The Army Times is reporting that the Army may temporarily assign a rather large number of soldiers to “installation support” duties, in some (I’d guess most) cases outside their normal MOS. These functions are currently being performed for the most part by contractor support personnel.
Specific roles planned for this temporary detail of soldiers are dining facility operations and security guard functions. The period would be for up to 18 months; around 6,000 positions are being considered for such temporary augmentation.
The rationale, as you might have guessed, is financial. Sequestration has cut budgets, and has reduced dollars available for both training and contractor support. So the Army has to do something make available dollars cover the essentials. This at least avoids reducing the number of folks in uniform.
In many ways this seems little more than a return to the way the Army did business prior to the Reagan-era push for “contracting out”. Prior to that, much if not most installation support was performed by personnel in uniform. That’s not generally the case today.
I have to admit I’m of two minds here. I’m not a huge fan of contracting out mission-essential functions – and many installation support functions are indeed mission essential. (You don’t eat or guard the place, you don’t operate or fight for long.) I’ve long thought DoD went much too far down the “contract it out” primrose path. That works OK as long as you have the money to contract things out and/or are in a safe area. But when funds get tight or you’re in a combat zone, there are some serious problems inherent in depending heavily on non-uniformed contractors for mission essential tasks. Plus, it also obscures the number of people it really takes to defend the nation.
On the other hand – doing this will take a rather large number of troops away from their units, particularly if the augmentation ends up being short-term (3 or 6 months) rotations. And it does make keeping those troops detailed to work outside their assigned units and MOS trained on their primary MOS damned difficult. That may not be an issue in the short term – if there’s no money to train, it’s damned hard to keep soldiers well-trained anyway. But eventually it certainly could be an issue, for both the service and the individuals. (However, please spare me the bogus “That’s work is demeaning!” argument. There’s nothing inherently demeaning about cooking, washing dishes, or pulling guard duty. They may not be glamorous or exciting jobs, but they’re essential. And soldiers have been doing them for centuries.)
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