The Columbus area is poised to gain hundreds of civilian defense jobs from a $458 million contract that has been awarded to a pool of companies eager to do business at the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning.
But the military and the contracting firms find themselves waiting and watching as the federal budget drama unfolds in Washington. A so-called congressional “super committee” is looking for ways to slash $1.2 trillion in spending, an effort likely to cause considerable financial pain for the Department of Defense.
“The super committee, I understand they have free rein. They can cut whatever they want to cut,” said Mike Burns, business developer and program manager for the Northrop Grumman Technical Services office in Columbus. “I think we’ll be safe because this isn’t for fluff. This is basic needs to train soldiers. So I think we’ll be good.”
Northrup Grumman is one of 14 defense firms who are now approved to bid for portions of the $458 million contract that will fund training and doctrine services at Fort Benning. Those 14 were chosen from an original group of 34 companies that submitted their qualifications and bids to the military’s Mission Contracting Office at Fort Bragg, N.C.
No business is guaranteed for those surviving the cuts, but they each will be able to bid on “task orders,” or mini-contracts, as the military needs civilian staffers to help run the U.S. Army’s Infantry and Armor schools over the next five years.
Burns, a retired Army colonel, said there could be dozens of the smaller contracts, with each employing between five and 15 people. That easily could add up to several hundred jobs, although the number is not yet clear because the military issues the orders throughout the main contract period, which lasts up to five years.
“Winning the IDIQ kind of gives you a license to fish, and those other companies that didn’t win, they can’t fish,” said Burns, referring to the initial contract process known as “Indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity.”
IDIQ is the military’s contracting system that allows it to hire a set number of workers -- through the defense firms -- for specific needs. There’s typically a base year with options up to five years. Unless it were to be changed, the $458 million in funding would likely continue through September 2016.
But no one truly knows how the budget-cutting process will play out. The stakes are extremely high, with the workers who would be hired by the defense contractors earning annual salaries of $50,000 or more and spending that money throughout the Columbus-Phenix City area.
There’s also the $72 million Benning Technology Park near the intersection of Interstate 185 and U.S. Highway 27, and just outside Fort Benning’s main gate. Although portions of the 173-acre property have been graded and prepared for construction, the project has been slowed amid the budget negotiations.
“We have spoken with everyone we can in the defense contracting industry. What we hear is that nothing is certain at this time with regard to the cuts that are being proposed,” said Jake Flournoy, vice president with Columbus-based Flournoy Development Co., which is working on the park along with Columbus State University’s Foundation Properties. CSU owns the land.
Projections for Benning Technology Park, when plans were unveiled in mid-2010, were for it to have 1.4 million square feet of office space, including a 100,000-square-foot structure to be completed by this fall. Employment estimates pegged more than 1,000 jobs to the site within five years.
Though not entirely backing off those projections, Flournoy acknowledged the current budget climate, as the United States scales down from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has injected uncertainty into the situation. Some changes are anticipated, he said.
“There’s just no question that whatever the federal government elects to do with defense spending, as it relates to Fort Benning contracts, will have a direct impact on the timeline for the rollout of this project,” he said.
But the park remains a sound and viable idea, he said, with plenty of interest from defense contractors -- as many as 40 firms in all -- and the potential to change south Columbus dramatically for the better.
The revised timeline for having office buildings in Benning Technology Park, Flournoy said, now stands at late 2012 or early 2013. The hope is to have as much of the office space preleased as possible before construction.
“We feel as though Fort Benning’s future is extremely bright, even if for the next three to five years we suffer some reduction in this bid process,” he said. “This business park has the potential to be a very longterm, very vital job generator for south Columbus … We’re patient and we’re going to be diligent and that’s pretty much our attitude.”
The prospect of a more austere budget environment has pushed much of the military into a contingency-planning mode. The Department of Defense originally was mandated to find $350 billion in savings over 10 years. Then that amount was increased to more than $450 billion.
If the super committee -- officially known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction and made up of six Democrats and six Republicans -- can’t hammer out an agreement before the end of this year, the Defense Department will face an additional $600 billion in cuts. That will bring the total to more than $1 trillion over a decade and severely harm the military’s long-term readiness, critics have said.
“Right now people are going through and doing an analysis and contingency operations,” said Gary Jones, executive vice president of economic development and military affairs at the Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce. “I think there’s a lot of people waiting right now to see what falls out of the budget, then they’re going to be able to give a better prediction” of how many defense contractor jobs will materialize locally.
Jones estimates there are about 3,000 contractors overall working at Fort Benning. That includes ongoing work related to the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure process that brought the Armor School to the post from Fort Knox, Ky. There also are contract civilians handling various chores on the installation, from maintaining housing and cutting grass to cooking meals at dining facilities and providing support services for soldiers and their families.
The $3.5 billion earmarked for Fort Benning because of the expansion related to BRAC will continue through fiscal year 2016, Jones noted, including more construction not linked to the Armor School.
As for staffing cuts on the post, Jeff Arneson, a strategic planner with the Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate, said there has been a slight reduction in civilian contractor positions in his area over the last three or four years.
About 170 of his office’s 343 personnel are contractors, with the directorate’s mission including writing doctrine, researching soldiers’ future needs for equipment, and coming up with strategies for improving military unit and operational readiness at Fort Benning.
Arneson doesn’t necessarily think the “fairly small” cut in staffing he has seen so far is tied to the current budget crunch.
“Sometimes a function or a mission just goes away; you no longer have a need to perform a certain function,” Arneson said. “So the (program manager) will pull the funding for that. It’s not necessarily because they don’t have the money.”
For defense contractors such as Burns at Northrop Grumman, it’s really not about cringing and bracing for gloom and doom. His office off Macon Road now has 12 employees working full time and there’s hope that the staffing will multiply once the budget crisis eases and the military starts seeking bids for task orders, or mini-contracts, for services. He thinks that could start in the first three months of next year.
“Fort Benning might say they need doctrine writers, and they give you a scope of work and then you bid on it against other companies,” Burns said of the process of selecting a firm for the job. “We’ll say: This is how we would accomplish that mission and how much it will cost. Then the government decides the best value and makes the selection.”
Northrop Grumman is among the seven companies in the large-business category vying for the future contracts, while Newcastle, Okla.-based Anautics Inc. is one of seven firms eligible on the small-business side.
“Over five years, I can’t predict how much we’ll grow. But I think there’s going to be enough work for all of (the companies) to grow right along with us,” said Sandy Johnson, chief executive officer of Anautics. She runs the rather fledgling 11-year-old firm with her son, Michael Johnson, who has a computer programming background.
She said Anautics already has its foot in the door, employing six people at Fort Benning. They handle planning and scheduling duties for soldiers’ training, groups visiting the post, and troops deploying and returning from missions.
Like the other defense firms, Johnson is keeping a cautious eye on the federal budget process and hoping there won’t be a major delay in the Fort Benning contract. She is eager to begin hiring and plans to focus on veterans living in the local community.
Northrop Grumman’s jobs will be listed on the Internet, Burns said, and while they will be open to anybody in the world, he thinks a large percentage of them will come from this area. And they more than likely will be former military personnel.
“If a guy’s already living here and he’s trained in the skill sets that we need, he’s a little more attractive than somebody who lives in Washington state and has to move here. That could take months,” he said.
