Troops or Private Contractors: Who Does Better in Supplying Our Troops During War?

Charles M. Smith | Wednesday 23 February 2011

We continue our series on the Department of Defense (DoD) with another solution from Charles Smith. As I mentioned last week, Mr. Smith was a career procurement officer whose career was cut short when he was the chief of the Field Support Contracting Division of the Army Field Support Command and tried to get control of the costs and use of the infamous Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) contract with KBR to supply the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. More about his brave fight against the company and intransient Army bureaucracy can be found in this New York Times article.

For this column, he tackles the longtime argument from the DoD, especially the Army, that contractors can do the job supporting the troops cheaper than Army military and civilian personnel (organic support units in DoD speak). This is a subject that is personal for me; for years, I have been championing for change. While Mr. Smith was fighting the internal Army politics over their KBR LOGCAP contracts during the beginning of these wars, I was researching and writing a book on how using contractors can be disastrous for the troops and should not become a permanent solution. The book, "Betraying Our Troops: the Destructive Results of Privatizing War," paralleled many of the problems that Mr. Smith has found with the heavy use of private contractors on the battlefield.