Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
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.
This is why I limited the critique to combat service support. Sure, use contractors to do the scut work on bases in the states -- maybe they could send a few over to my house to keep it clean while my husband is deployed, I wouldn't complain. But where the bullets are flying, the only people you are going to get to work amidst them are soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. The contractors won't do it.

On a side note, every time I see a Navy commercial with aviators or SEALS, I chuckle and imagine the commercial that highlights the scut work -- "Join the Navy, scrape barnacles!"


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.
It might be worth looking into whether the system they have for Marine officers might work with enlisted personnel. For the former, even if they are in a combat arms MOS, they alternate between A billets (fleet tours, usually, in their MOS) and B billets (office jobs doing some sort of support work -- at MARCORSYSCOM, MCCDC, recruiting, etc.). The B billets, while not jobs most enjoy, are usually good for down time from deployments, usually have a lighter workload, and are thus pretty good for family time. Sometimes they are a complete waste of time, but again, short days with little to do give a guy or gal a chance to catch up on all of the administrative scut work of their household that they've missed out on while on a strenuous deployment schedule.

Thus, you could increase the number of personnel who can join up in the combat arms MOS's, and get the rest of the work done by cycling them through A and B billets. You could make it nice and organized and efficient by assigning a primary MOS (their combat arms specialty) and a secondary MOS (the type of office work they will be assigned to), that way you'll know that the jobs will get done.

But again, they don't need to be cutting the grass or painting rocks. Unless, of course, they get themselves in trouble -- because that is great work for brig rats.


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...
This is why you make everyone be a combat arms person first. This is why Marines really want Marine aviators to be there for CAS -- [and why they hate that the Air Force wants all air assets under a single control, because this means they might not get their guys flying the really hairy missions] -- because those aviators have gone to TBS and know a bit about what the guy on the ground is going through. If you have an infantryman running a support service, he'll likely do it with gusto and integrity, because it's his buddies up at the front that he's supporting. It's why my husband was so aggressive at SYSCOM -- because the system he was deploying was for the artillery community, and the guys getting it were his colleagues, and one day he'd be using it as well.

The Revolution was a long time ago, so was the Civil War which had the same 'contractor' problems.
The Rev War wasn't so long ago that the lesson doesn't bear remembering. And, if my recollection serves, the guys charged with actually delivering the food to the troops were soldiers, not contractors. (Contractors may have provided the food, and that's probably where the problems came in.) That's why there's a memorial to McKinley the soldier at Antietam for delivering a hot meal and coffee to the battle weary soldiers.

No easy solutions to this one...
No, but if we don't even bother looking for one, then there are no solutions.

Cheers,
Jill