Home : Armed Forces : Private Warriors :

Military Education

The US government has a long history of contracting for military services. Up until the beginning of World War II, most of these services were in the area of logistics support and weapons procurement. Contractors were used to supply basic rations, make uniforms, transport supplies, etc. Also, as the arms industry began to grow, the government turned to private suppliers for small arms, bayonets, and ramrods (the most famous of these contractors was Eli Whitney, who supplied interchangeable parts.) During World War II, the US government contracted out additional services such as constructing airfields and training Pilots.

With the advent of the Cold War, US interest in stabilizing foreign governments under siege from communist insurgent forces opened more opportunities for private firms. In many cases, the stabilization of foreign governments included military assistance and training and some of this was contracted out. In the Vietnam intervention, for instance, university teams funded by the Pentagon provided military and police training to the South Vietnamese forces, contractors to the US Army provided electronics training to the South Vietnamese and Booz Allen developed a program to train Vietnamese officers. Also in Vietnam, Vinnell Corporation had 5,000 people in the country at the height of its involvement building military bases, repairing equipment, staffing military warehouses and, according to some reports, performing tasks the US forces could not do for legal reasons or lack of resources. In the wake of Vietnam and the concerns it engendered over US intervention, the 1980s brought an increased focus on military training as a substitute to direct US involvement and private firms played a role here as well. In the wake of the Iran/Contra scandal numerous accounts emerged of US contracts with private (and often quite unsavory) individuals and organizations.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s service branches of the US military also launched several initiatives to transfer education and (some) training of their recruits and enlisted forces to private, or at least nonmilitary, entities. The policy established by OMB Circular A-76 in 1983 provided a rationale (and eventually a push) for additional contracting by requiring that government rely on commercial entities to provide those services that are not inherently governmental - so as not to have government "compete" with its citizens. Though Circular A-76 was not to apply to the Department of Defense during declared war or military mobilization, it did apply during peacetime and caused the beginning of a more systematic examination of what kinds of services the Department of Defense might effectively privatize.

By the end of the Cold War, then, contracting with private companies for the delivery of military services was hardly new in the US. Since the end of the Cold War, though, the use of private contractors for military services has grown precipitously. As the US government downsized the military after the Cold War, it found itself committing troops in a broader and less predictable array of conflicts. The government turned to contractors for a wider array of services - and contractors mobilized to provide these. By 2002, the use of contractors was so pervasive that, according to (the late) Colonel Kevin Cunningham, then Dean of the Army War College, "the US cannot go to war without contractors."

In the 1990s, the Army outsourced a number of education and training programs. The prevailing rationale was to make better use of scarce personnel. MPRI, alone, provided support to the US Army Force Management School, US Army ROTC program, US Army Combined Arms and Services School, and Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Pilot Mentor Program at the Command and General Staff College. Of the more controversial among these is the Army's outsourcing of its ROTC program.

ROTC programs are designed to produce officers for each service branch. Indeed, 75 percent of all Army officers are produced through the ROTC program. The program also allows college students who think they might want a leadership career in the military an introduction to the service. Its primary aim, though, is to professionalize future officers during their educational careers at civilian universities. Students take leadership development and military skills classes and ROTC serves as their army home while they are going to school. In an effort to re-deploy active duty personnel, though, the Army began an experiment (in the 1997-98 academic year) to contract out some of the positions in this program. As of 2002 a portion of ROTC training was outsourced at over 200 universities and colleges across the country.

MPRI was hired in this initial experiment. The plan was to replicate the existing program - but with private personnel. This contract shifted discretion over the screening and selection of the personnel that would train future officers to a PSC - but with a number of requirements. Strict standards were set for those retired officers who could serve in the ROTC program. They must have been retired no more than two years, wear a uniform during performance of their duties, meet height and weight standards, pass the Army Physical Fitness Test, and participate in ROTC advanced and basic camps during the summer. The personnel MPRI hired met these standards continually, but some have nonetheless worried that there are other features important to ROTC instructors and trainers that are harder to measure - enthusiasm for the job, experience, and professionalism. MPRI claims that it does pay attention to these less tangible values and that it has fielded a good force of instructors and trainers. There have been no complaints from the Army about the quality of staff MPRI has provided.

