Logistics for the Military

As you know, I am against a volunteer army, largely because I think it makes us more likely to go to war. One aspect of the volunteer army is a greater reliance on private military contractors, about whom I've written several times.  In this article Dina Rasor looks at the effect these private contractors have had on the logistics involved in fighting wars. The effect has not been positive. Costs have escalated; we've paid KBR alone over $40 billion so far.  More importantly, the job of supplying our troops what they need, when they need it and where they need it does not get done as often as it should (which is always).

Rasor gives a couple of examples of this failure to properly supply our troops in Iraq:

One unit that was parked at the border between Iraq and Iran was so isolated because KBR would not go out and supply them that they didn't even know that President George W. Bush had landed on an aircraft carrier and declared, "mission accomplished" until three months after the event. They were living on scarce food and water, and part of their daily routine was to try to keep their trucks working so they could go out and scrounge food from the local villages while many of their general officers were being treated by KBR to desserts made by expensive pastry chiefs at the major bases, including former palaces of Saddam Hussein.

The supplies piled up on the Kuwaiti border to such an extent that even the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that was set up by the US to try to govern chaotic Iraq were forced to ration their food in Baghdad, while the Army desperately tried to find troops who had driven trucks in civilian life to replace the missing KBR drivers. 

It's clear that civilians are less likely to work in risky situations than soldiers are. If a civilian wants to leave, he can. A soldier does not have such a choice. And delivering food and other supplies to soldiers on the front lines is a risky situation.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Rasor attributes the rise of the private contractors to Rumsfeld. The understaffing of our troops in Iraq led to the need for someone to do the necessary logistics. You may recall that the army wanted 200,000 more troops than they got. With regard to logistics, the army had always operated on a "just in case", which sometimes resulted in having supplies on hand that were not needed. Rumsfeld changed the principle to "just in time", which usually works in business. However, wartime conditions can make it very difficult to meet deadlines.

The truly sad - and very costly - result of all this is that these private contractors have become a permanent part of our defense.