Flagellation Flak jackets in war zones

Harris seller Brook Reinhold courtesy Brook Reinhold

By Brendan McGarry and roxana Tiron

Brook Reinhold reed in an armoured truck last July with soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when the vehicle shooter was to look out the turret. As he moved into position, the shooter accidentally stepped on an aerial cable, shorting out the vehicle radio. The soldiers were steamed. Reinhold was not. He did what he always does in these situations. He snapped a few pictures on his BlackBerry and provide them with the electronic mail sent to a team of engineers in Rochester, NY he asked them to come up with a metal shield to cover the wires — a little handiwork he hoped would impress the Pentagon.

Reinhold is not a soldier. He is a seller, one of about 40 employees with Harris, who months in addition to troops looking for small product opportunities leading to big profits for the defense contractor lead can have spent. His observation in the truck led the company's Falcon III AN/PRC-117 G radio system improve. Another return to Ft Bragg in North Carolina, he heard a soldier who complain that the buttons on the radio turned too easy if they got bumped. He called in to fix that, too.

The company's willingness to change of its product on the fly has helped win the commanders in the field to sell more than 10,000 of the radios to the army for $ 30,000 apiece. "You are not going to know what the customer wants unless you are there with them at the moment they aggravated about something," says Reinhold.

Radio buttons and metal bits are not likely to be the first things that spring to mind when you think "defense contract." But these unglamorous side of the business is where much of the money is made, and where it is often easiest for contractors to penetrate — or even circumvent — the Pentagon bureaucracy. In the past decade, U.S. defense contractors such as Harris and truck makers Oshkosh and Navistar International sent engineers and sales personnel, often ex-military, Iraq and Afghanistan to maintain equipment and their gear directly to u.s. troops. Company reps to send to, the field is "a lot more than you think," says Jay Kimmitt, Executive Vice President for government operations and industry relations at Oshkosh, the militaire's largest supplier of blast-resistant trucks. "There are a lot of people both in Iraq and Afghanistan, lobbying forward" — as in lobbying for business in a "forward" area, or war zone.

Jack Kem experienced when he started his job two years ago as the senior civilian representative to the NATO training mission in Afghanistan. He describes fending off contractors try to an inside track on the sale of their services and equipment. Kem, who oversees a $ 12.8 billion Afghan security Fund, says that he did not allow contractors to see him or his boss, Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV, in order to avoid a display of ethics taint. "I want to totally clean," he says.

A frequent way-urgent requests that commanders send the Pentagon to fill gaps in equipment and rush gear to war zones. If a seller a commander to put in a request for his company can convince product, it can be a fast contract without the usual bureaucracy. It can also lead to redundant equipment, if company reps work from different parts of the country push competing products. Colonel Jim Carpenter, who served in Afghanistan last year, recalls that the army a long time multiple versions of the same kind of radio was buying. "When I left Afghanistan last summer," Carpenter says, "I would have come to see me, vendors trying to sell me other products that do that same thing."