At the end of fiscal year 2007, the number of civilian and military personnel in DOD’s acquisition workforce totaled over 126,000—of which civilian personnel comprised 89 percent. According to DOD, these in- house personnel represent more than 70 percent of the total federal acquisition workforce. DOD defines its acquisition workforce to include 13 career fields, based on the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act of 1990. From fiscal years 2001 to 2007, the number of civilian and military acquisition personnel in these 13 fields declined overall by 2.5 percent; however, some career fields have increased substantially, while others have shown dramatic declines. Table 1 shows the 13 fields, the number of military and civilian personnel in each of these fields in 2001 and 2007, and the percentage change between those 2 years. During this same time period, the number of contracting actions valued at over $100,000 increased by 62 percent and dollars obligated on contracts increased by 116 percent, according to DOD. Moreover, DOD has reported that the number of major defense acquisition programs has increased from 70 to 95. To augment its declining in-house acquisition workforce, DOD has relied more heavily on contractor personnel. In addition to the overall decline in its in-house acquisition workforce and an increased workload, DOD faces shifting workforce demographics and a changing strategic environment. The U.S. workforce as a whole is aging and experiencing a shift in the labor pool away from persons with science and technical degrees. According to DOD, advances in technology, such as the ability to do jobs from almost anywhere in the world, are also driving workforce changes and increasing global competition for the most highly educated and skilled personnel. To address these and other challenges— including wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an evolving mission to combat threats around the world, and an increased need to collaborate with both domestic and international partners—DOD has begun to establish a more centralized management framework for forecasting, recruiting, developing, and sustaining the talent pool needed to meet its national security mission. Several components in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) share policy and guidance responsibility for the workforce. The Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness serves as the Chief Human Capital Officer for DOD—both for military and civilian personnel—and has overall responsibility for the development of the department’s competency-based workforce planning and its civilian human capital strategic plan. Within the Office of Personnel and Readiness, the Office of Civilian Personnel Policy has overall responsibility for managing DOD’s civilian workforce and has the lead role in developing and overseeing implementation of the plan. For example, the Implementation Report for the DOD Civilian Human Capital Strategic Plan 2006-2010 lists enterprisewide skills and competencies for 25 mission-critical occupations, which the department has begun to assess in terms of future needs, budget-based projections, and anticipated gaps. Another OSD component, AT&L, is responsible for managing DOD’s acquisition workforce, including tailoring policies and guidance specific to the acquisition workforce and managing the training and certification of that workforce. As required by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (2008 NDAA), AT&L has drafted an addendum for the implementation report for the civilian human capital strategic plan to specifically address management and oversight of the acquisition workforce. Each military service has its own corresponding personnel and acquisition offices that develop additional service-specific guidance, and provide management and oversight of its workforce. The services have generally delegated the determination of workforce needs to the command levels and their corresponding program offices. Although each service uses a different management structure, the commands typically make overall organizational budgetary and personnel allocations, whereas the program offices identify acquisition workforce needs; make decisions regarding the civilian, military, and contractor makeup of the workforce; and provide the day-to-day management of the workforce. In addition, each service designates organizations aligned by one or more career fields to monitor and manage career paths and training, and to identify gaps in current skill sets. DOD lacks critical departmentwide information in several areas necessary to assess, manage, and oversee the acquisition workforce and help ensure it has a sufficient acquisition workforce to meet DOD’s national security mission. Specifically, AT&L does not have key pieces of information regarding its in-house acquisition workforce, such as complete data on skill sets, which are needed to accurately identify its workforce gaps. In addition, it lacks information on the use and skill sets of contractor personnel performing acquisition-related functions. Omitting these data from DOD’s assessments not only skews analyses of workforce gaps, but also limits DOD’s ability to make informed workforce allocation decisions. Critical success factors for human capital management include collecting data on workforce competencies and skills mix, and evaluating human capital approaches—including those for acquiring and retaining talent— for how well they support efforts to achieve program results. Such efforts, linked to strategic goals and objectives, can enable an agency to recognize, prepare, and obtain