Quote Originally Posted by Ratzel View Post
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