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Hiring too many civilians, both DoD, contractors & otherwise is only a small facet of the overarching issue(s). The travesty here is that the gov't civilians are ones bearing the brunt of the consequences of shitty decisions at the highest levels of government.
Here's what almost 21yrs of military service has shown me:
When military spending got severely cut, it was no secret that we, the military men & women would not be able to meet our respective taskings due to drastically reduced funding and manpower... The solution? Simple- hire civilians out of a completely different pot of money to pick up the slack. All well & good 'back door solution' for a while... but like anything else, the long term effects of that fateful decision usually take a decade or two to surface. As military spending got cut nearly every year since then; we, the men & women in the weeds became task saturated with constantly trying to find ways to do 'more with less' as the mission increased while the people & resources of our trades disappeared out from under us- All the while to serve as an enabler to propogate the stupid decisions being made by the higher-ups. The solution? Hire more civilians!
Again, this is a small part of the big problem. Above hiring civilians to take up our mission-related slack; there have been huge programmatic decisions, defense contracts etc that we have become progressively more irresponsibly handled. The result? Bigtime companies bleeding the DoD dry and for some reason being allowed to get away w/it... the left hand not talking to the right, blah blah. Somewhere along the lines, we, the military have been SO dependent on the private sector to help us 'win wars' that we seem to have forgotten that we are THE CUSTOMER...
When I was a young buck, if I needed a part for an aircraft, I could get it from several different sources because nearly EVERY AIRCRAFT TYPE in the command had the same damn part, and the same standard system(s). Obviously, there were differences between airframes, but you get the idea. There were a shit-ton of standard parts.
Fast-forward to here & now- we've buried ourselves so deep in individual contracts and integrated systems... organic sustainment is all but dead... now the majority of aircraft parts only work on THAT AIRCRAFT. So now, in order to sustain each individual aircraft mission, we are at the mercy of defense companies in order to sustain them; and constantly hit with obselescence issues etc. that translate into more money being thrown away.
^^Take that scenario and relate it to similar type situations happening across the other services, missions etc. & try to imagine the amount of WASTED MONEY... Might want to pop an Excedrin or two first lol...
Now consider that we have bases all around the world that we pay tens of billions per year to maintain (infrastructure, military/civilian families, medical, schools- the works). Why? I have no clue- The cold war is over and we have the tools to be anywhere, fully stood up & ready to fight within 72hrs. More wasted money. How about bring all those folks home and contribute to our own damned economy.
Afghanistan? Pssh- that shithole is not worth a single coalition life... yet we are spending billions per month there (about a million bucks per troop per year). Travesty- I spent a year there; lost 8 very good friends... Spent more time protecting civilian contractors than doing a real mission... The civilian to military ratio there is ridiculous- more of them than us! Between the military spending, and the DoD spending to keep civilians over there, again- the money wasted is mind-boggling!
Now consider the things above and try to imagine all of the other stupid decisions going on above in other areas of DoD/government that most of us will never know nothing about. Scary? Absolutely.
Bottom line: Thousands of Federal & other gov't civilian employees being furloughed is probably the easiest way to save face & a few bucks; rather than get rid of the criminals above who caused this in the first place.
To those of you who think they are overpaid; you may want to do some research. Many of my buddies who retired actually get paid LESS in their gov't jobs, but maybe make SLIGHTLY more than they did before only because they have a retirement check coming in to offset. I will agree that there are too many of them... But unfortunately, we have gotten ourselves into a position where we are absolutely dependent on them being there to help us meet the mission. Firing them now would NOT result in everything being fine in a couple years... It would result in the US Armed Forces completely disintegrating from the inside out.
I feel for each and every one of you who are affected by this. I wish there were someone up above to identify fix the REAL PROBLEMS instead of band-aid them by screwing you.
Mike
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