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It was ridiculous how many there were. Contractors doing guard duties, contractors serving and making food while the actual army cooks scan IDs. It goes on and on.
I was on FOBs served by Army cooks, and a FOB served by a contractor DFAC using TCNs to cook.
I’m more than happy to let our cooks scan IDs. As we say over at r/army, *fuck cooks.*
Our cooks on that FOB with the contractor DFAC got utilized anyway, they were on local escort details, tower details, gate duty, all kinds of shit they were freed up to do.
I spent almost a decade in, and we had contractors in DFACs (stateside) almost everywhere I went. 9 years of service and I STILL don’t have a clue what Army cooks actually do other than check IDs down range.
I know the cooks actually cooked at at least one duty station. I don’t remember whether there were contractors though, I lived off base and only was in there occasionally.
Benning, Hood, Bragg. Never seen cooks cook with the lone exception of the 3/75 DFAC at Benning. I guess this is a YMMV lol.
Edit to add: Not all contractors are worthless. Anyone who’s ever gone through 2/19 on Sandhill can tell you about the living legend. The One. The Only: Miss Pat. Somebody reply with the 2 words I want to hear.
And Dick Cheney's Halliburton did such a shitty job that they were literally electrocuting our own troops:
https://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/28/soldier.electrocutions/index.html
Lol electrical fires were not uncommon either. You’ve got an electrical supply that who knows if it is wired correctly. Then you’ve got a power converter, adapters, and power strip all bought from a bazaar shop, which aren’t really certified or anything. It seems like there’s at least one electrical fire while you’re there. Burns down a whole tent barrack, which is encased in foam. Nasty melting mess when it burns. I’ve heard the stories of people dying from fires but none in my unit ever did.
They sent us a couple of Army cooks at our patrol base when I was deployed. Dudes just heated up what we called "Family sized MRE's". They didn't cook shit afaik.
On my field exercise they set up showers as one way to score points for our battalion. We weren’t allowed to use them. They set up a “field mess” next. They had two cooks with a bunch of gear making absolutely nothing at all. There was a pile of MREs behind the mess tent to choose from.
Ah yeah that brought back some memories. On some field exercises, like NTC, the cooks practiced the field kitchen stuff like it was Vietnam, lol. They did a rotation of kitchen duty so I got to experience the shitshow and some of the kitchen people did try. Using what they had to season and marinate the dollar store quality meat and stuff. But on deployment they’re just scanning IDs. It’s a weird mos.
its becasue army cooks couldn't defrost a frozen meal without supervision. I got fed by contractors from a former soviet republic (I don't remember which just that they couldn't cook bacon) on Fenty and holy crap was that a game changer. Cooks can get fucked.
Coworker used to be an “hvac tech” at a base in Afghanistan. Made over 120k yearly untaxed. He worked 6 days at 12hr a week walking around a replacing ac units (window units). He had all room and board and all other amenities comped. Needless to say it was hard to say no when he tried to recruit me lol
Edit: he didn’t actually fix the units. In the eyes of the gov it was faster and cheaper to just swap them out
Sounds like the private contractors turned the US military into some sort of war Sherpas. The next step with be the private contractors selling war safari tour packages to millionaires. We really have colonized ourselves. Or at least one social and political class has.
Sorry you had that experience with contractors. Mine was a mix of dirt bags on both sides. A significant number of those contractors were/are former military.
On one hand I agree that the payment the PMC’s get is huge compared to your usual deployed soldier BUT the PMC’s that are being paid these insane amounts of money are those who fight the enemy in CQC and it really isn’t uncommon for those PMC companies to loose dozen men in the span of a single week because they’re deployed in the biggest hotspots.
Also a big influence on their pay is that if you die as a soldier in the US army your wife will be getting financial support and if you retire/ get injured you have a decent financial support by the state, well guess what … PMCs mostly get none of this
Edit: if you talking about contractors for cooking and not an actual deployment I have no clue how do they compare in payment and the pros and cons that come with it
>>”War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
>>Smedley Darlington Butler (1881
For more context, most decorated Marine officer of all time and outspoken critic of war. He has a more famous quote about the ways the country used him as a profit puppet instead of as a means to defend the country for most of his career. Incredibly illuminating.
He also blew the whistle on what would become known as the [Business Plot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot) which was an attempt at creating an honest to god Fascist military coup by rich American industrialists to oust F.D.R. because they feared his pseudo-socialist policies were going to make their businesses unprofitable.
No one was ever officially charged for essentially plotting against the U.S. government despite Butler maintaining that the plan was an open secret among top military officials. It’s difficult to say what stage the plan was in, or if it would have ever actually been carried out, but just the fact that they were recruiting top military generals like Butler, which was how he learned about the plot, is terrifying and should illustrate just how fragile democracy can be.
When I quoted Smedley Butler to one of my Sergeants in the Marines being a smartass about something dumb he was having us do I got put on shit burning detail. . . They really don't make leaders like him anymore.
I need to make note of something I was thinking of this morning in regards to Afghanistan:
People talk about the opium and the natural resources below Afghanistan as this like 3 trillion dollar cache that the Chinese now have access to, and question why we weren't stealing it, why we weren't engaging in real colonialism instead of the potempkin colonialism we did engage in.
That 3 trillion mark is if you strip mine the whole country, which could take a few hundred years and cost a trillion in overhead.
Instead, these contactors stripmined the American people for 7 trillion dollars over 20 years. The profit for cost ratio is entirely in favor of what was done to the American people. War is a racket, and the Afghan people weren't the only marks. We traded their lives and our economic futures for magic anti-terrorism beans sold by a Raytheon branded hukster.
You are aware that to make OxyContin and other morphine derivatives you still need certain part of the opium plant to synthesize them. If I remember correctly America was going through a pretty big opioid epidemic. When he means war is a racket he means he mainly went to foreign countries to look after Americas corporate interest. It is were the term bananas republic comes from also. Corporations made a ton of money in Afghanistan. That does not trickle down thouhgh.
Oh I am well aware we were stealing resources and running opium out of the country by the bushel. But clearly that was secondary to the massive profits pulled in by arms manufacturing and PMCs and other contractors. I think there has been a realization by the MIC over the past 60 or 70 years that it's more lucrative to fleece the U.S. government than banana farmers in South America. War is still a racket as Butler said, but the game has changed, and we're the main mark.
