At a 140,000-square-foot plant in Long Beach that the aerospace industry calls Space Beach, a former Raytheon executive is using agentic AI to turn out defense electronics in weeks instead of years — not to replace his engineers, but because the Pentagon wants far more hardware than the shrinking pool of engineers can build

At a 140,000-square-foot plant in Long Beach that the aerospace industry calls Space Beach, a former Raytheon executive is using agentic AI to turn out defense electronics in weeks instead of years — not to replace his engineers, but because the Pentagon wants far more hardware than the shrinking pool of engineers can build

Inside a 140,000-square-foot building in Long Beach that the local aerospace crowd calls Space Beach, circuit boards for spacecraft and defense systems are now coming off the line in a matter of weeks — the same boards that used to take years. The people who run the plant are not claiming the engineers suddenly got faster. They are saying something stranger: there are no longer enough engineers to build the hardware the United States has ordered…