For more than a decade, the Army has relied heavily on contractor support in Iraq, Afghanistan and at home to free soldiers for military tasks, but now that support is being reduced–saving $2 billion in one area–as the forces return home and budgets are restricted, the Army’s top officials told the Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) defense panel on Wednesday.
Various sources say it costs almost three times as much for a contractor employee vice a Defense Department civilian, SAC Defense Panel Vice Chairman Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), said, and he wanted to know what the Army was doing, in light of its concerns over a return of sequestration and a $126.5 billion budget request–$6 billion over the budget caps.
Army Secretary John McHugh generally agreed with the per unit costs, but cautioned the Army finds the ability to bring contractors on and off is more efficient than using the full time civilian equivalent. Thus, the Army will continue to use contractors.
That said, “We’ve reduced and in-sourced contractor positions by more than 10,000,” McHugh said. “That’s a straight reduction in contractor utilization in no small measure because we’re coming down in Afghanistan in numbers, but that’s come down by nearly 13 percent. Right now, there are about 5,000 Army contractors left in Afghanistan.”
Part of the Army restructuring is to try and ensure that when contractors are used it is justifiable “in terms of mission and in terms of dollars,” McHugh said.
Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Ray Odierno said while he was absolutely aware of the issue of the use of contractors, the ground force was taking steps.
In one area of change is contractor logistics support, where the Army took much of the work from soldiers and put it in the hands of contractors to meet the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“We are in the process of significantly reducing that,” Odierno said.
“We have saved $2 billion already in contractor costs by training our soldiers and giving them back the expertise that is necessary to sustain our equipment,” he said.
“I suspect that will double in the next several years as we continue to transition these responsibilities back to our soldiers who I want to be experts in sustaining our equipment.”
Some of the contractor support work went to sustaining new systems during combat operations, he said.
Also, Odierno said the service has overly relied on contractors to do tasks at installations that he believed could be done in different ways, including using soldiers.
In some cases, it is part of their training, for example, guarding installations.
“They do that while they are deployed,” Odierno said. “It’s an important task, it’s a leadership task. So we can reduce contractor costs by using our soldiers to do some of these tasks that we think are military related.”
The Army is still reviewing contractor work to see where savings and efficiencies can be achieved.
“We still have to take a look at where we have some contractors that are doing some things that I believe should be done either by Department of the Army civilians or by uniformed military and we are continuing to look at that,” Odierno said.