If You Can Keep It

Special comment on family support, privatization, and the all-volunteer force

On the last day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was famously asked what kind of government delegates had created. “A republic, if you can keep it,” was his response.

It was a warning that to avoid the new republic being swallowed by corruption or tyranny would require constant vigilance and civic participation by common citizens. Anything worth having is under attack from the moment it’s born.

Including America’s all-volunteer military.

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I don’t have the patience in this case to situate the Air Force’s latest grapple with self-defeat in the context of prior acts building to an imbecile crescendo, as is my normal habit. There’s only so many ways you can watch a golden goose get slain before you’re numb to it.

And yet, I can’t ignore it. Even amidst the inaudible self-mumble of christ, not this shit again, I just can’t walk past it.

This most recent clusterfuck evinces the Air Force’s ascendant fixation with copying the failed bureaucratic belly flops of others. Lacking the imagination and the stones to author its own original failures, it prefers instead to watch someone else fail in slow motion, taking careful notes.

Then comes the “hold my beer” moment.

15 years ago, the US Army realized it was so bad at running its own hotels for soldiers and families that it might as well consign the whole thing to a private contractor.

They couldn’t possibly do worse. Right?

Wrong. After a honeymoon period marked by carefully staged corporate propaganda, it became clear how the contractors intended to make a profit. By charging higher rates while keeping a lower standard.

Mold. Roaches. Mice. Sewage backups. Contaminated water. Carpet so dirty even the fleas were complaining. To borrow an old truck driver joke, you didn’t feel safe taking a shower after checking in, but you damn sure needed one after checking out. Soldiers coming home from Iraq were begging to be sent back.

It was as if no one was doing any basic upkeep.

Actually, that was it exactly. In many cases, maintenance records were falsified, reflecting and charging for work never done. This was just one of a variety of frauds riddling the program. Promised improvements got kicked into the tall weeds. Higher rates were charged anyway, the taxpayer footing the bill for a soldiers having a degraded experience.

To fully deserve the dunce cap it now dons, the Army locked itself into a 50-year lease.

Fifty years.

A warfighting service which has been notoriously mistaken in its predictions about the timing, scale, and character of war … which proudly and necessarily operates on a 3-meter, 10-second view of the future … confidently entered into a contract based on a 50-year prediction about commercial performance. A prediction lubricated by your tax dollars.

The mind boggles. We don’t let soldiers enlist for more than a few years because we understand the relationship might not be fruitful for both parties forever. We don’t plan budgets for more than five years or authorize them for more than two. But yeah, let’s lock soldiers and taxpayers into a lifelong marriage with a profit-seeking entity, giving it the boldness to under-perform knowing its bottom line remains safe.

“But you see, we already got the money. So there’s no problem.”

This exercise in galactic stupidity is the template the Air Force now wants to copy at 58 of its bases. It’s even pushing for the same 50-year lease.

On behalf of airmen and families who are too busy making the impossible look easy so generals can get over-promoted to senior posts and propose dumbass ideas, I’d like to offer a contrary opinion.

A slight re-framing, if you will.

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What’s that you say Air Force? You want to “privatize” temporary lodging?

No. That’s not what you want.

Let’s talk straight. In the regrettably immortal words of the Spice Girls, I’ll tell you really want.

You want to hand over a blank check, signed by the American taxpayer, to a likely pre-ordained contractor who has wielded the “unwarranted influence” Eisenhower warned us about to position themselves.

You want to then push their raft off the dock and into a rapid of thickly flowing money, headlong over a waterfall of moral hazard, into a lake of largess where they can swim and bathe and frolic in constantly replenished taxpayer dollars for a half century. They might occasionally climb ashore and do some work. They might not. You don’t care.

Because the other thing you want to do is rid yourself of the pesky problem of taking care of people, which distracts your mind from your money and your money from the next vanity weapon. You didn’t spend all these years wallowing in the slime of politics just to miss the golden opportunity to throw off a heavy yoke while simultaneously earning an approving head pat from the SecDef du jour, who has made it clear he equates family support with martial weakness.

