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By Mark Larson
Photography by Tony Novelozo

Black should be the new green, when the military is refashioning itself as a modern force ... again. Sacramento has had a long tradition of military bases, and in the wake of base closures, defense contracting aappears to have taken up the slack. Meet the heads of two very different big-time defense contractors in the region. One company is well know; the other hardly makes a ripple. But don't let visibility fool you.

SECRET WEAPONS MAN

When Ted Glum tells you something is “black,” it has a special meaning.
     Black means Glum can’t talk about it, because it’s classified government information. He will tell you his labs have had a hand in producing the electronic brains behind just about every major U.S. weapons system you’ve ever heard of: B-2 bomber, the F-22, a new fighter jet, the Hellfire missile, the Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as various “intelligence systems” that have never been in the spotlight. Asked for more information on those, Glum, politely, and even cheerfully, belying his name replies, “That’s as far as I can go.”
     You’d never mistake this 51-year-old Carmichael resident and Sacramento State-trained electronics engineer for Dr. Strangelove, the Peter Sellers mad-scientist character who ran weapons research in the 1960s movie comedy of the same name. Glum is an easygoing and affable man with one of the most high-powered technology jobs in the country. He’s the director of Defense Microelectronics Activity, aka DMEA, at McClellan Park, which has evolved into a stealth-technology unit of the federal Department of Defense.
     The federal defense folks keep the group’s specific activities under the radar so enemies are unaware of what weapons systems may be used to eliminate them. That also explains the odd name — Defense Microelectronics Activity — that sounds like a government-speak red herring for a super-secretive agency that annually spends half a billion dollars on state-of-the-art weapons systems.

We Don’t Do Basic
In fact, security clearances for visitors to get inside DMEA take some time, more than they did in the somewhat relaxed pre-9/11 days. “We don’t do basic research,” says Glum. “Once it is proved in the lab, we may take that technology into the field, especially in areas where there is critical need.” It is this focus on actually building super-secret systems, not just funding cutting-edge research, which makes DMEA unique. And very black.
     Glum began work at what was then McClellan’s Air Force microprocessors lab in 1981, after graduating with a degree in electrical engineering from Sacramento State. The lab was designing semiconductor chips to update Air Force and some Navy defense systems. It grew into an increasingly valued component of the Department of Defense — so much so, that in 1996, then-Secretary of Defense William Perry made three trips to McClellan to check out its operations. Thereafter, the lab became a unit of the Department of Defense, and Glum was named its director.
     Glum’s boss’s boss’s boss is newly confirmed Defense Secretary Robert Gates. DMEA keeps various federal defense systems upgraded with the latest in electronic technology, and for the recently ended federal fiscal year (Sept. 30), contracted out $433 million in work ordered by the Department of Defense and “other government agencies” to defense contractors all over the country, as well as to small businesses.
     This new fiscal year, Glum expects things to slow to about $385 million in work. DMEA employs about 250 in three nondescript buildings encompassing 73,000 square feet at McClellan Park; one building contains a clean room for silicon chip fabrication. To handle increasing chip-making demands, the clean room was recently doubled in size to 25,000 square feet.
     Defense contractors at McClellan doing work for DMEA include General Dynamics, which maintains its massive clean room, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and British-owned BAE Systems. “It is the black side of research and development, which we do have a lot of,” admits Larry Kelley, president of McClellan Park.
     But because of that black veil of secrecy over DMEA and the work it farms out, it is only guesswork to figure how many annual dollars the operation pumps into the local economy as an employer. Glum says last year his unit was given the goal to let at least 4 percent of its contracts to small businesses, and he managed to meet more than triple the goal at 13 percent. Those contracts, like those to the big prime contractors, are spread out all over the country.
     Bob Hauser is the program manager at the General Dynamics offices at McClellan next door to DMEA. He says most of his staff of 15 work on a DMEA contract, which since 1989 has been renewed four times. The current pact goes to autumn 2009 and could be renewed for an additional five years.
     “Most of our workload is DMEA’s clean room,” explains Hauser. “We replace old equipment and maintain the tools in the clean room.” He says the contract has spurred his office to hire more clean-room technology experts.
     Raytheon and the British-owned BAE Systems declined to respond to inquiries on their local work for DMEA. Both are believed to have relatively small staffs at McClellan, and they aren’t talking, either (probably just the way it should be).

ROCKET MAN

Southward off Highway 50 in Rancho Cordova is Aerojet, the long-time defense contractor specializing in missile and space propulsion and armament markets. It’s pretty hard to hide a rocket motor company, especially when it has to publicly warn the entire region before a test firing.
     With some big long-term contracts in the pipeline, Aerojet has 250 job openings for engineers, and 150 of them are at the local plant, says Aerojet President J. Scott Neish, 59, who is in charge of the Sacramento operation Aerojet employs 3,150, half of them in Sacramento.
     Aerojet’s biggest new contracts are with NASA to supply rocket-engine power for space exploration and a missile defense program for the Army and Navy. For those jobs, Aerojet will work as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences and Raytheon.
     Aerojet’s NASA projects are twofold. One will build the rocket and maneuvering engines for Orion, which will succeed the space shuttle program. “This (will be) one of our larger programs if the stars align the way NASA plans for them to do,” says Neish.

All Hail NASA
Aerojet also will provide the propulsion for the commercial orbital transportation system, a space-cargo transportation program eventually to consist of at least six launches a year. This system is expected to carry commercial payloads to an international space station.
     “It will more than make up for the decline of the Titan (missile) program,” says Neish of the Cold War missile program, which for many years was regular work at Aerojet. “We expect this will go on for decades.” Orion flights, however, aren’t expected to start until 2012.
     Neish lives along the Garden Highway in Sacramento, with boating and traveling his favorite off-time activities. He likes to vacation in the tropics to scuba dive, and since living here he’s been exploring Northern California.
     Neish, who succeeded Michael Martin as president of Aerojet a year ago, came to Sacramento from Redmond, Wash., in late 2003. He has 20 years of experience in the propulsion industry, having worked in technical and managerial roles at Aerojet’s Redmond operation and for its predecessors General Dynamics-OTS, Primex Aerospace Co., Olin Aerospace and Rocket Research Co.
     Neish’s responsibilities have included planning, marketing and business development, product development and finance. He was a key technical contributor to the hydrazine rocket engine that controls the altitude of communications satellites and the roll of upper stages of rocker launchers.
     The other biggie for Aerojet, says Neish, is its part in building solid-propellant rocket motors for intermediate-range defense missiles. They’re part of a defense program called Terminal High Altitude Aerial Defense.
     Getting the coveted NASA contracts, the value of which Neish declined to estimate, took a year of trying to persuade Lockheed Martin, the program’s prime contractor, to name Aerojet as a subcontractor. “It took a lot of proposals and iterations of proposals,” he admits.
     Now about 60 percent of Aerojet’s workload is related to defense, the rest to the rocket-propulsion business.
     With long-time engineers retiring, the defense-contracting industry is undergoing a turnover period. That turnover has put companies such as Aerojet on a full-court press to recruit top engineering talent out of universities, including Sacramento State and UC Davis.
     Of course, Neish has one big advantage when it comes to recruiting. His candidates at least know his company exists.

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