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Additional Options to
to repair military equipment. Two examples illustrate the range of ILS concepts: For the Stryker medium-weight armored vehicle, contractors currently provide most lo-gistics functions, including maintenance, technical assis-tance, and the supply and distribution of parts; in con-trast, the Abrams tank uses system contractors only for technical support, as required.4
Logistics support decisions are made as part of the process of acquiring a system and are taken into consideration along with decisions about technical specifications, the development schedule, procurement quantity and sched-ule, and so on. In deciding whether to adopt contractor logistics support for a system, the Army weighs a number of factors including cost-effectiveness, the time frame for fielding the system, labor force requirements, and organic and contractor personnel skills.5 DoD may use CLS on either a temporary basis (known as interim contractor support)—with a goal of transitioning to organic unit-level or government-depot support later—or for the sys-tem’s entire life cycle.
Studies by the Government Accountability Office (for-merly the General Accounting Office), RAND Corpora-tion, and the Army indicate that many major Army sys-tems receive some type of support from system
contractors.6
The Role of Federal Civilians Deploying to Support Weapon Systems
The roles of federal civilians and of contractors overlap in supporting weapon systems. To learn more about the role of federal civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Congres-sional Budget Office surveyed representatives from the
Army depots at Tobyhanna and Letterkenny (Pennsylva-nia) and Corpus Christi (Texas).
Representatives from Tobyhanna Army Depot report that they send both individuals and teams to support combat units overseas. Teams are called Forward Repair Activities (FRAs), and they generally support the same systems that they repair in the depot. As of December 2003, Toby-hanna had deployed FRAs to five areas in Iraq, plus one each in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Kuwait. Most of the employees were electronics technicians who de-ployed for tours lasting between 30 days and 179 days.
Furthermore, most employees who accepted a 179-day rotation were willing to volunteer for a second rotation of equal length.
FRAs are generally considered stationary, with the excep-tion of the 4th Infantry Division and the FRA-Stryker brigade combat team (SBCT) 1, which have per-sonnel embedded in the fighting force—traveling, eating, and sleeping with the unit they are supporting. Even per-sonnel in stationary units, however, can move to other lo-cations or respond to specific calls for technical assistance.
Tobyhanna personnel generally stay in combat-support or combat-service-support roles away from the areas of fighting, but they may go to (or near) those areas periodi-cally, if necessary.
Tobyhanna services much of the Army’s C4ISR equip-ment in the United States and overseas, including radios, missile guidance and control systems, landing systems, and radar and air traffic control systems.7 The depot fab-ricates installation kits of systems hardware and installs and tests those kits as needed for Army and Marine Corps customers. Depot personnel also test, troubleshoot, and repair those systems, including electronic and mechanical components as well as computer hardware.
Tobyhanna personnel report that they work with contrac-tors, who provide technical support of hardware and soft-ware, but that contractors and depot personnel are not part of the same teams. Also, one depot employee served as the contracting officer representative for the Army’s modular base-camp construction team, overseeing em-ployees of Kellogg, Brown & Root. Contractors and de-pot personnel may work on different components of the same system; for example, a private contractor might
4. U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command, Systems Contrac-tor Support of 4th Infantry Division (August 2001), p. A26.
5. Army Regulation 700-127, pp. 28-29.
6. General Accounting Office, Defense Department Maintenance:
DoD Shifting More Workload for New Weapon Systems to the Private Sector, GAO/NSIAD-98-8 (March 1998); General Accounting Office, Defense Logistics: Opportunities to Improve the Army’s and the Navy’s Decision-Making Process for Weapon Systems Support, GAO-02-306 (February 2002); Frank Camm and Victoria A.
Greenfield, How Should the Army Use Contractors on the Battle-field? Assessing Comparative Risk in Sourcing Decisions, MG-296 (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2005); and U.S.
Army Combined Arms Support Command, Systems Contractor Support of 4th Infantry Division.