Sure, he’ll be gone soon. Sure, you will too. But until then, you’ll remain swaddled in the comfort of approval.

Because let’s face it, you’re not strategists or a custodians. You’re carousel stooges enjoying what’s left of your ride before the next gaggle climbs aboard.

We know this because you’re also abdicating a timeless duty of military leadership: the duty to leave things better than you found them. After decades of systematic neglect and under-investment, you’re surrendering any claim and disowning any material responsibility for the lodging facilities taxpayers bought for airmen, mistakenly trusting you to make the most of them, treat them with care, and treat them as you would your own property.

As an incidental motive, you want to insult everyone’s intelligence by pretending the maintenance, upkeep, and operation of military lodging will magically cost less if it’s done by someone else. Things cost what they cost. But this ploy will allow you to dine on a false claim long enough to distance yourself and be safely barricaded behind a retirement annuity. Long after you’re gone, it’ll become obvious what this was really about. By then, you’ll be on corporate boards. Probably getting paid by the contractor you’re about to enrich.

Of course, you also want to make this process Byzantine and long-winded. This helps keep some of the more thorny questions hidden in the tall weeds. Questions like who will monitor contract compliance. How that will be done and what resources it will require. Which military leader will be responsible to hear and remediate complaints from airmen and families. Who will monitor and publish actual costs, improvements, and service levels, comparing them to what was promised. And what mechanisms will exist to punish and fine and, if necessary, prosecute or bankrupt corporations who fail to deliver what they assured in order to get their grubby hands on the blank check you wrote.

These are the questions previous privatization campaigns have swerved, to the detriment of our all-volunteer force and the taxpayer. You want to swerve them too, despite knowing how reckless and wrong it is.

Because we all know “privatization” belongs in scare quotes. Because it isn’t what it purports to be.

You want to avoid the tough discussion about how public money to provide a public service cannot be privatized. Because its customers are public employees. Because supporting them is a public responsibility.

That discussion would reveal the nature of this hide-the-salami scam. It’s a way to kill something without making too much of a scene. To inject it with a slow-acting lethal poison and then continually prop it up so the effects are hard to notice. Like a twisted “Weekend at Bernie’s” skit, slap some shades and a Hawaiian shirt on it and hope no one notices it is dead on its feet.

To land this scam, you want everyone to focus on efficiency. Yes … surely a private hotelier will be more efficient at taking care of our people because that’s what they do for a living.

But those of us who see the world through hard-earned lenses of cynicism know what that word means. It means you’re going to once again invoke more with less, which you and we know is complete horseshit.

Profit-seeking companies will not be more efficient running military hotels. They will be less efficient. The taxpayer will pay more for airmen to receive less. Until eventually, once the company has squeezed the turnip into a bloodless pulp, it will start saying it can’t make the whole thing work anymore. It’ll delay promised upgrades, claiming the remains of Jimmy Hoffa or a colony of endangered crested newts were discovered, preventing planned works.

That won’t stop it dialling up prices, eventually demanding a king’s ransom for the privilege of us allowing the squeeze to continue.

And when that moment comes, and sane rationalists who still believe in a semblance of accountability ask “who do we see about this?” …

… the answer will be crickets. Because the legislators fielding the question will have been profiting from the dirty deal themselves.

My suggestion, which is pure wish casting, is that you don’t do what you clearly want to do. Fight the inclination to continue cross-controlling the Air Force into a smoking crater by making it unwelcome to everyone with anything better to do.

Instead, do one of two things.

1. Bulldoze all Air Force lodging. Admit you don’t care about it. Admit you don’t see it as part of your remit. Say out loud that the money is not and will never be there. Tell the taxpayer they will have to pay more since off-base hotels will be exclusively used. Let airmen decide for themselves whether and to what degree they care, so they can make an informed decision about whether to serve.

