OIF contracting effort proves successful

  • Published
  • By Master Sgt. Scott Elliott
  • Air Force Print News
The early insertion of contracting officers into mobility packages may prove to be one of the most cost-effective decisions the Air Force made during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the coalition air force’s top logistics officer said.

“At first blush, you might ask why we’d deploy a contracting officer to an Iraqi air base early on, because where would we find vendors?” said Col. Duane A. Jones, chief of logistics for the Combined Forces Air Component Command. “But what we learned is, when you have entrepreneurs, it doesn’t matter what language they speak.

“If you know there’s a market, they’ll fill the void,” he said.

One of the first markets the Air Force was looking to find was gravel.

“When we build facilities for people to live in, we like to keep the dust down for health and welfare reasons. Gravel’s good for that,” Jones said. “Gravel is also important for some of the processes involved runway repair, so we had a contracting officer go in and make arrangements to get gravel off the local economy.”

Although the Air Force has found itself in some of Iraq’s more remote locations, Jones said that has not stopped the entrepreneurial spirit.

“Even when we put contracting officers into locations that appeared to have no real industrial base nearby, the word got around, and the entrepreneurs came out of the woodwork,” he said. “Sometimes they traveled great distances to do business with us because they know we’re reliable, we pay, and we usually deal in high volume.”

Besides helping build relations with the locals by increasing personal interaction and pumping money into the flagging Iraqi economy, Jones said purchasing local commodities aids the military transportation system.

“Having deployed contracting officers saves money on transportation,” he said. “Transportation is an expensive and rare quality for us, whether it be by air or land. Everything that we can procure locally is something we don’t have to move in.”

Quality-of-life improvements are also side benefits to local purchase, the colonel said.

“When our contracting officers are able to get anything locally, it cuts down on the required delivery time. That improves efficiency and quality of life,” Jones said.