The U.S. military has long used contractors to provide supplies and services to deployed U.S. forces, and more recently contractors have been involved in every major military operation since the 1991 Gulf War. However, the scale of contractor support DOD relies on today in Iraq and throughout Southwest Asia has increased considerably from what DOD relied on during previous military operations, such as Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm and those in the Balkans. At the end of the first quarter of fiscal year 2010, DOD estimated the number of contractors in Iraq to be about 100,000 and the number in Afghanistan about 107,000. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. citizens constitute a minority of the total contractor workforce. In Iraq, approximately 72,000 contractors are third country or Iraqi nationals, and in Afghanistan approximately 81,000 contractors, or 75 percent, are Afghan nationals. However, these numbers do not reflect the thousands of contractors in Kuwait and elsewhere who support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. By way of contrast, an estimated 9,200 contractor personnel supported military operations in the 1991 Gulf War. Factors that have contributed to the increase include reductions in the size of the military, an increase in the number of operations and missions undertaken, and DOD’s use of increasingly sophisticated weapons systems. DOD uses contractors to meet many of its logistical and operational support needs during combat operations, peacekeeping missions, and humanitarian assistance missions. Today, contractors located throughout the Middle East and Southwest Asia provide U.S. forces with such services as linguistic support, equipment maintenance, base operations support, and security support. In Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors provide deployed U.S. forces with communication services; interpreters who accompany military patrols; base operations support (e.g., food and housing); weapons systems maintenance; intelligence analysis; and a variety of other types of support. Contractors provide logistics support that includes parts and equipment distribution, ammunition accountability and control, port support activities, and support to weapons systems and tactical vehicles. For example, in Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, and Afghanistan, the Army uses contractors to refurbish, repair, and return to the warfighters a variety of military vehicles. Oversight of contracts—which can refer to contract administration functions, quality assurance surveillance, corrective action, property administration, and past performance evaluation—ultimately rests with the contracting officer, who has the responsibility for ensuring that contractors meet the requirements as set forth in the contract. Frequently, however, contracting officers are not located in the contingency area or at the installations where the services are being provided. As a result, contracting officers appoint contract monitors, who are responsible for monitoring contractor performance. For some contracts, such as LOGCAP, AFCAP, or theater-wide service contracts like the Afghan trucking contract, contracting officers may delegate contract oversight to the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) to monitor contractor performance. In Iraq and Afghanistan, these teams include administrative contracting officers, who direct the contractor to perform work, and quality assurance representatives, who ensure that the contractors perform work to the standards written in the contracts and oversee the Contracting Officer’s Representatives (CORs) assigned to DCMA- administered contracts. The DCMA team also includes property administrators and subject matter experts who advise the agency on technical issues such as food service, electrical engineering, and air traffic control procedures. These subject matter experts augment the DCMA staff and provide expertise not inherent to DCMA’s workforce and normally outside of DCMA’s core competency area of oversight responsibilities. Unless the contracting officer delegates the administrative contract management and oversight functions to DCMA, the contracting officer is responsible for the administrative oversight and management of the contract. Regardless of whether or not DCMA provides administrative oversight of a contract, contracting officers generally appoint CORs. These individuals provide much of the day-to-day oversight of a contract during a contingency operation. They are typically drawn from units receiving contractor-provided services, they are not normally contracting specialists, and often their service as contracting officer’s representatives is an additional duty. They cannot direct the contractor by making commitments or changes that affect price, quality, quantity, delivery, or other terms and conditions of the contract. Instead, they act as the eyes and ears of the contracting officer and serve as the liaison between the contractor and the contracting officer. In Iraq and Afghanistan, CORs who have been appointed as contracting officer’s representatives for contracts administered by DCMA report their oversight results to DCMA personnel. For contracts not administered by DCMA, CORs provide oversight information to the contracting officer, who may be located in Iraq, Afghanistan, or outside the theater of operations. DOD guidance requires that trained CORs be appointed prior to the award of a service contract. