Contractors
Peters seems a bit too high on his high horse here.
It’s fundamentally wrong to let contractors go head-hunting among our troops in wartime. Those in government who’ve elevated outsourcing to a state religion pretend it helps our war effort – with the whopper that outsourcing military functions saves taxpayer dollars.
Exactly how does that one work? You get stuck with the training and security-clearance costs; the soldier lured to the private sector gets his salary doubled or tripled – then the contractor adds in a markup for his multiple layers of overhead costs and a generous profit margin, and bills the taxpayers. How is that cheaper than having soldiers do the job?
The scam-artists tell us that using contractors saves money in the long run, since their employees don’t get military health care and retirement benefits. But the numbers just don’t add up.
Contractors are looting our military – while wrapping themselves in the flag.
I understand some of Peters’s frustration, but he doesn’t figure in the following mitigating factors:
- DOPMA, the federal regulation that fires you without retirement if you fail to select for LCDR in time and sends you home after a certain period of time (20 years for LCDR, etc).
- The insanely low retention rates for special operators, and the sure knowledge given by the submariners’ nuke bonus that people are influenced by gobs of cash, particularly when there are relaxations on General Order One when doing it and the chance to pull chocks and do one last thing before you go to work for Wal-Mart or whatever
- The inability to reenter service when you leave
- The interagency distaste for DoD protection, which is driving most of the personal security detailing in Baghdad and for which Blackwater is in the press this week (because it’s an effective way of keeping those other agencies from going out and about).
- Unlike garrison forces, expeditionary forces are not far from their wartime posture all the time. The Navy isn’t much different from what it was in 2000, and the stresses are slightly different but not by that much. Contractor force levels are determined more by who’s downsizing in OPNAV by 10% that year (and also by the sordid little fact that nobody can count how many contractors the Navy has!).
I understand Peters’ issue. It’s equally there, however, at all sorts of contractors. Who is on Northrop-Grumman’s board? Who gets hired at (list large number of companies with DoD contracts) partially based on the strength of their rolodex? Who gets a contracting job because nobody else in the world has been working issue x for twenty years and a government position isn’t feasible for bureaucratic reasons, forcing middle management to hire the retiring guy as a contractor to do the same job with a tie on and a bigger salary at higher government cost? So while I would agree that good reform of the revolving door practice for contracting needs to be done, I’d also be careful of that baby versus bathwater thing. Take the emotion out of it and look at national interest.
6 Responses to “Contractors”
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October 6th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Markets, old man. Trust markets. Your active duty types are a sort of honorable socialist animal. Its apples and oranges. The list of ‘mitigating factors’ reads like a mish mash of trade labor union issues and entrepreneurial sour grapes. The military truly is a higher calling. If you want to make real money, rob banks – the rationale for that statement is beyond the scope of this comment, but its true
I seriously question whether or not the skillset, say of a fully trained nuclear propulsion engineer or special operator is cheaper to the taxpayer in the form of a serviceman, or in the form of a civilian working for a military subcontractor. All the things you take for granted on the inside, like room and board for starters, on the outside are determined largely by markets and are orders of magnitude cheaper for the civvy, who must provide them out of his supposedly greatly inflated, more heavily taxed salary. You look at the military’s pay scales and just assume they come cheap. A true accounting of their overhead, I’ll bet, will prove otherwise.
War is hell, as the saying goes, and the costs are going to be outrageous no matter what. And the military is really just one giant school, as my Chief Morris pointed out. The guys who get out are not lost to the nation by any means. Mr. Peter’s frustration is misplaced – the talent is not wasted, nor is the money.
What does trouble is the mercenary thing. Once you make it voluntary, and once the dollar becomes primary, then you run afoul of Prince Machiavelli’s wisdom. We are, sadly in my opinion, well on our way to a mercenary military. Bush’s political woes will seem a drop in the bucket as soon as the rosy glow wears off and the populace looks on the military not as our sons, fathers and husbands*, but a bunch of greedy violent, torturing baddies. You have to admit we’re already half – way there. The draft will ameliorate that, unpleasant and inefficient as that may be. It is another cost of waging war successfully, just as private contractors now are.
*PC – sensitives please insert proper female gender sensitive words as required.
