Huntington Ingalls Industries: Admiral Kirkland Donald named with cybersecurity expertise

Huntington Ingalls Industries' proxy statement for its 2025 annual meeting, filed March 21, 2025, names one director as holding cybersecurity expertise: Admiral Kirkland H. Donald.

The filing states: "Admiral Donald also has cybersecurity expertise and holds the CERT certificate in cybersecurity oversight from Carnegie Mellon University."

The proxy also lists Donald as a member of the board's Cybersecurity Committee. His broader background, per the filing, spans 37 years in the U.S. Navy, ending as Director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, followed by service as a senior operating officer and chief executive of a private company serving the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.

No SEC rule requires this disclosure. The Commission proposed in 2022 to add Item 407(j) of Regulation S-K, which would have required every company to state whether any director has cybersecurity expertise, then dropped it from the final 2023 cybersecurity-disclosure rule: "we are not adopting the proposed requirement to disclose board cybersecurity expertise," reasoning that boards can oversee cybersecurity risk through general risk-management skill, without naming a specific director as the expert.

Naming Donald's cybersecurity background here is Huntington Ingalls' own choice, not a regulatory mandate. See the board cybersecurity-expertise record for other companies that make this same voluntary disclosure, with no comparison or ranking implied.