I'm not sure if it's such a good idea, this reliance on contracting for government services, and if there is a positive effective on retention, I don't think it ultimately makes up for the negative effects in so many other areas.
I remember when the contracting craze got underway in earnest, back in the early 90s. It was supposed to streamline and make more efficient many operations ("let industry do it - they have to make a profit ergo they are more efficient!"), and save the government a lot of money. I think neither goal has been achieved; unfortunately since that time, contracting and outsourcing have grown and grown, giving defense industry great influence and leverage over the formulation and execution of defense policy, and today, I think the department is in a bad shape due to that.
Like Jill, my blood boils hearing that a contractor held the troops hostage to their bottom line, but I am not suprised (just saddened) to see things come to such a pass, out at the front. It already happens here in echelons above reality. I have personally witnessed a dispute between my command and a service that shall remain nameless, where government interest was subverted and a corporate agenda was pushed in the place of legitimate military needs. Said service's training network was actually owned by a major contractor and only leased by the service, and refused to follow proscribed government networking standards and refused to connect their network to ours so that the Joint community could gain access to certain simulation resources there. When we held meetings between the sides to work it out, the service's representatives were actually contractors from the company that owned the network (well the first time; we threw them out and told the service next time to send only military or goverment civilians in the future). A short time later, this company sent its representatives to some installations belonging to another service, and tried to convince them not to use the already-installed Joint network to do Joint training, but to spend government money to buy nodes on their network, if they ever hoped to have access to their host service's training resources in the future. One example of defense contractor shenanigans among many I have witnessed.
I think things started going wrong when contractors shifted from being only providers of equipment to performing services. Performing services makes you a part of the chain of command, full stop; but unlike military/ government members of that chain, companies have a second set of loyalties, that their company's own bottom line. Thus it is impossible to have unity of command, or assurance that your private sector subordinates will do what the boss commands, unless the corporate folks abide by an ethic that the bottom line takes a back seat to the good of the government where those two collide. Example above and from Jill's post demonstrate that is not the case, nor have I ever heard of that happening anywhere else. Conflicts of interest are built in to this.
Over-reliance on contractors to do government business can also lead to a loss of control of government functions, again like the unnamed service no longer really being in control of their training network, and the Army's CSS support cited in the original article. Costs get out of hand - I think that almost goes without saying now, looking at endemic contract cost overruns, and
I haven't really talked about the massive consolidation of defense industry in the 90s but that plays a big role, too. There's really very little domestic competition out there to curb the worst excesses of the few contractors left in the field, often the government has nowhere to turn. This could be mitigated somewhat by using foreign contractors, but then the spectre is raised of the loss of domestic military production capability. The giant contractors are aware of this, and exploit that fact as a license to print money.
Unfortunately I don't see this changing much - too many in politics are beneficiaries of the status quo.
(Of course, I caveat all this with "I have nothing against contractor employees - I used to be one - just some of their corporate masters." Don't want anyone to take this as a slam against the worker bees)
Originally Posted by Stevely
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