General says nation needs more engineers

America is falling behind in the production of STEM graduates needed to design and maintain modern weapons systems, the commander of Tinker’s Air Force Sustainment Center said Wednesday.

“We are being eclipsed by the Russians and the Chinese,” Lt. Gen. Lee K. Levy II said in a report to the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education.

The U.S. needs more people educated in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to “maintain our technological pre-eminence in the modern battle space,” Levy said.

“The inability of the state of Oklahoma to produce enough STEM graduates causes me great concern. I would simply ask you to keep the pressure on,” Levy told the regents. “I need your help.”

Everything in the modern arsenal has embedded software — the new KC-46 aerial tanker alone has 3.2 billion lines of code — and somebody has to take care of that software, he said.

“I can hire every fouryear engineering graduate the state of Oklahoma produces at Tinker Air Force Base and still have empty chairs. Obviously that’s not a path to sustainability,” Levy said.

Long-term strategy

Regent Andy Lester, of Edmond, said the engineering dean at Oklahoma State University “tells me we have more good students who are applying, but we don’t have the funding to even take those students.”

The engineering enrollment has doubled at OSU since 2008, but faculty and facilities have stayed flat due to lack of funding, President Burns Hargis said in December.

Oklahoma’s higher education system has increased the number of STEM degrees by 6,000 in the past five years, a 28 percent increase, Chancellor Glen Johnson said.

“Our engineering schools want to do more, but obviously funding is restricting that,” Johnson said.

Levy said Oklahoma needs a long-term strategy to address the need for scientists and engineers because it takes 21 years to generate a STEM graduate.

It has to start in elementary school and continue through the university level, he said.

“That requires sustained funding,” he said. “We can’t do it one year and not the next.”

Jobs for Oklahomans

As the demand for STEM-educated workers continues to increase, so does the competition for those workers among various government agencies and commercial employers, Levy said.

Tinker loses some job candidates to the private sector because it can only pay a third to half as much, he said.

But the work is intriguing to many who like the challenge of developing software for “forward-looking infrared targeting systems for C-130 gunships,” Levy said. Because of that, the turnover rate is low.

“What we do is far more interesting and far more compelling than writing control language for dishwashers or microwaves,” he said.

Levy said Tinker has about 1,000 software engineers, but it’s not enough and he has to recruit outside Oklahoma.

“I’ll move the work eventually. The jobs will leave Oklahoma because the nation expects me to get the work done,” he said.

Tinker is the largest single-site employer in Oklahoma with 24,000 employees. Only the state of Oklahoma employs more people.

Keeping those good jobs here requires a commitment from the state and its higher education system, Levy said.

“We have an obligation ... to create an economic system that helps draw us away from the oil and gas centered-economy, puts more pre-eminence on the aerospace and defense industry, raises the tax base, and raises the opportunity for better jobs, better education and a better quality of life for Oklahomans.”