The Contract Field Teams program (also called Contractor Field Teams and commonly abbreviated CFT) is a program of the United States Air Force designed to provide temporary and long-term labor support for a variety of technical service needs; maintenance and repair, depot services, inspections, modernization for contingency support for aircraft, vehicles, weapon systems and other equipment. The CFT program is currently administered by the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center at Tinker Air Force Base, and has been in place since 1951.
The official USAF definition of CFT is: "A group of skilled contractor maintenance personnel who are provided with government furnished special tools, equipment, and supplies to accomplish maintenance on site at operational bases. The contractor provides supervision, people and hand tools."
Under the CFT program, a series of contracts is awarded to various contractors, from which separate task orders will later be issued. To win a CFT task order the contractor must be able to demonstrate that it can assemble the necessary personnel and deploy them to the directed site within a short time frame (generally 30 days from notification). The task orders may involve recurring effort (such as augmenting a depot workforce with certain skill positions for a specified period of time, usually an entire calendar year) or nonrecurring effort (such as installation of field kits on selected systems at a military installation). Usually all the contractors are eligible to bid on any task order; however, the USAF reserves the right to award a task order to a contractor without competition.
Although the program is administered by the USAF, all branches of the military are eligible to use the CFT program for their needs, as well as some civilian agencies.