Corporate barbarians inside the gate

Ralph Peters exposes the corporatist cancer eating away the military from inside:

Our troops are doing a magnificent job in a miserable environment – despite the lack of support from Pentagon civilians who never paid any dues except to their country clubs. The Rummycrats who insisted we could occupy Iraq with two Boy Scout troops and a repainted pickup truck would not listen to any common-sense warnings from those in uniform, or in the intelligence agencies, or in the State Department, or anywhere else.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's button-down hit men, each a champion of arrogance, saw what they wanted to see. And they paid far more attention to working political spin and handing out reconstruction contracts to favored corporations than they did to assessing what our soldiers might really need in the aftermath of war – or how many soldiers might be needed.

Now, their cherished contractors are lagging badly – to the outrage of our military in Baghdad. Underpaid, overworked soldiers are picking up the slack for Bechtel, Halliburton and the rest of the corporate vultures.

He then goes on to point out how taxpayers are being robbed by these people:

When honest budget managers in the services calculate the transition of any uniformed job to a private contractor, their working assumption is that the contract employee will cost the Pentagon $100,000 a year. A sergeant barely makes a quarter of that, and a private hardly a fifth – including benefits.

You, the taxpayer, are being cheated outrageously in the name of an ideologically driven crusade to reduce the size of government. This is corporate welfare that has nothing to do with the welfare of our troops. And guess what? Most of those contractors disappear when the bullets start flying.

Working in the technology industry, I've seen rampant use of outsourcing. It is a horrendous waste of resources. Organizations do this to reduce their headcount, which looks good on the books. But the cost easily exceeds three times what having the work done in-house would cost. And that includes benefits. Long-term knowledge is also lost, damaging the corporate memory.

As bad as this is, when government adopts outsourcing it is even more wasteful. Not only do they lose any internal competence, but any time something needs to change it invariably is redone from scratch. No strategic planning ever occurs, and nothing ever gets re-used or upgraded. Government has a tendency to go to the consultant and ask what should be done. It is no surprise that almost always the answer is whatever makes the most money for the consultant with the least amount of effort.

Outsourcing (privatization) in government could very well be the source of the most waste of tax dollars. When Republicans talk about less government, they do not mean spending less. They want less people in government and more dollars to corporations.

(via Off the Kuff)

kherr @ 23:47 CDT | link | war