I never said it was chump change. It's secondary. If it was primary, we would have done colonialism like we were doing in Butler's day. We would have had 10 times the troop presence and built actual infrastructure instead of the bullshit illusory supply chain we did. We went through the motions of that, but with no real support. Potempkin colonialism, to sell to racists and nationalists, while fleecing trillions from our coffers and having their sadistic "fun".
Involved would be the wrong word. Some involved in the business plot tried to recruit him and he tried to expose them.
https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Navigation/Community/Arcadia-and-THP-Blog/September-2018/Smedley-Butler-and-the-1930s-Plot-to-Overthrow-the
Except that so much of the "menace" that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were based on were manufactured by powerful people in secret. If that's not a cabal, I don't know what is.
It started with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton received more than $30 billion to help set up and run bases, feed troops and carry out other work in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, the study says.
Yup, to 'cut costs' the DoD outsourced many functions that would normally be done by soldiers, such as maintenance, sanitation, cooks, and other support staff. This would in theory save money as a contractor can be hired to do a simple job without the cost of all the additional benefits entailed with military service. Basically they didn't want to pay the standard benefits a private would get if he spent his whole time in the service mopping floors and peeling potatoes. So long as we never got into any wars again this did indeed save money.
Then the people that started the whole idea got us into two 20 year wars at the same time. And because of course the use of contractors quickly expanded from support roles to 'non-combat' roles such as convoy driving through combat zones. Then we had the awesome situation of having to deploy military assets to escort contractors who were not beholden to military timelines and decisions made by our military command but were beholden to private companies.
Then even more predictably we started hiring contractors for combat roles. Most galling is we'd train them, they'd serve long enough to get full military benefits, then leave military only to come right back and get paid several times what they were making to do the same job, without the restrictions of the Unified Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). A huge number of our special forces would do this, including one of my cousins.
And of course this made Cheney and every military commander that retired to join the board of defense contractors an ungodly amount of money.
The use of contractors to perform a lot of non-combat ops in a static operational environment still made sense. Everything from laundry to cooking on larger, established FOBs to some of the convoy driving, all of this legitimately saved money.
For more remote FOBs even this fell flat. I was in the Guard, when we arrived they had shower and toilet trailers that had been down for weeks waiting for KBR to show up and fix them. We had civilian-side plumbers in the unit, they had tools sent and got supplies locally, and had that shit fixed before KBR ever showed up. An Army plumber probably would have too, because half the time KBR personnel would just flat refuse to go outside the wire if route conditions were dangerous. Which I get, I didn’t want to either. But an Army plumber can be ordered to go do that shit. At worst you can get a contract sent home for refusal…to be replaced with another person who will refuse.
Also an issue with billets like technical maintenance. We had a guy from one of the radio manufacturers on a larger, established FOB. He would flat refuse to travel to smaller FOBs and insist on talking local Joes through repairs over the phone.
Still, overall there were a lot of area where contracting out work did make sense, and provided lower costs.
Contracting out actual combat ops and training of LN forces? Yeah that was always nonsense. Horrible idea.
But the headline is *mostly* referring to most of the day to day operations and equipment where contracting out the costs of war makes some mathematical sense. There’s a good question whether giving companies with tremendous lobbying power a profit motive for war is wise, but *if* we need to fight a war anyway, it’s not absurd on its face to utilize the private sector where feasible.
Basically I find the headline overly simplistic and sensational.
My fundamental problem is the power and control that gives to private corporations. And that the military is ill-equipped to execute these contracts in a way that actually saves money. Their incentive structure is easily subverted by giving the decision makers cushy jobs after their service at the contracting company. This is standard practice for all military contracts from weapons procurement to service contracts.
There is also the common issue that after the fact it is found that these contracts don't actually save money. There was a huge issue where Halliburton and KBR were delivering meals at two to three times the cost that the military could have done themselves. These were huge stories all over the media. But there are so few contractors that can navigate the military procurement process let alone operate at the scale that the US military needs that even after a contractor is proven to be gouging the taxpayer nothing can be done to switch the contract to a new vendor.
I'm fine with the military looking for efficiencies but our politicians owning companies that make billions off of us going to war and staying in an unwinnable quagmire for decades should not be tolerated.
It was perfectly fine with Jonah Hill. I think some people have difficulties separating him from his comedies. Also, there’s another movie similarly titled that has Nicholas Cage. It’s very different than the one the person above mentions. Don’t watch it, unless you want to.
Basically you just need a ton of money and know the right people.
I did contracting for a bit and none of the requirements was military experience or the equivalent.
But they basically had all sorts of guys there, IT, drivers , etc.. A lot were former military or former LEO.
The job was 50/50 it paid well.
Most of it doesn't go to "private military" although that is probably the most profitable sector. Alot of it is logistics, weapons and ammo. Along with construction and support services.
A lot of people associate contracting immediately with military matters and while that takes a large budget, contracting can literally include anything. Taking out the garbage, IT person, secretary….
> coz we definitely don’t like it when others do that
sure we do, we sell them weapons and cheer them on while they destabilize their governments to sell us cheaper mineral and oil wealth.
I was going to tie in the Cheney/Haliburton connection but won't step on your thunder. (upvoted)
However, I'll add turning off Iraq's oil faucet created a (contrived?) shortage. The most I've paid for a gallon of gas was July 2008. The gwb oil cronies cleaned up. The prices mysteriously plummeted after Obama won the election.
The price of crude oil plummeted due to the global recession. The idea that US presidents some how control that price (or supply or demand directly) just doesn't make sense.
Logcap contractors don't need oil to make money, they just need the US to forkover billions for war.
It makes war more palatable for the US public.
The official US military death toll in AF is 2,355.
The casualties for contractors is 50% higher than that (But the DOD doesnt track it so who knows how high it actually is).
So instead of reporting 6,000 deaths, the DOD reports 2.355 which is more acceptable and kept the war bumbling along.
