Just wanted to start a companion thread to this one started by Spooked911 that discusses "$285 BILLION in waste and fraud by the Pentagon over three years".
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=462750&mesg_id=462750I would like to share my husband's experience with you (and ask if you agree if it is an extremely wasteful use of our taxpayer dollars).
When he was called up, he began his deployment in-processing and first flew to one state to do medical/dental/legal things needed to make sure he was prepared for deployment (took a weekend). Then he was flown to another state and started a month-long training to prepare him for desert combat. He then was flown to another state to do mission-specific training into the final weeks of preparation to deploy to Iraq.
They were 2 days away from deploying when they were told that upon arrival in Iraq they would not be doing the 'activities' they'd been training for during the mission-specific training, that the civilians who had been contracted out for this job would be doing it. His soldiers were to 'observe' the contractors. The troops that he had been working so hard to bring into some kind of place where they were a cohesive unit flipped out (they were from several different reserve units who had just met). They wanted to know why they were being sent if someone else was doing their job.
It got worse when they got to Iraq and word got out about how much the contractors were earning, some of them were just arriving in the desert and started out at 80k, new soldiers in the sand start at about 17616 a year*, plus hazard pay of approx 2400 for a total of about 20016 a year (can't remember what other bens the new recruits get). That's for a single servicemember without housing or family (comparing 2 newly 'hired' just arriving in Iraq; contractor employee and new Army recruit). 80k for the contractor is from my husband's recollection of starting pay for the guys doing his MOS. Then take the example of a soldier who's been in 10+ years, their housing, hazard, separation, etc (50,000+) and add that to his contractor counterpart who has the experience and technical 'know-how' of the manager/supervisor and could get 150k+ a year (he knew of one who was offered $240k a year for his upper-tier job).
So the waste in this case was 2 groups of people in Iraq doing the same job, one younger soldier earning about 20016 and the contractor he 'watched' who earned about 80,000 (100,016 for the one job). Or the higher ranked soldier at 50,000 and the contractor supervisor he 'watched' at 150,000 (that's at least 200,000 for the one job and I'm being conservative with those amounts). Add all the soldiers and contractor sets in between those two. My husband and his guys did this until about a month before they came home, when (due to the drawdown) the contractors at his FOB were relocated to another that was still open. This is not including the feeding, housing, transportation, gas, supplies and other costs to pay for 2 groups of people to do the same job.
When you look at the total amount of money that is being abused/wasted in the Pentagon and Department of Defense, this one group and their one case of waste for the group isn't really significant. But if you add that to all of the other jobs/offices in all the FOBs in Iraq and Afghanistan and so many other cases of waste then you have what I think is the biggest source of drain in our budget.
(One other item; my husband had to fly from one FOB to another location and while he waited for them to give him the go-ahead to get on the helicopter, he watched the contracted group fill her up for the flight. One civilian prepped the tank opening (aka took off the cap), another placed the gas hose into the tank, and a third started the flow of gas to go into the tank. Something that one airman would do in the not so distant past).
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http://www.militaryfactory.com/military_pay_scale.asp
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