With all its flaws -- and it has plenty -- contracting basic services has merit. The troops hate that kind of stuff and the cessation of a lot of grass mowing, rock painting and, yes K.P or Mess Duty plus a lot of other minor annoyances has helped keep folks in all the services. The Navy can't do that on ships and thus, they have a very minor retention problem because of that scut work. Add it back into the Army, Marines and AF and it will cause retention problems. In an era of an aging population and a kinder gentler world where military service is eschewed by many that may not be a good idea.

It's easy for those who don't have to do that kind of make work (which is what some of it is) and necessary but unpleasant work to overlook the inhibiting effect on Joe. Joe doesn't do windows if he can avoid it -- and, if we're going to train him well enough to go risk his life (which we don't do well) then the least we can do id let him skip washing windows.

The the Army and Marines get plenty of enlistees for the combat arms and for both services, the re-up rates in the combat skills are great. Not so in the Combat service support arena. Enlistments are down and reenlistments are far lower than in the combat arms.

I'm not sure that a reversion to the WW II / Korea / Viet Nam era Army (all effectively the same; little changed) is a good idea. Having been a part of it, there was a lot of crookedness and corruption, petty and major theft by people in uniform. There was also a lot of mediocre performance. Even stupidity -- like the 1LT who futilely and rather foolishly told me and about 15 armed, dirty and smelly troops who needed shaves and haircuts we couldn't eat in his Chu Lai Mess Hall...

The Revolution was a long time ago, so was the Civil War which had the same 'contractor' problems. In fact, all wars seem to have contractor problems. The mostly Korean and Japaneses contractors in Korea were crooked and bore a lot of watching; the Consortium RMK-BRJ in Viet Nam got wealthy (the BR being then Brown and Root, now part of KBR. BR in the day were friends of Lyndon...). I suspect it's a human frailty problem and there's no fixing it, just a lot of watching.

My belief is that contracting is probably going to be with us absent a return to the draft (to which I am very strongly opposed) and that aside from the services getting a lot smarter about it -- and eliminating a lot of the Congressionally imposed bureaucracy involved in the contracting process as well as continuing Congressional influence in that process (NOTE: Which has a whole lot to do with the apparent DoD willingness to 'overlook' possible chicanery...) -- it seems to me that design of structure and equipment should be undertaken in the future with elimination of as much contract support as possible as an essential goal.

Consider also that the wants and needs of armed forces in peacetime and those in wartime differ considerably. The US has effectively been at peace since 1945 -- parts of the services have been to war many times since and are there now but Congress and the Pentagon have not been at war in a long time...

No easy solutions to this one...