While DOD Has Made Some Noteworthy Improvements, Long- standing Problems Continue to Hinder DOD’s Management and Oversight of Contractors at Deployed Locations

A number of long-standing problems continue to hinder DOD’s  management and oversight of contractors at deployed locations. These  problems include a lack of visibility over the totality of contractor support  at deployed locations; a lack of adequate contract oversight personnel; the  failure to collect and share institutional knowledge on the use of  contractors at deployed locations; and limited or no training of military  personnel on the use of contractors as part of their pre-deployment  training or professional military education. DOD Has Taken Some Noteworthy Steps to Improve Its Policy and Guidance on the Use of Contractors to Support Deployed Forces, but Lack of High-Level Action Hinders Implementation

In June 2003, we recommended that DOD take steps to improve its  guidance on the use of contractors to support deployed U.S. forces. However, the instruction does not address a number of  problems we have raised in previous reports. With limited  visibility over contractors, military commanders and other senior leaders  cannot develop a complete picture of the extent to which they rely on  contractors as an asset to support their operations. According to a senior  Multi-National Force-Iraq official, without this information, Multi-National  Force-Iraq ran the risk of overbuilding or underbuilding the capacity of the  consolidated bases to accommodate the number of individuals expected to  be stationed there. However, inadequate  numbers of personnel to oversee and manage contracts that support  deployed U.S. forces is another long-standing problem that continues to  hinder DOD’s management and oversight of contractors in Iraq. Without adequate contract oversight personnel in place to monitor its  many contracts in deployed locations such as Iraq, DOD may not be able  to obtain reasonable assurance that contractors are meeting their contract  requirements efficiently and effectively at each location. As a result, he was unable to determine the extent to which  the contractor was meeting the contract’s requirements at each of those 27  sites. Yet having too few contract oversight  personnel presents unique difficulties at deployed locations given the  more demanding contracting environment compared to the United States. Moreover, we found no organization within DOD or its  components responsible for developing those procedures. However, we found no  procedures in place to ensure units follow this guidance. When lessons learned are not collected and shared, DOD and its  components run the risk of repeating past mistakes and being unable to  build on the efficiencies and effectiveness others have developed during  past operations that involved contractor support. The entity that functions as  the focal point would act as an advocate within the department for issues  related to the use of contractors to support deployed forces, serve as the  principal advisor for establishing relevant policy and guidance to DOD  components, and be responsible for carrying out actions, including the  following six actions:    oversee development of the joint database to provide visibility over all  contractor support to deployed forces, including a summary of services or  capabilities provided and by-name accountability of contractors;    develop a strategy for DOD to incorporate the unique difficulties of  contract management and oversight at deployed locations into DOD’s  ongoing efforts to address concerns about the adequacy of its acquisition  workforce;  lead and coordinate the development of a departmentwide lessons-learned  program that will capture the experiences of units that have deployed to  locations with contractor support and develop a strategy to apply this  institutional knowledge to ongoing and future operations;    develop the requirement that DOD components, combatant commanders,  and deploying units (1) ensure military commanders have access to key  information on contractor support, including the scope and scale of  contractor support they will rely on and the roles and responsibilities of  commanders in the contract management and oversight process, (2)  incorporate into their pre-deployment training the need to identify and  train contract oversight personnel in their roles and responsibilities, and  (3) ensure mission rehearsal exercises include key contractors to increase  familiarity of units preparing to deploy with the contractor support they  will rely on;    develop training standards for the services on the integration of basic  familiarity with contractor support to deployed forces into their  professional military education to ensure that military commanders and  other senior leaders who may deploy to locations with contractor support  have the knowledge and skills needed to effectively manage contractors;  and  review the services’ efforts to meet the standards and requirements  established above to ensure that training on contractor support to  deployed forces is being consistently implemented by the services. We focused our efforts  on contractors supporting military operations in Iraq and elsewhere in  Southwest Asia because of the broad range of services contractors provide  U.S. forces in support of the Global War on Terrorism.
Why GAO Did This Study

Prior GAO reports have identified problems with the Department of Defense's (DOD) management and oversight of contractors supporting deployed forces. GAO issued its first comprehensive report examining these problems in June 2003. Because of the broad congressional interest in U.S. military operations in Iraq and DOD's increasing use of contractors to support U.S. forces in Iraq, GAO initiated this follow-on review under the Comptroller General's statutory authority. Specifically, GAO's objective was to determine the extent to which DOD has improved its management and oversight of contractors supporting deployed forces since our 2003 report. GAO reviewed DOD policies and interviewed military and contractor officials both at deployed locations and in the United States.

What GAO Found

DOD continues to face long-standing problems that hinder its management and oversight of contractors at deployed locations. DOD has taken some steps to improve its guidance on the use of contractors to support deployed forces, addressing some of the problems GAO has raised since the mid-1990s. However, while the Office of the Secretary of Defense is responsible for monitoring and managing the implementation of this guidance, it has not allocated the organizational resources and accountability to focus on issues regarding contractor support to deployed forces. Also, while DOD's new guidance is a noteworthy step, a number of problems we have previously reported on continue to pose difficulties for military personnel in deployed locations. For example, DOD continues to have limited visibility over contractors because information on the number of contractors at deployed locations or the services they provide is not aggregated by any organization within DOD or its components. As a result, senior leaders and military commanders cannot develop a complete picture of the extent to which they rely on contractors to support their operations. For example, when Multi-National Force-Iraq began to develop a base consolidation plan, officials were unable to determine how many contractors were deployed to bases in Iraq. They therefore ran the risk of over-building or under-building the capacity of the consolidated bases. DOD continues to not have adequate contractor oversight personnel at deployed locations, precluding its ability to obtain reasonable assurance that contractors are meeting contract requirements efficiently and effectively at each location where work is being performed. While a lack of adequate contract oversight personnel is a DOD-wide problem, lacking adequate personnel in more demanding contracting environments in deployed locations presents unique difficulties. Despite facing many of the same difficulties managing and overseeing contractors in Iraq that it faced in previous military operations, we found no organization within DOD or its components responsible for developing procedures to systematically collect and share its institutional knowledge using contractors to support deployed forces. As a result, as new units deploy to Iraq, they run the risk of repeating past mistakes and being unable to build on the efficiencies others have developed during past operations that involved contractor support. Military personnel continue to receive limited or no training on the use of contractors as part of their pre-deployment training or professional military education. The lack of training hinders the ability of military commanders to adequately plan for the use of contractor support and inhibits the ability of contract oversight personnel to manage and oversee contractors in deployed locations. Despite DOD's concurrence with our previous recommendations to improve such training, we found no standard to ensure information about contractor support is incorporated in pre-deployment training.