Pentagon to hire 20,000 people to manage weapon acquisition

Special Report: Global Financial Crisis

WASHINGTON, May 6 (Xinhua) -- The Pentagon will hire 20,000 new personnel in next five years to manage weapon acquisition as part of a sweeping budgetary reform, a senior official said here Wednesday.

The plan was disclosed by Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn in his testimony prepared for the House Armed Services Committee.

He said that although the proposal to hire 20,000 new employees is "aggressive," but the Pentagon needs program managers, cost estimators, software engineers and systems engineers in order to streamline the acquisition process and reduce costs.

Lynn said the Pentagon will start bringing the new people in at the beginning of fiscal year 2010 which begins Oct.1 .

The Pentagon plans to fill the 20,000 positions by 2015, including 9,000 in contracting, cost estimating, pricing and contract oversight positions at the Defense Contract Audit Agency and Defense Contract Management Agency.

The remainder of the slots will come from the conversion of contractor positions to federal civilian positions, and those positions will be primarily in program management, systems engineering, logistics and business management.

In the last 10 years, defense contracts tripled while the Pentagon's workforce fell by more than 10 percent, according to Lynn.

Both the House and Senate are considering legislation to reform the Pentagon's buying practices.