Department Of Defense Acquisition Workforce Analyses

The defense acquisition workforce (AW) is responsible for providing acquisition, technology, and logistics support for products and services to ensure that the U.S. military is an effective fighting force. The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment has directed the deployment of a comprehensive workforce analysis capability to facilitate assessments of the AW, and RAND researchers have aided in this effort by providing reports with updates on workforce gains and losses, as well as targeted analyses of specific topics of interest. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) began implementing the Back-to-Basics (BtB) initiative-the most significant change to the defense AW management infrastructure since its inception in the early 1990s. In this report, the researchers provide an update to their previous work and a final characterization of the pre-BtB AW. They present a descriptive overview of the AW as of the end of fiscal year (FY) 2021, describe changes to the AW over time, discuss the potential implications of a recent transition for the workforce, and identify opportunities for the collection of new data that could support decisionmaking.