The Trap of Recruitment and Employment in The Defense Industry

Many young people want to work in the defense industry, but did you know that this sector has one of the highest employee turnover rates in the world? And that employees leave their jobs quickly and continuously?

Let’s talk about a very important aspect that concerns everyone who aspires to work in this field, an aspect that no one will tell you about the reality of working in this industry, and how it is causing Europe and America to face a deep problem that is difficult to solve and will require many years and radical changes.

I will explain to you in the end how management sciences and humanities play a crucial role in the defense industries, as there are problems that military science or technology alone cannot solve.

We all know that Europe and America, as well as all countries, spend billions on defense, but what we don’t know is that they face a talent crisis that threatens their ability to turn that huge spending into real products.

Europe alone needs to fill about 1.5 million jobs in the defense and aerospace sectors, which is a huge number.

To understand the scale of this problem, let’s look at it from this angle: you have great defense ambitions, you face threats on your borders, you are pumping in huge investments, and you have a strong industrial base, but despite all that, you have a deep problem, which is that you don’t have enough talent to manufacture those products.

In fact, the opposite is true: people are leaving the defense industry, not necessarily because of low salaries (although that is one reason), but because the work environment itself is repellent to talent. Anyone who works in human resources will understand how difficult and dangerous such a problem is for an entire industry.

A study by McKinsey and the Aerospace Industries Association indicates that the attrition rate in the defense and aerospace industries has reached 15%, meaning that one in seven employees leaves their job each year.

To understand how serious this figure is, it is enough to know that the normal rate in the United States in general is only about 3.8%, which is about four times lower than the attrition rate in the defense industry.

And the problem does not stop there; there are much worse figures. For example, about 25% of the defense and aerospace workforce has reached or is very close to retirement age, which means that in just five years, this industry will lose a quarter of its human resources, along with 20 or more years of experience.

On the other hand, where is the younger generation that will replace them? So far, there is none.

This problem is essentially an economic one, because it represents a gap between what the industry actually needs and what countries and companies offer individuals.

This brings us to the most important question: Why are people leaving defense industries?

Many superficial analyses attribute the reason to salaries, i.e., wages are low, so workers resort to sectors that offer higher salaries. But in reality, this is not the root of the problem.

Major defense companies such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon offer reasonable salaries—not the highest compared to major technology companies such as FAANG, but still good—yet the real problem remains in the organizational culture and work environment itself.

There is a phenomenon known as ossified culture, a work environment that belongs intellectually to the “Stone Age” and still carries all its old flaws: harsh bureaucracy, overly long chains of command, intense fear of making mistakes, and other manifestations that stifle creativity.

While reading about this topic in preparation for writing about it, I found a popular forum for engineers on Reddit, where someone wrote that they had worked in the defense industry for about two years.

This person says that the prevailing image of freedom, innovation, and working on great projects is completely misleading; the internal culture systematically kills innovation. Even if you have an excellent idea, you have to go through a long series of approvals from about ten different parties, and in the end, the idea is usually rejected.

Another person mentioned that he worked for a large defense company and said that they reused old designs instead of developing new ones because any new project requires a lot of time, money for testing, and complex regulatory approvals. That’s why companies prefer the safe and proven route rather than embarking on development adventures — even if the new is much better than the old.

But the worst figure of all, which surpasses any other in its shock value, is related to security clearance delays.

These clearances are a prerequisite for working on classified projects. In the United States and Europe, anyone who wants to enter the defense sector is subject to a thorough and complex security screening process.

Since 2024, the duration of these processes has begun to lengthen significantly. For example, it now takes a minimum of 146 days to obtain a Top Secret Clearance, the highest level of security clearance.

The process is extremely complex, involving a thorough background check that examines friends, family, bank accounts, and every little detail of a person’s life. Anything suspicious discovered during the screening results in the candidate being immediately rejected without discussion.

Even if the screening is passed successfully, waiting 146 days is enough time for the company to lose a talented employee, as most of them find another job during that period—one that is faster, easier, and perhaps similarly or better paid—in an environment that is more supportive than the defense industry.

So instead of waiting anxiously and bored for that long period, the employee simply says, Why not start working at Google or Meta today? The talent shortage is not just a hiring problem, but part of a deeper management problem.

The focus is always on the known and proven: predetermined specializations and traditional backgrounds, such as mechanical engineering, military electronic engineering, military maintenance, and so on.

But the world has changed, while this logic remains the same.

Today, defense industries are no longer based solely on traditional manufacturing, as new specializations such as additive manufacturing have emerged. These specialists are extremely rare, and even when they are found, they often have no previous experience in the defense field. Sometimes, there are no departments available in the first place to accommodate this type of expertise.

Defense companies today point to a shortage of artificial intelligence and machine learning engineers, a shortage of software developers—who are attracted by much higher salaries at large civilian companies—and a significant shortage of engineers in advanced industries such as 3D printing and materials engineering.

However, the core of the problem lies not so much in the scarcity itself as in the structural imbalance that has allowed this crisis to escalate.

Defense companies are now asking themselves the question, too late:

How can we not attract AI engineers when we are working on the latest technologies and the largest defense programs in the world related to artificial intelligence?

