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Changing technologies
OPPORTUNITIES IN THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY

Defense technology steps up to the challenge

Hiring for defense and homeland security looks to remain strong for the next five to ten years.

“It’s where all the new projects will be happening,” says an industry participant

By Skip Waugh
Contributing Editor

Debbie Banko is president of Link Technologies.

In today's changed world, the work of defense contractors, along with the government agencies they serve, has taken on a new urgency. The challenge of updating existing weapons, battle management and intelligence systems, and developing the next generation, means workforce growth at defense contractors.

"The market is starting to break loose now," says Debbie Banko. Banko is president of Link Technologies (Las Vegas, NV), an IT and engineering consulting firm that works with the departments of defense (DOD), energy, and transportation.

With defense budgets finalized for fiscal 2004, which starts in October, defense technology should take off, says Banko. The job market for IT people and engineers - soft in the commercial sector - should get a boost from increased DOD spending.

"It's where all the new projects will be happening, especially when it comes to technology," Banko says.

Harris Corp satellite imagery obtained this enhanced picture of a palace in Baghdad.

In fact, the next five to ten years promise to be strong ones for defense hiring. Companies will be looking for the best talent in the marketplace, and techies will have the chance to roll up their sleeves and contribute to the welfare of their country.

Harris Corp: enormous opportunities
"Defense technology is the segment of the marketplace that continues to grow," says Cindy Kane, senior manager of corporate staffing at Harris Corp (Melbourne, FL).

"Technology begins here."

Harris is a communications equipment provider to government and commercial companies alike. Its major product areas are in RF/wireless, broadcast, microwave and network support. The company employs more than 10,000 people, close to half of them engineers and scientists.

"Once the homeland security offices are fully up to speed, there will be enormous opportunities for folks in the defense market. It might just be our next new frontier," Kane speculates.

Chief technologist Melanie Dietz works on "huge classified jobs" at Harris Corp.

Melanie Dietz follows the systems at Harris
As chief technologist at Harris Corp, Melanie Dietz sees projects through their whole life cycle. "I like the fact you are able to follow the systems from creation to delivery to the customers," says Dietz. "You also get to see their performance in the field."

Dietz works in the wireless products group of the government communications systems division (Palm Bay, FL). She leads many ongoing efforts, and much of her work is highly classified.

"You can become isolated when you work on these huge classified jobs, since you spend so much of your time behind closed doors," she says - but adds that her chief technologist post is the best job she could ever have.

Dietz' interest in engineering began in high school, where she ate up the math and science classes. A teacher told her about a NASA scholarship which would let her co-op at Cape Canaveral while attending college.

She got the scholarship and attended Florida Institute of Technology while she worked at NASA. She spent two semesters in flight readiness and two in the Space Lab, and completed her BSEE in 1984.

Then she got a Hughes Aircraft fellowship, which paid her tuition and a salary while she worked on her 1985 MSEE. She started with Hughes (Fullerton, CA) as a Level I engineer, and over the next five years moved to Level II engineer, then RF designer.

The work was great but she got tired of California traffic and high housing costs. In 1990 she took a job with Harris, moving from RF designer to integrated project team leader. Her work with $20 and $30 million projects earned her the promotion to chief technologist.

Claudina Tiznado of Northrop Grumman IT: "Defense technology has matured."

Claudina Tiznado of Northrop Grumman IT
Claudina Tiznado has worked in defense technology at venues around the world. Now she's at the Anaheim, CA facility of Northrop Grumman's IT sector as a senior software engineer in the missile defense department. She and her team are developing a training and exercise testing component for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense Program.

Working with her diverse team of about twenty engineers is fun for Tiznado. "I like helping the young engineers become senior developer types," she comments.

Tiznado studied EE at California State University-Long Beach, and spent a summer at Hughes Aircraft (Fullerton, CA), where she was put to work on a Pakistani air defense system.

When she graduated in 1984 she joined Hughes full time. For the next eleven years she worked on a series of overseas assignments. She did software integration for a United Kingdom air defense system, worked at the NATO Center in Brussels and at a British Air Force base near London. But when the company offered her a permanent post overseas, she turned it down.

In 1995 Tiznado took a job as a development engineer with Beckman Medical Instruments (Fullerton, CA), working on instruments for blood and urine analysis. Although the products were very different, "Software development applies pretty much the same principles," she says.

