I’ve been perusing the latest life cycle logistics (LCL) workforce data, and noticed some rather interesting things. First, the size of our workforce as of the end of FY09 increased from 13,361 to 14,852, an increase of 1,491 from a year earlier. This represents approximately 11% growth over the last year. Of that almost 15,000 person LCL workforce, 7,952 are Army (53.5%), 4,784 are Navy/Marine Corps (32.2%), 1,989 are Air Force (13.4%), and 127 assigned to the defense agencies (<1%). Life Cycle Logistics now represents 11.2% of the Defense Acquisition Workforce (DAW), and we remain the third largest acquisition career field behind Contracting and Systems Engineering.

These numbers will continue to increase in the coming years due to DLA expansion of their Life Cycle Logistics community, recoding of US Air Force positions as a result of their ongoing Life Cycle Logistics workforce Reconstitution Team initiative, and Component/Agency in-sourcing and planned workforce growth.

I remain concerned that the percentage of uniformed military personnel in our career field continues to dwindle to just 6% of the DoD Life Cycle Logistics community. While the overall numbers remained relatively steady at 925, as a percentage of the workforce, the trend is downward. As I said in my September 30, 2009 blog post, this is something I believe we should all be concerned about for a variety of reasons.

Is the rapid workforce growth we are experiencing a good thing? What are the implications? Are there potential issues with assimilating so many new people into our community in such a short period of time? What do you think?