Pentagon begins broad review of acquisition workforce skills.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

The Pentagon has launched an extensive evaluation of military acquisition and contracting personnel in order to gauge their skills and competence. A precipitous upsurge in defense spending during the past five years, accompanied by a significant rise in the number of procurement projects, has prompted questions about the ability of the Defense Department to properly manage that workload.

The Pentagon this year will buy more than $300 billion worth of products and services.

Following a streak of embarrassing disclosures about multibillion-dollar cost overruns in major military programs, critics on Capitol Hill and watchdog groups have called on the Pentagon to tighten its oversight of procurement programs.

"If you want to know why programs are going south ... It's management, inexperienced staff, mostly on the government side, sometimes on the industry side," said Mark D. Schaeffer, Defense Department director of systems and software engineering. Problems range from gross underestimations of what weapons systems will cost, to inaccurate assessments of the maturity of technologies, Schaeffer said at an industry conference.

Later this year, the Pentagon will begin a wide-ranging study to assess the technical skills and overall proficiency of the acquisition workforce, said Shay Assad, director of procurement policy at the office of the secretary of defense.

"We will evaluate each individual and their skills," Assad said in an interview. The study will encompass 26,000 procurement and contracting workers across the military services and the Defense Department.

During the past several months, Assad's office has designed a "competency model" that will serve as the basis for the evaluation of each worker. "We are looking at the skills necessary to effectively contract for different systems and services," Assad said.

The review--scheduled to get under way in June--will pay special attention to skills such as cost estimating. Many of the programs that have experienced cost overruns, Pentagon officials have argued, started out with unrealistically low cost estimates. After the skills evaluation is completed in mid-2008, it is expected that many acquisition managers...