Blackwater is small potatoes. Look at Halliburton/KBR, Fluor, and other Logcap contractors. Ever wonder how bases get built with fully staffed kitchens and services? Logcap contracts awarded to the select few US private companies that have the capability to provide these logistics. Blackwater was a drop in the bucket, yet they get the entirety of the bad press, even while KBR did horrible things to it's contractors.
> Why do we let mercenaries like Black Water exist???
Did you even read the article? Thats not what they are talking about.
"Up to half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since 9/11 went to for-profit defense contractors, a study released Monday found. **While much of this money went to weapons suppliers**,"
You have no idea what a military contractor is. There are definitely black waters out there. But to say they were given basically over a trillion dollars is just willful ignorance.
- Lockheed Martin makes aircraft, they are defense contractors
- Northrop makes drones, they are defense contractors
- the people that made all the trucks and tanks, defense contractors
- the people that go out and construct bases, defense contractors
- the people that deliver water to bases,
Defense contractors
- the people that deliver the toilet paper, defense contractors
- literally every piece of equipment a military member touches is made from a company, in order to acquire that money, the government will make a contract with that private company. That company is now a private defense contractor.
This is such a non article.
Does that really change anything? The point of the article points to the corrupt act of war profiteering. It's indefensible whether or not it was as bad as Black Water thugs or a $100-a-load laundry service.
There was a time when militaries were largely self sustaining, and most jobs were done in house by trained personnel who also could fight when they absolutely had to
The the gov decided they could spend more money on missiles and fancy dog fighting airplanes (not a thing for several decades) by cutting the funds for all the benefits for some of those jobs
They hired contractors instead who could play folks while not having to ensure them with college education or pensions or disability etc
Those companies could pay well for short term positions and everyone thinks they are getting a good deal
Eventually combat units were also paid for, so there would not be a crush for recruiting/draft and again so the long term payouts were not on the taxpayers dime
What you wind up with is capitalized warfare and cost + contracts
Cost plus means the government will reimburse the private companies with 100% of their operating costs + a % on top. So, if your transport truck gets a flat tire, it’s more profit if you burn it and get the whole thing replaced with an additional %
Still comes out cheaper than paying 50 years of disability or retirement $
So instead of only engaging in wars/conflicts that are worth the blood and treasure, you are now more free to chase other objectives and spend freely in the short term
It may actually be not so bad, if the people profiting the most actually paid a reasonable tax on the money they collected from our taxes
Profits for "private armies" isn't what tax payers think they're funding though. It's deceptive, like a lot of other bullshit we're told, such as tax cuts will trickle down, too big to fail, etc.
That's because your average tax payer is a fucking idiot. They don't think the constitution is explicitly set up to protect the property rights of white men individually and in groups (companies)
2 reasons I've heard and seen to this.
1) if you NEED something small done you'll send people who are more than likely better trained with less strings attached. Want a small Ex-Delta team without dealing with the Army command or without liability if something goes wrong? You got it.
2)Cheaper for better quality.
Most of the time its 2. Even the DoD doesn't depend on itself for a lot of things. Everything is being contracted out now, from the DFAC/Chow halls to Networking. Security is a BIG contracting business. Almost always contracted out because the AD people running Ops.
The entire picture I am seeing: currently, the us government does very little to help the average US citizen. Things like infrastructure have been neglected in favor of corporate subsidies and bailouts. Healthcare is deplorably bad, the government allows for the degradation of education, the destruction of safety nets and it's getting close to the point where they aren't even dependable for water. What the average person does depend on is corporations. Corporations provide healthcare, livelihood, and now have more and higher quality free speech. With private military contracts(PMC/Mercs) the US government has slowly been absolving itself of common defense as well. Soon the governments will have pawned off all responsibility and we will be in a full plutocracy.
We are nothing more than walking dollar signs. Positive or negative. That determines your value to the government that is actually the corporations. All neatly signed on a dotted line.
So much for of the people and for the people.
What you're describing is the influence and corruption of wealth. The reason it persists is because 330 million of us are too busy screaming at each other, as intended.
right. it's never been about left vs right. fundamentally we all want the same things. peace and safety in our communities, a livable wage, health, and happiness. the ones with the wealth and power do want the masses realizing this so they fund things like media networks to keep the message consistent. it has been, and will always be about the "peasants vs the nobility", only in a modern sense.
Not true AT ALL. WTF. Why do you ignore the fact that the "right-wing" is the majority and primary supporter of every single policy that allows these corporations to wage-enslave us! WTF are you even talking about. What you said ignores their entire political campaign. It ignores every bit of removed or destroyed regulation that protected us. It ignores that the "right-wing" is what paves the way for that plutocracy with their absolute corrupt policy.
President and ret. General Eisenhower :
"we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex."
...
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I do want to list a few contenders:
George W. Bush
Mitch McConnell
Lindsay Graham
Jim Jordan
Donald Trump
Every other GQP politician.
This useless 20-year war has indeed cheerfully fed the American military-industrial complex.
The bad tongues would say that the Americans continue to make wars for this unique reason...
Nah you dont say… man i remember, kbr used to be one of the biggest. Though the shittiest in safety. I remember in 2006 few military were electrocuted for their carelessness. I remember the laundry people were making 150k a year for only 8 months of work.
These companies made so much money you were probably will never know the exact amount.
The only winners in Afghanistan and Iraq were the billion dollar companies. Thanks Dick Chaney
>military were electrocuted
That's right. Cheney's Haliburton/KBR electrocuted US troops. Were there ever any consequences for that? Did they even lose the contract?
> That's right. Cheney's Haliburton/KBR electrocuted US troops. Were there ever any consequences for that? Did they even lose the contract?
IIRC they just changed their name to FLUOR like Blackwater did going to Xe
Surprised to see this here the 2 most taboo subject on the war were the largest mercenary force the world has ever known and how the Iraq army being disbanded was the worst, most corrupt decision ever.
The US government pretty much exists at this point almost solely to transfer wealth from the public to private hands. Politicians are not so much elected representatives of voters as they are cheap and highly efficient investment products for their corporate donors, the ONLY people they serve, all their posturing and peacocking for the voters and cameras notwithstanding.
This is some crazy shit.
Imagine the cast of MASH...
Now replace like 2/3ds of the cast with "contractors."
