Boondoggle

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his Farewell Address in 1961

I was nine when President Eisenhower warned of the threat to democracy presented by a war industry entwined with the profession of arms — the military industrial complex. Big words for a nine-year-old. Abstract, too. And complicated. By the time I entered the military industrial complex at age 54, it was far less abstract but vastly larger and more complicated than even Ike could have anticipated. In 2006 the Army already employed more contractors than soldiers. Like most contractors, I was originally trained by the military at taxpayer expense and stayed in the reserves. The Army could have easily put me on orders at minimal expense to do the jobs I did and taken me off orders when the job was done. Instead, the government spent a huge amount of money to pay me a much higher salary than I would have received as a soldier doing the same job and paid the companies for which I worked even more for the privilege of brokering my services.

The First Contractor War

We live in amazing times. The Iraq invasion of 2003 has been called the “First Contractor War” — the first war America has fought with more contractors than troops. Civilian labor has always supported the military, mostly in logistics, maintenance and transportation, but up until 1990, the US military employed relatively little contract support. In the Balkan conflicts of the mid 1990s, the numbers of contract security employees reached one…