COIN v. Conventional Capability Debate

[Stevely]

Maybe we should start thinking of contractors as part of the force?

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.

EDIT: this is starting to drag the topic OT, my apologies... I'll shut up now.

[Ratzel]

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.

[Eden]

Let me try to tie this little sub-thread back to the main topic. I agree that contractors are for the most part patriotic, can-do, and competent. I also agree that we could not sustain the level of effort in Iraq and Afghanistan without them. I also think we need to constantly review what we contract out and exercise caution in those functions we allow to be executed by civilians.

I say this because there are real problems with contracting, even if we postulate that all individual contractors are qualified and all contracting companies provide honest service for a reasonable fee.

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.

Contracting is addictive. It is a simple fix for a variety of problems, and this leads to contracting creep. Functions that used to be off-limits for contractors are now routinely farmed out. Training, for instance; twenty years ago it was not considered a good idea to contract this function. It was seen as a core military function. Now, as previous posts point out, we see contractors doing this all the time. In TRADOC, contractors are increasingly doing our thinking for us as concept developers and doctrine writers. General officers, instead of training their own subordinates, rely more and more on retired generals to head up 'evaluation teams', presumably to free the active leaders for more important duties. Maintenance contractors are doing more and doing it further forward - or perhaps I should say closer to the action these days. It is a cycle - either vicious or virtuous - that shows little sign of abating.

Contracting creep leads to mission creep. I have been in organizations that, despite personnel and fiscal reductions, continue to do all tasks assigned and accept more. How? By contracting those functions out. It can become a death spiral fairly quickly.

Contracting erodes military skills. When fewer soldiers teach, or maintain, or cook, or develop training programs, or write doctrine, we produce leaders with an increasingly narrow skill set. It also deprives leaders of learning experiences that produce deeper understanding of 'how things work'. Consider the simple example of a maintenance shop. A leader with a 'military' maintenance shop must learn the grimy details of inspections, repair, dispatch, etc., in order to keep his fleet operational. The 'contract' maintenance shop, however, tends to be a black box, and the only skills the leader develops are contract maintenance.

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.

[Ken White]

that the force structure folks should heed.

The statement that contracting is addictive is particularly true and contracting most training in particular is a dangerous course that has significantly eroded our ability to train and thus our total effectiveness. I submit a part of the problem that has forced us into contracting is legislative but the major flaw IMO is that we have not adapted to the size of the force dictated by costs. We're still largely trying to 'operate' the way we did in 1960 and that is simply not possible.

I'd also note that the contract security I've observed at the last three or four bases (Army, Navy and AF) I've visited make me seriously question the security thereon...

[Entropy]

I'd also note that the contract security I've observed at the last three or four bases (Army, Navy and AF) I've visited make me seriously question the security thereon...

Well, hey, a lot of our nuclear weapons infrastructure is run by contractors, and they are great at security!

[Ken White]

only gets 2,250,000 hits...

[Ron Humphrey]

When referencing concern for contracting in training do most here include educational training as well? I ask because when I think about it in the other areas mentioned I can see the validity of the arguments but when it comes to good ol schoolin it still seems to me that the balanced if not slightly heavier civilian presence is a better thing. If for no other reason than the diversity of experience and approach to teaching it provides.

Thought's?

[mmx1]

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".

[Sargent]

In the long run it is cheaper. No VA claims, no retirement, no family medical coverage. Think how much of this comes out of the defense budget alone. Is there anything wrong with me benefiting from my training? Afterall it was my time, blood, sweat,and tears that went into it? Is it any different than any other person out there? If said company trained me,then their competition comes along and offers me twice the money, do they owe them anything? Problem now is the knee jerk reaction, especially in SOF. Let's see, I can continue to do 6 month rotations making $50-$60 thousand a year or I can do contract work making 3 times that in the same amount of time. For me money isn't everything, besides I refuse to work with subpar organizations, very few of these PMCs today hire quality over quantity and the ones who do you never hear about unless it's them contacting you personally. Unfortunately as is the nature of todays world many quality guys jumped on this early on,got their share of the money,saw it wasn't what they thought it was and moved on, but not back into service. No thanks keep your money and subpar employees.

It's not cheaper if the war is lost. If we only look at combat service support, contractors almost cost us our independence, and I don't think the peril associated with hiring others to do that job has ever gone away.

As for the issue of what former service personnel and their skill set, there's nothing "wrong" with what individuals are doing with their training. There is no law against it, and I don't even think it's unethical. And if the contractors are making money hand over fist, the companies themselves are making even more. And I'll point out that it was the companies which were the object of criticism regarding the training investment made by the taxpayer, not the individual service members. Look, the question was asked, what to do with these former service personnel who are an asset. The assumption was that we are best served by them in a PMC. I don't think that's true, and I gave an analysis of why it's not. It's nothing personal.

I don't believe that the true costs of the contractors are being properly accounted. Alternatively, I don't think that the value of what may be gotten via the military benefits are well accounted for either. Does it cost more to constantly retrain new people or to retain them? In order to retain people, you have to give them a reason to stay. I'm absolutely certain that someone did a cost-benefit analysis and realized that even with the costs you list above the long-service family man/woman was still the better option, that even if they cost more in dollars, the intangible benefits were well worth it. Besides, again I have to say that the costs of war cannot be minimized in the same way that they can be for business.

