ANCAPS rejoice: High-technology brain drain takes heavy toll on U.S. military projects

When Paul Kaminski completed his graduate work in 1971 with degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, he started building advanced airplanes for the U.S. Air Force. By the time he stopped several decades later, he had played a pivotal role in producing a flock of new weapons, including radar-evading stealth aircraft.

If Kaminski were coming out of a university today, chances are that he would be going to work for the likes of Microsoft or Google.

Over the past decade, as spending on new military projects has reached its highest level since the Reagan years, the Pentagon has increasingly been losing the people most skilled at managing them. That brain drain, military experts like Kaminski say, is a big factor in a breakdown in engineering management that has made huge cost overruns and long delays the maddening norm.

Kaminski's generation of engineers, which was responsible for many of the most successful military projects of the 1970s and '80s, is aging. But declining numbers of top young engineers, software developers and mathematicians are replacing them. Instead, they are joining high-tech companies and other civilian organizations that provide not just better pay than the military or its contractors, but also greater cachet - what one former defense industry engineer called "geek credit."

Precise numbers are scarce, but one measure of this shift can be found at the air force: As a result of budget cuts, the demands of fighting two wars and the difficulty of recruiting and retaining top engineers, officials say, the number of civilian and uniformed engineers on the air force's core acquisition staff has been reduced by 35 to 40 percent over the past 14 years.

The downsizing "has taken a toll in our inability to refresh our aging acquisition workforce," said the air force's engineering chief, Jon Ogg.

When Kaminski and Ogg talk about military spending and the decline of engineering management, they tend to use measured, military tones. But with the Pentagon planning to spend $900 billion on development and procurement in the next five years, including $335 billion on major new weapons systems, the depth of their concern is reflected in a rising alarm among many in Washington.

At a recent hearing, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said cost overruns on military projects had "reached crisis proportions" and called for the creation of an internal Pentagon office to oversee costs. A recent Government Accountability Office study of 95 military projects worth $1.6 trillion reported cost overruns totaling $295 billion and an average delay of 21 months. Often a prime culprit was deficient engineering management.

"We're having awful problems with the execution of defense programs," said Kaminski, who was the Pentagon's top acquisition executive from 1994 to 1997. "It's absolutely critical to start becoming more efficient, more effective."

Kaminski is devoting much of his time as a private citizen to that goal, leading a high-level task force and visiting university campuses and defense companies to spread the word about the need for better engineering management.

As he and other experts explain it, the central problem is a breakdown in the most basic element of any big military project - accurately assessing at the outset whether the technological goals are attainable and affordable, then managing the engineering to ensure that hardware and software are properly designed, tested and integrated.

The technical term for the discipline is systems engineering. Without it, projects can turn into chaotic, costly failures.

Increasingly, that has become the case. What is more, the loss of government expertise has magnified the difficulties associated with another trend: In recent years, the Pentagon has transferred more and more oversight responsibility to its contractors, who themselves often lack sufficient systems-engineering skill and the incentives needed to hold down costs.

Kaminski's task force, organized by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, was composed of 18 defense experts, working together with the Air Force Studies Board, another high-powered group.

Their report scolded the air force for handling basic systems-engineering steps haphazardly or ignoring them altogether. Among those steps: considering alternative concepts before plunging ahead with a program, setting clear performance goals for a new system and analyzing the interaction between different technologies.

The task force identified several programs that, hobbled by poor engineering management, have run up billions of dollars in cost overruns while falling far behind schedule.

Among them:

A military satellite system designed to detect foreign missile launches that Kaminski said was inexplicably designed with two sensors that cannot operate simultaneously on the same spacecraft without extensive, costly shielding to prevent electromagnetic interference generated by one from disabling the other.

An ambitious army modernization project, known as Future Combat Systems, that moved into development before performance requirements were resolved.

A complex network of communications satellites that the Pentagon started building without a coherent plan for integrating an existing system with the new one or devising a consistent set of requirements to bridge the different needs of the four military services.

Kaminski and other experts see no easy fix. High-level reports and recommendations about poor engineering management have piled up over the years with little remedial action by the Pentagon, they said.

General Bruce Carlson, the head of the Air Force Materiel Command, which plays a leading role in acquisition programs, said he agreed with the panel's recommendations. Responding to questions by e-mail, he said that every air force program was now required to develop a systems-engineering plan. In addition, the service has established educational programs for its systems engineers and created a new degree in systems engineering at the Air Force Academy.

