Preparing the USAF Contracting Career Field for the next Humanitarian Assistance Disaster Response within the Continental United States

Abstract

This project’s focus is on the alignment of a U.S. Air Force (USAF) exercise design process with FEMA's challenges regarding humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR) events. The authors applied Joint Publication 4-10 and Yoder’s Three Tier Model approach to inform a disaster model that delineates roles and responsibilities for stakeholders. The authors also reviewed 104 after-action reports to identify trends within FEMA’s 15 emergency support functions and added three more categories to capture trends: finance, manpower, and training. This research resulted in five recommendations to the USAF contracting exercise designers: 1) ensure that exercise frameworks are aligned to the lead agency; 2) consolidate the many advance contracts throughout the federal agencies into one location such as Acquisition Gateway or GSA Advantage, or on a SharePoint site; 3) continue adopting category management practices within the disaster environment in order to effectively implement advance contracts; 4) further refine the career field education training plan with tiered development under a synthesized HADR framework; 5) consolidate the federal external stakeholders into a simplified location to improve the ability to research trends within the USAF contracting career field; and 6) ask other federal agencies for their approaches while de-conflicting procurement strategies.