THE problems with military outsourcing go far beyond last month’s massacre of civilians by Blackwater USA’s hired guns: Wartime profiteers are bleeding our military.
Astonishingly, contractors are free to approach those in uniform, offer them generous salaries to leave their service in wartime, then profit from the skills your tax dollars taught them.
This isn’t just about Navy SEALS or other special operators. In intelligence, for example, we train young soldiers for complex missions and expensively process their security clearances – then contractors bribe them to leave the military, raking in big bucks from your investment in their new employee.
Maybe we could look the other way in peacetime. But we’re fighting multiple wars. Would we have allowed contractors to hire away some of the most highly skilled men and women in uniform during World War II? (Of course, most lawmakers really were patriots then . . .)
It’s fundamentally wrong to let contractors go head-hunting among our troops in wartime. Those in government who’ve elevated outsourcing to a state religion pretend it helps our war effort – with the whopper that outsourcing military functions saves taxpayer dollars.
Exactly how does that one work? You get stuck with the training and security-clearance costs; the soldier lured to the private sector gets his salary doubled or tripled – then the contractor adds in a markup for his multiple layers of overhead costs and a generous profit margin, and bills the taxpayers. How is that cheaper than having soldiers do the job?
The scam-artists tell us that using contractors saves money in the long run, since their employees don’t get military health care and retirement benefits. But the numbers just don’t add up.
Contractors are looting our military – while wrapping themselves in the flag.
Thankfully, the finest soldiers and Marines aren’t in it for the money. But we’re still losing personnel with vital in-demand skills.
Here’s how one disgusted special-ops veteran puts it:
“I got tired of old SF buddies handing me their business cards as I exited the dining facility in Iraq [and] asking me to come over and work for them. I’ll go teach high school English in the inner city first.”
In a follow-up message, this veteran – who’s sticking by the colors – wrote:
“The saddest thing I see in those ‘flesh peddlers’ is the part of the conversation when they admit that they really miss the unit and the people in it. A true warrior isn’t in it for the money, but, rather, for those things that money can never buy: mutual respect, camaraderie and the self-worth that comes with it.
“Every one of my contractor ‘buddies’ eventually breaks down and admits these things to me. Unfortunately, they can also pick up on a malcontent quickly, therefore acquiring the ‘easy sale.’ ”
The disgraceful cycle works like this: Contractors hire away military talent. The military finds itself short of skilled workers, so contractors get more contracts. With more money, they hire away more uniformed talent.
Here’s what we need to do to right a wrong that borders on treason:
* Congress must defy its campaign contributors and criminalize attempts to hire those in uniform away from their service during periods of war and conflict.
* If a service member put in a full 20 years or more and retired, he or she should be free to take a job with any law-abiding firm. But any soldier short of 20 who accepts specialized training and a security clearance at government expense should have to wait two years after his or her discharge before moving to a related private-sector position.
* Defense contractors who hire young veterans with advanced skills or security clearances should have to reimburse the government 50 percent of their training and background investigation costs.
The current system is intolerable. The problem, of course, is Congress. Although the Hill is half-way to approving stateside prosecutions for criminal conduct by government contractors abroad, your representatives only did so because they were caught out by the Blackwater scandal.
The truth is that most members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, will favor a contractor who pays in campaign contributions over soldiers who pay with their lives.
We saw classic congressional behavior last week, when Blackwater founder Erik Prince testified on the Hill and set a new standard for smugness. A solid Republican phalanx defended a major contributor. The Dems, who failed to do their homework on the issues, looked stupidly partisan themselves – just harassing a GOP donor.
And Prince got away with his shameless claims that he and his trigger-happy thugs are true-blue patriots. If so, why hire talent away from our military in wartime? Why give heavy weapons to under-supervised “malcontents,” endangering our battlefield progress?
And if the independently wealthy Prince is so patriotic, why not provide Blackwater’s services to the government on a no-profit basis?
Well, Blackwater ain’t no red-white-and-blue charity, and Prince isn’t one of FDR’S dollar-a-year men. The company lacked serious credentials when it landed its first security contract – and one suspects it would never have been hired if not for Prince’s campaign contributions and political connections.
People like Erik Prince aren’t patriots. They’re vampires sucking the blood of our troops – war profiteers growing rich while soldiers die.
As I warned in these pages several years ago, we didn’t just outsource services in Iraq. We outsourced our nation’s honor.
Ralph Peters is a retired military officer and the author of “Wars Of Blood and Faith.”