Feral Jundi

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Quotes: Secretary of Defense Gates Answers a Question About Contractors

Filed under: Quotes — Tags: , , , — Matt @ 4:15 AM

   I thought that this was an interesting little quote and worthy of a mention here on FJ. On a funny note, notice the liberal use of ‘and’ in Sec. Gate’s replies?-Matt

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SEC. GATES: So now I’ll take a few questions. Yes, sir?

Q     Sir, Sergeant — (inaudible) — from 57-TRANS. A question, the subject is civilian contractors, especially down-range, the populace of over 2,000 civilian contractors doing or taking our jobs — i.e., truck drivers. Is there — the reasoning on that, sir?

SEC. GATES: Well, you’re talking about down-range or here at home?

Q     (Off mike.) Both, sir.

SEC. GATES: What we’re trying to do — and I think that the Congress has obviously taken a lot of interest in this, and I think, at the high point in Iraq we had on the order of 160,000 contractors, and probably only about a third of them were actually American contractors.

     And the contractors did everything but running the dining facility (DEFAC) and doing the laundry, doing the cleaning chores, doing some security work. But, the need was to try and free up as many soldiers for actual combat duty, rather than having them do things that civilian contractors could do. The problem is, we’ve — I think we let it grow without the kind of controls that we should, in terms of looking at it repeatedly.

     And I’ll just give you an example of what we’re working on right now — and, frankly, prompted by some questions from Senator Webb, and it was how we have turned over increasing numbers of training roles to civilian contractors, and where should we have a combat veteran doing that training, and where could we have a civilian doing it? And I think we’ve — we really had no idea where that line should be drawn. And we’re going back and looking at that now.

      And so, for example, for the Air Force it probably doesn’t make any sense to have a combat-capable pilot teach somebody how to fly for the first time in a Beechcraft just to get that kind of “Flying 101.” On the other hand, when that person graduates to an F-15 or an F-16, it probably ought to be a combat trained veteran or a person in uniform who’s teaching them. So, we’re kind of going back through all of these roles, at this point, to figure out where military ought to be doing these things and where civilian contractors can be.

      To tell you the truth, we’ve got a contractor problem on the civilian side of the government as well. I discovered, when we started working on this issue, that I actually have more contractors working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense than I do Civil Servants. And we’re going to fix that too. So, it is a problem.

      And I think that there is enough of a demand signal for experienced soldiers that nobody has to worry about losing their job. But, the question is, how can we make the best possible use of our soldiers and the skills that they’ve acquired?        And so you’ve raised an issue that’s taken a lot of our time and that we’re focused on, and it’s one that we need to get better control of.

Link to quote here.

 

Cool Stuff: Small Wars Journal $8,000 Writing Competition

Filed under: Cool Stuff,Industry Talk — Tags: , , , , , — Matt @ 12:33 AM

    This is great and I hope to see some FJ readers submit a paper.  Good luck. –Matt

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Small Wars Journal $8,000 Writing Competition – Warning Order

July 17, 2009

Papers are sought on the topics below. Winning entries and select others will be published in future special volumes of Small Wars Journal. For each of the two topics, a $3,000 Grand Prize and two $500 Honorable Mentions will be awarded. Hence $8,000 total purse.

Papers should be 3,000 to 5,000 words in length. Papers will be blind reviewed and judged primarily for clarity of presentation, relevant insights to the question asked, and overall significance of the key points made to the practice of small wars. No extra points awarded for length, name dropping, or how epic the incidents discussed were as distinct from the weight of the insights. Papers need not be OIF- / OEF-centric. Papers must resonate beyond a single silo, i.e. they must touch on at least some aspect of joint, coalition, interagency, multi-disciplinary, or cross-cultural significance.

Papers are to be submitted by midnight on November 10, 2009, with winners to be announced in January, 2010. One entry per author per question. Standard writing competition mumbo jumbo will apply, we will publish a final announcement shortly with those gruesome details, including detailed submission instructions.

We will not answer questions about this competition submitted in individual emails. Submit any good questions publicly in the comments below, but let’s not split hairs. The topics are what they are.

