Military Officer - May 2006 - (Page 50)

on, want the peace, want the prosperity that we Americans enjoy.” Changing U.S. strategy McCoy’s Baghdad staff is organized by specialty: electrical, oil, water, sewage, transportation, and communications. He meets regularly with Iraqi ministers with like responsibilities, including the ministers of electricity and water resources. The meetings can be loud “because they want things done faster or they want things done better.” The original U.S. strategy on reconstruction was to bring in large, design-build companies with the experience and capacity to do large-scale construction. These ﬁrms captured 60 percent of USACE’s initial 2,500 projects. “His estimate was 30 percent lower than our U.S. estimate. We allowed him to award the contracts. We provided the money,” McCoy says. Army Maj. Daniel Coffey, 39, an engineering ofﬁcer at Camp Victory, a large U.S. complex near Baghdad International Airport, oversees projects across an area 40 to 50 miles wide. He is the ofﬁcer in charge of USACE’s resident ofﬁces for the 1st Brigade Combat Team on Iraqi quality assurance engineers to track progress on site, supplemented by photographs. McMillan recently was shown a photograph of a new youth center built nearby that was “packed full of kids,” he says. Worker safety USACE ofﬁcers will visit a few job sites each week. But in Iraq, it’s better if locals associate the project with Iraqis. Iraqi contractors who aren’t local probably face the greatest risks, McMillan says. They can be perceived as taking jobs away from locals. “If we go to the council and hire their nephews to do the job, they’re pretty safe. If we bring in a major third-country contractor to do the job, they’re fairly safe. But if it’s anybody else from Iraq, there is probably going to be some sort of expectation of threats,” says McMillan. One contractor hired to install a new generator to pump water from the Tigris for irrigation reported 10 workers had disappeared. At Taji, two U.S. helicopters have been shot down and about a half dozen soldiers killed. Early last fall, Coffey’s convoy was leaving a project following a spot inspection when an improvised explosive device detonated between his Humvee and the one ahead of him. Insurgents engaged them with small arms before running away. No one was injured. Iraqis are starting to step up to the opportunity the United States and its coalition partners have provided, McCoy says. Security forces are getting stronger and infrastructure is improving, though not as fast as most would like. “All we needed to do was provide them with a kind of irreversible momentum,” McCoy says. “I think the resources that the govPHOTO: COURTESY U.S. ARMY Rebuilding Iraq means the Army Corps of Engineers must work closely with the Iraqi government. Iraqis are starting to step up to the opportunity the United States and its coalition partners have provided. The other 40 percent went to Iraqi ﬁrms, but the overall dollar value of those awards was signiﬁcantly below a 40-percent share. For the 1,100 projects remaining, the strategy changed. USACE and its partners now set out to direct business to Iraqi ﬁrms. McCoy says he recently gave the ministry for construction and housing responsibility for eight road and bridge projects. The initiative was successful. 50 MILITARY OFFICER M AY 2 0 0 6 (BCT), 10th Mountain Division and the 2nd BCT, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). In February his eight-person staff was overseeing about 70 projects with a combined value of $160 million. Coffey and McMillan and their staffs monitor construction projects largely through surrogates. That’s because visits to project sites can endanger workers and undermine local authority. Most resident ofﬁces rely

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Military Officer - May 2006 Contents From the Editor President's Page Your Views MOAA Directory Rapid Fire Washington Scene Financial Forum Ask the Doctor Chapter Activities Raising Iraq Dogfight Fun Caring For Our Own Pages of History Information Exchange MOAA Scholarship Donors Member Books Advertising Index MOAA Calendar Sounding Taps Encore

Military Officer - May 2006

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