A great article and lots of excellent suggestions for the commission to check out. (hint….hint?) Let’s review the statistics shall we, so we can have a little perspective during this conversation. 250,000 plus or minus private contractors operating in the various war zones.(this number refers to DoD, DoS, USAID, others) As for personal sacrifice of the contracting community, Iraq (1,314) and Afghanistan (111) casualties. Not to mention the 31,000 contractors that have been injured. (and that is a rough number as well) So with those numbers, why is the government still not doing the things necessary to organize and manage this industry?
Maybe the government wants this industry to be disjointed and unorganized? They want fraud and abuse cases to happen, because it takes the spot light off the government, and allows them to blame private industry for all of their ills? I don’t know, and it still boggles my mind as to how this continues to flail in the wind.
Look, it is simple. If the current leadership tasked with organizing and managing this effort is not up to the task, then fire them, and get someone else in there to get the job done. The next effort should be to shame those leaders in government and military who have allowed this to carry on. We have a war to fight, and if the Obama administration has deemed this war a national interest and priority, then we need get off our collective ass and do what is necessary to organize and get efficient.
I would also like to see a conversation about including this 250,000 plus or minus contractors into the discussion about the various regional military and diplomatic strategies. It is odd to me that we have thousands of us working with and around civilian populations out there, and our wartime strategies supposedly deal with protecting and helping those populations, and yet there is no coordination of my industry to insure we do not screw that up. If a company implements bad business practices, or grossly impractical road tactics, or poor treatment of local nationals, etc. because there were no regional rules on what was acceptable for private industry, then of course that is going to work against the overall regional strategy and the war effort. In the eyes of the local populations, we are all one in the same(foreigners in their land), and our military/diplomatic leaders and strategists need to recognize that reality.
The private industry does have an impact on the war, and if we are serious about managing that impact, then all 250,000 of us have to be brought into the conversation about war time strategy and how to conduct ourselves out there. That to me is reason enough to get serious about contractors, but who am I or David to bring that point up?
And the war continues……-Matt
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Can’t anyone here manage a contract?
by David Isenberg
June 9th, 2009
Tomorrow, according to the Associated Press, the Commission on Wartime Contracting will present a bleak assessment of how tens of billions of dollars have been spent since 2001. The 111-page report, according to AP, documents poor management, weak oversight, and a failure to learn from past mistakes as recurring themes in wartime contracting.
The commission’s report is scheduled to be made public Wednesday at a hearing held by the House Oversight and Government Reform’s national security subcommittee.
While this is hardly the first report to document failings of oversight on private contractors it is nevertheless significant, as supposedly the U.S. government has taken significant steps in the past couple of years to improve its management of contractors. Yet apparently, to paraphrase the poet Robert Frost, contractors have numerous promises to keep and the government has years to go before it can sleep comfortably.