As the Construction Flight Commander at arguably one of the busiest Air Bases in the entire world, Al Udeid Air Base, my flight did surprisingly little with actual runway construction or maintenance. Most of our involvement with the runway was to purchase raw materials for the Air Force Engineers to go out and repair damaged runways across the Middle East, and for the Engineers to continue construction on a runway ramp expansion to accommodate the incoming B-52 Bomber aircraft that were supposed to be coming later in my rotation.
The anticipated arrival of the massive aircraft did not proceed quite as planned. Their arrival was delayed for various reasons, and only when they finally gave us a date that the BUFFs would arrive did someone finally bother to go out and measure the width of the runway.
This late fact-finding mission indicated that the guide lights on the runway were too close together, and that even if a B-52 pilot managed to land exactly dead-center on the white line, the wheels that kept the wings from dragging on the ground would catch on the runway lights.
I can only speculate what the conversations were like among the Senior Officers when this discovery was made, so close to the anticipated arrival date. In my mind, they were panicking, barking orders into telephones and trying to figure out whose fault it was before actually settling down to figure out how to fix the problem.
It was a poorly kept secret that the B-52’s were coming, and it became an even more poorly kept secret that their arrival was being stalled by something that would have been so easy to detect and avoid ahead of time.
After maybe a week of panicking and finger pointing, the project finally worked its way down to my flight for us to find a contracted solution to Al Udeid’s runway problem. We had over a week’s worth of notice that the runway widening project was coming to us, but we could not act until it actually dropped in our lap.
When it finally came to us, we had just forty two days to finish the project, and less money than we had spent on replacement toilets to make it happen. While I would love to claim that I boldly stepped in and took the project from start to finish, landed the B-52’s on my own, and then personally bombed the daesh back into the stone-age, I ended up being merely a conduit through which the project flowed.
The bulk of responsibility for the project fell onto an excellent NCO, Staff Sergeant Stark. This allowed any potential contract reviews to be conducted within our flight, keeping the process as streamlined as possible. All of us in the flight had something to do with the runway expansion. Whether it was reviewing documents or communicating with the contractor, it was all hands on deck in order to work the project quickly. We were somewhat apprehensive about the low dollar value that was estimated for the project, but SSgt Stark pushed forward quickly.
After we started digging into the project, good news started coming quickly. The first, and most important was that the runway was technically the responsibility of the Qatar Emiri Air Force, which meant we could skip a few steps with regards to the U.S. Air Force Engineers. The second was that the contractor that maintained the runway was able to expand the lights, at least temporarily, for way less than the U.S. Air Force estimate, and in just a couple days.
SSgt Stark was given forty two days to finish the runway widening, and when all was said and done, between getting the project, negotiations, award, and completion of the project only twenty one days elapsed. The BUFFs could land as scheduled, and it was rumored that the Ambassador to Qatar was eternally grateful to the work we accomplished, as we helped her keep her word.
That praise never reached us officially, but it didn’t really matter. It was the first project I was actually proud of that we had accomplished. Up until that point, the vast majority of our workload consisted of managing previously awarded contracts, or simply providing resources for someone else to go out and accomplish a mission.
This runway widening was the first time that I actually was able to connect what I was doing as a Contracting Officer to the kinetic, bomb-dropping mission of the U.S. Air Force. Prior to that, my exposure to USAF Contracting had centered around the needs of Intelligence and Fire Fighter students at Goodfellow, an Air Force base without an active runway and where the only planes are up on display posts. Trying to correlate a bathroom renovation to killing terrorists or resupplying war fighters is not an easy task.
This was the point for me at which the switch flipped. Prior to that, I could not see myself doing contracting for any longer than the five years I owed back to the Air Force due to my Academy education. After that project, I slowly started to understand how important that Contracting Officers could be to the Air Force, and how large of an impact that I could have if I stuck with the career field.
To compare this new attitude with the flipping of a switch is not, however, entirely accurate. It was not an instantaneous paradigm shift. Rather, it was a slow build into acceptance. A build from disheartened, frustrated, and oddly salty Lieutenant, who was feeling as if he was more or less imprisoned by the U.S. Air Force’s mountainous levels of bureaucracy, to understanding, frustrated, and salty Lieutenant, and then finally to acceptance and motivation.
The Contracting Career Field still has idiosyncrasies that drive me a bit nuts. For instance the humor displayed by most dedicated Contracting Professionals is often incredibly dorky, and some seem to have a hard time seeing the bigger picture outside of their contract file. I can, however, appreciate the personnel inside the career field, and I can see large of an impact even the smallest teams of Contracting Officers can have.
That summer deployment to Al Udeid, my little team of four managed to wrangle everything from Runway Expansions, to refrigerator purchases. Our total portfolio’s value crept close to seventy million dollars by the time I boarded a plane to head back home. Even the most junior in rank among us, a Senior Airman, had a larger impact on Al Udeid than entire squadrons with her contract portfolio. In fact, a couple of her projects that she managed were responsible for fixing those squadrons’ mistakes.
I assert that anyone working as a U.S. Air Force Contracting Officer, especially in a deployed location, has the same potential to carry a massive amount of responsibility. Today’s wars are still fought with Military personnel, but the support that those War Fighters require is largely contracted out. All of those contracts require the types of Contracting Professionals that I encountered and worked with during my deployment to Al Udeid.
All of the members of my flight re-deployed before me, rotating back home to children and spouses, leaving me behind to ensure a smooth transition with their replacements. That transition phase lasted for several weeks, and that was when I realized how far I had come in the months prior. With no flight to lean on for their knowledge, I had to carry this new flight through the transition on my own. Catching them all up on the projects was exhausting, except in the case of the new Senior Airman, whose knowledge and motivation made him exhausting to keep up with. I managed to keep the new crew on track before turning over the flight to my own replacement in mid-August.
When I finally got back to Goodfellow, I sat down with my commander and discuss how the deployment went. Major T had been supportive but a little nervous about sending me out to the Deid in the first place, largely because there had been very little to test me prior to my departure.
“Ell-Tee!” Major T greeted me as I entered is office for a post-deployment de-briefing, “How’d it go? Anything exciting happen out there?”
“Well, sir,” I responded, shaking his hand before sitting down, “we had this really cool runway project we worked on.”