Ya, it's a real organizational management and national service tragedy.
So much of the technical modernization is getting pushed towards the R/NG units, and you can just see how that will go short/mid term. This is paired with a common refrain from vets in tech that the pay and lifestyle is great but the work is pretty empty, so they'd look to do something else. But, they also know the meaningless silliness they'd sign up for by going back into the R/NG, let alone active duty. So, they land in defense contractors or SV startups doing defense tech, and straddle a middle ground that's not much better. The good ones won't go to the big defense contractors either.
Therefore, given that the recruitment target is a populace that has lived fairly simple lives in duty stations around the US, are happy earning something over $100k and calling it a day, and have pretty firm moral views on the importance and value of service the inability to capture this population back into public service due to the lack of any form of sane incentives is maddening to watch. Even discussing the pay is hard - the general populace and their representatives in congress (I say this reading OPEDs via them, although it is def anecdotal) can't believe that $70k is too low pay for an engineer to leave private sector. I'll stop this rant here, but my dream is someone in power finally starts understanding it's only (1) pay, (2) work geography matching modern tech centers, (3) drug policies from the 1950's keeping the talent out in aggregate.
So much of the technical modernization is getting pushed towards the R/NG units, and you can just see how that will go short/mid term. This is paired with a common refrain from vets in tech that the pay and lifestyle is great but the work is pretty empty, so they'd look to do something else. But, they also know the meaningless silliness they'd sign up for by going back into the R/NG, let alone active duty. So, they land in defense contractors or SV startups doing defense tech, and straddle a middle ground that's not much better. The good ones won't go to the big defense contractors either.
Therefore, given that the recruitment target is a populace that has lived fairly simple lives in duty stations around the US, are happy earning something over $100k and calling it a day, and have pretty firm moral views on the importance and value of service the inability to capture this population back into public service due to the lack of any form of sane incentives is maddening to watch. Even discussing the pay is hard - the general populace and their representatives in congress (I say this reading OPEDs via them, although it is def anecdotal) can't believe that $70k is too low pay for an engineer to leave private sector. I'll stop this rant here, but my dream is someone in power finally starts understanding it's only (1) pay, (2) work geography matching modern tech centers, (3) drug policies from the 1950's keeping the talent out in aggregate.