Three years later she returned to defense technology as a software engineer for Northrop Grumman (Los Angeles, CA). And when Northrop Grumman merged several companies into its Northrop Grumman IT sector (Herndon, VA) last year, she went with them.

Tiznado thinks the future looks very promising. "The technology has matured since I entered in the 1980s. It is a lot more advanced," she says.

Susan Stitch.

Leapfrogging technology at Boeing
"We see customers of defense technology hoping to skip a generation in what they deploy," says Susan Stitch, director of people at Boeing Co's Phantom Works R&D division (St. Louis, MO).

Wanda Denson-Low thinks so, too. She is VP of people at Boeing's Integrated Defense Systems (IDS, St. Louis, MO). "The military is rapidly coming up to speed and its desire to be at the forefront of technology will move the ball significantly in terms of experience and skill level," she says. "There is significant opportunity here for anybody interested in doing a wide variety of things and working with cutting-edge technology."

Wanda Denson-Low.

IDS employs almost 77,000 people at thirty sites, and their average age is approaching fifty, Denson-Low says. "We'll be seeing increases in the people we hire as our current workforce retires."

Phantom Works employs around 5,000, and job growth there is expected to result from new programs. "We do a lot of integration with IDS and other parts of Boeing," Stitch explains.

"The nature of our business is changing," she reflects. "There will be a lot of opportunity to get involved in different types of products, roles, and leadership - long-term careers that can be very dynamic."

Eric Anderson.

Eric Anderson is a manager at Boeing's IDS
"With the increased emphasis on technology, defense companies are finding customer requirements changing in a dramatic way," says Eric Anderson, a manager in Boeing's IDS and a participant in the company's executive development program.

"The customer used to need companies to provide expertise in building new bombs or fighters," he explains. "Of course they still do that today to a certain extent. But now they're also looking for different ways to employ all of the assets they're using in the battle space. They want a company to help link them all together."

Anderson calls this concept "network-centric operations." He says it "presents a different challenge for us," and it's one that fits very well with his own background. Most of his career has been involved with understanding systems and how they connect.

Anderson earned a certification in airframe and power-plant mechanics while he was still in high school. "I never really wanted to work on airplanes, but I did want to have the knowledge," he explains.

He went on to the aerospace engineering program at California State University-Los Angeles. For the last two years he worked part-time at a nearby Lockheed Martin facility. He developed wiring schematics for CAD tools in the L-1011 aircraft program. When his BSAE came through in 1981 he went to work as a systems manufacturing engineer with Hughes Helicopters (now Boeing, Mesa, AZ), running factory tests for Apache helicopters.

The next year he was at Rockwell International (El Segundo, CA) working on the B-1 Bomber. He developed and wrote test procedures, then moved into project engineering for maintenance training and operational support equipment. He went from project engineer to project manager and, in 1989, to engineering manager, in charge of developing test software.

Then Rockwell's North American aircraft division sent him to the Defense Systems Management College, a twenty-week program at Fort Belvoir, VA sponsored by the DOD. "It was really an honor to represent the company in a governmental venue like that," he says. "I felt the need to do very well, since I was representing the entire company, not just myself or my division."

After that Anderson was rotated to Rockwell's manufacturing and ops area (Palmdale, CA). Later he helped land a major integration contract for the B-1, and went on to work as executive assistant to the VP for program management.

In 1996 Rockwell was purchased by Boeing, and Anderson became director for systems engineering for integration and testing evaluation. His responsibilities included systems engineering, configuration management, ground and flight test evaluation and systems integration, and he scheduled teams in five states. This was his work until he was recommended for Boeing's executive development program in 2001.

This is really serious stuff. It's a corporate-wide program which prepares senior managers to step into key leadership roles. For two years, the participants work as a cross-functional team on enterprise-wide issues - usually as many as seven or eight large projects.

Anderson is nearing the end of the stint, and now he's thinking about opportunities overseas. "My goal is to be more aware of all Boeing's global activities, and have a better understanding of how they relate to our current and future defense business," he says.

Susan Ying manages the technology portfolio at Boeing's Phantom Works R&D unit.

