A Military Force Turned Upside Down

[rangerrebew]

A Military Force Turned Upside Down
No other military pays three times more for a contractor to assist each of its soldiers.

Monday, May 19, 2025  1 min read
By: Bing West
 

No other military pays three times more for a contractor to assist each of its soldiers.
About 650,000 civilian contractors provide services to our military. These are not the workers building ships and aircraft. Instead, service contractors perform everyday tasks (e.g., maintain computers, deliver supplies, train the troops, etc.)

Service contractors are employed not as individuals but under massive contracts labelled communications or logistic support or some such. The Pentagon doesn’t know who the individuals are, let alone how to audit performance or value added. These contracts total about $270 billion, a quarter of the entire Defense budget.

Each service contractor annually costs about $430,000. Yes, you read correctly. Half a million civilians are employed at almost half a million dollars each to support the daily tasks of our soldiers and sailors. Not even Lewis Carroll could concoct a believable fable using those gargantuan real-world numbers.

https://www.hoover.org/research/military-force-turned-upside-down

[DefiantMassRINO]

The contracting outfit keeps most of the $430,000.  Government bidding and procurement process increases the cost of services because of all the upfront compliance, security, and investigative work required.

There's hundreds, if not thousands of man hours of groundwork required, just to apply, bid, and respond to RFP's.

Some of that $430,000 is probably re-couping some of the upfront sunk costs that they lose when they fail to win a bid or contract.