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.