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A House Armed Services Committee panel on Tuesday wrapped up a series of hearings on Defense acquisition issues aimed at reining in the cost overruns, schedule delays and performance problems associated with many of its major procurements.

Too often, Congress and the military services have given short shrift to the people whose skills are vital to purchasing the complex weapons and services needed to support military operations, said Rep. Vic Snyder, chairman of the House Armed Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

"These members of the workforce are key players in both supporting the warfighters' needs and safeguarding the taxpayers' dollars," Snyder said referring to the engineers, cost estimators, contracting officers, program managers, inspectors, auditors and others who make up the acquisition workforce.

Recent problems in military contracting stem largely from personnel cuts in the acquisition workforce made throughout the 1990s when the services significantly reduced staff after the end of the Cold War. But the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks ushered in a new era of spending at Defense. Contracts let through the department nearly tripled from $138 billion in 2001 to $396 billion in 2008, said Shay Assad, acting deputy undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and technology. During that same period the number of military and civilian personnel working in acquisition remained relatively flat.

"Congress may bear some responsibility for the current state of affairs because during the post-Cold War drawdown era, Congress mandated a series of reductions in the acquisition workforce, only to be followed by an era of increasing demands and dramatic growth in the department's procurement budget," Snyder said.

Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced plans to increase the size of the acquisition workforce by 20,000 positions through 2015 in an effort to return to the 1998 staffing level of 147,000.

"The objective is straightforward: To ensure DoD has the right acquisition capability and capacity to produce the best value for the American taxpayer and for the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who depend on the weapons, products and services we buy," Assad said.

According to the department's plan, it will convert approximately 11,000 contractor support positions to full-time government employees. "This will create a better balance between our government workforce and contractor support personnel and ensure that critical and inherently governmental functions are performed by government employees," said Assad.

Each of the military services has inventoried its existing acquisition workforce to identify gaps in the ability of its contracting workforce and is developing plans to increase staffing as needed. But John Needham, director of acquisition and sourcing management at the Government Accountability Office, said the department and the services lack critical information about the nature of some of the acquisition work now being performed by contractor personnel.

"In addition to lacking information on contractor personnel, DoD lacks complete information on the skill sets of its in-house personnel," Needham said.

"Shaping the right size and mix of the workforce is challenging," said Lt. Gen. Ross Thompson III, principal military deputy to the Army's assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology.

This is especially true for contracting operations that must take place on the battlefield, Thompson said. To increase the stature of contracting and highlight its importance to military operations, the Army sought and received authorization from Congress last fall to add five general officer acquisition positions, with the requirement that the selectees have significant contracting experience.

In 2008 Congress also gave the military services expedited hiring authority to fill acquisition positions quickly and circumvent the time-consuming conventional federal hiring process.

In February, the Navy was the first service to implement the new expedited process and now typically can offer a candidate a job within 72 hours, said Carolyn Bean Willis, director of acquisition and career management, in a recent interview with Government Executive. The conventional hiring process, which required prospective candidates to fill out pages of forms, took about 175 days, she said.

"It was so difficult to hire, especially the most qualified people," she said, noting that many candidates would receive other offers in the time it took to navigate the Navy's hiring bureaucracy. "That's all changed with this authority," she said.

The expedited hiring authority is scheduled to expire in 2012.