It looks like the shortage of manufacturing & technology labor in the U.S. is playing havoc with the U.S. military and government.
The dilemma is covered in a piece from the front page of yesterday's New York Times titled "Top Engineers Shun Military; Concern Grows" and authored by Philip Taubman.
According to the article and its sources, the erosion of engineering talent to manage military projects has "reached crisis proportions."
Over the last decade, even 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 ... say, is a big factor in a breakdown in engineering management that has made huge cost overruns and long delays the maddening norm. Mr. Kaminski's generation of engineers, which was responsible for many of the most successful military projects of the 1970s and '80s, is aging, and fewer of the nation's top young engineers, software developers and mathematicians are replacing them. Instead, they are joining high-tech companies and other civilian firms 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.'
Well, no kidding. The private manufacturing sector has been screaming to high heaven over engineering and manufacturing labor depletion for years.
There are task forces and senate committees and finger pointing to get to a solution for this symptom - as there should be. But that same scrutiny and urgency were needed when the private sector in the U.S. was leaking talent 15 years ago.
So, the primary symptom of the lack of high-caliber engineering governance is poor systems engineering.
... 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 ... 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.
And isn't this also the main impact on manufacturers in the private sector when dealing with those shortages of engineering and shopfloor talent? And as the suppliers that support those projects just as important to the "crisis?"
And another thing, will this be used to leverage the argument towards Boeing's challenge of the KC-X tanker program? I sure hope not - that would just be an embarrassing instance of "post hoc ergo propter hoc." Oh, wait - I forgot who we're talking about here.
Anyway, I have some questions for you: How do you deal with the labor or intellectual shortage? How have you seen it first hand - whether it's a lack of design or systems engineering talent or shopfloor expertise? What are you doing to compensate? Is it even a problem at your company?