Susan Ying: program integration at Boeing's Phantom Works
Susan Ying is executive program integrator for Boeing's Phantom Works R&D unit. Besides integrating programs, she attends key technology briefings, reviews critical programs, and coordinates the efforts of the twenty or so people who report directly to the president of Phantom Works. Through them, she's steering the efforts of 5,000 employees.

She also coordinates communications with armed forces customers, research labs and suppliers. The overall mission is to manage the division's technology portfolio, including tracking the development of technology and intellectual property and eliminating duplication.

Ying was always interested in airplanes and flying. For years her father worked in Indonesia while the family lived in Taiwan, and Ying and her brother commuted the 1,000 miles between the two countries. She logged more miles as a kid than many of today's frequent fliers. "I dreamed of being a pilot or an astronaut, exploring the world and the universe," she recalls.

She went to college in the U.S., studying ME and aerospace engineering on a scholarship to Cornell University (Ithaca, NY). "I was one of the few women in many of my classes," she says. "It helped me in the long run, considering that the industry is so heavily male populated."

At school, she joined the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). She's been a member for more than twenty years now, and was recently elected the AIAA's director of aerospace sciences. She's the first woman to hold the position, which oversees the largest AIAA technical directorate.

After she received her BS in 1981 she attended Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA), worked as a research assistant, and co-opped at NASA. She worked on computational flow dynamics side by side with Kalpana Chawla, who went on to become an astronaut and died in the Columbia Space Shuttle this February. It was Chawla who encouraged Ying to get her pilot's license.

Ying received her PhD in aeronautics and astronautics in 1986. In 1990 she joined a new combined engineering college for Florida A&M and Florida State University. She was one of the first faculty members there, teaching in the new ME department and researching at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute on campus. In 1993 she did aeronautical research at the Ames Scalable Computing Laboratory at Iowa State University.

Then she was accepted in NASA's astronaut program, but a diagnosis of early-stage cancer forced her to drop out for treatment. She took a job with McDonnell Douglas (Long Beach, CA) in 1995.

Her first job was working on the Advanced Subsonic Transport contract with NASA, applying her experience in computational fluid dynamics to actual aircraft design. When Boeing bought the company in 1997, Ying became systems engineering lead on a project to extend the flying range of the C-17 aircraft.

She entered the executive development program in 2001, working with colleague Eric Anderson on several strategic projects. She opted for early graduation when she was appointed executive program integrator for Phantom Works.

Lyn Belvin.

United Defense: flourishing in any economy
"Defense technology will remain an attractive field for the future," says Lyn Belvin, senior human resource generalist for the division of engineering at United Defense (Arlington, VA).

The company designs, develops and produces combat vehicles, artillery, naval guns, missile launchers and precision munitions used by the DOD and allies worldwide. It is also America's largest non-nuclear ship repair, modernization, overhaul and conversion company.

At United Defense, "People can expect to gain specialized skills and work with programs and technology not available in many other places," Belvin declares.

Kelly Turner of United Defense in the crew module demonstrator of a new cannon.

Kelly Turner: managing projects at United Defense
Kelly Turner is a mechanical project engineer in the Armament Systems Division (ASD, Fridley, MN) of United Defense. She's currently working on Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV) variants of the Army's Future Combat System (FCS). United Defense-ASD is responsible for designing and building two MGV's: the Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon and Non-Line-of-Sight Mortar vehicles.

Turner is a member of the common crew station design team, which is designing and developing crew compartments for these vehicles and other FCS variants. The design challenges, she says with a smile, are similar to working out the interior of a new car model, except it's a smaller space, more equipment needs to fit in, and the crew stays in the vehicle for as long as seventy-two hours.

So Turner's team decides where crew members should sit to reach the equipment they need, have adequate vision outside and be relatively comfortable during long missions. Then they figure out the best location for components in the crew compartment. They're also responsible for designing and integrating some of the individual components.

Turner joined United Defense in 1996. Her first assignment was as an ME on the Crusader combat vehicle program. Turner's responsibilities increased as the program progressed. Designers and engineers now reported to her, and the work grew more and more complicated.

"We started off building a sixty-ton vehicle," Turner says. "After we'd actually built prototypes, we were directed to get that weight down to forty tons." Then last August the program was cancelled altogether, and Turner moved on to the FCS vehicles.

