TAD already has had two lessons learned sessions on Iraq and one for Afghanistan, involving both TAD-North and TAD-South. The primary lessons, Eyre noted, have involved organization.
“If we have another contingency op in CENTCOM, we now have a USACE division headquarters ready to deal with that. When we first went into Afghanistan, we had to stand up an Afghanistan Engineer District [from scratch],” he said.
“Another big lesson learned is the use of USACE-wide reach-back, which we demonstrated with our project awards this year, using 15 districts in the U.S. helping us out so the forward-deployed units could focus on getting work done in theater. Using more reachback can reduce our forward footprint, with fewer personnel, or having them in theater for shorter amounts of time. But while we can do a lot with reachback, we still need the right folks forward, some military, mostly civilian, to provide leadership.”
Personnel, especially given the rotation of assignments common to those in uniform, has been a challenge throughout the current conflict. That is expected to be even more difficult in the spartan years to come as USACE strives to improve both efficiency and effectiveness, yet be ready to grow quickly to meet any future contingency.
“It has been challenging to maintain the key leadership positions, so we really have to look at civilian manning of all the districts,” Eyre said, adding OCONUS contingency ops also face a common problem with USACE domestic efforts. “Another piece – and this will be hard – is USACE business practices and procedures that may work well in the U.S. have to be more flexible OCONUS.
“At times, there are different levels of authority and timelines, which work, but they don’t have the responsiveness we need. We can’t always wait weeks or months, although you can’t work on projects until the funding is approved. We don’t have any pre-work funding available to us right now, so we have to wait. But we are looking for what we can do to make things more responsive to the needs on the ground, which may require a change in law or policy or processes.”
Kajaki Dam powerhouse, as seen April 8, 2012, in Helmand province, Afghanistan, is on tap for repairs by USACE. USACE photo by Karla Marshall
The high operations tempo and need to quickly evolve new processes to meet urgent needs in Southwest Asia already are giving way to a more traditional set of requirements on USACE to support future OCONUS contingency ops, especially as the size of the military is sharply reduced.
“Our structure [in Afghanistan] will change significantly, going from two forward-deployed districts to a single in the next year. That’s really a success. Beyond that, I expect those district offices will transition to the Middle East District, similar to what happened in Iraq when we stood down the Gulf Region District. There is now an area office that is now co-located with the embassy in Baghdad, and a lot of their work is infrastructure support for FMS [Foreign Military Sales],” Eyre said.
“However, the Transatlantic Division is here for the long term and must have the capability to build ourselves back up to support any future contingency in CENTCOM or build another engineering district. But that will be based on mission requirements, wherever that theater may be. We also are looking at whether we can, with other COCOM support, augment any other Corps district that may need additional resources anywhere in the world.”
Accomplishing that will bring the past decade of lessons learned deeply into future USACE planning, training, equipping, and even closer collaboration with the COCOMs. However, budget constraints mean USACE cannot simply maintain all the personnel and materiel it would need to do that.
“We have identified the minimum core organization requirements we need going forward, the baseline of folks we need for, say, the next five years in TAD, although that may be adjusted based on other requirements. We would look internally to USACE for resources, people with specific experience and expertise, which really is how we operate now with both a division headquarters and districts forward. If we don’t have the internal numbers, we would go outside and contract-hire to meet those requirements, which we also now do, depending on the length and expertise involved.
“For TAD,” he said, “our whole focus now is MATT: Mission – which we have to complete while preparing for the next contingency; Affordable – we can’t have too many resources on a project; Transition – we will be changing based on conditions on the ground and mission requirements, with our workload decreasing as we go from two area offices to one; Transformation – what will we look like going forward, with the Middle East District as the enduring operation in charge of remaining work in Afghanistan.”
In the end, however, perhaps the biggest challenge facing TAD, CENTCOM, and their equivalents around the globe is money – how much and for what applications Congress approves funding as budgets contract in the coming years.
“At what point do we say we can’t take on any additional projects because they won’t be done by the end of December 2014 or we don’t feel it’s the right type of project going forward? At what point do we say there will be no more U.S. funding for certain projects?” Eyre concluded. “All the projects we are doing have been identified, but at what point in the next two years do we say we aren’t taking on anything new? We already are looking at no more U.S. military facility funding [in Southwest Asia].
“So our intent is to complete [currently funded] construction and turn it over to the end user, whomever that may be. But when we turn things over, we want to make sure they can operate and maintain the facilities and equipment we have put in place, can handle preventive maintenance, order spare parts, etc. So we have efforts ongoing in Afghanistan to support that – a core cadre of USACE civilians, but mostly Afghan nationals.”
This article originally appeared in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Building Strong®, Serving the Nation and the Armed Forces 2012-2013 Edition.