This is what we call a circle - and the nonsense of Military Recruitment Advertisement

[ThomWV]

So you got a young guy walking around right out of school and he doesn't have a clue how to do jack shit. Once was a time when he could join the Army and with a little bit of luck they'd teach him how to drive a dozer and build roads or maybe he'd enlist in the Navy and as a CB they'd teach him how to build barracks and make a pretty good carpenter out of him. From cooks to mechanics, it was the same. The basic training and entry level experience could be gained by being one of the 90%+ of military personnel who are not on the front lines of much of anything.

But now days you can't join the service and expect to come out of it with some useful skill. The reason is they don't do that sort of work anymore, they contract it all out. And the Contractors that do the work that used to be the toil of most soldiers only hire people with relevant experience, something you can not get in the military.

[Xipe Totec]

1. Extremely insightful observation

[rfranklin]

2. Or they subcontract to those who use slave labor...

For example--

This old base: In the fall of 2007, the Air Force gave $18 million to contractor CH2M HILL for construction work at Camp Phoenix, an Army installation in Afghanistan. The firm hired a shady subcontractor who didn't pay his workers and fled the country with $2 million, which he used to build himself some villas abroad. The unpaid workers walked off with a bunch of generators and other materials. The delays left hundreds of NATO troops without suitable housing for a year and a half. When the contracting commission's Thibault visited the soldiers in their temporary digs, they alerted him (PDF) to the shoddy electrical work: "I just walked in the room and I'm talking to some of the people living there and they say, 'Sometimes when you put the plugs in, if you don't have the right extension, it's just like a sparkler.'"

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/contractor-waste-iraq-KBR

[deaniac21]

3. I hire Air Force people whenever I can find them

They are certified and are great network admins.

[SarasotaDem]

4. And ...

The Contractors cost considerably more in taxpayer money.

[msongs]

5. plus ripoff contractors are paid 10X what soldiers are paid for the SAME work nt