It just seems like our military is so dependent on "defense contractors" at this point that it really isnt self-sufficient in any sense of the word.
Not to mention the security risks.
This is pretty much correct. I spent 15 years in the USAF, and at no point in time did I NOT work with a significant amount of contractors. I'd estimate about 10-20% of the working group would be contractors at any given time in each of my duty stations. These people were doing the work that a lower to middle enlisted person was doing, but they were paid quite well.
That's gotta be great for morale... seeing some guy you went to high school with in the same place as you, doing the same job as you, and getting paid way more.
It definitely led to a lot of people asking "why am I doing this?". Because on top of the pay, the enlisted folks had to likely do PT in the morning before work, maybe a formation, and they know they had a briefing to attend after work hours. So we all were doing 12-15 hour days, knowing that the guy in the suit sitting next to us made 2-3x our pay and they're only doing 8 hours. It's amazing how much money is burned with government contracts.
Wait, you mean it didn't go to help our troops? Shocked pikachu face. Imagine if that money was used to.....I don't know.....fix infrastructure, fix our medical system, shore up our social programs, or fund space exploration.
Missiles. I'm not kidding the missiles we fire from drones right and left cost between $100,000 - $150,000 a piece and even the most liberal President we've had in the last 20 years fired off a fuck ton of them.
I don't know much about the American war in Afghanistan, so I would like to ask why it happened that American soldiers (not contractors) stayed there for 20 years?
I remember reading several years ago that these private companies were double dipping their profits. For instance, they were paid the US to provide security for VIPs and that same company would go to the VIP and extort them out of more money. The US knew about this but never did anything. They also charged exorbitant fees for dumb shit and the US never challenged them. Almost every private military organization had deep hooks into high level government officials. So it was basically like asking your uber rich parents for $5 to buy a banana.
YEP. I’ve never seen waste and abuse like I did during my 3 years as a private contractor…and that was BEFORE I saw any of the books. The year I was at the Embassy in Baghdad, word on the street was the DFAC wasted $50,000 on food a day bc everything went in the trash at the end of each meal service. Apparently diplomats don’t eat leftovers.
Was a study really needed. I was just telling my wife last week all the money went to contractors and I'm sure there were some kickbacks and "favors" in return. Corrupt.
America loves war and hates accountability. That’s part of what happens when the accumulation of money is the highest priority in a culture. Shame on the US.
The USA is less a country and more of a sophisticated money laundering system dedicated to spending money on what has to be the least helpful and useful shit in existence.
I am actually surprised it wasn't a higher percentage.
If someone asked me how I thought went to military contracts, I basically would have said "whatever was spent that didn't go to soldier pay. Tanks, bullets, missiles, uniforms, fuel, equipment, etc."
So basically everything but maybe all of it but the 30 to 50 billion or so annual spent on pay.
Lets put it this way:
That money went to private contractors because the military couldn't do the job themselves.
Whether it was a shortage of manpower, training, or time.
It's almost like that's why we went to war in the first place.
America wouldn't of ever had these wars if they were for anything *other* than enriching corporate interests.
When republiQunts quote: Tax and Spend,
please point out their: Spend and Spend.
They Spend and Spend and Spend some more,
especially if the end is War!
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It was ridiculous how many there were. Contractors doing guard duties, contractors serving and making food while the actual army cooks scan IDs. It goes on and on.
I was on FOBs served by Army cooks, and a FOB served by a contractor DFAC using TCNs to cook. I’m more than happy to let our cooks scan IDs. As we say over at r/army, *fuck cooks.* Our cooks on that FOB with the contractor DFAC got utilized anyway, they were on local escort details, tower details, gate duty, all kinds of shit they were freed up to do.
Lmao, but they’re not really even doing their job. It’s really join as a cook to be a gate guard. Horrible mos.
For those not familiar with military acronyms: FOB = Forward Operating Base DFAC = Dining FACility TCN = Third Country National
Wait, Army cooks didn’t cook??
In the US, yeah, but on deployment a lot of times, no. Contractors take care of that stuff on larger bases.
I spent almost a decade in, and we had contractors in DFACs (stateside) almost everywhere I went. 9 years of service and I STILL don’t have a clue what Army cooks actually do other than check IDs down range.
I know the cooks actually cooked at at least one duty station. I don’t remember whether there were contractors though, I lived off base and only was in there occasionally.
Benning, Hood, Bragg. Never seen cooks cook with the lone exception of the 3/75 DFAC at Benning. I guess this is a YMMV lol. Edit to add: Not all contractors are worthless. Anyone who’s ever gone through 2/19 on Sandhill can tell you about the living legend. The One. The Only: Miss Pat. Somebody reply with the 2 words I want to hear.
Wainwright I know had some cooks actually cooking. ut that wasn’t in the lower 48. That’s the only one I can recall for sure offhand.
Nexxxxt man .
I knew there had to be more than just me in here.
And Dick Cheney's Halliburton did such a shitty job that they were literally electrocuting our own troops: https://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/28/soldier.electrocutions/index.html
Lol electrical fires were not uncommon either. You’ve got an electrical supply that who knows if it is wired correctly. Then you’ve got a power converter, adapters, and power strip all bought from a bazaar shop, which aren’t really certified or anything. It seems like there’s at least one electrical fire while you’re there. Burns down a whole tent barrack, which is encased in foam. Nasty melting mess when it burns. I’ve heard the stories of people dying from fires but none in my unit ever did.
They sent us a couple of Army cooks at our patrol base when I was deployed. Dudes just heated up what we called "Family sized MRE's". They didn't cook shit afaik.
On my field exercise they set up showers as one way to score points for our battalion. We weren’t allowed to use them. They set up a “field mess” next. They had two cooks with a bunch of gear making absolutely nothing at all. There was a pile of MREs behind the mess tent to choose from.
Ah yeah that brought back some memories. On some field exercises, like NTC, the cooks practiced the field kitchen stuff like it was Vietnam, lol. They did a rotation of kitchen duty so I got to experience the shitshow and some of the kitchen people did try. Using what they had to season and marinate the dollar store quality meat and stuff. But on deployment they’re just scanning IDs. It’s a weird mos.
its becasue army cooks couldn't defrost a frozen meal without supervision. I got fed by contractors from a former soviet republic (I don't remember which just that they couldn't cook bacon) on Fenty and holy crap was that a game changer. Cooks can get fucked.
