The pay scales are locked down by two primary components: 1) the project contract document locks charges pretty severely for the project, to the point where a single high pay scale putting in hours will probably require a revision to the charges, but more importantly, 2) the owning Big Defense Conglomerate has armor plated pay ceilings for non-managerial employees - non-financial technicians are interchangeable cogs, that's the doctrine, regardless of any particular realities of skill shortage or availability.

Disregard what the Overlords might tell you; 2 is way more important, because when it comes to 1, the military program offices are VERY open to revisiting the charge schedule, if it means they get transparency and a better chance of something that might work. Those non-managerial pay ceilings were laughable pre-Covid, and now it's gotten just surreal, still based on a flat national average of what they consider the job role to be, something that's also gotten surreal, with Kinkos employees being included in sw engineer pay codes.

It's worsened by the fact they can't really take advantage of remote workers, somewhere with less CoL, in Alabama or Pakistan or whatever. Everything's on site, and it really does seem like every defense company I've ever worked is sited in some random shitty place where the local economy - if there is one - is composed of the company and three Applebees-like chains that service it.