the knowledge, skills, abilities, and size for the workforce it needs to pursue its current and future missions. DOD has increasingly relied on contractors to perform core missions, but has yet to develop a workforce strategy for determining the appropriate mix of contractor and government personnel. Our prior work has noted the importance of effective human capital management to better ensure that agencies have the right staff who are doing the right jobs in the right place at the right time by making flexible use of its internal workforce and appropriate use of contractors. We have also reported that decisions regarding the use of contractors should be based on strategic planning regarding what types of work are best done by the agency or contracted out. While DOD planning documents state that the workforce should be managed from a “total force” perspective—which calls for contractor personnel to be managed along with civilian and military personnel — DOD does not collect departmentwide data on contractor personnel. Program offices, however, do have information about contractor personnel. Data we obtained from 66 program offices show that contractor personnel comprised more than a third of those programs’ acquisition- related positions (see table 2). According to MDA officials, the agency collects and uses such data in its agency-level workforce allocation processes, which in turn has helped inform staffing and resource decisions at the program office level. Because contractor personnel likely comprise a substantial part of all personnel supporting program offices, AT&L is missing information on a key segment of the department’s total acquisition workforce (in-house and contractor personnel). DOD also lacks information on factors driving program offices’ decisions to use contractor personnel rather than hire in-house personnel. DOD guidance for determining the workforce mix outlines the basis on which officials should make decisions regarding what type of personnel— military, civilian, or contractor—should fill a given position. The guidance’s primary emphasis is on whether the work is considered to be an inherently governmental function, not on whether it is a function that is needed to ensure institutional capacity. The guidance also states that using the least costly alternative should be an important factor when determining the workforce mix. However, of the 31 program offices that reported information about the reasons for using contractor personnel, only 1 indicated that reduced cost was a key factor in the decision to use contractor personnel rather than civilian personnel. Instead, 25 cited staffing limits, the speed of hiring, or both as main factors in their decisions to use contractor personnel. Additionally, 22 program offices cited a lack of in-house expertise as a reason for using contractor personnel, and 17 of those indicated that the particular expertise sought is generally not hired by the government. In addition, at 3 of the 4 program offices we visited, officials said that they often hire contractors because they may face limits on the number of civilian personnel they can hire, and because budgetary provisions may allow program offices to use program funds to pay for additional contractor personnel, but not for hiring civilian personnel. Program officials also cited the lengthy hiring process for civilian personnel as a reason for using contractor personnel. AT&L’s lack of key pieces of information hinders its ability to determine gaps in the number and skill sets of acquisition personnel needed to meet DOD’s current and future missions. At a fundamental level, workforce gaps are determined by comparing the number and skill sets of the personnel that an organization has with what it needs. However, AT&L lacks information on both what it has and what it needs. With regard to information on the personnel it has, AT&L not only lacks information on contractor personnel, but it also lacks complete information on the skill sets of the current acquisition workforce and whether these skill sets are sufficient to accomplish its missions. AT&L is currently conducting a competency assessment to identify the skill sets of its current acquisition workforce. While this assessment will provide useful information regarding the skill sets of the current in-house acquisition workforce, it is not designed to determine the size, composition, and skill sets of an acquisition workforce needed to meet the department’s missions. AT&L also lacks complete information on the acquisition workforce needed to meet DOD’s mission. The personnel numbers that AT&L uses to reflect needs are derived from the budget. Because these personnel numbers are constrained by the size of the budget, they likely do not reflect the full needs of acquisition programs. Of the 66 program offices that provided data to us, 13 reported that their authorized personnel levels are lower than those they requested. In a report on DOD’s workforce management, RAND noted that the mismatch between needs and available resources means that managers have an incentive to focus on managing the budget process instead of identifying the resources needed to fulfill the mission and then allocating resources within the constraints of the budget. AT&L has begun to respond to recent legislative requirements aimed at improving DOD’s management and oversight of its acquisition workforce, including developing data, tools, and processes to more fully assess and monitor its acquisition workforce. Each service has also recently initiated, to varying degrees, additional efforts to assess its own workforce at the service level.