Similarly, naval officials are working with the National Academy of Engineering on a plan to encourage more interest in the sciences in school and improve the navy's recruitment and retention of engineers, mathematicians and other specialists. And universities like Georgia Tech and Purdue, responding to the kinds of concerns raised by Kaminski, are expanding their systems-engineering programs.

Still, the military is hard-pressed to compete with the corporate stars of the high-tech era.

"Ten to 20 years ago, many mechanical engineers went into a limited number of industrial sectors, automotive and aerospace - including defense - among the largest," James Jones, associate head of Purdue's School of Mechanical Engineering, said in an e-mail message.

Recent surveys of Purdue graduates, he said, show engineering students heading into a much broader array of jobs, including finance, management and medicine.

At MIT, a 2007 survey showed that 28.7 percent of undergraduates were headed for work in finance and 13.7 in management consulting, but just 7.5 percent in aerospace and defense. The top 10 employers included McKinsey, Google, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Bain, JP Morgan and Oracle - but not a single defense contractor or government office.

The same survey showed that the average annual starting salary in finance and high-tech was more than $70,000, compared with $37,000 at the Defense Department. The average in the defense industry was $61,000.

MIT does not have comparable survey data for 10 or 15 years ago, but officials there say the trend is unmistakable.

"Google calls me every other week looking for systems engineers," said Donna Rhodes, a systems-engineering expert at MIT.

The dean of the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech, Don Giddens, noted an additional factor limiting the recruitment of highly trained engineers into defense jobs: More than half the engineering doctoral candidates at American universities are from abroad and so are ineligible for jobs requiring security clearances.

Stuart Kerr, a software developer with advanced degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering, left the defense sector in 1999 after 10 years to work for a high-tech company. He said the protracted development time for defense projects amounted to "a professional death sentence" for scientists and engineers who want to keep up to date with technological advances.

Kerr, who now directs computer systems research at the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research organization that supports national-security space programs, said young engineers were also put off by the multi-layer bureaucracies associated with defense projects.

Gilbert Decker, a member of Kaminski's task force and a former assistant secretary of the army for research and development, said he understood the appeal of nondefense work. In 1999, after retiring from government, he became the top engineering executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, which designs and handles the engineering work at Disney theme parks.

"We did the rides, shows, hotels, the whole works," he said.

Kaminski has not taken that route.

A precise, fit graduate of the Air Force Academy, he spent most of his career running big defense projects, including development of the F-117 fighter and B-2 bomber, the world's first stealth aircraft. These projects are now regarded as models of technological audacity and successful management. Now 66, he serves as a consultant and is a director of General Dynamics and several other defense contractors. He also advises the FBI and the National Reconnaissance Office on technology issues.

In his role as engineering Johnny Appleseed, he uses the history of the F-117 as his gospel. He appeared at UCLA in March and MIT earlier this month, and will speak later this year at Aurora Flight Sciences, a Virginia defense contractor.

"Defense acquisition problems should be the subject of acute concern to Americans," he said in a recent interview at his home office in northern Virginia, miniature models of the aircraft he helped develop arrayed atop the bookshelf.

"This is an area in which our country has enjoyed a fundamental advantage. It's has been vital to our great economic strength, and our strength in national security. If we don't address the problems, those strengths are going to erode. In fact, they are eroding."

Though his F-117 lecture can be densely technical, the message is clear: Successful projects require exacting preparation and continual testing of assumptions and technologies.

"You start by analyzing the problem a bit, building a little something, testing what you've built, and finding out from those tests what you did that was stupid and learn from those mistakes," he said. "After you've done enough of that in a few areas, you're ready to start putting things together."

Kaminski said that while he was encouraged by the Air Force response to the task force report and recommendations, he knew even before the recent dismissal of the service's two top leaders that some commanders would probably not be around long enough in a new administration to make changes stick.

"You can be sure I'll be knocking on the doors of their successors," he said.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/24/america/engineer.php
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"Taking money without permission is stealing unless you work for the IRS then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania unless you work for the Army then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy unless you work for the FBI then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp & poisoning people makes you a murderer unless you work for the CIA then it's counter intelligence." R. Wilson. ANCAPS Forum Headquarters, Ancapolis