-disabled veteran-owned business certification. This certification signals something to potential employees: the company’s leadership has military background and understands veteran transitions.
Howard’s trajectory from Air Force service member to defense contractor CEO demonstrates a career path for people leaving the military. Her experience shapes company culture in ways that affect veteran integration.
The company has hosted several fellows through the Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellowship Program since 2021, bringing in two transitioning service members annually. The Department of Defense SkillBridge initiative allows active-duty members within 180 days of separation to gain civilian work experience while still receiving military pay and benefits.
Fellows work four days weekly at host companies on active projects. The fifth day covers professional development: project management techniques, corporate communication styles, strategies for influencing without formal authority. The 12-week structure provides extended evaluation periods for both employer and veteran.
For HX5, the fellowship offers early access to candidates who often already possess security clearances and relevant technical backgrounds. For veterans, it provides practical experience applying military skills in contractor settings.
Howard describes ideal HX5 candidates as “purple unicorns”—professionals combining rare technical skills, appropriate clearances, and relevant experience. The fellowship creates a pipeline to transitioning military members who frequently meet those criteria.
Mission alignment matters too. “The work we do is very exciting. Some of it is not being done anywhere else in the world,” Howard says, explaining that meaningful work often matters as much as compensation in retaining talent.
HX5’s contracts include supporting advanced weapons research, conducting production readiness reviews for sensor systems, and performing modeling and simulation for defense and space programs.
From Tricare to Today
Twenty years after founding HX5, Howard runs a company where veterans comprise nearly one-third of the workforce.
The approach stems from Howard’s combined experience: military service that showed her how service members think and operate, and Tricare years that revealed how military culture intersects with civilian business operations and government contracting.
She saw the friction points during Tricare implementation. The resistance to change. The need for constant communication between military and civilian stakeholders. The complexity of coordinating large-scale government programs.
Those lessons have translated into how HX5 approaches veteran hiring: not as a recruiting advantage to exploit, but as alignment between the company’s operational needs and veterans’ existing capabilities. The company needs people who understand government operations. Veterans often possess that understanding before they separate.
The Tricare program Howard helped implement continues serving millions of service members and their families. The company she built two decades ago now provides pathways for veterans transitioning to civilian contracting work.
