William Maxwell Aitken, better known as Lord Beaverbrook, never carried a rifle. He was a Canadian newspaper baron and a political kingmaker, an outsider that Whitehall, the government and civil service establishment that runs Britain, resented. He was also the man Winston Churchill trusted with the one thing that would decide whether Britain survived: aircraft production. This was the summer of 1940, during the Battle of Britain, when Britain was losing the war.

The Luftwaffe was larger and, by reputation, the most formidable air force in the world. The Royal Air Force was losing fighters faster than the country could replace them, and the flagship Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich had not delivered a single plane.

Beaverbrook refused to run it like a ministry. He stripped control from the men who were failing, pulled every decision into his own hands, and ignored the committees he called the Ministry of Obstruction (every defense founder today would probably call it the valley of death). He demanded output figures every day, ran the whole effort by telephone and force of will, kept almost no records, and pushed planes out the door faster than they could be counted.

The numbers moved. Fighter production nearly doubled by July. By September, at the height of the Battle of Britain, British factories were delivering more aircraft than Fighter Command was losing. That margin, thin as a razor, was the difference between holding the sky and losing the war. Churchill told Parliament the turnaround looked like magic.

Our motto comes from a letter. Beaverbrook and Churchill were old friends, and Churchill valued him above almost anyone in his cabinet. Beaverbrook clashed with nearly everyone around him and the work left him exhausted, but Churchill's faith in him never wavered. After the Battle of Britain was won, Churchill wrote him the words that became our motto:

“Your work during the crisis played a decisive part in our salvation. The figures speak for themselves ... You are one of our very few Fighting men of genius.” Winston Churchill, in a letter to Lord Beaverbrook

We are not the warfighter. We do not fly the missions or hold the line. We are the engine that cuts through the obstruction, moves faster than the process can fathom, and gets capability into the hands of the people who fight. Beaverbrook proved that production is its own kind of combat, and that the outsider who delivers can decide the outcome as surely as the pilot in the cockpit.

Harrison Rider is built on that idea.