Northrop Grumann moving to D.C.

The West Coast was the place to be for defense contractors back in the 60s... Aerospace guys in particular.

This.

Had to be out close-ish to Edwards Air Force Base and Groom Lake (Area 51).

FTFY

They already have a huge facility plus some smaller ones near the airport in Baltimore, also some in Northern Virginia. I pretty much thought they were already headquartered here as it is.

There's a lot of big government contractors that are not headquartered in the DC area, although they all have major offices there. Boeing, Raytheon, SAIC (though I heard they are moving from San Diego to DC area as well), L-3, KBR, EDS (now part of HP), and Harris are all among the largest contractors, and most of them are headquartered near the place they were founded.

It mostly has to do with what particular area of the DoD the contractor is servicing at the time. As mentioned above, much of the hard aerospace defense work (designing, testing, manufacturing new airframes and weapons) is done on the west coast to have access to Vandenburg AFB, Groom Lake in NV and the radar stations on the Aluetian Islands. Also during the cold war, the most likely route for Soviet bombers to hit CONUS was to fly over the artic and attack, thus a lot of the SDI work was done on the west coast. Not to mention in California and Washington, the defense contractors have access to some of the best engineering departments in the world (Cal, Stanford, and CalTech to name a few), that's a deep talent pool.

Northern Virginia and Maryland are home to the more "soft" defense work, developing new defense software, logistics, radar and other sensors, and intel related contracts. for example, Lockheed Martin (F-22 developer/manufacturer) has it's "Skunk Works" aerospace lab out in CA but it's technology and software deveolpment is all over Southern MD and Northern VA, with their corperate HQ in Bethesda. Northrup Grumman's Electronic Systems is in Baltimore. Many of teh other contractors follow similar structures. That way their logistics divisions are near the Pentagon, the Electronic systems groups are near CIA/NSA and DARPA, and their Naval Surface divisions are close to the Naval Surface Warfare center in Maryland.

It makes sense to put the business units near their revenue streams.

As with other large contractors lately I'm sure the "move" is more on paper than it is physical. Just a formal change of address for the most part. They won't be up-rooting every single person and moving them to Northern VA.

when you fly stealth, you are close to everywhere.

Aren't General Dynamics and LockheedMartin already HQ'd in Wash suburbs?

Doubt many smart engineers from Stanford or Berkeley choose to work for aerospace/defense industry anymore....may have been true in '60s or '70s...but sharpest kids today are usu CS grads who go to either BigTech or start-ups in SiliconValley...or hedge funds in CA or NYC...not a lot of bucks or intellectual challenge working for a gvt contractor, esp when 30-something Stanford alums are some of wealthiest guys in world after starting own cos. (or being early employees in now-ancient cos. like google)

Besides, life is too short to live in a dump like Wash; anyone smart/ambitious tends to live/work in SV or Manhattan these days, both for lifestyle and to maximize career liquidity amongst the many tech or financial start-ups of more dynamic regions

all those firms are in rosslyn, va not dc

O really?

Call me crazy but I prefer DC over Silicon Valley. Manhattan is kind of in the air.

I didn't go to a real high ranked college, but a lot of my friends that were CS or engineering majors in the school's honors program were recruited to big gov contractors in Orange County/LA area out of college - I knew multiple people that went to work for Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed.

Okay, I'll call you crazy.