October 6th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
He’s just jealous of the pay they get…They definetly don’t hire pencil necked geek intell wienies! ;-)
That being said, Mr. Peter’s is just just showing the side of himself that once again displays his vertical only thinking..the man just can’t take the Army intell outta himself and see the big picture. He often does this when describinbg/assailing things he is ignorant about, including avaition and defense contractors…of which I am one..Trust me, I still work for the Navy and I still lookout for the taxpayer and the WARFIGHTER, despite my contractor label. He has vendors and contractors providing services, mixed up like many ignorant AD and retired officers.
To take it one step further, I’m better than him. He is the one who’s turned an avocation he was mildly successful at into a well paying job as flame thrower after 9-11..not me.
So. While I agree with him a lot on a lot of things, I know when to turn him off….click.
b2
October 6th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Cottus,
Interesting points. The military is a socialist meritocracy, but only because other people–citizens–pay for it to be so. The monopoly on use of force is pretty much the irreducible aspect of government–which is why the Second Amendment was such a radical idea.
I must disagree with your trendline, though. I lean on Burkett’s Stolen Valor a lot, and one of the reasons I do so is because that’s where I first learned of the 60′s-era drive to push the idea of military as nasty dirty uncouth barbarians fit only to kill. (Or maybe from Kipling’s Tommy, but where Kipling describes the universal Burkett gives cases for establishing the existence of a political drive to the idea.) So although I know we’re being described that way by some people, I also know the trendline is politically driven and therefore not going to go all the way in the direction you describe if I have anything to do with it!
October 7th, 2007 at 12:06 am
Chap,
I have learned to parse Cottus’ words with great care, and I think he’s asserting something important that you’re not responding to.
I warn you I’ve been wrong before.
Here’s what I think he’s saying.
The socialist aspect of the military isn’t intrinsic, and doesn’t flow from the government monopoly on force. Government exercises other monopoly powers through contractors and agents (revenue collection, surveillance, etc.) . That the military appears to prefer to run as a centralized socialist entity with fairly little randomness in career paths or incentives is a separate issue.
Non DOD-agencies of the government are demonstrating their ability to hire competition. The military may think its cheaper than the competition, but the growing market shares of firms like Blackwater indicate that that’s not true. Or if military is cheaper, the competitor provides better service. Let us call it more utility for the dollar.
Cottus’ point is (I think), once you move away from compulsory service, there is no airtight argument that military members need to be federal employees.
October 7th, 2007 at 4:29 am
–As an aside: I assert that the military is a socialist meritocracy because ever since World War One mechanized warfare has forced militaries to go to a command economy-style system. (That’s one of the interesting aspects of the current enemy, who’s not constrained by the limitations of a command economy but also works on a much smaller scale. This scaling limitation partially drove them to information warfare in their choice of attacks, and drives their desire for spectacular attacks and WMD acquisition.) Until we have some other method of warfare that’s what we’re stuck with.
–The other agencies and NGOs hiring out are actually costing themselves more in the way they feel it most, from the bucket of money they have to spend. (Check of assertion: How much out of immediate operating costs does an NGO pay DoD for support vice Rent-A-Gun?) They’re paying this because they don’t trust, or comprehend, or desire the entering restrictions of, or want to be indebted to, the military. That’s not better service, with the exception of some speed of rampup at the squad scale and ability to evade UCMJ and government restrictions.
–If Cottus is saying that military is only restricted to federal service because of the draft, then he’s wrong. First, state-level force is the de facto definition of what a state is in its basic and irreducible form. If someone other than the state has sufficient force to counter the government militarily, then that’s called “losing the war” or “armed revolution”. Secondly, we’ve had a standing army for a long time with and without drafts, and a standing Navy with and without drafts since the Constitution was written. Thirdly, what keeps mercenaries beholden to the government that hired them first? What keeps the country as it is without the investment in its own defense? (There is an excellent argument to be made that the “Of Paradise And Power” description of Western Europe under the American defense umbrella has made those cultures unable to not only operate militarily but also unable to think in a way that supports their own defense. Nobody washes a rental car.) There are examples of states that outsourced their defense in history, and they fell for that reason. Military service is part of citizenship, although I argue not one to be compelled of every citizen.
October 8th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
I gave up rising to Ralph’s bait earlier this year. He is just too “Ralph” now and then.