Advisory Services
Advisory services
Who does this work
Advisory work at Meridian Prime is led by Gene Richter.
Gene has served as a U.S. Air Force officer since 1999, working in intelligence and international affairs. He is a Foreign Area Officer — the Air Force's specialists in the politics, militaries, and languages of specific parts of the world.
Most recently he was Chief of Security Cooperation at Space Operations Command in Colorado Springs, where he built and managed defense agreements with allied nations and advised partner air forces in Chile and Colombia on how to plan their space programs.
Before that he handled political and military affairs at U.S. European Command, writing country plans and preparing generals for talks with allied governments. He directed strategy and policy work for U.S. Air Forces in Europe focused on Russia, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. He was the senior intelligence officer for a fighter wing in Italy, running intelligence for more than four thousand people.
He taught geospatial intelligence and human geography at the U.S. Air Force Academy for four years and served as deputy director of its geospatial science program.
On the civilian side, he was a national security consultant with BAE Systems supporting the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and a senior intelligence analyst supporting National Guard Bureau leadership.
He holds a master's degree in international relations and strategic studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a master's in strategic studies from Air University. He speaks Spanish at a professional level.
How we work
We work with government agencies on hard planning problems — the kind where the answer isn't in a manual and the cost of getting it wrong is high. Our work is unclassified analysis and advice: we study a problem, look at the options, and tell you what we think and why.
What we cover
Defense Strategy and Policy
We analyze policy options, review whether programs are doing what they were meant to do, and help leaders think through trade-offs before they decide. That includes written assessments and stress-testing the assumptions a plan rests on.
Intelligence
We produce written analysis built from publicly available information — country and regional assessments, tracking how a situation is developing, and research support for teams that need a question answered carefully. All of our intelligence work is unclassified and open-source.
Security Cooperation and International Defense Engagement
We plan and support defense cooperation with partner nations — building country plans, preparing senior leaders for meetings with foreign counterparts, and advising partner defense ministries on how to put agreements into practice. We have done this work across Europe and Latin America.
Space Programs and Partnerships
We help space organizations plan and manage work with partner nations, including advising partner governments on how to build and structure their own space capabilities. This is planning and policy work, not engineering.
Border and Transnational Threat Analysis
We produce analysis on border security, trafficking networks, and how threats move across national boundaries.
Exercises and After-Action Review
We help organizations plan and run exercises that test whether a plan actually works, then write the after-action reports that identify what to fix. We have done this for multinational humanitarian assistance operations.
Our advisory work has focused on Europe and Latin America. We work in Spanish at a professional level.