Army officials will need to hire thousands of new workers to ensure that closing Fort Monmouth, N.J., and transferring its functions to Aberdeen Proving Ground won’t disrupt the services the bases provide to America’s military, according to a new government report.

After surveys at Fort Monmouth showed as many as half of the workers there would retire or quit rather than transfer to Maryland, the Army said it will still have about 2,200 openings at Aberdeen after Monmouth closes in 2011, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

At the current rate, those vacancies would not be filled until 2016, but Fort Monmouth officials said they could make it happen by 2014 if they were given authority to hire employees directly rather than go through the government’s Office of Personnel Management, wrote Brian Lepore, author of the report and the GAO’s director of defense capabilities and management.

If most of those employees are new hires, it may take even longer for them to be as good at their jobs as the retirees they will replace.

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“It could take three to eight years, depending on the occupation and an individual’s experience, for a newly hired entry-level employee to reach full proficiency in a position,” Lepore said.

To minimize disruption, the Army may prioritize the jobs being done by the smaller workforce and reassign some of the work to other organizations or contractors.

But local officials said interest in the jobs appeared high enough to fill the positions as they came: A job fair at Aberdeen in June attracted 1,750 potential applicants — many with relevant experience and advanced degrees — for about 250 jobs being transferred in September, said Karen Holt, regional Base Realignment and Closure manager for the counties surrounding Aberdeen Proving Ground.

“If this is any indication early on of local interest in these jobs, we feel very confident moving forward that we’ll meet those needs,” Holt said.

Linda Siegel, operation manager for the Susquehanna Workforce Network, said her organization has not yet fully implemented plans to aggressively market the available jobs to the entire “labor shed” of workers capable of commuting to Aberdeen — which stretches into central Maryland, northern Delaware and southern Pennsylvania.

Given the existing workforce and the size of the area they could draw upon, the workforce network had no doubts it could fill the 2,200 jobs before the deadline, Siegel said.

The GAO also was concerned with the rising cost of the transfer, which has more than doubled its original estimate to $1.6 billion for implementing all of the BRAC commission’s recommendations. The report said officials would continue to monitor Congress’s BRAC funding and ensure it would meet the Army’s needs.

The construction of new facilities at Aberdeen appeared to be on schedule, but the last building would not be completed until five months before the Sept. 15, 2011, closure deadline at Fort Monmouth. Any significant delays would risk blowing that deadline, the report said.

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com