The security that Blackwater provided was for the State Department. DoS was really just not equipped to handle that large a job. Security for DoS is provided by civilian regional security officers not the military.
Thanks, all, for the responses.
Jake
Not necessarily. Sure, the salary is higher, but you have to remember all the money that goes into a soldier’s clothing, housing, medical care, etc. Just because the Army pays Blackwater $200k per person to replace a PFC, it doesn’t mean the Army is losing $180k on the deal.
Absolutely. It’s a matter of short term loss vs. long term gain. You are comparing the cost of one year in Iraq against the cost of training and maintaining a soldier for the length of his entire career. If the soldier makes it to retirement, you might still be paying his pension 40 years from now.
It may very well be cheaper to pay a premium price for a short-term mercenary than the long-term investment that is required to field a careerist soldier… even more so when you are talking about low-paying jobs like laundry and santitation.
The main reason the military outsources non-deployable jobs is the exact same reason private companies do it- to concentrate on their core competencies- which in the military’s case is to get troops where they need to be, fight when they get there, and support them in the field.
Why go to the trouble of having a volunteer Soldier/Marine/Airman/Sailor spend his career cooking shit on a shingle or standing around in the cold at the post gate when he really ought to be doing those jobs that are more pertinent to the mission of their particular service? It makes good sense to outsource those jobs, and probably may even save some money in the long haul to do so.
A lot of the tradition of the military doing all those jobs is more of a historical relic of the WWI/WWII/Korea/Vietnam draftee armies- if you have more or less unlimited really low paid draftee manpower, it makes sense to put them to work doing shit jobs. But, if you don’t have unlimited manpower, and you have people who specifically volunteered to serve, it’s a dumb decision to put them to work doing shit jobs, and won’t help your retention rates one whit.
Why, though? I mean, if you’re paying a soldier $X per year, does it matter (from an economic standpoint) if they’re stationed at Fort Awesome or Fort No Puppies Allowed? There’s got to be thousands of soldiers with no dependents or partners who could be deployed to bases like the one you mention for the purpose of guarding the gates and other such things.
Sure, it’s not very exciting work, but paying a private company $Y per hour to do it instead of the people who are already there with guns doesn’t make it any more exciting, IMHO.
Keep in mind that today’s soldiers are volunteers. They didn’t join up to peel potatoes, do guard duty at the post gate, or any number of other crappy menial jobs.
They joined to be professional soldiers (or airmen, marines or sailors). It all ultimately pays the same, you’re right, but does it make much sense to take someone willing and able to be an actual fighting man and stick them behind a stove?
Doesn’t seem like a very good allocation of resources to me, especially not when that E2 almost certainly costs more to employ as a cook than you’d pay some other firm to provide a cook, and that E2 has specific soldier/sailor/marine/airman skills that can be better put to use elsewhere.
Does the Army still use KP as a mild, non-UCMJ form of punishment for minor offenses?
'Cuz…I had to do some dishes a couple times back in the day.
The thing is, that’s true of most jobs. I think many (most?) people do a number of things at work which they really don’t feel is what they signed up for or are a waste of their skills.
I can understand outsourcing cooks since it probably is cheaper and more efficient to pay someone to cook than get soldiers to do it. But guarding a military base is, IMHO, pretty much exactly what I’d consider to be within the job description of a new recruit-type soldier.
When I went through boot camp in 1968 at Fort Jackson, we had a full week of KP, and rotation of guard duty. Because it was the draft, at that time, we had no shortage of personnel to perform these duties. We still had some tough old mess sergeants that had been in since the Korean War. In Vietnam, we had no one but ourselves to do our cooking of those horrible K and C rations we used to get. I remember eating canned hamburgers that were canned in the mid 50s. Even Tabasco sauce did not help them…lol. Thanks for the memories…
Including the contractors, what is the tooth to tail ratio in the military? What is the tooth to tail ratio of only enlisted people? I heard in Iraq we had more contractors than soldiers for a while but many of those contractors were infantry too.
I thought cooking (as well as various other duties) was outsourced to Kellogg Brown and Root a while ago.
I never saw any contractors being used like infantry or anything even close. I saw contractor used as security such as for the Department of State. DoS protection is handled by there RSOs but that department isn’t nearly big enough to handle security in a combat zone. The contractors we worked mostly with were used to man security checkpoints.
KBR was used in Iraq for cooking. Our cooks were used to supervise KBR. In the states the cooks are sometimes military, sometimes contractors.
I was/am interested in food service on such a large scale, and consulted Google, which coughed up first KBRcaterers.com–whose motto is “service with a smile.” Unfortunately it only serves business clients in Kerala, so don’t go there for information regarding anything to do with this thread. (Just a heads up.)
But I did find this from KBR, which touches on other contracting jobs, for the Brits:
Houston, Texas — August 29, 2011 — KBR (NYSE: KBR) today announced that it has been selected by the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to provide life support, vehicle maintenance and healthcare services across Baghdad, Basra and Erbil in Iraq, and Kabul and Lashkar Gah in Afghanistan.
[snip]
KBR will deliver a comprehensive suite of services such as medical support (including nursing and medical supplies), fleet management of armoured and soft skin vehicles, interpreters, sustenance, laundry, environmental services and fuel.
[snip]
In another pageKBR says they supply “a full range of hard and soft services to the British military in Afghanistan.” What does that mean? I have a guess it has to do with spear and tip, but maybe others know the business/industry use of the terms.
FWIW, they say they’re the largest single contractor in Afghanistan.