Contingency Operations: Army Should Do More to Control Contract Cost in the Balkans

The U.S. military has relied on contractors to provide supplies and services in support of major contingencies since the Revolutionary War. In the past decade, however, deployed U.S. forces have increased significantly their dependence on contractors for support. In the Balkans, the primary contractor houses, feeds, and provides a range of other services to about 11,000 troops and played a key role in building the base camps in Bosnia and Kosovo. The Department of Defense DOD has increasingly relied on contractors rather than soldiers to provide some services in the Balkans as force-level ceilings have been reduced, and contracts for support services represented over 2 billion of the more than 13.8 billion spent on Balkan operations through March 2000. Moreover, we have identified defense contract management as a high-risk area of government spending. Based on the magnitude of contractor costs and the need to ensure that services are provided as efficiently as possible, you asked us to determine whether there are opportunities to improve contractor utilization and reduce costs of Balkan operations without jeopardizing mission success. This report assesses whether 1 the Army is taking effective actions to contain costs and 2 improvements are needed in how the Army and other DOD agencies involved in Balkan operations manage activities under the primary Balkan contract.