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Gansler: U.S. Army Needs More People, Oversight, to Improve Contracting

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Jacques S. Gansler, Chairman of the Gansler Commission on U.S. Army Contracting, former Undersecretary of Defense.
Interviewer: Greg Bruno, Staff Writer, CFR.org

November 20, 2007

Jacques S. Gansler, who recently chaired a commission investigating the army’s contracting programs and in November 2007 published the findings (PDF), says inexperienced personnel, increasing workloads, and institutional neglect have produced an “opportunity to create fraud” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. Gansler, a former undersecretary of defense during the Clinton administration, says the army needs to change its cultural attitudes toward the contracting profession.

What is the current status of the army’s contracting system?

Two things had happened [to create the current contracting problems]. One is the post-Cold War defense budget plummeted, and as a result you took a lot of people out of the services. In order to maintain the “so called” fighting forces, they took most of the reductions out of the support areas, particularly in terms of the contracting and even the acquisition workforce. Then in the mid-90s, as the budget turned around and after 9/11, they did not replace those [contracting] people. So there was a big gap between the people who were doing the implementation of contracts and a huge increase in the number of contracts, a huge increase in the dollars of the contracts, but an actual reduction in the number of people who are doing the contracting.

While these cutbacks were taking place [the Pentagon] actually eliminated what had been in the army in 1990 a five general officer [position]. Now, if you are military officer thinking about going to the contracting field, and you can get no promotion potential up to the general officer level, you can say I’ll pick some other career.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.