(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 two of a two-part interview.)

In the time you've been here at the headquarters, what is your impression of the command?

It's just phenomenal. I've always been impressed by organizations of what I call the total force -- Soldiers and civilian service professionals -- working side by side. This is a great example of that. In contracting, the majority of the workforce is civil service professionals with some Soldiers intermixed. This staff here, the ACC and ECC combined staff, mirrors most of our contracting organizations. We have some military who bring in their perspective and we have civil service professionals who bring in longevity and a lot of knowledge. Both organizations are made more effective by the combination of experiences and that makes for a great place to work.

What are the organization's strengths?

I think probably the diversity of the workforce is a big piece of it. I think another strength is most of the folks in ECC know that we are the first responders. When there is a problem and the U.S. decides it's going to support it, some of the first people out the door are the ECC personnel. For example, a few weeks ago the U.S. decided we would do everything we could to support, specifically, Senegal and Liberia (in the fight against Ebola). When the joint task force commander was named (U.S. Africa Commanding General Maj. Gen. Daryl Williams) I met with him on a Sunday before he flew to Liberia on a Monday. When he left, a very small group of people flew on his plane and that included a contracting officer from ECC. So again, wherever our nation needs to put DOD personnel, ECC goes along. We have two contracting teams in Liberia and Senegal and a battalion deployed with the 101st Airborne Division deployed to West Africa.

Could you see that happening 10 years ago?

I'll go back 20 years ago to when I got a phone call asking if I'd like to do this acquisition contracting job. My first job in acquisition was as a contingency contracting officer at Fort Lewis, Washington. At the time, there were only had about 100 of us. I was deploying all over the Pacific in support of Special Forces groups. Back then, contracting didn't have the focus like it does now. I think the big shift occurred around 2006 when the Army determined there were some problems in contracting. That's when the secretary of the Army and the chief of staff of the Army called up Jacques Gansler and asked him to do a study and find out what are the challenges with Army contracting, specifically supporting the warfighter.

That became known as the Gansler Report and highlighted that the Army didn't have the workforce, the numbers or training it needed to execute contracting effectively in a war-time environment. Because of the report (the Army) created for the first time, general officer positions that were focused primarily on contracting. Then Brig. Gen. Camille Nichols (former ECC and ACC commanding general) was the first one. Twenty years ago, I knew if you stayed in contracting you could make it to lieutenant colonel then either get out or do something different. Fast forward from there to eight or nine years ago, when I was a lieutenant colonel, then to September and I just pinned on a star. Ten years ago this would not have been possible.

DOD as a whole is looking at contracting as a very powerful enabler and it has to be. A month ago we had 61,000 contractors supporting the mission in Afghanistan and we had 39,000 U.S. and NATO soldiers. Someone has to write and manage those contracts.

The other thing is you have to look at the economic power we bring to the table. I was heavily involved in Operation Tomodachi in Japan. A giant tsunami hit Japan and its nuclear reactors were out of control. The U.S. said we're going to dedicate $24 million to this effort and then it was raised to $80 million by the time it was over. With a little bit of money we helped Japan avoid a potential international crisis if those nuclear reactors melted down. Using money during a phase zero operation -- government to government -- like we did is sometimes a lot cheaper than having armed conflict where there is money, materiel and blood at stake.

What challenges do you think will need to addressed?

One of the biggest challenges is always training. I am big believer is training, then training some more and then going out to train even more. We have an older, primarily civil service workforce that is incredibly skilled. We went through a number of years where we didn't really hire a lot of people and so in the last five-to-six years, we've been hiring a lot more trying to get to the right level of contracting support. So what we have is one group of folks with five or less years of experience and another group that has 25-30 years of experience, which is great, but we have this gap. So we need to capitalize on the skills of the mature workforce to groom and train the younger employees. That's a good news story because if you had asked me that five years ago, I would have said we have people with 20 years of experience and we have people with one year experience. So we've come a long ways in the last five years.

Have ECC Soldiers integrating into stateside units helped the Soldiers?

I don't know if it's any really big change. Twenty years ago I was imbedded in the Fort Lewis contracting shop, so we've been doing this type of thing for a long time and it's something we have to do. If you tell someone they are a contracting officer and they don't work in an actual contracting office in their day-to-day mission, then they are not going to know what they are doing when it's time for them to deploy.

One of the things Maj. Gen. (Ted) Harrison (ACC commanding general), Brig. Gen. (Jeffrey) Gabbert (Mission and Installation Contracting Command commanding general) and I have been heavily emphasizing with the subordinate units, especially the military, is that the military contracting officers have to be embedded in post, camp and station contracting shops or at the contracting centers like Rock Island or Redstone. There, they can learn and mature their skills in contracting so that when called upon to go forward, they are ready to go. You can't just have them off by themselves and think that when an emergency hits, they are ready to deploy.

