ARMY AL&T
areas of expertise where we could address issues on the front end rather than after they’ve been done.”
Bass said actions such as establishing contracting reachback support stateside, bringing in logistics civil augmentation program planners in the early stages, and working with units to establish coalition and joint acquisition review boards were based on lessons from previous military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The concept of reaching back to contracting centers away from the Area of Operations was first used to support operations in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The Rock Island Contracting Center (RICC), IL, provided support on an on-call basis rather than as an active participant. This allowed contingency contracting officers (CCOs) to concentrate on immediate onsite requirements, leaving complex actions for the RICC.
“Learning from the past helped us deploy quicker and smarter,” Bass said. “Just as we gathered lessoned learned from previous deployments, we have gathered some from the Haiti deploy- ment that should help us the next time we have to deploy.”
Further Improvements Identified During the Haiti deployment, contracting officers (KOs) identified areas where challenges still existed, even as they responded to a host of immediate needs. “This is the first time the command has been involved in a disaster relief effort of this magnitude,” said John Hess, ECC, Principal Assistant to the Director, Mission Operations. The Joint Task Force-Haiti Regional Contracting Center developed contracts for latrine services; water; support to current facilities; vehicles; and other assets needed by military personnel supporting the relief effort.
As CCOs arrived in Haiti, they relied heavily on outside units and agencies for basic life support services. The immediate mission for the contracting Soldiers was obtaining the supplies and services needed by those providing the direct assistance to the Haitian people.
“The lack or limitation of resources within country, and the speed in which contracting requirements came in for action and award, was a challenge,” said LTC Lynda Royse, 410th Contracting Support Brigade.
“As with any disaster type-relief operation, there were immediate needs-type items,” Royse said. “As they [Combined Joint Task Force-Haiti responders] were planning, they were coming in with requirements needing a quick turnaround, usually for the next day.”
To ease the initial burden, ECC developed prepositioned deployable equipment packages for its contracting teams as part of an early-entry equipment capability.
67 OCTOBER –DECEMBER 2010
Building upon lessons learned, it was determined that a contract review threshold should be established early to allow CCOs to adjust to the administrative requirements of contracting operations in a deployed environment. This would also allow oversight, man- agement control, and quality control of high-dollar contract actions.
In addition, it was evident that the decision to issue a contracting warrant should be based upon the CCO’s experience level. The fact that the simplified acquisition threshold increases from $100,000 to $1 million during a declared contingency operation does not mean that all CCOs should be issued a $1 million warrant. Warrants should be issued based upon a CCO’s contracting experience and the dollar size of actions needed to meet the mission. The bottom line: it takes time to train KOs and for them to gain experience.
Bass would also like to improve the ECC’s reachback capabili- ties by creating standardized reachback support for contingency operations. “We’re looking into the possibility of establishing a reachback center of excellence for global contingencies that would include creating points of contact [POCs] aligned region- ally with the combatant command and the contracting support brigades,” Bass said. “There’s a lot more to it, including integrat- ing the reachback POC into our training events and exercises, creating a logistics planning team for contracting, and providing assistance for immediate and/or complex requirements.
“Moving forward means reviewing what we’ve done and how we have done it in the past, then reviewing it again and constantly using those lessons to better ourselves with each new challenge,” Bass concluded.
Larry D. McCaskill is a U.S. Army Contracting Command Public Affairs Specialist. He holds an A.A. in liberal arts from Queensborough Community College and has attended numerous military schools, including the Defense Information School.
Unit Readiness Means Train and Train Some More MAJ Thomas Lutz
The Commission on Wartime Contracting indicated in a 2009 interim report that there was an inadequate number of trained contracting officer’s representatives (CORs) assigned to contractor oversight in Iraq and Afghanistan. In response to that report, the 413th Contracting Support Brigade (CSB), Fort Shafter, HI, a subordinate command of the U.S. Army Expeditionary Contracting Command, is doing its part to
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