As is often the case, however, the cost of garnering the exact same service from the private sector was higher. Indeed, from the start, the privatization of ROTC was expected to cost more than the alternative of using active duty personnel. The RAND Corporation estimates suggested that each year it cost about $10,000 more per instructor for private staffing of ROTC training in the United States." In 2002, the contract for ROTC training was re-competed and MPRI lost the contract on cost concerns. Many worried, though, that the new contractor (Communication Technology or COMTek) would field less-qualified staff. They pointed out that officials from MPRI routinely participate in intellectual forums sponsored by the Army - partly because MPRI has such an impressive array of retired, high level staff - and thus MPRI is considered well positioned to do a better job keeping up with the implicit requirements for ROTC instructors and trainers (enthusiasm, experience, professionalism). Paying attention to cost alone, these people argued, would generate a less impressive program.

Regardless of who hires retired military personnel to work in the ROTC program, all go through a similar socialization process in the Army, and both the Army's strong professional networks and the requirement that personnel be retired for no more than two years create an atmosphere that should lend stability to social control of force. Critics of the experiment in ROTC outsourcing recognize this (though they are quicker to point out the variation among individuals and their internalization of professional norms) and acknowledge that private ROTC trainers may not be so different from their active duty counterparts in the short run.

Portions of the Army's leadership and retired leadership, however, have voiced worry about a different kind of effect on social control. Given the importance of the personnel that staff ROTC programs as role models for future officers, some have questioned the wisdom of having for-profit companies staff the programs with retired officers. It is not a matter of whether MPRI or COMTek fields good retired officers, but whether the use of a commercial company can instill the ideals of a profession whose defining tenet is self-sacrifice. As James Burke put it, reliance on PSCs for ROTC training "may subtly teach new entrants into the profession that, despite the rhetoric of self-sacrificing leadership, market logic trumps other considerations."

This may contribute to a trend analysts have labeled the "deprofessionalization" of the military. The outsourcing of ROTC training, by turning over the mission of educating and modeling professional behavior to profit-seeking firms, goes along with the identification of military service with side-payments (like education, travel, acquiring technical skills, etc.) in defining military service as a job rather than a profession. If privatization of ROTC further promotes the deprofessionalization of the army, it may have longer-term effects on the overarching values that motivate military service in the first place. The switch from MPRI to COMTeIc amplified these worries. COMTek does not have the same staff or interest and some worried that it would not be attuned to what the army really needs. Others claimed that the only way COMTek would be able to implement the contract at the cost they bid was to hire less experienced personnel in a way that would undermine the effectiveness of the program. Though there have been no serious complaints about COMTek two years into the switch, these worries remain.

The effects of privatizing this program on the functional control of force are mixed - adding flexibility but at increased cost. The effects on political control of force are subtle. The decision shifted discretion over hiring to a PSC. It also left Congress out of the loop as Congress had no information about the initial outsourcing or about the switch of venders. Furthermore, the re-deployment was one of many taken in the 1990s to keep the military beneath what was considered an "appropriate" size but still do an increased number of missions. Thus it can be seen as a way of increasing the effective size of the force without generating political agreement on this increase. Though such arrangements are often sold publicly as cost-saving devises, as we saw above, it was more costly. The most significant concerns about the program have to do with the social control of force - particularly the impact of outsourcing core professionalization activities to a commercial entity - and are worries about the future. ROTC candidates may not have the same sense of service if they perceive that MPRI or COMTek and not their country is responsible for their training. Also, as PSCs do more of the curricular development as well as training, the Army is ceding control over the shape of a core element of its professionalism to commercial firms that may be influenced by the variety of consumer demands rather than the US government's alone. Over the long term, if the shape of professionalism changed in a way that reduced the professionalism of the Army, at the extreme perhaps making dying (or killing) for one's country less legitimate, one could imagine such changes eroding the fit between the dimensions of control and decreasing military effectiveness.

Deborah D. Avant. . Cambridge University Press. 2005.

Jump to page:  [ 1 ]  [ 2 ]  [ 3 ]

top of page

back a page