Prepared To Embrace The Future

At the beginning of this letter, I summarized the scope of our progress these last several years in focusing on customer success, reshaping our portfolio, improving process discipline, and strengthening the balance sheet.

This year's Annual Report puts the spotlight on another key contributor to the company's success: innovation. Raytheon is a technology company, and we are very proud of our team's wonderful solutions...from Universal Control Systems that enhance performance in piloting unmanned aerial systems...to our role in two of TIME Magazine's 50 Best Inventions of 2008: our Radio Frequency components for NASA's soon-to-be launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and our Active Protection System that is being developed for the U.S. Army. In the pages that follow, you will read about some of the many, many technology solutions developed by our world-class engineers and scientists.

Our engineers and scientists inspire us. They show us what can be accomplished when we look at the world with fresh eyes, collaborate, welcome new ideas and try to do things differently. We feel so strongly about this mindset that we are redoubling our efforts on innovation at Raytheon. That is, we want there to be an innovative approach to meeting needs that extends beyond our engineers and scientists to include all members of our team – whether they are developing a more efficient way to close the financial quarter, rolling out a new ethics education program to reinforce our core values, strengthening our leadership and development programs, or finding new ways to help secure the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pipeline for the future.