&gt; This problem would be much less severe if the military could hire software pros directly at anywhere near fair market value.<p>I think this is a big piece of it, and we see this at NASA too. It&#x27;s hard to convince experienced software engineers to start out in gov&#x27;t service at ~$50k (roughly a GS-9 master&#x27;s graduate degree level), and there is very little that individual agencies can do to pay more reasonable market rates.<p>Turning to contractor companies is one option, but the overhead tends to be massive.