Civilians vs. Military

Instapundit is linking to this Strategy Page story.

The army is scrutinizing every job they have, and deciding which could be done by civilians. While the media reports a "recruiting crises" in the army, they are missing the real story of how the army is reorganizing so that it can get along without the people it is having trouble recruiting. ... The army is using a lot more civilians now. In a war like this, it's cheaper to hire additional civilians, on short term contracts, than it is to recruit and train more troops.

The Great Steven Den Beste opines:

It used to be that those job were done by civilians. Problem was that they were hired under civil service rules, and if they turned out to be incompetent, or lazy, or corrupt, it was damned near impossible to get rid of them. The structure ended up so rotted out that eventually the Pentagon switched over to using servicemen for those tasks. ... But if they go back to hiring those civilians under civil service rules, then in the long run they'll be back to the same rotted out useless structure they had before.

It may be that by using contractors instead of civil service hirees they can avoid that. That's really the question.

As an Army Civilian, let me interject a little light on the situation. Increasing the civilian presence in the military services is not a bad thing. Frankly, person for person, civilians are capable of doing as good a job as the green suiters and in many cases can do it better.

This is not because uniformed military is lazy or uneducated. They aren't, we have the greatest and smartest military in the world. The competency on both sides of the green line is equivalent. The primary reason is that the military duty cycle at a given position is one or two years. In extreme cases it can go as high as four to five, but that is truly extreme and requires special circumstances. On the Civilian side, we commonly work in a given position 5 to 7 years just like in private industry. We don't stop being the new guy until a year or two in, but by that time the green suiters are already moving on to their next posting.

The military has realized this. They have been increasingly training civilians in technical and decision making fields because they realize civilians maintain the expertise in a program far longer than with equivalent members of the military. This is also why the National Guard is trained in a lot of technical fields like communications. Their deployment rotation is also much longer than the regular military so they can get very good at their jobs.

Will this use of civilian labor result in performance rot over the long term? I'll be honest, it's possible. However keep in mind that most of these personnel are signed to "short term contracts." This is very common in the military. When I came aboard I was signed on as a two year intern. If I had turned out to be a slacker or an idiot, my contract would not have rolled over and they would have let me go. Also keep in mind that the Department of Defense is taking the lead in switching from the seniority-based General Schedule system to more meritocratic Pay Banding systems. While some old timers don't like this (for obvious reasons), generally it means that you either pull your weight or you get left behind.

In dealing with performance rot, we need to be careful not to destroy government employment stability. I went into this in one of my first posts from over a year ago. There are three advantages to working for the government; job satisfaction, job stability, and vacation time. I took my current job after my father had been bounced around the aerospace industry every seven years until he was too old to be employable. Why would I put myself through the same experience?

Employing contractors is a mixed blessing. Contractors work well if you pay them for services rendered. They make great cooks, truck drivers, and even analytical assistants. They make horrible decision makers because of a fundamental conflict of interest. Contractors are most interested in making the taxpayers' money on their company while the government should be most interested in spending the taxpayers' dollar efficiently. Now when employing the contractor is the most efficient solution, everything is great. But, as you can guess, this isn't always the case.