7. C4ISR equipment is for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, sensors, and reconnaissance.
maintain an aircraft, while depot personnel would pro-vide and maintain the communications gear on that aircraft.
Responses from representatives of Letterkenny Army De-pot and Corpus Christi Army DeDe-pot were generally con-sistent with those of representatives from Tobyhanna Army Depot. Letterkenny Army Depot tests and repairs the Patriot missile and its supporting systems. During 2003, small numbers of Letterkenny civilian employees traveled to Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia to perform such functions as testing circuit cards used in the Patriot system. One team was sent to rebuild part of the Avenger fire-control system.8
Corpus Christi Army Depot repairs and maintains heli-copters for all of the military services. As part of that mis-sion, the depot sends personnel overseas as needed to per-form one of two main functions. One group perper-forms hands-on mechanical work on engines, operating the Flexible Engine Diagnostic System. That team is led by one Army civilian with two contractors. A second group—the Analytical Investigation Division—investi-gates helicopter crashes. An investigator from Corpus Christi generally will travel alone and stay less than two weeks. The investigator is mobile and may go near the crash site until the crashed aircraft is recovered and brought to a military installation. Depot personnel per-form the investigation, but contractors may be engaged to move the aircraft from the crash site.
On the basis of that information, it appears that federal civilians provide testing or repair work that is consistent with their work in government depots in the United States—that is, supporting systems that are maintained in those depots. The systems that rely more on contractor support at home, or those whose repairs and other logis-tics functions have not yet transitioned to government personnel, may require that contractors deploy. Thus, the maintenance philosophy of the system (whether it is rou-tinely maintained by contractors or by civilian personnel) determines whether contractors or federal civilians deploy with the forces. Even systems that are maintained by
con-tractors, however, receive oversight from government offi-cials, who are often civilians.
Deployment of System Contractors in Recent Operations
System support contracts are typically prearranged out-side of the wartime theater. For the Army, those contracts are usually awarded by the program manager (PM) or program executive officer (PEO) or by the Army Materiel Command.9 Some system support contracts contain spe-cific language pertaining to contractor deployment. In other instances, deployed CLS personnel may be funded through modification of an existing contract to support the system within the United States or through an en-tirely new contract.
The PEO or PM who oversees a particular system may track the number of contractor personnel who deploy, but until recently there has been little or no centralized tracking of contractors.10 Two of the larger program ex-ecutive offices, Ground Combat Systems (GCS) and Command, Control, and Communications—Tactical (C3T), took responsibility for tracking all PEOs’ de-ployed system contractors in Operation Iraqi Freedom (see Figure 4-1). Following the initial buildup of forces early in calendar year 2003, the number of system con-tractors remained between roughly 350 and 500 through June 2004. The November 2003 arrival of the Army’s first deployed SBCT in Iraq resulted in a sudden boost in the number of deployed contractors. (SBCTs, under their current interim contractor support arrangement, require relatively large numbers of contractors in-theater.) CBO estimates that between January 2003 and May 2004, the number of active-duty Army personnel per sys-tem contractor has hovered between about 300 and 400 (see Figure 4-2). However, the quantity and location of contractors in-theater is fluid, with individuals constantly arriving, departing, and relocating. The PEOs who
pro-8. Avenger is a lightweight, mobile, transportable air-defense system equipped with Stinger surface-to-air missiles, mounted on a high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle. See the description of Avenger at the Federation of American Scientists’ Military Analy-sis Network Web site (www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/
avenger.htm).
9. A PEO manages a portfolio of related programs, and the PMs for those programs report directly to the PEO. Two examples in the Army are the PEO for Aviation, Tactical Missiles, and Air and Missile Defense and the PEO for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation.
10. The Code of Federal Regulations recently incorporated rules that require the contractor to “. . . establish and maintain with the des-ignated Government official a current list of all contractor person-nel that deploy with or otherwise provide support in the theater of operations” (48 C.F.R. 252.225).
Figure 4-1.