Steve Peacock's U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor

U.S. Prepares for Casualties in Africa

The extrication of U.S. Special Forces injured in African military ventures soon will provide contractors with an additional revenue stream, now that the Obama administration plans to keep such vendors on stand-by, 24/7, for cross-continent airborne mobilization.

While the Pentagon’s reliance on private vendors to support international military operations is nothing new, plans to station such providers specific to such a large swath of Africa does deviate from prior procurement actions.

The Trans-Sahara Short Take-Off and Landing Airlift Support initiative will rely on outside assistance in the event that soldiers of U.S. Special Operations Command-Africa sustain traumatic medical emergencies, thereby requiring urgent transportation out of hostile zones.

Indeed, SOCOM-Africa places such urgency on its anticipated use of such Casualty Evacuation, or CASEVAC, services that, at a minimum, contractors must be capable of launching an airborne response with only a three hour notice.

The selected vendor likewise must possess the ability to be placed on heightened response and “be airborne within one hour of notification,” according a revised Performance Work Statement released April 16 that U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor located via routine database research.

Despite this urgency, the vendor securing that contract largely will engage in cargo- and personnel airlift activities, plus a limited number of air-drop missions.

The “most likely” locations for such operations are Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia, according to the U.S. Transportation Command solicitation.

Kenya, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, and Uganda also fall within the Primary Operating Area, or POA, of this endeavor, the USTRANSCOM document says.

SOCOM-Africa will enable this expedited response-capability by stationing the contractor in Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African nation, it says.

A search of prior Tactical Combat Casualty Care and CASEVAC solicitations available via the FedBizOpps system shows that USSOCOM and other Department of Defense units typically and primarily seek only training and equipment.

Rather than soliciting continent-wide provision of emergency medical and flight assistance, those contracting actions generally have sought assistance to enable combatant commands to provide themselves with such medical assistance.

One USSOCOM contracting action representative of the government’s acquisition of CASEVAC “kits” and trauma-management training, for example, described a critical need for Special Operations combat forces to obtain new techniques and technology in support of “ongoing operations worldwide.”

Another Special Ops solicitation from late last year revealed a $40 million, two-year contract extension awarded to Tribalco, LLC, a Bethesda, Maryland-based maker of CASEVAC and other “soldier-survival” equipment.

USTRANSCOM did not disclose an estimated cost of the Africa-centric CASEVAC procurement.

In other U.S. military procurement actions specific to Africa:

• The Defense Logistics Agency on April 12 issued a request for bids to provide the U.S. Air Force with 547,500 gallons of No. 2 diesel fuel “for ongoing deliveries to Niamey Airport, Niger, (Africa).”
• The U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command, or NAVFAC, announced it intends to spend up to $25 million for power plant upgrades at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti (CLDJ), Africa; however, despite acknowledging in an earlier document the estimated cost of the Caterpillar generators, a partly redacted no-bid Justification & Approval document blacked out the final award amount. It offered no explanation for the redaction .
• NAVFAC additionally began soliciting bids to build a cold-storage food warehouse and a separate galley to store P-218 anti-malarial drug reserves, representing another potential $25 million contracting endeavor at CLDJ.
• NAVFAC on April 12 revealed that it awarded a $33 million contract to Kellogg, Brown and Root to “perform base operating services at CLDJ and occasionally other locations within Africa.” Despite announcing the KBR contract this month, the Navy unit actually awarded it in December, the document shows.

This article originally appeared via WND April 28. Under prior agreement, rights have reverted back to the author, Steve Peacock.

WND: U.S. Prepares for Casualties in Africa

My latest from WND:

The extrication of U.S. Special Forces injured in African military ventures soon will provide contractors with an additional revenue stream, now that the Obama administration plans to keep such vendors on stand-by, 24/7, for cross-continent airborne mobilization.

While the Pentagon’s reliance on private vendors to support international military operations is nothing new, plans to station such providers specific to such a large swath of Africa does deviate from prior procurement actions.

The Trans-Sahara Short Take-Off and Landing Airlift Support initiative will rely on outside assistance in the event that soldiers of U.S. Special Operations Command-Africa sustain traumatic medical emergencies, thereby requiring urgent transportation out of hostile zones.

Read more at WND.com...

U.S. Aiding Tunisia in Reforming Labor Laws, Institutions

The Millennium Challenge Corporation is assisting the nation of Tunisia in achieving greater economic growth by getting it to improve its government and private-sector institutions, which MCC says suffer from a bloated workforce and strict labor laws that keep that unwieldy labor market intact.

Tunisia, a North African nation tucked between Libya and Algeria, has agreed to pursue their reforms as a step toward signing a formal compact with MCC. First it must undergo scrutiny via MCC’s Threshold Program, which:

assists countries in implementing policy changes in order to improve prospects for MCC Compact eligibility.  MCC has signed 23 threshold program agreements with 21 countries totaling nearly $500 million to date. Of the 21 countries, eight countries have been selected as Compact eligible; seven have signed Compacts; and one is in Compact development.   

MCC, a U.S. government-funded corporation, in this latest instance is following up on what is known as a market “constraints analysis,” or CA, that the government of Tunisia, the African Development Bank, and the Obama Administration jointly conducted last year. 

The CA reached the conclusion that one of the biggest constraints to economic growth in Tunisia is the absence of institutions capable of ensuring “public sector accountability, the rule of law, and checks and balances on power.”

Another conclusion is that Tunisia spends too much on social security and has regulations making it too difficult for even the private sector to fire employees. As a result of this “high fiscal and regulatory cost of employing workers,” Tunisian companies face one of the “highest payroll tax burdens in the world.”

As Tunisia has some of the most stringent worker-dismissal laws around the globe, it discourages investment and reduces demand for workers of all skill levels, MCC says. Consequently, Tunisia negatively affects its ability to compete internationally, according to MCC.

MCC seeks to correct this situation by hiring independent contractors to assist Tunisia in carrying out relevant reforms.

The organization is seeking, in separate solicitations, contractors capable of assisting the Tunisian government is achieving reforms via contract vehicles known as Design of Tunisia Threshold Program Labor Markets (Solicitation #MCC-13-RFQ-0024) and Design of Tunisia Threshold Program Public Sector Accountability (Solicitation #MCC-13-RFQ-0029).

The Obama Administration claims it is helping Tunisia in its transition to a more a democratic society, following what have been hailed as "free and fair multiparty elections for a Constituent Assembly," which was then tasked with drafting a new constitution.