Aerospace Industries Assn. Frustrated With Bush Defense Policies

Aerospace Industries Assn. Frustrated With Bush Defense Policies
Aviation Week & Space Technology 08/08/05
author: David Bond

The Aerospace Industries Assn. is expressing frustration with some Bush administration defense policies--or lack thereof. ... the industry has little to no insight into Pentagon officials' assumptions regarding the industrial base as they conduct the Quadrennial Defense Review. He fears they may assume engineers skilled in specific advanced technologies will be available far into the future even if they don't have projects to work on in the near term. "The industry is really fragile today compared with where it was," Douglass says. "When I graduated college, there were 153,000 engineers working on defense. Today it's probably 8,000-9,000." Douglass also says the large number of vacancies in senior defense positions makes industry uneasy.

This is something I've seen mentioned sporadicaly for the last few years. Unfortunately for our government, the defense industry needs a base of engineers to perform the work necessary to develop new programs. Congress seems to like to "ignore" this little issue. Well, maybe ignore is the wrong word.

People, even in industry, forget that you need an experienced base of people, including engineers, to get a job done effectively. When the people are experienced, the project not only costs less than it otherwise would, but usually runs according to their predictions of schedule. (Notice I said "their" predictions of schedule).

Lets take some quick examples -- The Apollo program. A massive program that built up a decade of experience that is all gone. If we wish to return to the moon, it will take many years, perhaps even decades, to return to capabilities that we had in the 1960's! The experience base is gone, with no shoulders to stand upon.

Another example, is our defense aircraft industry. It used to be that we had 5-10 aircraft programs in work at any one time. This supported a base of skilled workers from mechanics, and engineers to program managers. Today we have two manned aircraft programs, both run by Lockheed -- JSF and F-22. Neither is being built in the numbers aircraft used to built in, and each is very expensive as a result. The number of engineers and other skilled workers necessary to support these two programs is much lower than the 5-10 program of the past, as you would expect.

This also leads to another problem of sorts, the greying of our engineering workforce, and the lack of interesting programs to draw in new engineers.

The engineering workforce is not getting the attention it deserves, and the ones to pay the price will be Americans from coast to coast.

Aerospace | Defense | Engineering