Gates has never told the truth about anything. He plays by "Washingtons Rules".
He tries to come off like he cares about financial problems, like the bartender who cares about the drunk, or the dealer who cares about the junkie. Mr. Ricks is doing double time barking for Gates. The War Party is destroying America. The greatest criminal gang in our history.

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
-H.L. Mencken

The problem of keeping count of contractors is even worse down range. Try getting a head count of how many contractors of all sorts are on some of these large bases and you would be shocked at how often the answer is "I do not know".

Excuse the previous title. Was writing on two boards and swapped the titles in my mind.

Oops.

Consider the actions of the tsarist lackeys before the 1917 revolution, or those high-level communist party officials before the USSR fell apart. They could see that they were part of an unjust and economically dysfunctional system, but they didn’t have the courage to speak or live the truth. How many folks reading this blog see themselves as one of the MIC parasites on the larger American body-politic? Why don’t they do something courageous? The defense industry? Consultants? Try looking in the mirror. It’s amazing how fully/deeply we can delude ourselves when personal interests are at stake.

They say that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics. At Fort Campbell, it's mostly people in khakis and polo shirts talking the logistics. I think that's why they have us by our sensitive anatomical spheroids. G-4 was the greatest source of rear-d angst after our unit deployed.

To the contracted workforce's credit, the guys down in the motorpools and supply areas working the forklifts and turning wrenches did a superb job. They truly had an honest, blue-collar 'merican work ethos-- "we're here to do a job an' we ain't leavin' till it's done right." God bless them, every one.

But the folks managing those motorpools and supply yards? Aye, caramba.

There was/is a way out for the unit in which the contractor works-- simply complain to the employing company. They have a strong desire to keep the customer happy, and will usually have that person out of your office within a week. The downside to this is that they don't actually fire the loser. They just kick them down the street to another unit. Don't feel too bad about hosing the adjacent unit, though. After all, where do you think the company is going to get the replacement they send you?

It's like playing musical chairs, except the company always finds a way to invent a new chair so everyone has a seat when the weasel goes pop.

I think at this point the problem has gone super-critical, and it will fuel itself. How do you tell a privately-owned special forces regiment, complete with its own aviation battalion and engineer slice (and apparently now its own privateer vessel) that it has to draw down when the Senators and Congressmen from North Carolina argue against it? In addition, no maintenance trooper with substantial technological skill (electronics repair and IT guys are major targets) is going to spend more than ten years in the military when they can make three times as much doing the same job for a corporation.

The more contractors we pair up with troops, the more face time advertising the contractors get with the troops, the more troops the contractors pull away from the Army, the more the Army needs the contractors.

I know an old woman who swallowed a fly...

We say too often that the war in Afghanistan is costing us $190 million a day. Try looking at it another way-- it's a $190 million-a-day industry. World peace is going to be really bad for some peoples' businesses. Given that, it's going to be pretty difficult to justify declaring world peace when all your intel reports say otherwise. Never mind just how many privately contracted intel analysts we have out there right now.

So, I agree with Mr. Y's comments, but am particularly concerned about those agencies that have gotten so contractor-heavy that they can no longer do the mission without the contractors.

There are several combatant commands (or sub-HQ agencies, components or otherwise) out there that have bloated their staffs beyond the 50% contract place. Many of them generally pay those contracting companies close to a 1/4 to a 1/3 of a million per year for each of those contractors - and those contractors are, not surprisingly, compensated at $150k+ per year.

That pay scale frequently draws the highly technical folks, the go-getters, the folks who can branch out into dozens of different places because they have fungible systems engineering, IT, analysis, and/or cyber skills that make them hot commodities. Some (I emphasize some) of those left behind in the <50% gov/mil remainder are people who have chosen gov/mil positions for safety's sake because they know they're not as competitive, or don't have the personality to embrace risk..

The dynamic decision makers left behind are those poor eager O-4/O-5's mentioned by Mr. Y, who have to struggle against the majority weight of the gov/mil safety pool and the generally-more-technically-knowledgeable contract labor force. It's a miserable experience for them, leaving them desperate to either escape into the contractor workforce (if they have the specialized skills) or back out into the field, where they can make a difference leading soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines without the weight of the gov/mil safety pool and the contractor bloatforce interfering with them.

At some places (I'm looking at you, Cyber Command), the tech skills in the O4/O5 go-getter and the gov/mil safety workforce is so slim that there isn't any other way to do this. We're stuck with a few dozen go-getter O4-O5's struggling to make sense of and develop policy for a new domain. They're weighed down by the gov/mil safety pool, and don't have the domain skills of the contract workforce to function without them.

We know we have to cut down the contract numbers, but at some places if we do that we're cutting into the only workforce who actually understands the domain. Don't get me wrong, there's room to cut incompetent contractors from Cyber Command (for example), but we still face a lot of risk if we decide to get rid of this workforce.

