The Evolving Contingency Contracting Market PKSOI Papers | Page 8

The Evolving Contingency Contracting Market:
Private Sector Self-Regulation and
United States Government
Monitoring of Procurement of Stability
Operations Services
Whitney Grespin
Introduction
Although there is a dearth of reliable statistics
representing the size of the international contingency
contracting industry, there can be little argument that
the scope of the private industry’s services in support of western interventions has paralleled the waxing and waning of western interventions in complex
environments. At a recent industry conference that
brought together an impressive array of contingency
contracting and stability operations service providers,
a high ranking U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) official presupposed that in future complex operations,
“Fifty percent of the U.S. force structure in a deployed
environment are expected to be contracted support
and not military personnel.”3 While somewhat alarming, this estimate is an educated opinion given that as
of late 2015 the U.S. claimed to officially have 9,800
military personnel augmented by just over 30,000 contractors in Afghanistan. Even as U.S. engagement in
Afghanistan is expected to draw down, the DoD official assessed that the U.S. will probably see a 2:1 contractor to military personnel ratio in stability support
missions, since these types of missions will continue
into the foreseeable future.4
Considering recent sociopolitical events and the
posturing of international actors, many of whom are

1