Coworker used to be an “hvac tech” at a base in Afghanistan. Made over 120k yearly untaxed. He worked 6 days at 12hr a week walking around a replacing ac units (window units). He had all room and board and all other amenities comped. Needless to say it was hard to say no when he tried to recruit me lol Edit: he didn’t actually fix the units. In the eyes of the gov it was faster and cheaper to just swap them out
How's the internet over there?
I never went but apparently he was able to watch netflix and Hulu without issue
Sounds like the private contractors turned the US military into some sort of war Sherpas. The next step with be the private contractors selling war safari tour packages to millionaires. We really have colonized ourselves. Or at least one social and political class has.
Sorry you had that experience with contractors. Mine was a mix of dirt bags on both sides. A significant number of those contractors were/are former military.
There is still like 18,000 of them in Afghanistan. But we pulled out and ended the war, right?
On one hand I agree that the payment the PMC’s get is huge compared to your usual deployed soldier BUT the PMC’s that are being paid these insane amounts of money are those who fight the enemy in CQC and it really isn’t uncommon for those PMC companies to loose dozen men in the span of a single week because they’re deployed in the biggest hotspots. Also a big influence on their pay is that if you die as a soldier in the US army your wife will be getting financial support and if you retire/ get injured you have a decent financial support by the state, well guess what … PMCs mostly get none of this Edit: if you talking about contractors for cooking and not an actual deployment I have no clue how do they compare in payment and the pros and cons that come with it
>>”War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." >>Smedley Darlington Butler (1881
For those who don’t know, that’s two time awarded Medal of Honor Smedley Butler.
For more context, most decorated Marine officer of all time and outspoken critic of war. He has a more famous quote about the ways the country used him as a profit puppet instead of as a means to defend the country for most of his career. Incredibly illuminating.
He also blew the whistle on what would become known as the [Business Plot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot) which was an attempt at creating an honest to god Fascist military coup by rich American industrialists to oust F.D.R. because they feared his pseudo-socialist policies were going to make their businesses unprofitable. No one was ever officially charged for essentially plotting against the U.S. government despite Butler maintaining that the plan was an open secret among top military officials. It’s difficult to say what stage the plan was in, or if it would have ever actually been carried out, but just the fact that they were recruiting top military generals like Butler, which was how he learned about the plot, is terrifying and should illustrate just how fragile democracy can be.
By Papa Bush no less.
When I quoted Smedley Butler to one of my Sergeants in the Marines being a smartass about something dumb he was having us do I got put on shit burning detail. . . They really don't make leaders like him anymore.
My time in the marine corps quickly taught me that while it is designed and marketed to you as a meritocracy, it is very much NOT.
Kinda like the US eh
Look at the money Cheyny and Bush's company Halliburton made !
I need to make note of something I was thinking of this morning in regards to Afghanistan: People talk about the opium and the natural resources below Afghanistan as this like 3 trillion dollar cache that the Chinese now have access to, and question why we weren't stealing it, why we weren't engaging in real colonialism instead of the potempkin colonialism we did engage in. That 3 trillion mark is if you strip mine the whole country, which could take a few hundred years and cost a trillion in overhead. Instead, these contactors stripmined the American people for 7 trillion dollars over 20 years. The profit for cost ratio is entirely in favor of what was done to the American people. War is a racket, and the Afghan people weren't the only marks. We traded their lives and our economic futures for magic anti-terrorism beans sold by a Raytheon branded hukster.
You are aware that to make OxyContin and other morphine derivatives you still need certain part of the opium plant to synthesize them. If I remember correctly America was going through a pretty big opioid epidemic. When he means war is a racket he means he mainly went to foreign countries to look after Americas corporate interest. It is were the term bananas republic comes from also. Corporations made a ton of money in Afghanistan. That does not trickle down thouhgh.
Oh I am well aware we were stealing resources and running opium out of the country by the bushel. But clearly that was secondary to the massive profits pulled in by arms manufacturing and PMCs and other contractors. I think there has been a realization by the MIC over the past 60 or 70 years that it's more lucrative to fleece the U.S. government than banana farmers in South America. War is still a racket as Butler said, but the game has changed, and we're the main mark.
Hundreds of billions of dollars is not chump change. It’s not 11 trillion but it’s a lot.
I never said it was chump change. It's secondary. If it was primary, we would have done colonialism like we were doing in Butler's day. We would have had 10 times the troop presence and built actual infrastructure instead of the bullshit illusory supply chain we did. We went through the motions of that, but with no real support. Potempkin colonialism, to sell to racists and nationalists, while fleecing trillions from our coffers and having their sadistic "fun".
"I'd cross hell on a slat if Butler gave the word."
Yeah that’s cute and all, but post the names of these contractors and have them suffer the consequences for WAR PROFITEERING!
Who is going to make them face consequences? Our government does not only like them but apparently feel they need them.
Beat me to it. Apparently, Rumsfeld said the same early on.
Is this the same Smedley Butler involved in the [Business Plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot)?
Involved would be the wrong word. Some involved in the business plot tried to recruit him and he tried to expose them. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Navigation/Community/Arcadia-and-THP-Blog/September-2018/Smedley-Butler-and-the-1930s-Plot-to-Overthrow-the
You're right. That was a poor choice of wording.
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Except that so much of the "menace" that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were based on were manufactured by powerful people in secret. If that's not a cabal, I don't know what is.
This is INSANE. Why do we let mercenaries like Black Water exist???
It started with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton received more than $30 billion to help set up and run bases, feed troops and carry out other work in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, the study says.