Or

2. Tell the truth. Go to Congress and ask for the money to do this properly. Say publicly what it costs. You might get fired. The truth is not a defense against getting fired. But it’s a defense against losing credibility and self-respect. It’s a defense of your legacy. Ron Fogelman is still remembered as a man who put principle above personal gain. Merrill McPeak is still remembered as an arrogant gobshite who forced a failed reorganization and a comical uniform down everyone’s throats. Most are not remembered at all. Do you want to be remembered as the gang who helped politicians put airmen in roach motels?

Privatization pretends to be a middle of the road option, but it’s really just an ornate and interlocking bullshit machine for the creation of a crap experience at monarchy rates. It’s the middle of the road only in the sense that airmen will get run over.

Privatization, in its various names and guises, is never anything but an iron sulfide mine for the naïve. While they’re busy getting bad news from the appraiser, the mine operator is sipping cocktails on a beach in a country with no extradition.

And you know this. So now we’re clear on what you really want, and what you really mean when uttering this weaselly euphemism.

If the foregoing makes you feel attacked, then congratulations. You are my target.

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Privatizing military lodging is the worst idea since the reverse petting zoo.

Actually, I take that back. Privatizing military lodging is the worst idea since the last privatization scam.

Before that, the worst idea was raiding base infrastructure and maintenance budgets to support five administrations spending $7T of our grandchildren’s money to fight two wars without taxing for them.

Just like the animals at a reverse petting zoo almost never pet people back, privatizing public services almost never works.

Look no further than the privatization of mental health care in the 1980s, and the ensuing explosion of untreated disorders in the years since.

The cosmos typically doesn’t install a monetary incentive into things we should just do because they are clearly right and responsible.

But there’s another reason this is a bad idea.

I learned in my time at Amazon that if something is core to value creation, you bring it under your control. Customers who pay for Prime expect to be delighted by delivery speed. Amazon understood this, and created its own last-mile delivery service to rescue struggling segments of its network.

How airmen and families feel when they’re changing station, or visiting a base for critical training, or on duty somewhere away from home, fundamentally impacts their quality of life. And thus, their attitude toward service. This is not something you consign to a third party who doesn’t get it.

But we’re reaping seeds planted long ago, mainly by Donald Rumsfeld. He came to the Pentagon intent on shrinking the services by excluding from their budget portfolios anything not directly military, a definition he concocted on our behalf.

He moaned about exchanges, commissaries, housing, and hotels. He even moaned about health care.

When the costs of two wars outstripped what politicians could secure absent a difficult conversation with the general public, he squeezed the services into default. Forced on pain of mission failure to pay operational bills far beyond their budget authority, they could only solve by torching budgets for support activities. It became a habit. Then it became entrenched. It fit perfectly with Rumsfeld’s plan to make support so bad there would be less opposition to letting cash-motivated corporations have a crack at it.

Twenty years of institutional neglect later, we are living Rumsfeld’s vision.

And it was all built on a lie. The lie that something is cheaper when it’s done by a private company instead of a public agency.

The costs borne are the same. The operating margins are the same, at least initially. Public agencies use those margins to reinvest, improve, and maintain facilities. Private agencies take those margins as profit.

Then they raise prices and take more. They keep doing this until reaching the highest price the market will bear, which in privatization is one dollar less than the price triggering public outrage and political opportunism.

Privateers extract a grotesquely huge amount of money in exchange for precious little before that point is approached.

So if something isn’t breaking even under public control, it won’t break even under private control either. In fact, it’ll end up costing more. And all anyone gains is the temporary and misleading misperception of savings.

Rumsfeld never told us why he felt our all-volunteer force should be reordered in this particular way. But he succeeded at putting it on a path of shattered support and dying infrastructure. To stay on course, he also rang in the era of suppressed speech, marginalizing and firing and punishing senior officers who came within blast radius of the truths spelled out here.

And thus began the hyper-politicization of senior uniformed service. Generals today are less like leaders and more like corporate executives.

They are accordingly entrusted with the biggest secret of all: that our political appetite for defense activity exceeds by many multiples what we can ask Americans to fund without raising taxes or defaulting on other expenses.

