As a former Marine officer, I sometimes get employment offers for military-related work. At the end of April, I received an email from a contractor seeking former military personnel capable of speaking French to spend a month teaching peacekeeping skills in an African country (intentionally unnamed). Since I love to travel and was broke at the time, I immediately jumped on the opportunity.
This small African country, located just below the Equator, is coming out of a 10-year civil war and whose painful history included a genocidal massacre. Through compromise and power-sharing agreements, the government was able to slowly reintegrate the various factions back into society, finishing at the end of May with a new peace treaty bringing the rebels down from the mountains. Despite its internal problems, the country is nonetheless a contributing member of the African Union (AU) and has already sent a reinforced battalion (approximately 700 soldiers) to support peacekeeping operations in Mogadishu, where they have already lost personnel to suicide attacks.
In many ways, the AU is a great deal for the country- the army gets to keep all the equipment the AU purchases to support their mission in Mogadishu, and their units receive free military training courtesy of the US State Department.
When I arrived in Africa, I was a little nervous. I thought that the contractor’s staff would be mostly former Special Forces personnel, fluent in French and with years of experience in Africa, and I was worried that I would be the weakest link in the unit. I found that in my team of eight, I was actually in the top third for both experience and ability. We did have several native-French speakers, but on the other end, we had others with no ability at all in French. With the exception of our one former French Legionnaire, the team’s background was diverse and unspecific- ranging from sergeants to colonels, and from Special Forces to supply.
Once we got working, classes were easy. Most had been created previously and only required some final tweaking. Others needed to be created from scratch or translated into French. We normally taught one or two classes a day, each lasting 30 minutes to an hour. The rest of the time, we would sit in the back of the classroom and play on our laptops. In the afternoons we hung out at the hotel pool or went horseback riding.
I quickly realized that the work assigned to us could be done by two or three competent professionals at a much lower cost than having the eight of us hanging out. When I asked why the company had brought over so many personnel, I was informed that by the stipulations of the contract with the State Dept, the contractor was required to have a certain number of trainers on hand. Some of the more experienced contractors told me of several cases where the company had brought someone over and left them in the hotel doing nothing simply to have enough personnel to satisfy the contract. This amazed me, considering the costs involved.
As a rookie contractor, I received $2000 a week as my salary. I also received $602 a week in per diem, plus the cost of my travel to Africa. On top of that, we stayed in a resort hotel for about $100 a day/room. I was also covered by the normal government insurance that contractors receive for medical/death. Not too shabby considering I was performing roughly three hours of real work a day, and I was really only doing that much because I was bored and had volunteered to do extra translation and teaching.
Some of the cost seems justified. The per diem rate ($86/day) was based upon the State Department’s rate for the country, and was expected to cover incidentals such as laundry as well as food. As for the salary, I suppose that it can be justified by the difficulty of getting skilled personnel to travel to potentially dangerous and “austere” environments. Others have told me that some of the other missions have required the trainers to live in conditions that were more spartan. My one major complaint would be the lack of a quality personnel-screening process. While the majority of the personnel were competent and capable, several personnel lacked either the necessary military experience, language capabilities, or both. Additionally, one instructor was sent home for drunkenness after several warnings and apparently this was not the first country in which he had been relieved of his duties.
However, at the risk of the pot calling the kettle black, the real waste is found in the NGOs. The amount of money spent supporting the people who work for the NGOs and their lifestyles is incredible. In the country I was working in, the UN has several missions addressing food distribution and re-integration of former combatants. Worthy tasks, but when one sees the countless convoys bringing the foreign NGO workers from their palatial estates (each with security, maids, cooks, drivers, etc.) down to the offices in the sprawling UN compounds, one wonders if the money is really being well allocated. Not to mention the number of times I have seen UN employees arrive at my hotel just to drop off their children to play in the pool. I know that aid workers living in foreign countries need some diversions, but the average foreigner’s house rivaled even the US ambassador’s. Many of the workers have lived in these countries for years- living like royalty while also claiming that they are doing the best they can to improve the world.
I have heard many arguments for and against contractors. After fighting in Iraq and then becoming a contractor myself for the State Department, I’ve come to believe that contractors can be a powerful tool, especially to free up soldiers to fight. In my case, the US government was able to hire former military members to achieve their goals in Africa, while avoiding the use of their over-stretched Special Forces units (normally used for these types of training missions). To be effective, I believe contractors need to be closely and properly supervised, from the bidding/contracting process down to their actual daily work. I do not think we should necessarily write off using contractors completely, but their use should not be unrestricted. Teaching peacekeeping to a friendly nation is one thing- protecting the ambassador to a country we’ve invaded and occupied is another.
Further Reading: Wired