The economic activity of a society consists of activities related to the production and consumption of goods and services. Since earliest times, the primary function of organized society has been economic in nature.
The Pentagon is a large office building, with about 6,500,000 sq ft (600,000 m 2), of which 3,700,000 sq ft (340,000 m 2) are used as offices. Approximately 23,000 military and civilian employees and about 3,000 non-defense support personnel work in the Pentagon. It has five sides, five floors above ground, two basement levels, and five ring corridors per floor with a total of 17.5 mi (28.2 km) of corridors.
The budget would reverse a contracting boom, beginning after the 2001 terrorist attacks, in. which the proportion of private contractors grew to 39 percent of the Pentagon's workforce. Gates said he wants to reduce that percentage to a pre-Sept. 11 level of 26 percent. The government said it would hire as many as 13,000 civil servants to replace contractors in the. coming year and up to 39,000 over the next five years. Roughly 7.5 percent of metropolitan Washington's labor force -- about 291,000 jobs -- is tied to. Pentagon contracting.