We greatly respect the works and insights of the usual suspects from the many DoD-centric writing competitions and anticipate some great and hard-to-beat entries from them. We would really like to see some stiff competition from fresh new voices and experience sets not often heard. Please spread the good word about this competition to the far reaches of the empire of important participants in the vastly broad and complex field of small wars. This is a level playing field, and let’s get all the players on it.

The topics are:

1. Security vs. [Jobs & Services & etc.] — horse and cart, or chicken and egg?

The “security is the military’s job” camp at an extreme expects more order than can be obtained by kinetic measures without a scorched earth approach. Alternately, it demands that the armed forces exceed their organizational mandate in early phases and then obediently (and wastefully?) hop back into their military box until things go awry again. Other camps may err by expecting too much from non-military actors in non-permissive environments, understating the risks they already do or should accept, or tinkering with building massive non-lethal expeditionary capabilities that may be unsustainable.

What does security really mean in a small war, how much is needed when, and how do you make meaningful security gains through the pragmatic application of affordable capabilities? How does security relate as an intermediate objective or an end state? Include examples of real successes and failures.

2. Postcards From The Edge – the practical application of the Whole of Government approach.

Organizational issues are being discussed from Goldwater-Nichols II to unity of effort and simple handshake-con. Whatever the structure on high, people from different walks of life and different functional expertise need to work together on the ground at the pointy end of the spear to deliver effects that matter. Discuss real experiences (personal, known firsthand, or researched and documented) of real people facing real challenges that offer relevant insights into the conduct of a small war.

Consider any, all, or none of the following:- Discuss what worked and/or what didn’t, and why.- How did participants from different agencies, branches, nations, etc. look at problems differently, and how were those views eventually reconciled (or not)?- Discuss personal challenges.- Discuss the moral and ethical challenges of small wars.- Approach as a turnover guide to a successor.- Inform operational approaches and “grand” tactics, techniques, and procedures.- Inform human resourcing / manpower / training & education.- Relevance for national resource strategy.- Relevance for go-to-war decisions and conflict strategy.

Story here.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Industry Talk: Wall Street Goes to War

Filed under: Afghanistan,Industry Talk,Iraq — Tags: , , , , , , — Matt @ 5:05 AM

     Well if you want to know the DynCorp story, read this sucker.  As a contractor, we are so removed from the world of the CEO’s, investors and upper level management, and reading this article made that reality very clear.  I wonder if these guys have any ‘shared reality’ with their company?  Do they visit with the guard force in Qatar, or hang out at the mechanics shop at some airbase in Afghanistan or Iraq?  Or how about hang with the police advisors that are all over the world, or drive along during a poppy eradication mission in Afghanistan? Who knows, and for those that have worked for DynCorp, this story is for you. (some reverse shared reality I guess)

   And if any of you bigwigs with DynCorp are reading FJ, all I would like you to know is that your contractors/employees are your best asset out there–take care of them.  You are making a lot of money off of their hard work and sacrifice, and the least you can do is show them some respect and take care of your people.  I understand the concept of free market capitalism, and completely support it.  But that is not everything in life, and please take note, the most respected companies in the world do an excellent job of taking care of their people while still remaining profitable and providing an excellent service/product.

    The goal of any company in the defense industry should be to achieve what Google or Toyota has accomplished, and that is acceptance and respect.  To have your company’s name stand for something good, and not bad, should be your goal.  Be the company that contractors want to work for and customers want to do business with. And because most of DynCorp’s work is US government related, be the company that taxpayers feel is a good value. Be the company that a reporter could write about, and be in awe of it’s operations and total dedication to Kaizen and customer service/satisfaction.  And if you are profitable, there is no reason in the world to not take a little of that and invest the time and money into the little details that could make you the best.

     Maybe Forbes will write an article about a defense company like that some day? Some day….. –Matt

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Wall Street Goes to War

Nathan Vardi

Forbes

For 19 years Robert McKeon and Thomas Campbell were inseparable. They raised money and struck deals together, buying and selling dozens of companies, often in the defense sector–smallish outfits such as Athena Innovative Solutions, Integrated Defense Technologies and Vertex Aerospace. Working 12-hour days out of next-door offices in midtown Manhattan, they could hear each other’s phone conversations and knew the most personal details about each other. They golfed together, went skeet and trap shooting, traveled together for meetings and once shared a hotel room in Mexico. On Fridays they would dine, just the two of them, at Harry Cipriani, the ritzy Manhattan restaurant. “I believe we were pretty close to best friends,” says Campbell.