And the other thing is those contracting offices will serve as reach back capability because many times deployed contracting officers will not have things like policy support with them or that mature civil service employee with 30 years experience to question.

As a young contracting officer I used to call back to my mentors while I was in Cambodia and ask about things like how to do a contract with the United Nations and what kind of legal problems could I run into. They'd walk me through the process. So not only is it important for people to be embedded for training, that same mature civil servant is the contracting officer's reach back capability.

With possible force structure reductions, how will ECC still be able to grow and sustain its forces as planned?

I don't know if ECC will be able to grow. I think that if we are able to sustain that will be a good thing. There are significant challenges with drawing down the contracting force in general. As the Army and as DOD draws down, missions aren't going away. The JTF and geographic combatant commanders are mitigating the cuts are by hiring contractors to do a lot of the work. So if you draw down the contracting capability at the same rate or even more than you are drawing down the actual force, then you are hurting yourself twice. You're drawing the military capability to do it themselves and you're also drawing down the capability to contract that out. So I would argue that if you are going to draw down the force, you need to, at minimum, maintain your contracting capability so that you can mitigate that drawdown.

Twenty years ago we had a lot of truck companies so that when the Army went to war or responded to a natural disaster, we had a lot of logistical units we could deploy. We have a lot fewer logistical units and truck companies than we did 20 years ago. How the Army has mitigated it is with the use of contracting for the capabilities. So if you get rid of your contracting officers and you get rid of your force structure, then who is going to do it? Then we run into the same problems we had in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq where you had me and seven other people managing 44,000 contractors across the country. I would argue we didn't do it very effectively but that's all we had. When the Gansler report hit in 2007, we started to increase the workforce and now we have a more robust capability than we did ten years ago.

How important is it for ECC to be embedded in the ongoing contingency operations?

The importance of contracting embedded in operations is critical because we don't have all of those truck companies in the force structure. In many cases it's better and cheaper to use a contract to do a short mission versus having it in the infrastructure. The Army has very few construction units. Do we want an Army construction unit within the infrastructure or do we just hire a construction company to build an Ebola treatment center in Liberia? In some ways it's better to hire what you need when you need it than it is to have the capability within the force structure. So it doesn't have to be an ECC unit, but I believe that contracting capability is going to be needed wherever we go.

There was Congressional testimony a year ago that showed we spent $45 billion on the logistics civil augmentation program, LOGCAP, in Iraq over an eight-year period. If you were to replace that with force structure, it would have been more than $70 billion. Now $45 billion is a huge number but $70 billion is an even larger number. So in some ways, it's more effective, cheaper, to use contracting on some of these missions.

Another thing is sometimes because of political considerations there's a limitation to boots you can place on the ground. Some countries don't want the 82nd Airborne to run around their streets, but are ok with contractors wearing jeans running around the streets. So contracting gives the task force commander a different tool in the tool box.

ECC is getting ready to transition the lead role of contracting from a joint organization currently being run by the Air Force in Afghanistan to an Army-lead mission, referred to as lead services for contracting. We're deploying a brigade to take that mission.

What are your thoughts on Contracting Officers focusing on being good stewards of the American taxpayer?

It's part of every contracting officers' and specialists', military and civilian, warrant as well as their duty description. Every single contract they sign, they have to put a statement in the contract saying 'I have determined this is fair and reasonable to the U.S. government' based on their knowledge and skills. It's important to define what fair and reasonable means. Many times the U.S. government could really drive the cost of something to where the company would almost go bankrupt because, in some cases, we're the only show in town. Fair and reasonable means it's fair to both parties. If you are going to build me this Ebola treatment facility in Liberia, then you should be giving us a great product at a fair price. That includes paying your employees a fair salary and making a fair and reasonable profit.

What do you like to do with any spare time?

My wife Debby and I like to build houses. We're woodworkers but I can do electrical, plumbing and all that stuff, you name it. Debby and I also have worked with Habitat for Humanity and it has truly been a great way for us to give back to the community. We've built and renovated a number of houses. We just recently purchased a laser engraver. When it comes to going-away gifts for Soldiers and civil servant professionals, I typically build them myself.

When I was commanding out in the Pacific, part of the organization's logo was a Hawaiian short spear with shark's teeth on it. I purchased a couple as going-away gifts and they were a little expensive, between $125 and $200 apiece. I said, "Heck I know how to turn wood, I can use a lathe." Then my wife saw what I was doing and she got excited about it. We ended up making more than 100 of these shark-tooth spears and my wife and I presented them to every military and civilian servant in the command before we left.

My plan is to make my own coins out of wood and personalize them. So if you want a coin or if you're deserving of a coin I'll personalize it with your name and my name on it.

Anything else?

I'm just happy and excited to have been given this opportunity to be here. Being that I've done contracting, mostly expeditionary contracting, for years, this is the best job in the Army. I'm just thrilled to be here.