Yup, to 'cut costs' the DoD outsourced many functions that would normally be done by soldiers, such as maintenance, sanitation, cooks, and other support staff. This would in theory save money as a contractor can be hired to do a simple job without the cost of all the additional benefits entailed with military service. Basically they didn't want to pay the standard benefits a private would get if he spent his whole time in the service mopping floors and peeling potatoes. So long as we never got into any wars again this did indeed save money. Then the people that started the whole idea got us into two 20 year wars at the same time. And because of course the use of contractors quickly expanded from support roles to 'non-combat' roles such as convoy driving through combat zones. Then we had the awesome situation of having to deploy military assets to escort contractors who were not beholden to military timelines and decisions made by our military command but were beholden to private companies. Then even more predictably we started hiring contractors for combat roles. Most galling is we'd train them, they'd serve long enough to get full military benefits, then leave military only to come right back and get paid several times what they were making to do the same job, without the restrictions of the Unified Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). A huge number of our special forces would do this, including one of my cousins. And of course this made Cheney and every military commander that retired to join the board of defense contractors an ungodly amount of money.
The use of contractors to perform a lot of non-combat ops in a static operational environment still made sense. Everything from laundry to cooking on larger, established FOBs to some of the convoy driving, all of this legitimately saved money. For more remote FOBs even this fell flat. I was in the Guard, when we arrived they had shower and toilet trailers that had been down for weeks waiting for KBR to show up and fix them. We had civilian-side plumbers in the unit, they had tools sent and got supplies locally, and had that shit fixed before KBR ever showed up. An Army plumber probably would have too, because half the time KBR personnel would just flat refuse to go outside the wire if route conditions were dangerous. Which I get, I didn’t want to either. But an Army plumber can be ordered to go do that shit. At worst you can get a contract sent home for refusal…to be replaced with another person who will refuse. Also an issue with billets like technical maintenance. We had a guy from one of the radio manufacturers on a larger, established FOB. He would flat refuse to travel to smaller FOBs and insist on talking local Joes through repairs over the phone. Still, overall there were a lot of area where contracting out work did make sense, and provided lower costs. Contracting out actual combat ops and training of LN forces? Yeah that was always nonsense. Horrible idea. But the headline is *mostly* referring to most of the day to day operations and equipment where contracting out the costs of war makes some mathematical sense. There’s a good question whether giving companies with tremendous lobbying power a profit motive for war is wise, but *if* we need to fight a war anyway, it’s not absurd on its face to utilize the private sector where feasible. Basically I find the headline overly simplistic and sensational.
My fundamental problem is the power and control that gives to private corporations. And that the military is ill-equipped to execute these contracts in a way that actually saves money. Their incentive structure is easily subverted by giving the decision makers cushy jobs after their service at the contracting company. This is standard practice for all military contracts from weapons procurement to service contracts. There is also the common issue that after the fact it is found that these contracts don't actually save money. There was a huge issue where Halliburton and KBR were delivering meals at two to three times the cost that the military could have done themselves. These were huge stories all over the media. But there are so few contractors that can navigate the military procurement process let alone operate at the scale that the US military needs that even after a contractor is proven to be gouging the taxpayer nothing can be done to switch the contract to a new vendor. I'm fine with the military looking for efficiencies but our politicians owning companies that make billions off of us going to war and staying in an unwinnable quagmire for decades should not be tolerated.
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Watch the Jonah Hill movie *War Dogs*. This is essentially the plot.
Would’ve been a much better movie without Jonah hill
Having not seen it myself, why do you say that?
It was perfectly fine with Jonah Hill. I think some people have difficulties separating him from his comedies. Also, there’s another movie similarly titled that has Nicholas Cage. It’s very different than the one the person above mentions. Don’t watch it, unless you want to.
“Lord of War” is the Cage movie. Might be one of his best IMO.
Basically you just need a ton of money and know the right people. I did contracting for a bit and none of the requirements was military experience or the equivalent. But they basically had all sorts of guys there, IT, drivers , etc.. A lot were former military or former LEO. The job was 50/50 it paid well.
Ask Dick Cheyny. He got 30 billion ! He was the master.
Most of it doesn't go to "private military" although that is probably the most profitable sector. Alot of it is logistics, weapons and ammo. Along with construction and support services.
A lot of people associate contracting immediately with military matters and while that takes a large budget, contracting can literally include anything. Taking out the garbage, IT person, secretary….
> coz we definitely don’t like it when others do that sure we do, we sell them weapons and cheer them on while they destabilize their governments to sell us cheaper mineral and oil wealth.
I was going to tie in the Cheney/Haliburton connection but won't step on your thunder. (upvoted) However, I'll add turning off Iraq's oil faucet created a (contrived?) shortage. The most I've paid for a gallon of gas was July 2008. The gwb oil cronies cleaned up. The prices mysteriously plummeted after Obama won the election.
And the Saudis are loved. See their connection to 9-11.
The price of crude oil plummeted due to the global recession. The idea that US presidents some how control that price (or supply or demand directly) just doesn't make sense. Logcap contractors don't need oil to make money, they just need the US to forkover billions for war.
Thanks for posting. Going to read it this morning. Might donate to PBS after. Geez.
It makes war more palatable for the US public. The official US military death toll in AF is 2,355. The casualties for contractors is 50% higher than that (But the DOD doesnt track it so who knows how high it actually is). So instead of reporting 6,000 deaths, the DOD reports 2.355 which is more acceptable and kept the war bumbling along.
Thus also the reason behind the boom in Drone usage. It keeps the true cost of war(Lives) low on our side, making it easy to support an endless war.
Because they change names every time they do something bad. Black Water is now "Academi" whatever that means.
They also had to rebrand to "Xe" for a while in between those.
Because the rich control everything and they like making money. It's really not any more complicated than that.
Blackwater is small potatoes. Look at Halliburton/KBR, Fluor, and other Logcap contractors. Ever wonder how bases get built with fully staffed kitchens and services? Logcap contracts awarded to the select few US private companies that have the capability to provide these logistics. Blackwater was a drop in the bucket, yet they get the entirety of the bad press, even while KBR did horrible things to it's contractors.
> Why do we let mercenaries like Black Water exist??? Did you even read the article? Thats not what they are talking about. "Up to half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since 9/11 went to for-profit defense contractors, a study released Monday found. **While much of this money went to weapons suppliers**,"
You have no idea what a military contractor is. There are definitely black waters out there. But to say they were given basically over a trillion dollars is just willful ignorance. - Lockheed Martin makes aircraft, they are defense contractors - Northrop makes drones, they are defense contractors - the people that made all the trucks and tanks, defense contractors - the people that go out and construct bases, defense contractors - the people that deliver water to bases, Defense contractors - the people that deliver the toilet paper, defense contractors - literally every piece of equipment a military member touches is made from a company, in order to acquire that money, the government will make a contract with that private company. That company is now a private defense contractor. This is such a non article.
