Q&A with Brig. Gen. Michael D. Hoskin, commanding general, Expeditionary Contracting Command

By Army Contracting Command Public AffairsNovember 21, 2014

ECC commanding general
1 / 2 Show Caption + Hide Caption – (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL
Touring units
2 / 2 Show Caption + Hide Caption – (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

(Brig. Gen. Michael D. Hoskin became the commanding general of the U.S. Army Expeditionary Contracting Command August 1. The Virginia native has more than 20 years of contracting experience. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant Armor officer through the Army ROTC program after graduating from Ferrum College in Virginia in 1986. Prior to becoming the ECC commanding general, he served as the division chief, Operational Contract Support and Services Division, J-4, Joint Staff, the Pentagon. This is part one of a two-part interview.)

How does it feel to be part of the Expeditionary Contracting Command again?

Exciting! I'm thrilled to death to be back as part of the family. I commanded the 413th Contracting Support Brigade in Hawaii, then left for a position on the Joint Staff for two years doing very similar work as a subject matter expert on operational contract support. Although I was on the Joint Staff, I never really left this type of work. Coming back to the Army Materiel Command, the Army Contracting Command in particular, is sort of like coming home.

As a member of the Joint Staff you became heavily involved with the operational contracting support training ACC was planning. How did members on the Joint Staff react when you first brought it up to them?

Initially it was mixed. A lot of people think of OCS as officer candidate school (laughing). Operational contract support is a lot more than just contracting. When I explain it to people I say it's like the three different legs of a stool.

The first leg is defining what the requirement is and have you planned for that. For example, let's say logisticians have a requirement for 100 trucks to move from a port overseas to an inward location but they only have 50 Department of Defense-owned vehicles. Well, the requirement is to have 100 trucks to move stuff every day. They may say we'll contract for that. Well, we can do that in most cases but is that plan, that requirement, part of your operational plan for that mission? Is it actually written out? Has anyone done any market research to see if there are any trucks even available in a place like Liberia or wherever? Have people thought about the second and third order effects? Again, that first leg is defining the requirement and planning for that requirement.

The second is what the contacting and acquisition community are very familiar with and that is the physical process of turning a requirement into an actual contract and the management of the contract.

The third leg is managing the contractors supporting the mission. Part of that is called the vendor vetting process. That became a huge issue in Iraq and Afghanistan because we had to make sure we didn't have the enemy inside our fence line.

I had to explain to every staff section on the Joint Staff why the operational contract support training was important to them. The Joint Staff surgeon looked at me and said tell me why it's important to me. I explained that in late 2006, 2007 when we were trying to draw down forces in Iraq, we put on contract, privatized security to a forward operating base we were turning over to the Iraqis. The contractor hired this private security force out of Ghana. Well, it turned out that a percentage of those hired had tuberculosis. We didn't know that until they got to Iraq and a bunch of them got sick, then diagnosed with TB which, as we know, is very, very communicable. We immediately had to send that contracting workforce back to its home.

That impacted the whole medical piece of the U.S. and Iraqi forces at the FOB. All the U.S. and Iraqi forces had to be tested for TB and we didn't have a guard workforce until we were able to work out an alternative solution. So after that the surgeon understood that she had to include in her operational plan that any contractors who were going to be interacting on a regular basis with our military personnel needed to have a medical check. She realized we needed to have medical standards in the contract.

That's a great example where every staff section had to internalize their piece of it. Once the sections understood everyone owned a piece of it and that contracting was commanders' business, it became real easy for them to support the training. Later, we had the support of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of Defense and of Congress. I had to brief the House Armed Services Committee on a regular basis before and after the training.

When you're talking about the billions and billions of dollars that we spent on contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq, if we can mature that capability, we potentially save the government billions of dollars. If we don't have it, and it's just a pick-up game, then there's a potential for waste.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting testified before Congress a couple of years ago that DOD wasted between $31 - $60 billion in 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are some who will say that number is not correct but everyone agrees billions have been wasted. If we learn how to do this well, we save money for the U.S. tax payers and we have good affects for the battlefield commanders.

During the operation contract support joint exercise in January we trained more than 500 personnel, a lot of contracting and planning officers and noncommissioned officers at the geographic combatant command at U.S. Northern Command (Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado) and at U.S. Army North (Joint Base San Antonio, Texas) and at Fort Bliss, Texas. The interesting part, and my personal objective, was to train as many of our contracting and non-contracting workforce and to build shelf-ready contracting products for NORTHCOM. Now NORTHCOM has the shelf-ready contracting products it can use in the event of a natural disaster occurring in America. They can take them out, dust them off and use them. Some of the things developed were documents showing the steps to working with OSD, Congress and the senior levels of the Army on issuing things like a civil augmentation contract.

This year the Air Force is taking the lead on the operation contract support training. Why?

The Army had the lead for many years. Last year it was truly a joint exercise. Previously the Army conducted the exercise and invited other services to attend and for the most part they would come. Last year, the training was funded by the Joint Staff and by OSD and the Army. The Army is very good at running large exercises. The Joint Staff just capitalized on what they were doing. The Joint Staff had a small team of about six people that augmented the 412th CSB (Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, Texas) in planning it.

This year the Joint Staff asked the Air Force to take the lead so that there would be at least two different services that had planned, organized and executed a large OCS-related mission in recent history. The Air Force is doing a good job and the Army is providing a massive amount of support to them.

U.S. Air Force Col. Renee Richardson is in charge of the exercise and Col. Tim Strange of the 412th CSB is the Army lead, working side-by-side with her to get the mission accomplished.

(Part two will be published next week.)