The peacetime thinking of those in charge says the military can achieve great "efficiencies" (read that - cost savings) if we hire civilian contractors to perform non-core functions on the battlefield. Hence Secretary Rumsfeld is trying to shift any number of functions out of the uniformed ranks.
Problem is, according to the senior Army logistician...it doesn't work. You can't force civilians into a war zone, you can't afford their insurance, and if the water-balloon hits the fan, civilians make very poor riflemen.
So - if you have a soldier in Iraq who is still eating MREs 3 times per day on any day of the week, a soldier who isn't sleeping in air-conditioned billets, or using a "real latrine' instead of a 55 gallon drum, your soldier is the victim of this sort of "Just-Too-Late Logistics" that Mr. Rumsfeld wants us to buy more of.
We've said it before...when you want to buy an Army on the cheap, you wind up with a cheap Army.
U.S. troops in Iraq suffered through months of unnecessarily poor living conditions because some civilian contractors hired by the Army for logistics support failed to show up, Army officers said.
Months after American combat troops settled into occupation duty, they were camped out in primitive, dust-blown shelters without windows or air conditioning. The Army has invested heavily in modular barracks, showers, bathroom facilities and field kitchens, but troops in Iraq were using ramshackle plywood latrines and living without fresh food or regular access to showers and telephones.
Even mail delivery -- also managed by civilian contractors -- fell weeks behind.
Though conditions have improved, the problems raise new concerns about the Pentagon's growing global reliance on defense contractors for everything from laundry service to combat training and aircraft maintenance. Civilians help operate Navy Aegis cruisers and Global Hawk, the high-tech robot spy plane.
Civilian contractors may work well enough in peacetime, critics say. But what about in a crisis?
"We thought we could depend on industry to perform these kinds of functions," Lt. Gen. Charles S. Mahan, the Army's logistics chief, said in an interview.
One thing became clear in Iraq. "You cannot order civilians into a war zone," said Linda K. Theis, an official at the Army's Field Support Command, which oversees some civilian logistics contracts. "People can sign up to that -- but they can also back out."
As a result, soldiers lived in the mud, then the heat and dust. Back home, a group of mothers organized a drive to buy and ship air conditioners to their sons. One Army captain asked a reporter to send a box of nails and screws to repair his living quarters and latrines.
For almost a decade, the military has been shifting its supply and support personnel into combat jobs and hiring defense contractors to do the rest. This shift has accelerated under relentless pressure from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to make the force lighter and more agile.
"It's a profound change in the way the military operates," said Peter W. Singer, author of a new book, "Corporate Warriors," a detailed study of civilian contractors. He estimates that over the past decade, there has been a ten-fold increase in the number of contract civilians performing work the military used to do itself.
"When you turn these services over to the private market, you lose a measure of control over them," said Singer, a foreign policy researcher at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.
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