Before United Defense, Turner worked at Rosemount Aerospace, now part of Goodrich Aerospace. She spent eight years with Rosemount as a design engineer for air data sensors and pitot-static tubes, which measure an aircraft's altitude and airspeed. She came to United Defense looking for a different challenge.

She began her technical education at Northland Community and Technical College (Thief River Falls, MN) in CS, but switched to pre-engineering. She took her associates degree to North Dakota State University, where she received her BSME in 1987.

Turner recently earned a masters certificate in project management at George Washington University (Washington, DC). "I like the project management side of things," she says. "You coordinate team members not only within the company, but sometimes offsite." So getting things done on schedule can be an interesting challenge, she finds.

William Cotton of Raytheon Tech Services: "more secure than passwords."

William Cotton: IT at Raytheon Tech Services
It takes a smoothly working IT structure to keep defense contractors and their clients on track. William Cotton helps systems stay up and running.

Cotton is a computer network technologist I at Raytheon Technical Services (Las Vegas, NV). In many ways, he is the IT department at his location. "I handle the servers and support the sites we have contracts with," he says. "I also support sites where we don't have IT people on location."

Right now he's wrestling with the possible introduction of bio-infomatics for his users. "Instead of using a password to log in, they'll use a thumbprint," he says. "There are too many passwords to remember. We're shooting for something simpler and more secure."

Cotton began with Raytheon in July 2001. Before that he worked in IT at several small companies in California. Working at a company the size of Raytheon has been an eye-opening experience for him. One very nice perk: "I have the option to transfer almost anywhere worldwide and still be working for the same company."

When Cotton graduated from high school, he went to work right there as a teacher's assistant in computers. Then he discovered that companies were also willing to pay him for what he loved to do. Working full time, he completed a BSCIS at Azusa Pacific University (Azusa, CA) in May 2000. He's presently working on an MSCIS at the University of Phoenix.

Ted Glatt

Rocket science at Lockheed Martin
"There's a significant breadth of advanced technology capability here," says Ted Glatt, who is manager of talent sourcing at Lockheed Martin (Bethesda, MD). "We literally do rocket science every day."

Lockheed Martin does 80 percent of its business with the DOD and other U.S. government agencies. Its capabilities range from IT to new space systems. "A tremendous amount of pride goes with the products coming out of this industry," says Glatt.

Good job stability, too. Glatt points to projects and programs with a long life span, such as the Atlas launch vehicle and F-16 fighter jet.

Lockheed Martin employs over 125,000 people worldwide. "We give them a lot of customer visibility along with the chance to do presentations in front of large groups," Glatt says. Some employees start right after college, others come from the military.

Anthony Chu works on air traffic control, vital to the homeland security effort.

Anthony Chu: air traffic management at Lockheed Martin
Anthony Chu was nineteen when he arrived in the U. S. from China in 1992. His uncle told him to join the Army and learn a trade. "He was my recruiter," Chu says.

Chu took his uncle's advice, and found he liked life in the Army. "They teach you a lot at an early age," he says. "You learn how to be responsible for your actions along with a ton of technological stuff."

After Army career center tests, Chu was recommended for an IT specialty. He selected IT for avionics, navigation and flight systems. The army taught him that, and gave him the chance to fly everywhere.

He spent three years in Germany, served in Bosnia for six months, and eventually became an avionics supervisor working on Apache and Blackhawk aircraft at Fort Hood, TX. He left the Army in 2000, enrolled in a CS program at the University of Texas-Austin, and completed an MS in software systems at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN) in 2001.

When he applied to Lockheed Martin, "I had worked with a lot of Lockheed technicians and knew it was a good company," he says.

He began as a software engineer in Eagan, MN, coding for Lockheed's SkyLine air traffic management system. Last year he was installation team lead for an air traffic control system in China, and also did a lot of the hardware integration. "It was something outside my job description," he says. "I did it well, though, and the managers liked it."

Air traffic control isn't strictly defense, Chu admits, but it's vital to the homeland defense effort because it safely integrates all air traffic, commercial and military alike. "You have to be very careful and responsible for what you are working on. A mistake can cost people their lives," he says.

