Contractors help out the military

The late Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill., allegedly said, "A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking real money."

Some would say in a trillion dollar economy like that of the United States, even several billion dollars won't make the "real money" cut.

Recently, a local newspaper headline complained, "Contracts in Iraq costing taxpayers at least $85 billion."

Irrespective of Dirksen's sarcasm, $85 billion is the number 85 followed by nine zeros. By most people's standards, $85 billion easily makes the real money cut.

In fact, the real number isn't as small as the number 85. By the end of this year, the United States will have spent $100 billion on contractors, according to a Congressional Budget Office report released last week.

The CBO report goes on to say civilian contractors may not be cheaper than using military personnel even though lowered expense is one of the primary reasons for using contractors in the first place.

On the Web, you can go to www.propublica.org/article/100-billion-to-contractors-in-iraq-812/ to find the CBO report and news about it.

But none of us should be surprised about the number of contractors in Iraq, the throngs of them in the Department of Defense or the price of keeping contractors in the federal government as a whole. Today, civilian contractors form a substantial and growing percentage of the total federal "government" work force.

The CBO report substantiates this. According to the CBO, the ratio of uniformed members of the War Department to contractors during World War II was 7-to-1.

Today it's 1-to-1.

The report says in the beginning of 2008, 190,000 civilian contractors - equal to the number of uniformed personnel - were performing jobs in the Iraq theater. One civilian contractor has been hired for every uniformed member of the Department of Defense performing duty in Iraq.

Why? During World War II, soldiers, sailors and Marines performed most of the jobs being done by civilian contractors today.

Is it any wonder civilian contractors are costing Americans $100 billion in Iraq alone? The military personnel needed to get the job done just don't exist.

According to the General Accounting Office, the National Defense Authorization Act for 1991 called for a 1995 end strength of 1.6 million active duty positions, about a 25 percent reduction from the 1987 level of $2.2 million personnel, the post-Vietnam War peak.

In 2005, the U.S. military active duty strength was even less, 1.4 million.

Yes, increases in active duty military end strength have recently been called for, approved and budgeted. The Marine Corps alone is growing from 178,000 to 202,000 uniformed personnel, with some of those increases coming to Cherry Point.

But even with this growth, the number of uniformed personnel will still be less than that required to accomplish the military's mission without substantial numbers of civilian contractors.

Remember the so-called "peace dividend" promised after the fall of the Soviet Union?

It never really materialized. Instead, reductions in military personnel planned to be a part of the peace dividend have been largely compensated by civilian contractors doing many of the jobs once performed by soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

The tasks, duties and responsibilities performed by the U.S. military to build and sustain itself have not decreased since 1991. If anything, they've increased.

It would have been far tougher - maybe even impossible - to accomplish the U.S. military mission since 1991 without civilian contractors.

At roughly the same time these substantial cuts were being made in the active duty personnel, the Department of Defense was also required to comply with the Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76 that directs federal agencies to procure services from the private sector when doing so is more economical than in-house performance.

"In-house performance" is government-speak for "federal employee." In plain language, the A-76 program mandates civilian contractors be permitted to compete for jobs that were once the sole domain of government employees.

Consequently, civilian contractors now perform many jobs in the Department of Defense in lieu of federal civil servants, especially those classified as "inherently nongovernmental."

And they're performing them mostly very well, if not cheaper to the U.S. taxpayer.

So, we may be surprised at the extent to which civilian contractors now perform roles once played by both uniformed military personnel and federal civil servants.

But because of reductions in military strength and the A-76 program, we should not be surprised at the number of civilian contractors who have infiltrated the Department of Defense, nor the expense they pose to the U.S. taxpayer.

Barry Fetzer is a retired Marine whose column appears here every other week.