STRATEGYPAGE ON RECRUITING:

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 people who actually do the fighting continue to join up, and stay in. . . .

The army’s solution is to go back to the past, when many of the “non-combat” troops were civilians. Way back in the day, these people were called “camp followers,” and they took care of supply, support, medical care, maintenance and “entertainment” (that’s where the term “camp follower” got a bad name). The majority of these people were men, and some of them were armed, mainly for defending the camp if the combat troops get beat real bad and needed somewhere to retreat to. 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.

Very interesting.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste emails:

A switch to the use of civilians by the Pentagon isn’t necessarily good news.

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. That meant that if they didn’t do their jobs, they could be replaced or disciplined under military rules, so the organization did a better job overall.

Now they’re switching back to civilians. In the short run, it will work fine. 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.

Yes, it is.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Thad McArthur emails:

Of course, Steven also just put his finger on why the use of private contractors is so widespread in the Pentagon. Hire Brown & Root, let them hire the people. If their people don’t do the job, make them do the firing.

Yes, the harder you make it to fire people, the greater the likelihood that their jobs will be outsourced.

There are more thoughts here, including this observation about experience curves:

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 at 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.

Read the whole thing. And reader Floyd Clark notes that Robert Heinlein was ahead of the curve with his novel Starship Troopers:

“While a few M.I. are on desk jobs you will always find that they are shy an arm or a leg, or some such. These are the ones – the Sergeant Hos and the Colonel Nielssens – who refuse to retire, and they really ought to count twice since they release able-bodied M.I. by filling job which require fighting spirit but not physical perfection. They do work that civilians can’t do – or we would hire civilians. Civilians are like beans; you buy ’em as needed for any job which merely requires skill and savvy.”

Heinlein, an Annapolis graduate, wrote that in 1959.

Indeed.