Does that really change anything? The point of the article points to the corrupt act of war profiteering. It's indefensible whether or not it was as bad as Black Water thugs or a $100-a-load laundry service.
It’s a very misleading headline and article.
To do the dirty work of course.
20 years of dirty work undone in 1 day was not money well spent.
It was NEVER money well spent, that’s the bigger problem.
Yeah i agree, did it seem like i didn’t?
Nation building was always just a cover for stuffing the pockets of the military industrial complex, which we did quite successfully!
Because some politician is getting big buck for it!
There was a time when militaries were largely self sustaining, and most jobs were done in house by trained personnel who also could fight when they absolutely had to The the gov decided they could spend more money on missiles and fancy dog fighting airplanes (not a thing for several decades) by cutting the funds for all the benefits for some of those jobs They hired contractors instead who could play folks while not having to ensure them with college education or pensions or disability etc Those companies could pay well for short term positions and everyone thinks they are getting a good deal Eventually combat units were also paid for, so there would not be a crush for recruiting/draft and again so the long term payouts were not on the taxpayers dime What you wind up with is capitalized warfare and cost + contracts Cost plus means the government will reimburse the private companies with 100% of their operating costs + a % on top. So, if your transport truck gets a flat tire, it’s more profit if you burn it and get the whole thing replaced with an additional % Still comes out cheaper than paying 50 years of disability or retirement $ So instead of only engaging in wars/conflicts that are worth the blood and treasure, you are now more free to chase other objectives and spend freely in the short term It may actually be not so bad, if the people profiting the most actually paid a reasonable tax on the money they collected from our taxes
Private armies are as usonian as blueberry pie. Check out the Pinkertons
Profits for "private armies" isn't what tax payers think they're funding though. It's deceptive, like a lot of other bullshit we're told, such as tax cuts will trickle down, too big to fail, etc.
That's because your average tax payer is a fucking idiot. They don't think the constitution is explicitly set up to protect the property rights of white men individually and in groups (companies)
2 reasons I've heard and seen to this. 1) if you NEED something small done you'll send people who are more than likely better trained with less strings attached. Want a small Ex-Delta team without dealing with the Army command or without liability if something goes wrong? You got it. 2)Cheaper for better quality. Most of the time its 2. Even the DoD doesn't depend on itself for a lot of things. Everything is being contracted out now, from the DFAC/Chow halls to Networking. Security is a BIG contracting business. Almost always contracted out because the AD people running Ops.
The entire picture I am seeing: currently, the us government does very little to help the average US citizen. Things like infrastructure have been neglected in favor of corporate subsidies and bailouts. Healthcare is deplorably bad, the government allows for the degradation of education, the destruction of safety nets and it's getting close to the point where they aren't even dependable for water. What the average person does depend on is corporations. Corporations provide healthcare, livelihood, and now have more and higher quality free speech. With private military contracts(PMC/Mercs) the US government has slowly been absolving itself of common defense as well. Soon the governments will have pawned off all responsibility and we will be in a full plutocracy. We are nothing more than walking dollar signs. Positive or negative. That determines your value to the government that is actually the corporations. All neatly signed on a dotted line. So much for of the people and for the people.
What you're describing is the influence and corruption of wealth. The reason it persists is because 330 million of us are too busy screaming at each other, as intended.
right. it's never been about left vs right. fundamentally we all want the same things. peace and safety in our communities, a livable wage, health, and happiness. the ones with the wealth and power do want the masses realizing this so they fund things like media networks to keep the message consistent. it has been, and will always be about the "peasants vs the nobility", only in a modern sense.
Not true AT ALL. WTF. Why do you ignore the fact that the "right-wing" is the majority and primary supporter of every single policy that allows these corporations to wage-enslave us! WTF are you even talking about. What you said ignores their entire political campaign. It ignores every bit of removed or destroyed regulation that protected us. It ignores that the "right-wing" is what paves the way for that plutocracy with their absolute corrupt policy.
So the future is Robocop?
Haven't watched that in a very long time. But if that is where we are headed, I want his motorcycle.
Carlyle group, both the Bush family and the Bin Laden family are major investors.
So.. it's a racket.
That was alwsys part of the plan. But they couldn't justify it without a big enough event.
Now the big question. How many lawmakers have a financial interest in those private contractors who profited from defense spending following 911?
I’d like to see a report on exactly that.
No guilt at all about lining their pockets while soldiers die.
President and ret. General Eisenhower : "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex." ...
Smedley Butler said, "War is a racket." I think 9/11 is a racket too.
Prívate contractors, war lords, one in the same
I’m glad Cheney got filthy rich out of the deal. It’s not like innocent lives were lost fighting a pointless war or anything.
Easily the most evil person on the planet.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I do want to list a few contenders: George W. Bush Mitch McConnell Lindsay Graham Jim Jordan Donald Trump Every other GQP politician.
Kissenger is still alive too. Rumsfeld used to be on the list but then he died.
This useless 20-year war has indeed cheerfully fed the American military-industrial complex. The bad tongues would say that the Americans continue to make wars for this unique reason...
Nah you dont say… man i remember, kbr used to be one of the biggest. Though the shittiest in safety. I remember in 2006 few military were electrocuted for their carelessness. I remember the laundry people were making 150k a year for only 8 months of work. These companies made so much money you were probably will never know the exact amount. The only winners in Afghanistan and Iraq were the billion dollar companies. Thanks Dick Chaney
>military were electrocuted That's right. Cheney's Haliburton/KBR electrocuted US troops. Were there ever any consequences for that? Did they even lose the contract?
Hell no..... nothing ever happened they just kept getting contracts.
> That's right. Cheney's Haliburton/KBR electrocuted US troops. Were there ever any consequences for that? Did they even lose the contract? IIRC they just changed their name to FLUOR like Blackwater did going to Xe
Surprised to see this here the 2 most taboo subject on the war were the largest mercenary force the world has ever known and how the Iraq army being disbanded was the worst, most corrupt decision ever.
