I worked at a couple of major defense/aerospace companies in college, and you're spot on. At both places, I (the intern) and other junior engineers were doing meaningless paperwork that could be replaced by a relational database. At one of the jobs, I actually wrote that database and replaced myself, which made my manager very angry, as I wasn't doing what I was supposed to. I talked to a guy a year later and they were still using the thing I wrote.
On the other hand, one of my friends works at a small (~30 people) aerospace company that does various contract work for prototyping and research that the larger firms do, and I'm pretty sure it's a dream job. He does a mix of everything from cool analysis work to working with state of the art machining tools to build stuff. And he's not some PhD genius from MIT either, he has the same degree I do from a middling state school. He just had a lot of passion and drive and found the place that rewarded that.
I know that feel. I'm at a tiny aerospace firm that manages to move slower than any of the huge companies where I once worked. I'm in the process of trying to convince my analysis group to move to a real SQL database instead of hundreds of Excel files, but it's going to be tough. These people are technical in the sense they all have aerospace/mechanical engineering degrees, but know as much about databases as maybe my parents (i.e. nothing).
You first job is probably billing the government/tax player by the hours. The more hours, the higher the billing. Automation means less $ for your boss.
Actually, at large defense contractors there is significant pressure not to bill more than 40 hours per week. It (theoretically) keeps costs down and makes the contractor more appealing for future work. It skews the actuals all to hell, though, because on paper it looks like a project took X hours when it actually took 1.2X hours because everyone was working an average of 48 hours a week but only billing 40. In some cases it can skew even worse. I had a couple workaholic co-workers who regularly put in 25+ unpaid extra hours.
The government doesn't particularly like this, but they usually don't clamp down on the practice. They do get upset when contractors knowingly distort their bids with estimates of this, though. Marietta, before they got rolled up into Lockheed Martin via mergers, once got in trouble because they submitted a bid wherein they assumed "full-time" would be 43 hours per week and set their time projections accordingly. The government auditors were pissed when they found out.
On the other hand, one of my friends works at a small (~30 people) aerospace company that does various contract work for prototyping and research that the larger firms do, and I'm pretty sure it's a dream job. He does a mix of everything from cool analysis work to working with state of the art machining tools to build stuff. And he's not some PhD genius from MIT either, he has the same degree I do from a middling state school. He just had a lot of passion and drive and found the place that rewarded that.