Jonathan L Wright

In Preparation for the Perfect Storm: A Case for Transforming Air Force Contingency Contracting Jonathan L Wright

Publisher Marketing: Contingency contracting support for incident response operations requires on-demand, specialized skills to provide mission-critical logistics support during an incident's emergency, restoration, and recovery phases. The support depends on the CCOs' responsiveness, proactive acquisition planning, the ability to identify local potential contractors, advance partnering with interagency counterparts, and site-specific preparations. Various options exist to make contingency contracting support planning for incident response operations more effective and efficient, including assigning military and civilian CCOs to each Air Force installation; anointing one center of excellence for all CCO deployments; employing regional contingency contracting centers of excellence; and increasing the use of the Air Force Contract Augmentation Program. Among these options, the regional contingency contracting center of excellence option most efficiently and effectively addresses the challenges of providing support to incident response operations. Under this option, advance coordination with customers can enable acquisition planning activities, including the creation of pre-declaration contracts. This teaming may also provide proactive solutions for mission-critical requirements in situations when CCOs do not accompany first-responders. This option also offers an efficient focus for identifying local vendors as well as correlating with local, state, and federal counterparts. Additionally, the option focuses on regional issues associated with site-specific preparations by studying cultural impacts on business processes and identifying mission-essential contractors before incidents occur. Transforming Air Force contingency contracting readiness under this option substantiates reorganizing portions of the peacetime contracting support in order to sharpen CCOs' support.