By Ann Roosevelt
The Army is likely to have contractors on the battlefield into the future, according to the top service acquisition official.
“Is it going to change significantly in the future? Not right away, Claude Bolton, assistant secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
Contractors have been on the battlefield since the Revolutionary War, but their presence has drawn wide attention in the current war on terror and in concerns over private security contractors.
Whenever the Army puts new equipment in the field, it considers the cost in terms of contractors needed to be in the field for maintenance, Bolton said.
“We are thinking about it…how do we use less people on the battlefield. Whether it’s contractors or greensuiters in our case.”
The Army’s major modernization program, the Boeing [BA]-SAIC [SAI]-managed Future Combat Systems (FCS), is designed to reduce the numbers of contractors required with built-in diagnostics and prognostics and reach-back capabilities.
But with FCS, “unless I can wave a magic wand, it will take a decade or two to fully populate the United States Army at the rate that we’re going. I think contractors will be on the battlefield for a long time.”
However, the Army is taking a look at its contracts to ensure that they say what the service wants them to say and that contractors are performing as contracted.
Bolton’s office was asked to look at all security-type contracts to see if any lessons could be learned from the recent State Department issues with private security contractors. However, the Army does not contract out security.
“As best we can determine, [Army contracts] say what we want them to say and our contractors are performing and they will probably remain on the battlefield for some time to come,” Bolton said.