Imagine you are a hiring manager at Lockheed Martin, and you have two candidates' resumes in front of you:
One has a bunch of certifications, a TS/SCI with polygraph, a list of skills/technologies that overlap strongly with the ones you are interested in, work experience with your biggest customers (responsible for 85% of revenue), but only has very vague information about what he has done specifically. Everything looks like a good fit, but it is hard to tell for sure because of the vagueness.
The other has an excellent, detailed, resume listing several jobs in the purely private sector. Even though he has worked in large enterprises, they weren't DoD and so the technology overlap isn't quite as good. But by and large you think he'd be an excellent fit based on the projects he has undertaken so far.
It will cost you six figures and take at least many months to get the second candidate security cleared, which will be necessary before he can start working on the project you have in mind. He might fail to get cleared in which case you will have to start all over.
This thought exercise suggests that someone with an NSA background will have significant trouble straying far from government-connected "private industry" work.
GovCloud is pretty much AWS (I got the impression basically a separate DC, switches, racks, etc. - an airgap of some sort I guess) and is accredited for U//FOUO workloads, which is where a lot of work has shifted to make it easier for contractors that are having trouble clearing people to TS/SCI quickly as well as to be able to do some work on platforms outside of a SCIF.
Contrary to the prevailing popular opinion that defense is run by complete idiots, a lot of programs are run by extremely intelligent people... that have a litany of pressures that are completely contradictory that results in completely insane outcomes.
"Imagine you are a hiring manager at Lockheed Martin".
I'd say walking away from that job might be the best option. You're not part of the mil/industry complex any longer, you sleep better after the next drone bombing of civilians, based on intel received from RQ-170 or similar.
It really depends on the project, but in my case, I could talk about technology, but not the specific problem we were trying to solve. I have the unclassified cover names listed on my resume as well.
