Air Force Officer Helps Build Clean Drinking Water Infrastructure for Iraqis

  • Published
  • By Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • AFOSR
Lieutenant Colonel Joseph J. Fraundorfer, a senior reservist with AFRL, worked as deputy chief of the Water Sector for the Gulf Region Division in Iraq during his recent deployment. He worked alongside Air Force (AF), civilian, and Iraqi civil engineers as part of a construction crew working to reconstruct the water system in Iraq, improve water treatment processes, and otherwise make positive changes in the lives of Iraqis.

The team worked on potable water projects along with improvements to dams and irrigation capabilities in order to boost the country's agricultural output. The State Department identified and prioritized projects, which involved managing a budget of approximately $2 billion to construct 400 water projects. Lt Col Fraundorfer's group worked with Joint Contracting Command to get the jobs under contract and manage them programmatically to completion. While both Lt Col Fraundorfer's civilian experience as a program manager within a large defense and aerospace systems supplier and his AF role as a civil engineer working in foreign countries helped in completing the  tasks of balancing cost, schedule, and technical issues, he found that construction in an active combat environment is a great deal more challenging.

By the end of his deployment, Lt Fraundorfer and his team had helped bring clean running water to more than 5 million Iraqis who had previously relied on untreated or boiled water for drinking purposes. This is not the 23-year AF veteran's first challenging overseas assignment. He served with the military as a test engineer for a space shuttle group; as a civil engineer during the Bosnian War; and, in Kosovo, as an air operations and logistics officer. He also did counter-drug work in Panama; civil engineering in Aviano, Italy; and air operations and logistics (as an officer) in Stuttgart, Germany, during the war in Bosnia. In May 2006, he deployed to Iraq for a 4-month tour of duty, becoming so enthused about the mission that he subsequently volunteered for a second, 4-month tour.