Let me offer another way to look at the contractor issue. I can't help thinking that part of the contracting objective is to minimize the number of "troops" we have deployed, because the American people might look at things differently if it were the case that we had 300,000 or so troops in Iraq. It would give them an entirely different sense of the war. So, in effect, there is a bit of a lie involved, in order to maintain public support. And that's a problem, because at some point the lie is going to catch up with them.

MMX wrote: It appears you are confusing business principles of "best allocation of limited resources" for "minimize costs regardless of the consequences".

I wasn't just talking about business principles and cost. I'm talking about the application of a business philosophy to warfare in general. There are many things that don't translate. But it's really at the heart of things where the translation breaks down: business seeks to achieve efficiency, whereas the application of that same idea to warfare does not work. Armed forces must be effective, and often to achieve that, they must be inefficient. So, while a throwaway B-school buzz-line like "best allocation of limited resources" might be vaguely transferable, what you realize in the conduct of warfare is that what constitutes "best" bears no resemblance to its definition in the civilian sector. Once you get beyond the platitude, the applications diverge widely.

Please don't confuse this with a suggestion that profligacy is the only way to fight a war or manage one's armed forces. But it's a whole 'nother post to get into to consider how the military could do with a bit more wisdom in the allocation and use of resources.

V/R
Jill

[Old Eagle]

Can someone pull this back over to the contractor thread or start a new contractor thread?

As I recall, we were here to drain the conventional/COIN swamp, not play with the contractor alligators.

[Ken White]

The contractor stuff is mixed with some pertinent, some not.

Dave, Bill or one of the other mods may wish to move those posts but I decided not to move 'em due to vague applicability (he said as he guiltily slunk away ).

That said, we should try to stick to the topic which is COIN vs. Conventional Capability

[Sargent]

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.

Because, when it comes to operating at the front lines, private contractors won't cook, guard base camps, or drive trucks. This was the first lesson of American military history, in the War for Independence. It's why George Washington took one of his best combatant commanders, Nathanael Greene, and made him the Quartermaster General -- because the sutlers and other contractors weren't getting the food and other materiel to the troops, causing very serious problems with the line troops.

A memorial was erected at Antietam to McKinley, for bringing a hot meal and coffee to the battle weary troops. A bit of a political move to build the memorial, no doubt. However, the action was genuine, and to the troops fed, it was no joke.

In WWI, kitchen trucks were frequently shelled getting food to the front line troops.

In WWII, soldiers were killed when the German arty opened up on them as they tried to get a Thanksgiving dinner to others in the frontlines.

At Chosin, the cooks and other support staff of 1st Marines had drop their spoons and mops and grab rifles to fight the Chinese.

Fast forward to the winter of 2007, and there was a MTT sitting in the city center of Fallujah, not getting fed. For three months they tried to figure out an answer, and finally, the only one guaranteed to work was to send the SINGLE Marine messman stationed at the FOB out to them to cook for them. Of course, they still couldn't get anyone out to empty the portajohns, but that's another story.

We've decided to unlearn our first lesson in war, one supported by 200+ years of subsequent history.

Contractors can quit. They have no bond to the people they support. (Consider the analogy to Marines preferring Marine aviators flying CAS for them -- they know that these guys have, before doing their flight training, spent six months at TBS, learning the job of the guy on the ground, thus being bound to him in a way that no other aviator really ever can.) If they don't do the job, it's very hard to get the money they've been paid back -- the government does anything about it, takes it as a sunk cost. Look at all the unfinished/badly finished projects in Iraq. Also, a lot of the contractors in Iraq aren't all patriotic Americans -- this is not a criticism, I'm simply pointing out the fact that they're not, and therefore cannot necessarily be counted on to care that much about what America or Americans want.

Maybe there's something useful that can be done with the former service personnel -- a draft? If they're so keen to serve, why not go back on active duty? Oh yeah, because for doing the same jobs they get paid way more than the military personnel. 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.

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.

V/R
Jill

[ODB]

Maybe there's something useful that can be done with the former service personnel -- a draft? If they're so keen to serve, why not go back on active duty? Oh yeah, because for doing the same jobs they get paid way more than the military personnel. 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.

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.

V/R
Jill

In the long run it is cheaper. No VA claims, no retirement, no family medical coverage. Think how much of this comes out of the defense budget alone. Is there anything wrong with me benefiting from my training? Afterall it was my time, blood, sweat,and tears that went into it? Is it any different than any other person out there? If said company trained me,then their competition comes along and offers me twice the money, do they owe them anything? Problem now is the knee jerk reaction, especially in SOF. Let's see, I can continue to do 6 month rotations making $50-$60 thousand a year or I can do contract work making 3 times that in the same amount of time. For me money isn't everything, besides I refuse to work with subpar organizations, very few of these PMCs today hire quality over quantity and the ones who do you never hear about unless it's them contacting you personally. Unfortunately as is the nature of todays world many quality guys jumped on this early on,got their share of the money,saw it wasn't what they thought it was and moved on, but not back into service. No thanks keep your money and subpar employees.