... 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. ...
... 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.
... 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. ...