Chu is still at Eagan, now as an application software engineer in Lockheed Martin's new Transportation and Security Solutions business unit, which works on a number of homeland security programs. He leads a team that's designing, coding and testing an enhanced backup system for the new En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) air traffic control system that Lockheed Martin is developing for the FAA.

ERAM, he explains, will modernize the nation's core air traffic control automation system, enhancing security and providing new capabilities to increase efficiency and capacity. "It will take years to develop the entire system," Chu says. "Our backup system will replace the old system for enhanced safety before ERAM becomes operational."

Blossom Baker works on Lockheed Martin's new ERAM system for the FAA.

Blossom Baker: ERAM system software at Lockheed Martin
"Being in a position like mine where you have a chance to contribute to homeland security and bridge some of those international gaps is certainly exciting," says Blossom Baker.

Baker, who works in Rockville, MD, is a software engineer on the new ERAM system that Lockheed is developing for the FAA. She supports requirements-related activities in systems engineering, making sure all necessary documents are available and appropriate information is presented to the FAA during the company's reviews. Right now she's preparing a white paper on the interfaces of two subsystems for ERAM.

"I am working with the knowledge base, and also with the people who have the historical knowledge on systems we've built for years," she says.

When Baker was a kid, her father hoped she would go into art or nursing. But science and computers caught her fancy, and "Once my father saw the progress I was making, he strongly supported me," she says.

She attended Howard University (Washington, DC) and did her last year at Columbia Union College (Tacoma Park, MD), completing a BSCIS in 1999. Her 2003 MS in software engineering is from the University of Maryland-University College.

Baker learned to multitask the hard way, by working full time while going to school. She worked at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp (Washington, DC), doing calculations for retirement benefits. But she wanted a job in IT.

On an extended lunch break, she rushed over to a job fair. "I was so hungry and tired and late by the time I got to the Lockheed Martin booth that I just gave them my resume and told them if they hired me they wouldn't regret it." A compelling argument: they did hire her.

Her first job was at Lockheed Martin's Naval Electronics and Surveillance Systems business unit (Baltimore, MD). She was testing Tomahawk and other missiles.

She transferred to the air traffic management business in 1999, as a software test engineer on the team developing the new En Route Centre for the U.K.

She also worked on the User Request Evaluation Tool (URET) system for air traffic management. URET is part of an initiative to make air traffic management more flexible, enabling route changes in flight to increase efficiency. And she spent three years in the company's engineering leadership development program before moving to the ERAM team.

Defense careers at BAE Systems
"In the present world situation, and with the implementation of the Homeland Security Department, one of the largest items on the U.S. budget is defense," says Ken Aubrey, group manager of human resources at BAE Systems (Rockville, MD). "Defense contractors are, and will be for the near future, a good place to plan a career."

BAE Systems North America operates in fifteen states, Washington, DC, and the U.K. It develops state-of-the- art aerospace products and intelligent electronic systems for government and commercial customers.

"Techies looking for a future with unlimited possibilities should join our family," Aubrey suggests.

Wanda Hicks Drake of BAE Systems: "I resolve the quality-related issues."

Wanda Hicks Drake manages IT quality at BAE Systems
Wanda Hicks Drake always liked computers. "They run on pure logic," she says. "When they do not function correctly, it's usually your error.

"Because I consider myself to be a person of logic, the relationship of function and error is very intriguing to me. These two elements of my personality led me to computers."

Hicks Drake is the business unit quality manager for BAE Systems' advanced technology solutions (ATS, Rockville, MD), with responsibility for planning and implementing quality control and assurance systems within the unit. It's up to her to ensure that all projects and contracts for the FAA, the Army, the Navy, DOD and other government agencies and commercial clients incorporate quality programs.

She's currently working with customers to ensure QA reporting is ongoing for each project and monitored on a day-to-day basis. "I analyze and resolve all the quality related issues and conduct periodic quality audits," she explains.

She also supports the ATS business development effort. "I enjoy the challenge of multitasking, balancing quality and competitiveness across many projects," she says. "My job gives me the chance to interact with people and help them improve themselves and, in turn, the performance of the business unit."

Hicks Drake received her BSCS with a minor in math from South Carolina State University in 1984. In college, she was a member of Alpha Kappa Mu national honor society and the Association for Computing Machinery, and won the school's presidential scholar award. She's currently a member of the American Society for Quality and the Software Productivity Consortium.

