TPM Reader CH chimes in on military contracting ...

I just wanted to chime in again on the contractor issue because in my own military experience, I arrived at my duty station in late 1997 and even at that point my unit was losing senior enlisted who decided to get out and, as you stated, do what they were doing anyway but privately and for substantially more money. This continued over my five years of service, and one of the factors that led to my leaving military service was that I could look up the chain and see the proverbial rats fleeing the ship. These were individuals with 12-16 years of service too!! They could retire at 20 years, but decided to leave and go private. My colleagues and I would often debate the merits of privatization back at that time as well. I worked in military intelligence, and I think this was one of the first areas to go private. It never made sense to us that the U.S. Government would pay a contractor 10 times (or more) what we were making to do the EXACT same thing and with no guarantees that the results would be on par with ours or better. From my experience and that of my friends, we also came to know certain contracting operators WERE in fact incompetent. This stemmed from the fact that private companies jumping into the bidding process to get a piece of the pie had never before done the work that we were doing. If/when they would win the bids, they would just hire whomever and throw them at the mission. This, naturally, caused some trouble. Furthermore, there were issues of morale in places like JTF-Guantanamo when private contractors were treated far better than military members doing the same jobs. In some cases, people who were called up out of the IRR left Gitmo only to come back as private contractors too. I don't blame hard-working people for jumping the military's ship in favor of much better pay and treatment, but it would seem that an argument could be easily made to show that an increase in the military's size and ability to carry out the operations needed WITHOUT private contractors would be beneficial to everyone. Well, everyone except for those making the money...which, in my and most of my colleagues' opinion is 100% mercenary work. I still don't blame those who choose to do it because they're just taking advantage of where things are now, but we should call it what it is and not delude ourselves into thinking that it is anything but war-fighting for hire.