Feral Jundi

   Lots of meat in this nice little post from Mr. Miller.  All of this is nothing new to those of us in the industry that know the real deal.  But I love posting this stuff and spreading the word to those readers who are looking for information about contractors in this war.  We are making great sacrifices and we outnumber today’s military, yet these facts are also the most ignored element of the war.

   The other factor I want to bring up is that when guys get killed on your contract,  that is the time when you see the great epiphany happen within a small percentage involved.  Those who were in it purely for the money are usually the ones that cut and run after seeing their co-worker blown up in front of them. But for those that are in the game not just for the money but because they actually believe in the cause and truly despise the enemy and all they represent is a different story. For them, to stay and press on is the only option.

   In my view, and from what I have seen in this war, the guys who stay and press on far outnumber that 1 percent of 1 percent who shouldn’t be there in the first place. Years of contracting in war zones, tends to weed out those that do not have the heart for this stuff–which is good. It is also an indicator to me, that there are more contractors driven by something other than profit.

    With that said, no one feels that their life is cheap.  Even soldiers do not ‘volunteer’ for military service.  The military and my industry have families to feed and no one does this work for free.  A soldier joins the military to fight for their country, but they also join the military to get a new and better life than the one they left behind. That includes sign on bonuses, paycheck, medical care, dental, housing allowance, insurance, valuable training or clearances, clothes, food, shelter, tax breaks, education, retirement plan, job security, veterans preference for federal jobs and the GI Bill. Wow, that doesn’t sound like volunteer work to me. lol. (I have actually heard of contractors going back to the military because it was a better deal for them and their family)

   I highly doubt that if the military was to ask a civilian population to work for free as a soldier in a long war such as this, that they could get anyone at all.  How would those soldiers feed their families, or would the military only hire single people with no life?  Yet again, tell me how that would work?  The point is with contractors and soldiers, is that the government and war planners don’t get our pound of flesh for free.  Our service has value, our deaths or injuries have value. At least that is how I view things. –Matt

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Contractor Deaths Accelerating in Afghanistan as They Outnumber Soldiers

by T. Christian Miller

April 14, 2010

A recent Congressional Research Service analysis [1] obtained by ProPublica looked at the number of civilian contractors killed in Afghanistan in recent months. It’s not pretty.

Of the 289 civilians killed since the war began more than eight years ago, 100 have died in just the last six months. That’s a reflection of both growing violence and the importance of the civilians flooding into the country along with troops in response to President Obama’s decision to boost the American presence in Afghanistan.

The latest U.S. Department of Defense numbers show there are actually more civilian contractors on the ground in Afghanistan than there are soldiers. The Pentagon reported [2] 107,292 U.S.-hired civilian workers in Afghanistan as of February 2010, when there were about 78,000 soldiers. This is apparently the first time that contractors have exceeded soldiers by such a large margin.

Using civilian contractors to haul food, prepare meals and act as bodyguards has kept the Pentagon’s official casualty figures lower than they would have been in past conflicts, where contractors were not as heavily used.

Contractor casualties are, by and large, invisible to the public, disguising the full human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are not reported in totals given by the government. If they were, the death toll in Afghanistan would have surpassed 1,000 — 848 soldiers, 289 civilian contractors — from 2001 to 2009, a milestone that has gone entirely unmarked.

The number of contractor dead are released only through the Labor Department, which keeps count as part of an insurance program for contractors known as the Defense Base Act. And these numbers, agency officials have admitted and our reporting has shown, undercount fatalities. As David Isenberg [3] pointed out in the Huffington Post recently, a new database designed, in part, to track contractor deaths is still not being used to do so.

Story here.