Home News Archive New Report Blasts DOD Management of Contractors Deployed in the Battlefield
New Report Blasts DOD Management of Contractors Deployed in the Battlefield
Thursday, 11 June 2009 08:08
administrator
The Commission on Wartime Contracting has issued its interim report, "At What Cost? Contingency Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan." The Commission describes itself as a "bipartisan, independent entity charged with evaluating and reporting on America's wartime contracting for logistics, reconstruction, and security." (I note that the commission is headed by Michael Thibault, former Deputy Director, DCAA, and Christopher Shays (R) - former member of Congress.) The report states that roughly 240,000 (nearly a quarter million) contractor employees now work in Afghanistan and Iraq, supporting the Department of Defense (DOD); that figure does not include additional contractor employees that support the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The figure is expected to increase during the drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq, making effective management even more critical. Yet, the report asserts that DOD has largely failed to effectively manage its contractor workforce, stating "There is a critical shortage of qualified contract–management personnel in theater and those that are there are stretched too thin. In particular, the process for designating and training contracting officer’s representatives to check contractor performance in theater is broken." The report also contains other assertions, such as "Too many contractor business systems are inadequate and must be fixed" and "There is a need for greater accountability in the use of subcontractors. Subcontracts account for about 70 percent of the work, but government has very little visibility into their operations." Read the full report
here