Which means we are constantly ahoof in a game of hiding the truth by working feverishly to reduce costs, freeing up money that can patch the holes and refresh the paint on our Potemkin village.

How do we do that?

By slapping a “Joint Base” label on an installation and pretending we saved money by consolidating support. We really just stretched it thin as a sheet and took key levers out of the hands of commanders responsible to train and fight. Whatever was saved quickly got eaten by the creation of senior officer billets to sort through complexity and incessantly have pissing contests.

By reducing the value of retirement checks and health benefits, cynically reliant upon a steady flow of recruits from economically depressed communities with few good employment options to hit recruiting targets.

By reducing staffing to a level guaranteeing endemic overstretch and burnout, turning service into a merciless and joyless salt mine instead of a demanding series of crucibles punctuated by a sustainable tempo. This has the added feature of assuring that those lasting long enough to reach high command will have internalized an “exclusion of all others” fealty code before getting anywhere near politics.

By cutting maintenance budgets and relying on the serial grinding of our people to keep equipment working.

By slashing infrastructure budgets, creating a problem for “tomorrow guy” when it’s no longer possible to conceal the rusted dilapidation of a once proud and world class collection of military communities.

By levelling down training in subtle increments until we’re training less than our enemies, again planting a future risk bomb for someone else to defuse.

And of course by reducing support to families. This will create retention problems and constitute a breach of faith in the eyes of many. But officials will simply blame retention woes on macroeconomic factors and give field commanders the task of delivering combat readiness despite an eroding caliber.

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It’s been said we military volunteers are suckers.

We hate hearing that. But we get even more pissy when the actions of those we trust and rely upon to represent our equities are complicit in making it true.

Privatizing billeting is another regrettable stride in the wrong direction, equal parts cynical, tone deaf, and misguided.

Airmen trusted their senior leaders to look after them. Those senior leaders are consigning them to a future of sad and decrepit Budget Host Inns barely distinguishable from third-world plastic and plywood hovels, which they will soon enough deploy to live in, feeling right at home for months or years while the roaches keep their families company.

Privatization is a scam. And it’s undertaken in service to the bigger fraud, which is pretending we can afford unlimited global military activity in response to the twitches of executive whimsy without paying for it, taxing for it, or limiting the intrusion of trough-feeding politics into it.

Since 2001, the national debt has risen by about the same amount as what we’ve spent on military operations. Without wars providing an excuse to keep borrowing, there is a frantic need to either make ends meet or be unable to conceal the truth that it takes an oceanic shitload more money to finance our all-volunteer force. And to do it right, vs presenting a glittering façade masking a moldy reality.

We were supposed to have learned all this 50 years ago, when we confronted a hollowed-out military and paid a massive national premium to get it back in good order.

But we didn’t learn. Truth is, we seldom do. Our pioneering spirit and optimistic swagger prevent us getting bogged down in such tedium. We never cared much for history class, unless it was an alternative to civics.

But unlike the previous iterations of military disrepair, this one falls at a time when confidence in our institutions is already low, and we lack a clear and obvious external threat to unify and focus our minds. All under the hand of a SecDef who is openly touting the virtues of the serial fraud I now lament.

The risk of rot at the foundation of our services has never been greater.

Anything worth having is under attack from the moment of birth. By corruption, by avarice, by power, or by other forms of nature. It’s as true for bird feeders or lamp posts as for factories and fleets.

Most of us have lived in relative tranquility without fear of conscription or rationing for our entire lives. This is not because of the generality of American greatness in an increasingly chaotic and unstable world. And it’s not because humans have broken their addiction to war, which will never be the case.

It’s because responsible patriots wrought for us an all-volunteer military capable of deterring aggressors, defending our interests, and securing sufficient tranquility in the global commons to unlock mutual prosperity and commercial interdependence among nations, making a longer period of peace more achievable before war once again comes.

We haven’t been engaged or vigilant enough in preserving that gift. Unless that changes, we will not keep it. Nor the peace it assures.

Tony is a retired military officer and independent writer.