After graduation she joined BAE Systems as a programmer/analyst and engineer. She designed, coded and tested software and hardware for the Terrier and Tartar missile weapon systems. When she became a senior programmer/analyst in 1994, she managed programs for a Navy surface antisubmarine warfare combat system.

From 1997 to 1999 she was involved in homeland security. She provided QA support for BAE Systems' system engineering division as it worked on databases and client/server systems for an IT partnership between EDS and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Then she moved to her current position.

As Hicks Drake sees it, the partnership between defense and technology will grow even stronger in coming years. She thinks "The focus will shift from strategic weapons to tactical weapons that are more automated and precise in nature.

"The ever-changing climate in world politics and the U.S. role as a world power presents a unique challenge to IT," Hicks Drake adds.

Kerri Koss Morehart.

SRA Corp: a good job for the country
Kerri Koss Morehart is VP and director of talent acquisition at SRA Corp (Fairfax, VA). "For people who haven't been in the military, working for a defense contractor is another way to serve your country. Many of the technologies we enjoy today were developed through defense contracts," she notes.

SRA provides IT solutions to government agencies in areas from national security to healthcare. The firm has long-standing partnerships with the Army, Navy and Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Department of the Treasury, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It also has clients in the White House and the judicial and legislative branches of the federal government.

Ellen Moyer of SRA: "supporting vital missions related to national security."

Ellen Moyer: deputy director of intelligence at SRA
It was three in the morning when Ellen Moyer decided to become an engineer. At the time, she was working as a condo property manager, and she had been called out in the middle of the night to supervise a crew fixing a boiler system.

Moyer already knew a lot about boilers from the engineers who worked for her. "But it wasn't until I was sitting on the edge of that hole in the middle of the night that I realized I wanted to be an engineer, too."

Moyer enrolled in EE at George Washington University. She migrated to computer engineering and eventually graduated with a BSCS in 1987.

She joined SRA right away, working, at her request, in command and control. But coming straight out of college, "I had no security clearances," Moyer says.

Her managers had to find something useful for her to do until her clearances came through, so they started her programming in Ada, a new DOD language she'd learned in college. She built an operational prototype of a system that managed pre-positioned military fuel reserves that she later developed into a full-scale system for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Once she had her clearances, Moyer began to build a reputation as a troubleshooter. "My boss would send me where there were serious problems on projects," she explains. "I would go in, fix it, turn it around, and hand off leadership. It was really fun."

The work earned her several awards, including a leadership award from SRA. And fixing problems also built up her expertise. "I got to see the full software development life cycle. That's really important for someone in CS work," she says.

Moyer is now deputy director of intelligence programs and a senior principal at SRA. The intelligence group employs seventy-two people, almost all working offsite at various government agencies. Moyer makes sure her people have what they need out in the field.

"In our area of command and control, communications and intelligence, SRA staff members support intense, vital missions related to national security," she says. "Whether we're on the front lines with our customers or in our offices, we can all use our skills in a meaningful way to support our country."

SRA's Angie McNeill is in command and control, communications and intelligence.

Angie McNeill: at SRA, the thrill of contributing
Angie McNeill is a project manager in the command and control, communications and intelligence area of SRA and a principal at the company. She's currently the project and task lead for a small group that "makes sure users in intelligence and defense have the access they need to read information posted to various Web-based communities."

Before she joined SRA, McNeill was on active duty in the Army for six and a half years, and in the Army Reserve for nine years. The army taught her computers and automated processing, and, "It really piqued my interest in computers in everyday life. It is still fascinating to me that these little machines can be so smart."

She joined SRA on the recommendation of a military colleague who went to work at the company. In 1989 SRA called to offer her a job, and she's been there ever since.

Like other PMs, McNeill works with SRA employees, and also folks from other companies. "Right now I'm on a large contract that involves many contractors," she reveals. "It matters more what jobs people hold within the contract, than what company they work for."

Working closely with government managers and high-ranking officials can make for an unpredictable day. "Some days I go to work saying I'm going to do ten things on my list, and something else becomes a priority and I don't get any of them done," she says.

It's the nature of the work. And for McNeill, the thrill of contributing so directly to defense technology makes it all worthwhile.

D/C

Skip Waugh is a freelance business writer living in Denver, CO.