Idealogical dilemma.
The Specialist
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I lurk here a lot but generally refrain from posting because I don't like it when people point out what a douche I am. But I'm a little confused and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the matter.
I'm currently a US soldier looking at the end of his six year enlistment (technically 7 because I will be stop-lossed).
Taking a job with a government contractor in either Kuwait or Saudi Arabia maintaining aircraft is my highest paying prospect when my enlistment is up.
But If I believe that these government contractors are lining the pockets of the guys running the war to begin with, does taking the job make me a hypocrite? I don't like the idea of working for them. But I'm going to need the money, and it's a lot of money for a guy like me.
I'm currently a US soldier looking at the end of his six year enlistment (technically 7 because I will be stop-lossed).
Taking a job with a government contractor in either Kuwait or Saudi Arabia maintaining aircraft is my highest paying prospect when my enlistment is up.
But If I believe that these government contractors are lining the pockets of the guys running the war to begin with, does taking the job make me a hypocrite? I don't like the idea of working for them. But I'm going to need the money, and it's a lot of money for a guy like me.
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If your answers to the above questions are all "no," then there's nothing unethical/hypocritical/illegal about taking a job like that. If I could, I know I would.
Suck it up, you douche.
(I kid.)
Do you believe that the contractor is doing ill in the world? Or is it overall a good (or at least morally neutral) company that does some bad things? There isn't an employer in the world that is both successful and morally pure - every company is going to have some kind of corruption in its upper management. As long as you believe that the work you personally do is good, not liking your boss (or your company) doesn't make you a hypocrite.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Well my answer two the first two and the last would be no. It's that third one that bugs me. Technically it wouldn't illegal or unethical. I mean, it's just fixing helicopters. But it supports a war I'm having a tough time living with now. But at least now I know that I don't have a choice in the matter. If I take the job I'll know I did it for the money. Regardless of how much I may need the money.
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It's not like you're being asked to electrically shock a guy tied to a bed and "just follow orders".
Until the performance review at any rate.
Alternately:
At least until you get married.
Whether or not you work to fix those helicopters isn't going to make the slightest difference as to whether the war continues or not. Not a bit. However, if it's big money for you, then why not?
Thoreau would be appauled right now. Not that you should necessarily give two shits about what he'd think.
I enlisted in the Navy in 2000, and did my four years and got out. On my way out I was offered a job as a communications contractor. Taking a job in a new town, the only people I've been able to make friends with are colleagues, and all of them are also comm contractors. In fact, one of them is taking a contract in Kuwait at the beginning of next year.
We've been struggling with this recently also. Here's what I've decided: Doing your job and doing it well helps keep the many soldiers who are fighting this war alive, in spite of the best efforts of the military industrial complex to get them killed off as quickly as possible. Without someone doing that job, the only person that suffers is not the faceless corporation, it's the guy in the sand.
As much money as you make there, and believe me I know how much money you can make there, you will be getting paid to do something that needs to be done.
The majority of the contractors that are wasteful and criminal are the no-bid contracts for base services, and the contstruction and shipping contractors (And many many comm guys), not mechanics.
So me, I'm not quitting. Like I said, the only person that suffers is the guy on the ground.
I'm probably just being an emo fag about it. But the people I usually ask about this sort of stuff (my grandfather mostly) tend to lean to the right anyway and I don't think they'd understand.
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the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If you think you're going to keep feeling like this and that this feeling is going to make you so unhappy that the money isn't going to mean much you might not want to do it.
I don't really think it follows that repairing helicopters is helping the evil war continue but if you feel it does then that's what you need to make your choice upon.
I turned em down because I was headed to college with my GI bill check but I was sure as hell tempted.
Your hesitation is to your credit but I see no moral hippocracy here.
Don't get killed.
Do whatever will let you sleep with a clean conscience. If you're second guessing yourself and whether or not what you're doing is right every night, you're going to be miserable, no matter how much money you're making.
Is there any particular reason you need to make that much money right now? Is there any reason you can't instead just go to school for a few years and figure out what else you might want to do?
As long as we're not talking about mercenary work or zapping some poor Iraqi's testicles (which we aren't), I don't see any huge moral dilemma. I just think you're looking at the big dollar signs and possibly not realizing you have other viable options that you might enjoy more.
Unless you did something downright nutty like buy a brand new truck with a $500 a month payment, there's no reason financially that you shouldn't be able to go to school instead...the GI Bill+Army College Fund is a fuckload of money. Don't forget to do the "top-up" program (or whatever they call it) to add the additional $600 dollars (bringing the total to $1800) if there's any chance you'll ever go to school. You have to do it while still on active duty.
It's a support position, meaning doing the work helps save lives, and even if you chose to "protest" and decline the position on moral grounds only one of two things will happen: (1) Someone else, hopefully as qualified as you, will fill the position and do the work, leading to the same result at best or a worse result if they do a worse job or (2) The company will be unable to fill the spot, and the other workers will have to stretch to cover the missing manpower, leading to a chance of shoddier work and people getting hurt.
Ultimately, it comes down to either you can do the job well and help people, or turn down the job and have no effect or a negative impact. This isn't to say that you have to or should take the job from a moral viewpoint, merely that the net moral effect of your taking the job is either non-existent or positive.
I want to go back to school so bad I can taste it. But if I can do it in a way where I don't have to worry about much else than that's the way I'd prefer to do it.
