Quote Originally Posted by Stevely View Post
Or maybe the government should throw in the towel and admit that the mass outsourcing of functions to contractors in DOD was never the good deal it was promised to be, either financially or otherwise, and return those functions to military/ government personnel? This all got underway in the early 90s, IMO at least heavily influenced by the wild popularity of management cult gibberish and the downsizing/"rightsizing"/consolidations going on in business at the time. The military is not a business and what works in industry has limited application at best in the profession of arms.
I'm not sure that it would even be possible to "throw in the towel." The Army is having trouble meeting its goals for man power as it is, do you really think we could recruit the 150,000 troops that would be required to replace these contractors? I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but can you provide me with any data to support your claim that outsourcing certain functions is not "a good deal" financially? I would think, that if there's at least one very solid argument for outsourcing that it would indeed be financial.

Besides that, why should we waste precious man power on cooking, guarding the base camp, and driving trucks when we can have patriotic civilians do it? Many of the contractors we use are retired service people who have the skills and motivation to preform these functions and not using these people would be a major waste of human capital.

Contractors also have a comparative advantage at certain skill sets. Blackwater does a fine job at guarding diplomats. How many SF people would we have to divert from doing their missions if we didn't have Blackwater to preform this function? How many troops would we have to have back in Kuwait if we didn't have contractors repairing tanks and Bradly's in the rear? Before the invasion of Iraq, my unit was trained by ex-SF people for MOUT. This training was the best training I ever had in urban combat and I can say without a doubt that this training increased my units skills for the war. All of our trainers were ex-SF and Rangers with 20 years plus of experience and each one of them had seem combat. Why should these guys be back in the US when they can used to train people? What else should people of this caliber be doing while a war is going on? Perhaps they would be better off as the town sheriff or the sporting goods manager at the Wal-mart?

This is not to say there isn't negatives with contractors. We all know there's issues relating to accountability and the possibility of Special Forces personal leaving for the big money that some of these firms provide. But in general, I think a cost-benefit analysis would prove the contractors to be beneficial to the force.