They tend to use Greenhills tools. Just the memory partitioning/object space thing in that is bizarre and buggy. But it does provide complete isolation of chunks from each other. When I brought up the single-vendor problem inherent to that, I think it ended my career at that company. "But we need our vendors."

RTLinux will be treated with open source FUD. Doesn't matter if you escrow it or not - a single licensing slip would be a security breach. Since you can't successfully argue that this is specious, you're done before you start.

It's impossible to understand the way this plays out without seeing it up close. I don't know how it is in all DoD contractors, but the lifespan of an actual programmer in the one I saw was five years. If you tried to stay technical, you'd get a PIP and be laid off in the next round unless you made yourself indispensable to the customer. Doing that is tantamount to a life sentence - you have to actively politick to get on another program and that's unlikely.

Charge numbers are life or death.

You might be left alone if you got an advanced degree and published certain sorts of papers. And if you do stay technical, you'll be subject to death marches.

And of course it's all processes optimized for maximum paperwork; waterfall and crushing technical debt. Each action item is budgeted and when the budget runs out, you're done regardless.

You are expected to angle towards program management to feed the beast. Even then , it's still "up or out."