The map of the U.S. defense contracting industry is not a random scattering. It is, in large part, a shadow of the federal government’s own infrastructure: clustered around military installations, NASA research centers, and the civilian agencies that run them. That geography shapes where companies hire, where they open offices, and where they embed their employees for years at a time.
Aerospace and defense contractor HX5 is a prime example, employing roughly 1,000 people at over 70 government locations spread across 20 states
Margarita Howard, HX5’s sole owner, CEO, and president, says the sprawl is not the result of acquisition or expansion planning in the conventional sense. The work goes where the government goes.
“Our presence is driven by where our clients need us,” she said. “We prioritize being close to major government facilities and agencies to ensure that we can deliver services, especially customer service, effectively.”
The Geography of Federal Work
The U.S. defense contracting industry concentrates in specific states for predictable reasons. California, Florida, Texas, and Virginia have long held the largest shares of Pentagon contract dollars, partly because they house the most active-duty military personnel and civilian DoD employees based inside the United States. These states together account for more than 60% of active military forces stationed domestically. When a facility matters to the Pentagon, contractors follow.
Northwest Florida, where HX5 is headquartered, illustrates the pattern clearly. The region is home to six military bases, and it hosts roughly 500 companies in the aerospace and defense industries. Eglin Air Force Base, Hurlburt Field, and Naval Air Station Pensacola are among the installations that anchor that concentration. For a company like HX5, which focuses on research and development, engineering, information technology, and mission operations support for the Department of Defense and NASA, starting in northwest Florida was an alignment of location and customer base.
The same logic that explains HX5’s origins in the Florida Panhandle also explains its national reach. NASA operates field installations from Virginia to California, at Langley Research Center, Johnson Space Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, Ames Research Center, Kennedy Space Center, and others.
Defense agencies, research laboratories, and test facilities are similarly distributed. A contractor serving both DoD and NASA at the technical level has no choice but to follow the work.
Two Variables: Clients and Talent
Howard breaks HX5’s location calculus down to two factors. The first is proximity to the client. The second is access to the workforce.
“We look for talent access,” she said. “Analyzing where we can find top-tier talent is a big driving force. Some regions have specialized expertise that aligns very well with our projects.”
The company focuses on STEM professionals — engineers, scientists, IT specialists, and mission operations personnel with direct experience supporting DoD or NASA programs. Those workers are not uniformly distributed across the country. They accumulate in places with aerospace research infrastructure, university pipelines that feed technical talent into defense programs, and existing contractor ecosystems that create pools of workers already holding the security clearances that government work often requires.
A Company That Follows the Contract
While talent is always a key consideration, for service-oriented firms, the location of the customer drives commercial real estate decisions above almost any other factor. HX5’s structure makes that principle visible at scale.
The company provides what the Federal Acquisition Regulation classifies as advisory and assistance services — embedded technical personnel who work alongside federal employees without assuming inherently governmental functions. That model means HX5 workers are not sitting in company offices in a single city. They are sitting inside government facilities, often at secure locations, working on programs that can run for years.
“When visiting one of our work locations, it is often apparent that the type of work being done is not the type of work that someone can just come in with minimal education or experience and start performing,” Howard said. “Much of the work requires a substantive combination of advanced education and specific work experiences, most often gained from working in the DOD or at NASA.”
That embedded structure — people at over 70 locations rather than housed at a central campus — places extraordinary demands on communication and management.
Managing Across Time Zones
Howard’s solution to the coordination problem runs through a dedicated field team that travels to government sites for training, employee engagement, and customer visits. The company also updated its internal communication tools to accommodate the preferences of younger employees, including instant messaging and interactive project management platforms.
“We invest very heavily in team-building activity across all locations,” Howard said. “I believe we’ve built a very strong communication framework that can carry out the message.”
HX5 also invests in retention as an alternative to constant recruitment. The company’s management team has, by Howard’s account, stayed remarkably stable — “many of them have been with us for 10 years or so,” she said.
In an industry where employees with specialized clearances and mission knowledge are in persistent demand, turnover in key roles creates operational disruptions that agencies notice. Low turnover at the management level makes distributed operations more coherent.
The company’s veteran hiring rate adds another dimension to the retention picture. More than 30% of HX5’s workforce consists of veterans. Veterans who transition to contractor roles near installations where they served represent a workforce with built-in geographic ties, institutional knowledge, and existing clearances, all of which reduce turnover risk.
The dispersed structure of a company like HX5 forms when a company decides to follow its clients — the Department of Defense and NASA — wherever those clients need technical support. That the result is a presence in more than two-thirds of U.S. states, across dozens of government facilities, is less a reflection of the geography of federal work itself.
