Federal officials told lawmakers Thursday they are applying in Afghanistan lessons learned from contracting mistakes made in Iraq.

The State Department is shifting away from large U.S.-based reconstruction contracts with tiers upon tiers of contractors, as seen in Iraq, to more smaller, flexible contracts that have fewer contractors. That will create flexibility to respond to Afghanistan's "dynamic conflict environment," said Daniel Feldman, the State Department's deputy special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, at a Dec. 17 hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on contracting oversight.

The smaller contracts, unlike the large contracts used in Iraq, are managed by U.S. officials in the country where they are executed, enabling better oversight and management, Feldman said. State is choosing contractors that employ Afghans, which should make it less likely they will join an insurgency, he said.

The Army, which manages the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) that supplies troops with food, laundry, maintenance and other support services, is transitioning to the fourth iteration of the contract. Unlike LOGCAP III, which had a sole contractor, LOGCAP IV has multiple vendors — KBR, Fluor and DynCorp — allowing for price competition and flexibility to support a surge, said Jeffrey Parsons, executive director of the Army Contracting Command.

In Afghanistan, which will rely entirely on LOGCAP IV next year, the work was awarded to two of the three contractors to avoid the "single point of failure" problem experienced under the previous LOGCAP III contract in Iraq, he said.

Under LOGCAP III, KBR was the sole contractor and "if KBR decided not to perform we didn't have a back up," Parsons said.

Further, the program office decided to split the awards in Afghanistan regionally, with Fluor handling work in northern Afghanistan and DynCorp operating in the south, "to maintain capability so if we need to increase requirements we would be able to," Parsons said.

The Congressional Research Service estimates that the 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan will spark a corresponding surge of 26,000 to 56,000 contactors.

Also, the Defense Contract Auditing Agency is auditing prices contractors are charging the government in search of anomalies and accounting problems, Parsons said. The agency has already found problems with accounting systems at Flour and is withholding $14 million in payments until they are fixed, Parsons said.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has trained and deployed more contracting officers technical representatives to oversee reconstruction projects, said Charles North, senior deputy director of AID's Afghanistan-Pakistan Task Force. In addition, the agency has asked its inspector general to conduct more performance audits on its Afghanistan projects, he said.

One senator — Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. — appears unswayed that mistakes made in Iraq won't be repeated in Afghanistan.

"In Iraq, we saw how poor contract management — including contractors overseeing contractors; poor coordination of interagency efforts; continual personnel turnover; and the challenges of contracting in a war zone — resulted in projects the Iraqis didn't want or couldn't use, shoddy construction, and billions upon billions of dollars in waste" McCaskill said at the hearing. "Unfortunately, it looks like we may not be applying these lessons learned in Afghanistan."

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