Elliot Danish, CEO

While beginning his United States Marine Corps life as a rifleman and departing as a field artillery officer, Elliot Danish observed combat arms training from multiple rank viewpoints.  As early as a Lance Corporal, Elliot was fortunate to be afforded the opportunity to call in live indirect fire missions as a rifleman which later led to him becoming an artillery officer upon earning a commission after completing Officer Candidates School and completing an undergraduates at West Virginia University. Once joining the Fleet Marine Force at Camp Lejeune, NC, Elliot was immediately sent from 5^th Battalion, 10^th Marines, to be attached to Charlie Company, 1^st Battalion, 8^th Marines – of which had just returned from their historical deployment involving the second battle of Fallujah, Iraq.  It was during that time that Elliot slowly realized even the most seasoned of combat units lacked the most basic indirect fires skills. 

With a rare opportunity to conduct a patrol while calling in 81mm mortar training rounds during a short stop in Jordan, Elliot tailored a range to just his company’s squad leaders.  The exercise required those seasoned squad leaders to wear all PPE, carry a full combat load and assigned weapons, use only their organic communications equipment, and quickly react to notional enemy contact while calling for fire with 81mm mortars.  First iterations for each platoon’s team of squad leaders resulted in failure to produce a simple, adjust fire mission on a notional target.  Instead of frustrated, the squad leaders were mature enough to openly realize that those simple call for fire classes in the past were anything but simple during an actual patrol and each group of them requested “re-do’s” until they got it right. From that point on, Elliot has been striving to better prepare warfighters to use a historic, game-changing capability that has become drastically underutilized over time due to perishable fires coordination skills.

After departing the Marine Corps in 2008, Elliot Danish has since moved down to Charleston, SC where he simultaneously earned his MBA at The Citadel and worked his way up within the Defense Contracting Industry to become the operations manager for ACAT I Level programs.  With that new learning and experience of Defense Contracting, Elliot returned to his determination of improving indirect fires training by establishing Gray Cove Solutions with the mission of creating a large-scale range that has never been seen before. 

Steve Brevitz, COO

Steve’s decision to join the United States Marine Corps was made while in the middle of attending college for a business degree.  While initially angered during high school when viewing the fall of the twin towers, the impacted Pentagon, and the fight of those on Flight 93, the on-going daily news footage of service men and women deploying to foreign lands to protect our freedom is what caused Steve put college on “pause” and enlist into the Marine Corps.  After recruit training at San Diego, CA, Steve was sent to Fort Sill, OK for artillery scout training and then Coronado Island, CA for Naval Gunfire observer training in order to round out his initial training as an artillery scout observer. 

Steve Brevitz arrived at Camp Lejeune in 2005 and was assigned to a unit deploying with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (24^th MEU); Sierra Battery, 5^th Battalion, 10^th Marines (5/10).  Marines of Sierra Battery had just returned from Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah, Iraq and the NCO and SNCO observers were a leading factor to Steve’s successes as a USMC Observer.  They shared actual observer stories with Steve and ingrained the importance of indirect fires (IDF) within him – stories that made him realize that while IDF saves lives, the inability to utilize IDF can take just as many lives.

After several months of arriving at 5/10, Steve Brevitz was attached to 1/8 with 2nd Lieutenant Elliot Danish as Elliot’s Scout Artillery Observer.  This is where both Steve and Elliot quickly realized that even with extensive combat operational experience, that most of those combat-seasoned Marines still lacked the basic fire support coordination skills after Operation Phantom Fury.  The actual IDF basic skill training that squad leaders received was not enough for them to have mastered the use of IDF — even during Fallujah as well as in future, kinetic combat events.  This is exactly when Elliot and Steve exhausted all possible resources that they could to train Charlie Company squad leaders and platoon commanders to call for fire; even using real life Call for Fire scenarios that Alpha Company had successfully employed during that Fallujah II battle.  Once reaching the end of the 24^th MEU deployment, Steve and Elliot could confidently state that all Platoon Commanders, Squad Leaders, and even most Fire Team leaders, were capable of calling for fire while simultaneously fighting their units.   

Upon separating from the Marines in 2009 with an additional combat deployment under his belt, Steve deployed back to Iraq as a civilian DoD Contractor supporting a Fires Program as a Fire Support SME for 13 months and finally returned back to the continental United States where he switched from the DoD contracting industries to the food and beverage industry.  Steve had saved up to invest and then became a successful business owner of four restaurants in 2011.  That said, Steve never lost his passion for indirect fires and became a thorn in Elliot‘s side once discovering FAMEX.  Steve linked up with Elliot later in life and together they gravely believe that FAMEX is the future for significantly improving IDF combined with maneuver unit training of any size — because it WILL save lives with the knowledge and experience units will receive from FAMEX training. There has yet to be any training that comes close to what FAMEX can do to prepare warfighters for what they have been expected to do in combat.