As the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency works to meet the demands of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops sent to Afghanistan, it will have in place an "assessment group" to prevent cases of contractor fraud, said the agency's director, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Alan Thompson.
The group "is now embarked on a deep review of contracting at every one of our supply centers, and specifically, they're focused right now on all of our contractual support for the plus-up in Afghanistan," Thompson told reporters Jan. 26 in Washington.
"Although there's a great deal of urgency there and we need to be very responsive … we want to make sure that we're doing it right and that not only do we have good, tight contracts that are awarded, but that we're administering the contracts properly and therefore doing everything that we can to prevent procurement fraud," he said.
Recently, a Kuwaiti company called Public Warehousing, operating as Agility, was charged with overcharging the Pentagon on food supply contracts. The company has contracts totaling more than $8 billion to feed troops in Iraq, Kuwait and Jordan.
Thompson said this is the type of fraud case that DLA is looking to prevent.
"As a result of that particular situation, as well as others, we've kind of accumulated some of the lessons learned and the vulnerabilities," he said.
In addition to the assessment group, which Thompson said came "on-line" two months ago, the agency also has had senior acquisition executives in place for at least the past 18 months at each of DLA's supply centers.
"[They] are extremely experienced in contracting and acquisition to kind of enhance how well we're doing there," Thompson said. "I want to make sure that we're very focused on all the support for the plus-up in Afghanistan … and [to] make sure that we do not create vulnerabilities that are taken advantage of."
DLA supplies much of the fuel, food, spare parts, medical supplies, uniforms and construction equipment used by the U.S. military.
Thompson also fielded questions about the U.S. military's support operations in Haiti in the wake of the Jan. 12 earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince, the capital of the Caribbean country. DLA has started delivering 14 million meals to troops and survivors there, at a cost of more than $100 million, he said.
"The most urgent issue is related to the emergency feeding of the population of Haiti," Thompson said. As of Jan. 26, DLA was underway in delivering more than 5 million meals to two ports in Florida to be sent to Haiti, and will send another 1 million meals a day after that, he said.
Thompson was reluctant to predict just how long the bulk of DLA's operations in Haiti will last.
"There's interest, obviously, in moving the follow-on support to potentially other organizations," he said. "There's certainly some inherent capabilities that the U.S. armed forces have that others don't, so I think those are being leveraged, but generally, that's not the best answer for the longest term.
"I think there's a commitment to continue to provide support and stay engaged until other organizations can take over the role, so my sense would be probably in the three- to six-month time period would be when there would be efforts to try and transition some of the support."
The U.S. military's mission in Haiti hasn't strained troops beyond what they can handle, as DLA also continues to supply soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.
"From the DLA perspective, I am not concerned that what we're doing today we cannot handle," Thompson said. "We have a lot of capabilities and capacities in the agency that are very scalable and can be leveraged to do even more."
Improvements have helped, he said, such as updating the agency's information technology infrastructure and installing enterprise-resource planning software, a system aimed at smoothing the flow of equipment and supplies.
"That gets us an engine, a backbone, that has allowed us to scale remarkably quickly without increasing staffing," Thompson said.
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