Quote Originally Posted by Eden View Post
Contracting tends to reduce the flexibility of any military force. By replacing soldiers with contractors, you automatically reduce the pool of manpower available for mowing grass, raising the flag, providing individual augmentees for wartime operations, or manning the defensive perimeter when the Chinese break through the lines. This creates a problem that can only be solved by either further stressing the remaining soldiers...or hiring more contractors. This leads me to my next point.
I disagree in general principle. Contracting increases the flexibility of the military in giving it a fairly responsive ability to supply additional manpower and skillsets in response to demand, faster than the military can do so itself by either retraining existing personnel in other MOS's or increased recruiting.

When the hazards are fairly low for contracting to represent a viable economic alternative to civilian jobs, it is a cost-effective way to get skillsets found in the civilian sector (logistics, maintenance, personal protection), where the civilian market for their skills pays for their sustainment between periods of demand, rather than the military paying them to practice in peacetime.

Finally - and to bring us back to the COIN vs Con argument - we only have the luxury of extensive contracting because we operate in low-threat environments. Should we have to fight against a near-peer on a high-intensity battlefield, we may find ourselves having to reinvent numerous wheels. After all, the historical trend from, oh, 1792 to the recent past had been to reduce or eliminate contractors from the conventional battlefield, because they proved to be inadequate to the demands placed on them.
Agreed that the utility of contractors drops off sharply as risk increases. Well, since the thread is about the HIC/LIC balance, why not utilize the savings in costs and manpower from contracting in a low-threat environment to enable more of the force to sustain their HIC training even during a LIC? Just because contractors are not a viable resource for HIC doesn't mean we can't leverage their abilities in LIC to ease the strain on the active force.

And if it costs less to hire one of them than to send a Lance Corporal, it's because we the tax payers have already paid for their training, which the private corporations get to leverage at no cost to their own bottom lines. (Maybe we should demand a rebate from them?) But I think the cost savings is more like a shell game -- I don't think it's really costing us less in the long run.
People will inevitably leave the service and take their skills with them. Do you expect every service member to remain active or reserve until retirement? Their skills remain useful to them and to others. The option of contracting gives us a very quick way to retain those skills without resorting to measures like a draft that would dramatically decrease recruitment. Yes, there's a short term cost in decreased retention, but the pool of people getting out early to cash in on contracting is far smaller than the pool that we are drawing from.

I agree that contracting as a long-term solution can be addictively poisonous if contracting subsumes military functions rather than augments them, and becomes a long-term solution rather than a flex capacity. I gather that comes (as it does in business) from a misunderstanding of the real costs and benefits of contracting.

So, I'm not much of a believer. War is not business, and it cannot be run like one. It has costs, and trying to minimize those costs according to business principles is a bad idea all around. If we cannot afford those costs, then we need to rethink how we fight. Or we need to consider whether the effort is worth the cost. But to think we can cheat the costs of war is a foolish game.
I can think of few things more dangerous. The costs of war are not fixed, and even in a national wartime footing, are always subject to constraints. Today, military spending and recruiting competes in a vastly larger national economy. Our ability to generate combat power at the tip of the spear is inextricably linked to the costs at the other end. It appears you are confusing business principles of "best allocation of limited resources" for "minimize costs regardless of the consequences".