Understanding the Issues: Education

[firstdown]

Originally Posted by That Guy

wha?? you mean the life time benefits after TWENTY+ YEARS of making craptacular pay? or are you forgetting the overhead paid to hal etc on top of that 120k salary (admin costs, his employer insurance and benefits, his food and housing over there, and 20% on top of that as the profit portion of the cost + contracts).

it's not cheaper, and it's not even close.

In no way do I have any problems with our servicemans benefits and agree they are way under paid. I was responding to what you where saying about cost and the use of contractors. About a year ago I read a report about the use of contractors and cost v/s having a larger service and its cost. The numbers I read showed in most cases it was cheaper to use contractors because after the contract is up the cost stops. Then it showed the cost to train, house , benefits, (which we agree are not that great) and other cost such as moving them from place to place etc... add up to allot of money. It was not nor am I sugesting doing away with any of our forces and agree we should keep a strong military I was just responding to the cost part.

[That Guy]

Originally Posted by firstdown

In no way do I have any problems with our servicemans benefits and agree they are way under paid. I was responding to what you where saying about cost and the use of contractors. About a year ago I read a report about the use of contractors and cost v/s having a larger service and its cost. The numbers I read showed in most cases it was cheaper to use contractors because after the contract is up the cost stops. Then it showed the cost to train, house , benefits, (which we agree are not that great) and other cost such as moving them from place to place etc... add up to allot of money. It was not nor am I sugesting doing away with any of our forces and agree we should keep a strong military I was just responding to the cost part.

but how long was the cost analysis, cause 1 year with contractors vs 10 years of a bigger service is different than the 6+ years of deployed contractors with huge overheads.

when i looked at the numbers, with the amount of time in and the length of time a full contracting force will be over there on our dollar, the numbers for contracting over that span really didn't look very good.


and you've also got a lot of air force members doing army jobs (in lieu of) like sentry, towers, gates, convoys, bomb squad, patrols (cop cars), etc, and the army's not taking them back any time soon, since the army doesn't have enough manpower of its own right now.