Article

September 2003

Army Not Equipped to Manage Contractors on the Battlefield

by Roxana Tiron

The conflict in Iraq highlighted the difficulties the Defense Department faces in managing contractors on the battlefield, officials said. Of particular concern is the inability to track and oversee growing numbers of contractors. Military commanders, additionally, worry that they are not always aware of what contractors were hired to do and how they should be managed.

The Army, for example, has realized that there are “hundreds of sub-issues under the issue contractors on the battlefield,” said Army Col. James Chambers, a career logistician, now the support commander for the 3rd Corps, at Fort Hood, Texas.

In Operation Iraqi Freedom, Army officials relied on contractors for many logistics support functions. It became confusing to commanders to determine exactly what the contractors were supposed to do, Chambers said. “The demands that we asked of our contractors were not always written in the contracts that they were supporting.”

To get the situation under control, the Army recently awarded a $10 million contract, under which “we actually pay a contractor to come to account for contractors,” said Chambers in remarks to the National Defense Industrial Association’ armaments conference, in Parsippany, N.J.

Nobody in the service knew how many contractors were employed for Operation Iraqi Freedom, Chambers said. “There was no single source collecting, either in the theater or outside the theater, [information about] how many contractors we have,” he noted.

Even though he refused to give any details on how many contractors are in the battlefield, Chambers said, “it was a surprising number.”

“You will see numbers that for every 10 soldiers there is one contractor,” he added. “That number is probably a little bit high, but those numbers are telling.”

Generally, it is only when contractors come under enemy fire that the news media question the Defense Department’s policies for supervising and protecting contractors, Chambers noted.

Those are legitimate concerns, he said. Contractors should have protective gear such as body armor and chemical-biological suits. “They should have all the force protection and security that we afford soldiers in an area of combat, Chambers said.”

Nevertheless, he said, the Army is not certain how to implement and find resources to ensure contractors have adequate protection. It is something the service will have to “figure out over the next couple of years,” Chambers said.

Chambers’ remarks coincided with a General Accounting Office report, published on June 24, entitled “Military Operations: Contractors Provide Vital Services to Deployed Forces, But Are Not Adequately Addressed in DOD Plans.”

The use of contractors to support deployed forces around the world has increased significantly since the 1991 Gulf War, according to the report. Reductions in the size of the military, the added numbers of operations and missions, and sophisticated weapons systems have spurred the increase.

The types of services contractors provide to deployed forces include communication, interpretation, base operations services, weapons systems maintenance, gate and perimeter security, intelligence analysis, and oversight over other contractors, said GAO.

The Defense Department adheres to the philosophy that soldiers should be ready to deploy for any contingencies. But some weapon systems require specialized contractor support, because military personnel may have not received sufficient training to operate or maintain them independently.

GAO criticized the Pentagon for failing to include contractor support in its operational and strategic plans. “As early as 1988, DOD was aware of the need to identify contractors providing essential services, but has done little to do so in the ensuing 15 years,” said the report.

The Defense Department, in 1991, instructed all agencies to identify essential services provided by contractors and develop plans to ensure the continuation of those services should contractors become unavailable.

“However, we found that DOD components have not conducted the directed reviews to identify those contracts providing essential services,” said the report.

While individual contract oversight was in place in most locations the GAO team visited by April (the report does not include many of the contractual challenges that arose in OIF), the watchdog agency identified a number of broader issues associated with managing contractor support in key areas.

“Commanders at deployed locations have limited visibility and understanding of all contractor activity supporting their operations and frequently have no easy way to get answers to questions about contractor support,” the report said. The management of contractors is inconsistent. In addition, there is no standard contract language for deployment of contractors.

According to the GAO, the Army has developed substantial guidance and policies to deal with contractor support to deployed forces, while the other services make less use of contractors.

The Defense Department issued Instruction 3020.37, which requires the services to determine which contracts provide essential services. Military units either have to develop plans for continued provision of those services during crises or assume the risk of not having the essential service, the report said.

“Neither DOD nor the services have taken steps to ensure compliance with this instruction. ... Without a clear understanding of the potential consequences of not having the essential service available, the risks associated with the mission increase.”

The services have little understanding of the government’s responsibility to contractors during hostilities. This can cause confusion and makes managing contractors more difficult, because commanders often have contractors from several services at their location with different requirements, understanding and ob-

ligations, said the report. Many commanders, senior military personnel and contracting officer representatives are not aware of their roles and responsibilities in dealing with contractors.

“Most commanders at the locations we visited had only limited visibility and limited understanding of the extent and types of services being provided by contractors,” the report said. “The lack of visibility over the types and numbers of contractors limits the contract oversight that can be provided and hampers the commander’s ability to maintain accountability of contractors.”

The Army’s G-4 recently published a draft of a contractor manual to provide guidance for future deployments, according to an Army Material Command spokesperson.

Meanwhile, the office of the defense secretary has been floating the idea of creating a “first corps,” made up of active-duty forces. This first corps would do the job that contractors do today on the battlefield, without any more outside help, said Chambers.

This might not be feasible, he said. “We are always finding out that it is an extreme resourcing decision to have a completely active, non-contractor fighting corps ready to deploy at a moment’s notice,” he said. “It is just not an achievable goal.”

The reserves and the National Guard are trained and equipped to fulfill support roles, said Chambers. But many already have been deployed in fighting roles both in OIF and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

Also, Chambers said, having only active-duty troops as support personnel would be impossible because the majority of weapons systems depend on contractor support to keep them in operation.

Deployment methods also need to be revisited, said Chambers. The incremental approval of deployment orders and port accessibility issues resulted in changes of the Time-Phased Force and Deployment Data flow. Chambers described TPFDD as a “very deliberate, piecemeal method of deploying forces.”

In trying to deploy the “force packages, we were command-centric and not necessarily theater-centric,” said Chambers. “So what happened [was that] a lot of the kinds of units and capabilities that you needed to run a theater fell out. We reached back, and we pulled units from the 90-day mark on the TPFDD. We had reserve components who were notified 10 days before deployment.”

Chambers called the TPFDD process “antiquated.” However “we do not have anything to replace it with,” he acknowledged. “I do not think anybody would sign up on this to do a next deployment.”

In preparation for OIF, the Army faced challenges in processing soldiers and contractors for deployment. Unit integrity, in terms of combat loading, could not be maintained. Matching arriving equipment with mobilizing or arriving soldiers was difficult, Chambers said.

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