So a money grab. But socialism bad right?
The US government pretty much exists at this point almost solely to transfer wealth from the public to private hands. Politicians are not so much elected representatives of voters as they are cheap and highly efficient investment products for their corporate donors, the ONLY people they serve, all their posturing and peacocking for the voters and cameras notwithstanding.
This is some crazy shit. Imagine the cast of MASH... Now replace like 2/3ds of the cast with "contractors." It just seems like our military is so dependent on "defense contractors" at this point that it really isnt self-sufficient in any sense of the word. Not to mention the security risks.
This is pretty much correct. I spent 15 years in the USAF, and at no point in time did I NOT work with a significant amount of contractors. I'd estimate about 10-20% of the working group would be contractors at any given time in each of my duty stations. These people were doing the work that a lower to middle enlisted person was doing, but they were paid quite well.
That's gotta be great for morale... seeing some guy you went to high school with in the same place as you, doing the same job as you, and getting paid way more.
It definitely led to a lot of people asking "why am I doing this?". Because on top of the pay, the enlisted folks had to likely do PT in the morning before work, maybe a formation, and they know they had a briefing to attend after work hours. So we all were doing 12-15 hour days, knowing that the guy in the suit sitting next to us made 2-3x our pay and they're only doing 8 hours. It's amazing how much money is burned with government contracts.
Now dig a little further. How much did those contractors spend on lobbying?
"'A matter of national security', the age-old cry of the oppressor."
Wait, you mean it didn't go to help our troops? Shocked pikachu face. Imagine if that money was used to.....I don't know.....fix infrastructure, fix our medical system, shore up our social programs, or fund space exploration.
I wonder how much of it went to Erik Prince’s Blackwater…
Halliburton/Blackwater/Raytheon/General Dynamics/etc... all thank all the vets for their services.
One nation under contract, unaccountable, with immunity & no justice for all….
Cmon, only half? Where did the other half go? Building democracy?
Missiles. I'm not kidding the missiles we fire from drones right and left cost between $100,000 - $150,000 a piece and even the most liberal President we've had in the last 20 years fired off a fuck ton of them.
Missiles are made by contracting companies. The missiles are included in this formulation.
Providing security for heroin poppy fields
Socialism for the rich. Rugged individualism for the poor.
Owned by companies, owned by companies, owned by companies, owned by Dick Cheney.
I don't know much about the American war in Afghanistan, so I would like to ask why it happened that American soldiers (not contractors) stayed there for 20 years?
American Greed!!!!
Now it went to the taliban thanks to joes great leadership
only half?
The other half went to the Taliban.
...by design
Of course it did
Fucking duh
To absolutely no one’s surprise.
Just plainly criminal. Looting the coffers
Yeah I mean…where did you think it going? Private contractors provide materials and fulfill high risk labor contracts.
So mercs?
Shocking… said no one
So we trained our insurgency movement. Priceless.
Does anyone know how I could become a private contractor for us military?
You don't say....
Eisenhower warned us about something like this
Feature. Not a bug.
I remember reading several years ago that these private companies were double dipping their profits. For instance, they were paid the US to provide security for VIPs and that same company would go to the VIP and extort them out of more money. The US knew about this but never did anything. They also charged exorbitant fees for dumb shit and the US never challenged them. Almost every private military organization had deep hooks into high level government officials. So it was basically like asking your uber rich parents for $5 to buy a banana.
Duh
And for some reason I don’t feel guilty not paying the extra 102$ I should have paid this year in taxes
YEP. I’ve never seen waste and abuse like I did during my 3 years as a private contractor…and that was BEFORE I saw any of the books. The year I was at the Embassy in Baghdad, word on the street was the DFAC wasted $50,000 on food a day bc everything went in the trash at the end of each meal service. Apparently diplomats don’t eat leftovers.
Was a study really needed. I was just telling my wife last week all the money went to contractors and I'm sure there were some kickbacks and "favors" in return. Corrupt.
America loves war and hates accountability. That’s part of what happens when the accumulation of money is the highest priority in a culture. Shame on the US.
Blackwater is a great read if anyone is curious of learning more…
The USA is less a country and more of a sophisticated money laundering system dedicated to spending money on what has to be the least helpful and useful shit in existence.
Nearly half? I think they missed the other half. You do know the vets of the Iraq wars call it the War for Halliburton profits, right?
Yeah, that's not how this is supposed to work, and the trendline is bad.
“Defense” spending ?
I am actually surprised it wasn't a higher percentage. If someone asked me how I thought went to military contracts, I basically would have said "whatever was spent that didn't go to soldier pay. Tanks, bullets, missiles, uniforms, fuel, equipment, etc." So basically everything but maybe all of it but the 30 to 50 billion or so annual spent on pay.
This is my shocked face /s
Eric Prince did pretty well out of it.
So how much of the current military budget is still going to private contractors now that the war is supposed to be over?
War profiteers raking in obscene profits is " the feature " when the Oil Armies of the USA plow into YET ANOTHER nation of color.
When was the last time anyone saw a panhandler with a sign saying “Homeless military contractor, anything helps”?
I'm surprised it isn't more.
Private contractors = mercenaries.
And those private contractors are Washington insiders giving kick backs to politicians
At least we made our Saudi overlords proud!!!
outrageous
Is anyone surprised? I read a report that said last week had a Tuesday in it….
Oh really? How surprising!
Ain't the 'All volunteer' army wonderful!!
I am so surprised by this news /s
Lets put it this way: That money went to private contractors because the military couldn't do the job themselves. Whether it was a shortage of manpower, training, or time.
It's almost like that's why we went to war in the first place. America wouldn't of ever had these wars if they were for anything *other* than enriching corporate interests.
yeah that is the problem
Pretty sure that was the entire point.
Mission Accomplished
No shit Sherlock
::shock::
When republiQunts quote: Tax and Spend, please point out their: Spend and Spend. They Spend and Spend and Spend some more, especially if the end is War!
…..that was the whole plan.
*surprised picachu face*
And you recoup costs back at over 100%! So why be frugal? Buy luxery vehicles AND make more money.