We all know that the weapons procurement process doesn’t work well.  The whole process is a bureaucratic nightmare.  So the answer?  A huge new bureaucracy.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s Defense Department plans to create 20,000 new government jobs to help revise how it buys more than $100 billion of weapons each year, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official told Congress.

The Pentagon also plans to tie contract fees more closely to performance and make deals spanning two years, or more, only when “real, substantial” savings result to taxpayers, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.

Lynn said the planned jobs growth would take place over the next five years. Included would be more than 9,000 positions at two Pentagon agencies that audit and manage contracts for everything from bullets, to bombs, to bread rolls.

The remaining 11,000 new hires would come from the conversion to federal civilian slots of jobs that had been outsourced to contractors.

“This unprecedented, five-year planned workforce initiative will result in a properly sized, well-trained, capable and ethical workforce,” he said.

Lynn and Shay Assad, acting deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition, said bringing more work in-house would cost less than relying on contractors over the long run.

The current workforce is made up of 127,000 government employees and 52,000 contractors for a total of 179,000, said Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman.

“We are going to 147,000 and 41,000 contractors for a new total integrated workforce of 188,000,” he said in an emailed reply to Reuters.

Assad told Reuters after the hearing that the U.S. Army would seek to restructure its costliest arms program, the $159 billion Future Combat Systems, as part of the Pentagon drive to link contractors’ profits more closely to their performance.

The problem with the future combat systems is not that there aren’t enough people holding the contractor responsible.  The problem is that the system, including the exoskeleton, should never be implemented to begin with.

And the problem with the system is not that there aren’t enough bureaucrats.  Contractors’ earnings can be linked more closely to performance now, without a huge increase in the Pentagon “system.”  Whatever else this growth in bureaucracy is meant to achieve, it has little to do with weapons procurement.  It would be better to take the cost associated with this and put it towards an increase in the size of the Marine Corps.