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the Joint Contracting Command requires that its contracting officers appoint CORs for all contracts valued at more than $2,500 and having significant technical requirements that require on-going advice and surveillance from technical/requirements personnel. The contracting officer may exempt service contracts from this requirement when the following three conditions are all met: 1. The contract is awarded using simplified acquisition procedures; 2. The requirement is not complex; and 3. The contracting officer documents the file, in writing, as to why the appointment of a COR is unnecessary. Based on preliminary observations from our ongoing work in Iraq and Afghanistan, we found that DOD continues to be faced with five challenges related to providing management and oversight of contractors in ongoing operations. First, DOD continues to be challenged in having an adequate number of personnel to provide oversight and management of contracts. While DOD has acknowledged shortages of personnel and has made some efforts to address them, these efforts are in the early stages of implementation. Second, training non-acquisition personnel such as CORs and unit commanders to work with contractors continues to be a problem. For example, we found some instances in which a lack of training raised concerns over the potential risk of military commanders directing contractors to perform work outside the scope of the contract—something commanders lack the authority to do. Third, DOD continues to face badging and screening challenges, particularly of local national and third- country national contractor personnel. Fourth, DOD lacks reliable tracking data on contractor personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fifth, DOD faces challenges in identifying its operational contract support requirements for ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. For instance, officials from U.S. Forces-Afghanistan’s logistics staff appeared to be unaware of their responsibility as defined by DOD guidance to identify contractor requirements or develop the contract management and support plans required by guidance. As we noted in several of our previous reports, having the right people with the right skills to oversee contractor performance is crucial to ensuring that DOD receives the best value for the billions of dollars spent on contractor-provided services supporting contingency operations. Additionally, as our previous work has shown, poor contract oversight and the poor contractor performance that may result can negatively affect the military’s mission. Although we could find no DOD guidelines regarding the appropriate number of personnel needed to oversee and manage DOD contracts at a deployed location, several reviews by GAO and DOD organizations have consistently found significant deficiencies in DOD’s oversight of contractors due to having an inadequate number of personnel to carry out these duties. In 2004, 2006, and again in 2008, we reported on DOD’s inability to provide an adequate number of oversight personnel in CENTCOM’s theater of operation, and our ongoing work in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrates that this problem has not been resolved. For example, During our December 2009 trip to Afghanistan, officials at a contracting command told us that their workload required them to devote all their efforts to awarding contracts, and as a result they could not provide contract oversight. During that same trip, the commander of a maintenance battalion in Afghanistan expressed concern over having an inadequate number of personnel available to provide oversight of a key maintenance contract used to support the increase of troops in Afghanistan. He noted that the lack of sufficient quality assurance personnel and technical experts was an identified problem they were working to correct, but that the additional civilian personnel were slow to arrive. Furthermore, he expressed concern that the expanding U.S. mission in Afghanistan would require additional technical experts and quality assurance personnel to oversee the increased number of contractors expected to be needed to support the increased vehicle maintenance and repair requirements. In preliminary findings concerning the drawdown of forces from Iraq, we noted that an Army unit in Kuwait that was responsible for ensuring the steady flow of equipment out of Kuwait and for conducting certain maintenance tasks had 32 government personnel to provide oversight for more than 3,000 contractor personnel. In January 2010, Army Materiel Command requested funding to double to approximately 800 the number of this unit’s contractor personnel assigned to conduct retrograde-specific tasks—for example, receiving, accounting for, sorting, and moving equipment— necessary to prevent equipment backlogs in Kuwait. In July 2009 this unit identified the lack of oversight personnel as a significant concern with respect to successfully moving equipment out of Kuwait. According to contracting officials, the unit had requested an increase in civilian oversight personnel. However, we have previously reported on the Army’s difficulties in filling civilian personnel vacancies in Kuwait. In a June 2009 report, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan found that DOD had insufficient logistics subject matter experts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the department’s response to the June 2009 report, DOD noted that DCMA had in March 2009 requested 57 subject matter experts for food, water, medical, fire, and petroleum services, but only 40 of the 57 positions had been filled. Furthermore, according to DCMA as of January 2010, only 19 of the 40 personnel had arrived in theater. During our December 2009 trip to Afghanistan, DCMA officials stressed to us the need for more subject matter experts, and they have requested an additional 47 subject matter experts, but officials do not know when these positions will be filled.