By Chao Deng | Photography by Houston Cofield for WSJ
Camden, Ark. -- When the Pentagon put out an urgent call for rocket launchers and ammunition to send to Ukraine and replenish supplies at home in 2022, an answer came from an unlikely place: this remote southern pine-belt town, population around 10,000.
The town faced a basic challenge: where to find enough workers to meet a surge in demand for weapons?
Lockheed Martin, one of the defense contractors clustered in the east part of Camden and already one of the town's biggest employers, was reeling in government orders to produce more mobile rocket launchers. Other big defense contractors in the area also soon landed contracts to produce ammunition and expand their rocket facilities in Camden.
Some of the local defense companies found themselves sometimes poaching talent from each other, and realized they were ultimately hurting themselves. They were often all part of a single production supply chain.
"We were robbing ourselves by robbing our neighbors," said Adam Bailey, a production operations manager for Lockheed in Camden at the time. "I knew we had to back up and figure out a different way."
Lockheed's immediate strategy: expand the pool of potential workers. It began inviting local high-school seniors and their parents to its Camden facility for tours. The contractor also started working with Southern Arkansas University Tech, a two-year community college in Camden, to ramp up apprenticeships, so it could more readily hire people who had never worked at a factory.
In return, state officials stepped up workforce-development grants and began funneling millions of dollars to SAU Tech.
The efforts largely worked, and have helped turn the area into an engine for America's war machine. As of last year, Ouachita County, where Camden sits, and neighboring Calhoun County employed 3,140 people in their aerospace and defense industries, up about 54% from 2020, according to the Arkansas Department of Commerce.
On his visit to Camden in February, part of a national defense tour that included stops in Newport News, Va., and Fort Worth, Texas, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth praised the more than 1,500 employees at L3Harris Technologies' facilities in Camden, for their speed and proficiency in producing rocket motors. He said they were setting the pace for the rest of the U.S. defense industrial base.
James Lee Silliman, executive director of Ouachita Partnership for Economic Development, said the expanding defense industry is benefiting the broader community, including small restaurant owners who are getting more visitors.
Also, "we're seeing younger engineers right out of college going to work, " said Silliman.
Camden's identity as a defense manufacturing town dates to 1944, when the U.S. Navy set up an ammunition depot to produce rockets for World War II. The town sat near major rail lines, which allowed munitions to be transported to both coasts. Its remote, rural location offered protection from a foreign attack.
The town suffered in the years following the Cold War, when U.S. military demand waned. The decline in the timber and paper industries, once significant employers in the region, also dented the local economy.
The city's fortunes began to turn after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, as the war helped touch off a new round of investment in U.S. defense. Among the early Army contracts that rippled out to Camden was a $431 million agreement for Lockheed to produce more mobile rocket launchers. Aerojet Rocketdyne -- now part of L3Harris -- struck an agreement with the Defense Department to invest in new manufacturing facilities for rocket propulsion systems.
Lockheed's Camden facility started recruiting people right out of local high schools. To address their lack of work experience, the firm gave them 2,000 hours of on-the-job training and also channeled them to SAU Tech, for 80 hours of coursework. It was an apprenticeship program already in place that the school and company doubled down on as hiring ramped up.
Many students saw it as a way to build a career while staying at home, at least to start.
During tours of their facility, Lockheed would tell the high-schoolers that they could make around $36,000 plus benefits -- an attractive proposition given that local schoolteachers were making about that much. Starting salaries at Lockheed have since increased to around $50,000.
"I was surprised stuff like that was in Camden," said Darryl King, 21 years old, who toured the contractor's facility with his grandfather when he was a senior at Camden Fairview High School and was part of the company's first class of high-school recruits in 2023.
These days, King is one of several young assemblers on Lockheed's PAC-3 missile assembly line. Inside a clean, cavernous production hall, the workers rotate through different work stations, sometimes working near robots that handle delicate, high-precision tasks like fitting dozens of tiny steering thrusters into a missile's nose. King has also worked to coat and sand down the missiles, a key step in improving their aerodynamics.
Hundreds more workers will be needed in Camden in the coming years. President Trump is pushing to expand the U.S. defense budget to $1.5 trillion for fiscal 2027, up from the $900 billion authorized for fiscal 2026 by Congress.
L3Harris is creating a new campus of more than 20 buildings in Camden to increase its large solid-rocket motor manufacturing sixfold; Lockheed is ramping up interceptor production; and RTX is building a new facility as part of a $1.25 billion contract to supply Israel with Tamir missiles. Lockheed Martin also plans to open an in-house Munitions Acceleration Center to teach its workers how to program robotic manufacturing systems and adapt to increasingly automated production lines.
SAU Tech has scaled up its one-week intensive classes for employees in the defense industry. The topics, from hydraulics to robotics and electricity, are tailored to what the defense employers need.
General Dynamics, which ramped up its Camden-based workforce after being awarded contracts in 2023 to produce more 155mm artillery rounds, is training its employees there to scan and test equipment for quality and safety.
The dream for some Camden residents and officials is that their town gets national recognition one day as an aerospace and defense hub, with similar stature to Huntsville, Ala.
"Camden would be a ghost town if not for aerospace and defense," said Silliman, who oversees Ouachita County's economic development. "Nobody really likes war or conflict, but it's the reality of the world today."
Write to Chao Deng at chao.deng@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 17, 2026 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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