Via Atrios, great piece from a retired general in the New York Post on Rumsfeld's Army:

Want to know how far off the rails things have slid at the Pentagon? Recently, the Army wanted to tally up how much money it had been forced to divert to private contractors as part of Rumsfeld's rush to privatize military tasks. The Rummycrats forbid it. They refused to let the Army balance its own books — because the privatization mafia knew what they would find: Contractors cost more, not less, than soldiers.

When honest budget managers in the services calculate the transition of any uniformed job to a private contractor, their working assumption is that the contract employee will cost the Pentagon $100,000 a year. A sergeant barely makes a quarter of that, and a private hardly a fifth — including benefits.

You, the taxpayer, are being cheated outrageously in the name of an ideologically driven crusade to reduce the size of government. This is corporate welfare that has nothing to do with the welfare of our troops. And guess what? Most of those contractors disappear when the bullets start flying.

The occupation and the reconstruction efforts are going well in Iraq — much better than the media reports imply — but our soldiers are making progress despite the lies, incompetence, greed, favoritism and wishful thinking on the part of the Rummycrats.

| |