The answer is simple:

A young person who has studied artificial intelligence and graduated from university has three clear options:

• Work at OpenAI, Google, or Amazon, and earn a very high salary and, more importantly, intellectual and spatial freedom at work.

• Work at a defense company for the same or lower salary, in exchange for severe bureaucratic restrictions, complex security clearances, and procedures that take months, without any real freedom of movement or innovation.

• To join a startup in Silicon Valley.

The choice here is quite clear, and it doesn’t take a genius to know which path this engineer will take. Naturally, he will not choose the second option, i.e., working for a defense company.

As for Europe, its problem is much deeper than that of the United States, because salaries there are lower—according to statistics, they are about one-third of American salaries—in addition to a bureaucracy that is much more complex than its American counterpart.

Consequently, in most cases, Europe’s top talent in the fields of technology and defense simply leaves for America, because the incentives there—both financial and professional—are incomparable.

There is a phenomenon in Europe known as reverse brain drain.

After World War II, Europe was suffering from difficult economic conditions that drove large numbers of young Europeans to emigrate to the United States. This wave began to subside in the 1960s and 1970s when Europe stabilized economically.

However, the wave has returned today, especially in the technical, defense, and space sectors.

German engineers are emigrating to America, as are British and French engineers.

If you browse LinkedIn and look at the profiles of engineers working in the United States, you will find that many of them studied at a European university, then worked briefly for a European company, and then moved to an American company.

This means that the problem is not limited to a particular company or even the defense sector alone, but is a much deeper structural problem; European countries themselves have put themselves in a position where they cannot retain talent.

This brings us to the third problem:

European and American countries spend billions on defense, space, and armaments, but at the same time, they invest very little in human resources, education, and the real development of talented workers and cadres.

A 2024 study by McKinsey indicates that 48% of employees in defense and aerospace companies stated that the tools and resources available to them are insufficient to perform their work with the required efficiency.

Worse still, 60% of mid-level and junior employees say they do not feel empowered to improve the way they work, meaning that employees go to work every day without even daring to suggest changes in methods or mechanisms to improve their work.

Furthermore, 60% of companies themselves confirm that they face a fundamental problem in retaining their staff.

When these companies and countries began to think about a solution, the only response was almost always to increase salaries by a small percentage.

However, these increases did not solve the problem, because the essence of the crisis is not only financial, but also structural and cultural within the economy itself. As we said earlier, salary has never been the root of the problem; rather, the root causes are culture, freedom, appreciation, and the opportunity for innovation.

Hence, it can be said that these countries are currently stuck in a difficult trap, a trap that is simple to describe but extremely complex to solve.

The trap is that you realized the problem too late.

Talent is not lost suddenly without warning, but erodes gradually.

As soon as a person feels that the company or system they work for is unable to accommodate their development or appreciate their innovation, they begin to look for another place that will give them greater respect, greater freedom, or faster achievement.

This is where companies make the same mistake, attributing the cause solely to material factors, because they do not want to admit that the crisis is essentially psychological, institutional, and cultural before it is financial.

The final problem is that universities are not equipped with educational programs tailored to the needs of the defense and aerospace sectors, and defense companies do not cooperate effectively with universities to guide them on what to teach young people or to provide the necessary support for these programs.

The end result is that graduates lack the skills that the industry actually requires.

Furthermore, the number of graduates in vital defense-related disciplines is very low each year.

A study conducted in 2024 indicated that less than 100,000 students worldwide graduate annually in technical fields related to semiconductors, while the global demand for employees in these fields exceeds one million people annually!

Think about it: we are talking about a military industry facing a deep crisis, but the solution is neither military nor political, but rather purely administrative.

Imagine if the company’s management itself consisted entirely of retired officers with a strict military leadership style! Then you could say goodbye to cadres and talent.

Some decisions have recently been made to try to address these crises, but there is still a long way to go, and the problems are piling up day after day.

In my opinion, one of the most important decisions that should be made is to give defense companies the freedom to make reasonable profits and convert them into private companies operating under government supervision or sponsorship.

The reason is that what is currently happening is that governments have reduced the profit margins of these companies on the pretext of preserving public funds, so that companies are now operating with extremely low margins, making them unable to hire more, raise salaries, make necessary structural changes, or even invest sufficiently in research and development and human resources.

I have elaborated on this topic because the goal is not only to explain, but also to draw a very important lesson—in addition to the immediate lessons.

That lesson is that the defense industry suffers from deep problems that require radical changes, and that the solution lies more in the civilian and human sciences than in military science or technology.

The only real solution is to recognize that defense engineering, technology, and innovation are not purely military responsibilities, but are first and foremost administrative, economic, and cultural responsibilities.

Take this important observation: these problems are much less prevalent in emerging countries—such as China, India, Turkey, and Brazil—because these countries follow a completely different model; they focus seriously on education and human resource development, allow room for experimentation and failure, and grant greater freedom for initiative and innovation.

It is essential to understand that human resource problems are the most serious of all, because they require many years of investment, education, culture, and freedom.

When a great country loses a generation of talent, there is no guarantee that it will be able to regain it in the next generation.