I'm not sure how to deal with this short of a great deal of expensive training and bonus pool money thrown at these high-value skill areas in the O4/O5 population. But I'd rather it go to them then give 1/3 million/year to contractors who may wonder away to another job very easily.

As a contractor myself, I completely agree that there are too many contractors, and that the nation seems to be entrusting ever-increasing vital roles to individuals that--though many are patriotic, driven and dedicated--are ultimately shackled to the bottom-line.

Yet it's not a situation that can be easily turned around, and one that I don't think can even begin to be addressed until you do one of two things: make the DOD/IC civilian hiring process faster and more efficient, and/or reduce the scope of the mission for these organizations. I don't think with 2 OCOs ongoing that the second is viable. On the first, however: I originally was looking for a DOD/IC civilian position, but after 9 months of usajobs questionnaires, mind-numbing "essay questions," and nothing beyond automated feedback, I finished my Masters degree and needed a job! I shot my resume around the contracting world, met with a few folks, and had real offers on the table within 2-5 days. The DOD/IC needs a process that can achieve even some fraction of that efficiency and flexibility before it can start booting contractors. Is the usajobs (or its defensejobs evil twin) going to be able to staff 100 civilian intel analysts in AF in 14 days--as was requested in a recent solicitation? Not a chance the way it is currently functioning: try 140-240 days.

Nothing to add to this debate except a question: Are contractors to the U.S. military bound by the UCMJ? If not , why not?

I think it bears repeating that MIC is an inaccurate acronym. Eisenhower basically coined the term - and as such he called it the MICC. The first C = Congressional and they are complicit in all these shenanigans.

Mercenaries. They mesh very nicely with that other set, the AVF. I can hear the Founding Fathers now: "Geez, if we could only figure out how to outsource war and not have to do it ourselves."

If the contractor system is working, at least to a degree, for an army tail pretty much sitting on its ass in fixed long-term bases, how do you all think it might work in a dynamic war of movement across a broad expeditionary theater?

Does not seem like a good fit to me.

Assigning a greater number of military tasks to contractors probably made sense when we were thinking in terms of a military with a shrinking mission and no overseas combat deployments lasting in excess of a year. Which we were, pretty much, starting about 20 years ago.

Military contractors look like a bigger problem now because we're not thinking of the military in that way today. Really, we started thinking of it differently with the Bosnia peacekeeping mission -- which has never ended -- and the long containment deployments aimed at Saddam Hussein. You spend more on logistics contractors when you need more logistics, which we started doing in the mid-late 1990s, and of course did a lot more of after 9/11 and the Iraq invasion.

We're asking the military to do a lot more things than we thought we'd have to when the vogue for replacing uniformed personnel with civilian contractors began. We were also looking at a civilian economy that offers fewer temptations to good people in uniform than does the one we have today. I suspect that some of the people getting all emotional about military contractors ("Mercenaries!" "Hessians") would be getting all emotional about some other subject if this one weren't on the table. They might do better to think about ways we can begin asking the military to do less, and about opportunities to shift some support functions back to people in uniform, even if that means we end up having to recruit more such people.

Our Army in Korea should be a case study of this. We have a heavy armor brigade there (reinforced) so around 4000 combat troops. Yet we have 20,000 active soldiers in Korea, several thousand American civilians in support, some 17,000 Koreans working on our bases, and an unknown number of contractors. All this when the South Korean military is five times stronger than the rag tags in the North. (oops, that's a big secret , lest Congress start asking questions)

Here is another example of absurd units. We have several Army reserve units in Germany! The 7th ARCOM with 22 "drilling" units. It seems most are full time soldiers pretending to be reservists, while others are flown from the USA to "drill". Either way, its an absurd duplication of command and support. The true reservists can drill in the USA and units flown in when needed, while the actives merge into active units cutting costs in half.

You could solve a huge chunk of the contractor problem by making service members subject to non-competes. When someone gets out of the military, they should be barred from doing a similar job for a) a private company contracted by the U.S. government or b) a civilian arm of the federal government.

Civilian companies use this type of arrangement all the time. They would never invest significant amount of training resources without limiting the ability of the worker to use those skills at a competing company. Doctors do this. Lawyers do this. Hell, even journalists do this.

As long as soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines can make more money just by changing out ID cards, they will continue to do so. Prohibiting that will help stem the exodus from the military and keep more hard-won expertise in-house, thereby reducing the need for contractors.

Of course, non-competes wouldn't be permanent. They would expire after a set number of years - again, as they do in the civilian world. But the specter of five years looking for a job in the hopes of getting a higher one sometime down the road is much less attractive than getting a higher paycheck just by exchanging a uniform for a suit - sometimes even while continuing to sit in the same chair.