They also hatched the most lucrative deal of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their 2005 purchase of DynCorp International, the Falls Church, Va. provider of services to the U.S. military, landed McKeon and Campbell at the center of a booming and controversial business. The leveraged buyout also helped rip apart their relationship. McKeon ended up very rich, personally earning $350 million, or seven times his investment, and in control of a company that has emerged as the biggest winner in the war game. Campbell, forced out of DynCorp, came away with very little and has started over. Today the two former friends are locked in mortal combat–trading accusations of greed and betrayal in protracted litigation and competing for $25 billion a year in battleground services contracts for the U.S. government.

Battlefield contractors have been around for years. But their importance has grown in post-Cold War defense spending. Roughly 240,000 contractor employees, many of them foreign nationals, support U.S. missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, outnumbering the troops they serve. They provide security, military and police training, logistics and air support, reconstruction and every mundane service it takes to feed, clothe and clean fighting forces–collecting some $100 billion of the $830 billion U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for in the two wars. Though they don’t operate under the same rules of engagement as the U.S. military, contractors risk their lives; 1,360 of them have been killed and 20,000 injured in the two war zones.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Building Snowmobiles: Franklin ‘Chuck’ Spinney Talks about Afghanistan

Filed under: Afghanistan,Building Snowmobiles — Tags: , , , , — Matt @ 2:40 AM

   This was an interesting article, because Chuck was analyzing the situation much like Boyd would have.  And of course Chuck is a member of Boyd’s Acolytes, so I thought this to be certainly befitting of this category.  Enjoy. –Matt

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Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee

The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

By FRANKLIN SPINNEY

July 14, 2009

On July 7, the Times [UK] carried a remarkable report describing the trials and tribulations of the Welsh Guards, who are now engaged in the ongoing offensive against the Taliban in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. It described in riveting detail how accumulating mental and physical stress are grinding down the bodies and minds of what are clearly highly-motivated, well-trained, and competently-led troops. My aim is to elaborate on the Times report by examining its information from a different perspective. My hope is that this will provide a better appreciation of the Taliban’s game.

With the exception of the last sentence in the penultimate paragraph (i.e., “The Taliban fight not to win but to outlast”), which is silly, the Times provides a graphic description of the pressures on the individual British soldiers, and it is an excellent window into the effects of the Taliban’s military art. The information suggests the Taliban’s strategic aim is to wear down their adversaries by keeping them under continual strain and by working on their psychology, or as the late American strategist John Boyd would say, by getting inside, slowing down, and disorienting their adversary’s Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loops. Moreover, the Taliban’s operational art seems particularly focused on the mental and moral levels of conflict. Outlasting, by running away to fight another day whenever faced with superior forces, is a central part of any winning strategy directed toward achieving this aim. (Interested readers can find a brief introduction to OODA loops in the last section of my remembrance of Boyd in the Proceedings of the Naval Institute, Genghis John.

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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Technology: Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies

Filed under: Cool Stuff,Technology — Tags: , , , , — Matt @ 8:49 PM

   This has to rank as one of the top technology posts here.  Robots feeding on dead bodies in war zones?  Interesting to say the least. Doug found this one by the way. –Matt

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Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies

Tuesday , July 14, 2009

It could be a combination of 19th-century mechanics, 21st-century technology — and a 20th-century horror movie.

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that’s right, “EATR” — “can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable,” reads the company’s Web site.

That “biomass” and “other organically-based energy sources” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they’d be plentiful in a war zone.

EATR will be powered by the Waste Heat Engine developed by Cyclone Power Technology of Pompano Beach, Fla., which uses an “external combustion chamber” burning up fuel to heat up water in a closed loop, generating electricity.

The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.

In press materials, Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through “foraging,” despite the obvious military purpose.

Story here.

• Click here for a brief description of EATR at the Robotic Technology Web site.

• Click here for a much longer overview of the project in PDF format.

• Click here to read about the Cyclone Waste Heat Engine.

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