Why is the U.S. Military becoming more and more dependent on private contractors instead of its own personnel?

For the contractors:

A). Because it's cheaper. Even if the initial cost is higher (eg salary of a contractor vice that of a soldier), you're not paying for the contractor's wife and kids, you're not paying his health care costs (for the rest of his life), you're not paying for education benefits for the guy, you're not potentially paying his salary for the remainder of his life.

B). Scalability. I can get rid of every contractor in Iraq/Afghanistan within a year. How? I just don't resign their contracts. Piece of cake. Whereas with active-duty/other military, if I want to get rid of them altogether...heck, it will take us longer than that just to set up the boards to decide which people we want to get rid of.

C). Experience. The problem with replacing all the contractors with military personnel is that the contractors fill mainly mid-level and more senior support positions. We don't have personnel in place to support those billets. There aren't a surplus of officers/non-commissioned officers around to put into the jobs to remove the contractors from.

Put another way, the military people you need to take over contractor positions aren't in the military. They got (or were pushed/RIFed) out 15 years ago (and many are now contractors. Ironic, isn't it?). You can't replace contractors with people you don't have.

"Why is it that active duty forces have been deployed and redeployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan without sufficient dwell time"

Ummm...because there's a war going on that required large numbers of troops for long periods of time for the first time in 40 years? I guess we could have built up our land forces further, but I'm not sure that would have worked out well, either.

"Why is it...the National Guard and Reserve have been transformed from a strategic to an operational reserve"

That was actually a deliberate decision taken by the Army after Vietnam. The logic was to move as much of the logistical support functions as possible to the Guard and Reserve, so that way, the government would have to decide to FULLY commit the American people and call the Guard/ Reserves up from the civilian world before going into any possibly lengthy war (otherwise, they would not be able to keep forces properly resupplied). The idea was to prevent the military again from being involved in protracted guerrilla campaigns where only the services themselves were being engaged and were having to suffer with the civilian populace being blissfully unaware at home, their only interaction being watching the war on the Nightly News.

It was a good theory, anyway. They may want to go back to the drawing board on that one.

JBryan gave yo a good answer and kmed gave you the correct answer, but didn't get the full reason correct. Contractors are cheaper because they are only used for the mission they are contracted for and when it is over, they are released. Contractors are already trained for the job and didn't have to go to AIT/tech school, etc. Using military would be much more expensive because they are not only going to have to go to basic, AIT and other schools, the military would also have to pay for their families, medical, housing, etc, for YEARS after the mission they were used for. You can't just train people for a war and then send them home afterwards. That gets VERY expensive. Additionally, the number of troops allowed is Congressionally mandated and adding more troops costs a lot ore money than hiring contractors for the short term.

Look at it this way. Would it be cheaper for you to go to school to learn how to design and build houses (about 5 years of college) or is it cheaper to pay someone a few thousand dollars, who has already gotten the experience to do it for you? Now multiply that by 1000 and you can surely see how much cheaper using a contractor is.

BTW, as Bryan told you, the military has been using contractors less and less over the past 10 years; not increasing as you have assumed. One other thing, any contractors (security) who killed anyone were contracted by the State Department; not the military...and was NOT indiscriminant as you call it. You weren't there and are only repeating media sensationalism. If you are good enough to tell who is who in a fire fight in an urban environment, then you must be able to read minds in a split second.

Your question is flawed. The "torture" at AG wasn't contractors. It was service members who made bad decisions and are paying for them. We aren't depending on them to fill "so many" duties. 99% of what they do overseas in those two countries is training for the Iraqi and Afghan military and police. I don't know who told you that contractors are doing so many tasks over there, but they're wrong. Have you been there? You couldn't have been, because you'd know your question is wrong. We have the numbers. The dwell time was just recently increased to two years and deployments reduced to nine months. Also, the military is trying to cut back our numbers because we are over strength. If we were hurting so bad with numbers, NONE of those three things would happen.

Well, you answered your own question. Our military is simply not big enough for our current needs. Therefore we have mobilized the reserves and used our National Guard as a second reserve force, but also bought contracters to fill the slots that cannot even be filled by our reserves and our backup reserves. It's one of the main flaws of having a volunteer army in a country that is trying to maintain a global hegemony.

Because the more civilian contractors kill and are untrained soldiers the more you will focus on them and not the civilians the soldiers accidently killed.

Our troops and resources were stretched to the limit with two war zones that we were deployed to!

Should we have reinstated the draft ???

Cheaper- They dont have to pay for their food, pay to house them, pay for their clothes. ... everything the army gets for free, the gov. pays for...contractors are paid less than it takes to put up one soldier (< possibly spelt wrong) for housing, food, and uniform. they get paid to do their "mission" and thats it