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That's basicly the idea...
Well guys, I don't know if all this has cleared the issue for me, but it's certainly given me other ways to think about it. I gotta crash though.
Thanks for the input.
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As a single person you can pretty much live off the GI Bill (plus Army College Fund) and go to school full time, without working, and without racking up any serious college debt.
I get over $1500 a month for each month I'm in school...36 months total (4 school years). Figure a 9-month school year nets me $13.5K, none of which is taxed. Add the fact that, after being out for a year, your income is likely to be low enough to qualify you for grants...so add another $1-2K, also untaxed, and doesn't need to be paid back. Say you can pull in $3K over the summer (working 30 hrs. a week at $6-7 an hour over the summer), and you're up to $17.5K to $18.5K, which may be enough to get by if you have a roommate, or can find cheap housing (depending, of course, on where you go to school). And that's without working at all during the school year, or taking out any loans.
And you'll only be paying taxes on about $2-3K of that...which means you won't be paying any taxes at all.
But yes, you do have ten years to use it, and this (the contracting work) is a good opportunity to go to school with a sizeable savings. I'm just saying that if you are feeling like you'd rather take a break and start school instead, it really can be done pretty easily. No real need to worry.
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This reduces the pay of soldiers, and reduces their benefits.
If you take this job, you not only support a military industiral complex expanding into the realm of private armies, you support the people who are pushing that change.
As well, you are helping to reduce the wages of soldiers, of whom you are one yourself.
All in all, I say, that knowing what you know, it is unethical to take the job. And if, especialy if, you are already having reservations about the war, continueing to support is is a bad idea.
It will be financialy worth it, but not ethically or morally.
This I know is true but, how does that lead to this:
I am well aware that the military does not get paid nearly what the job is worth, as evidenced by how much a civilain doing the same job gets, but I fail to see how it reduces pay and benifits.
edit: you do have a point about the privitization of some parts of the military. However, I would like to point out that the quality of the logistical support has improved by orders of magnitude since the veitnam era, when the attitude was that there were always more men to send in. In an all volunteer force soldiers are a commodity. I quite liked somone else setting up and maintaining the latrines and showers and cooking the food and other day-to-day stuff. Having civilians do some of the more mundane jobs frees up more soldiers to do the job they were trained for i.e. not building bathrooms.
Because in an all volunteer army, in order to attract more people to the job, they need to offer more pay and more benefits.
Contractors get payed very well, much better than soldiers, and that pay increase is why they are able to get people to come work for them.
Its supply and demand, if you need to buy more of something, you have to pay more per unit.
Military gives work to civilian contractors. Civilian contractors pay high wages to attract employees. Some sort of intermediary step. Soldiers get paid less and receive less benefits.
This doesn't make sense.
If soldiers are not being used for a particular job, this does not automatically mean other soldiers are paid less. If logistics is outsourced to private firms, then why would a shooter be paid less as a result?
Part of the reason for the increase in civilians filling the non-combt roles is that the supply of soldiers is low. Right now the demand is quite high, the recruitment standards have even been lowered to try and make up for this. Cutting pay and benifits when it is already difficult to get new recruits and retain current troops would seem counterintuitive.
You're fixing helicopters and other aircraft your fellow soldiers will be relying on to stay safe and keep the advantage in their favor. Sure, eventually that translates to "supporting the war" which you (and most others) are not fond of. More directly, however, you'd be contributing to the safety of fellow U.S. soldiers that my not like the war any more than you do but must fulfill their military obligation. If less good men die in the war due to your efforts you can rest easy at night, so I would recommend you pursue this career.
Because if they didnt hire contractors to do the jobs, they would have to recruit more soldiers, and if they have to recruit more soldiers they have to pay them more.
Soldiers = Supply. The Higher the quantity you want, the higher the marginal cost of soldiers.
Less soldiers you need, the less you have to pay to get that many soldiers.
If after some soul-searching, you find that this was just a moment of hesitation and that you'd actually feel OK about doing this work, then I say, go for it. If you can't shake those doubts, though, don't let the money trick you into thinking this is a good idea.
1) Military pay will only stay the same or go up.
2) The military is not a doughnut shop, simple supply and demand do not apply.
3) Civilians are being hired precicely because there is a shortage of soldiers.
4) There is ALWAYS a demand for more soldiers, If you can pass the ASVAB and the physical, YOU WILL GET IN.
You guys are getting deployed?
And if you can't they will get you a waiver and let you in anyway.
Believe me, I work with the fucking morons who can't even score a 31 on the ASVAB.
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I'm Dem who's worked for defense contractors since I left college, doing work from relatively benign or beneficial (nuclear test ban monitoring) to questionable (signal intelligence analysis) to wasteful (national missile defense) to involving weapons (cruise missile mission planning).
I don't like it, really. I don't really like the environment, the work, the people (mostly very conservative, though less so in Massachusetts). I didn't mind the cause when America was behaving sanely, but I have my doubts now. I don't like the obvious and systemic waste.
But, you know, it's a living. And most of the projects I've worked on are either things that are going to need to be done by someone, or else just a case where the government is throwing money at a contractor as quid pro quo, and someone's going to be hired to be paid as a function of the contracting structure.
I don't like this, and I campaign and vote against these fuckers every election, but I keep going to work every day.
I too work for a defense contractor, and have asked myself this very same question before. My company makes UAV's - nothing as ominous as tanks or guns thankfully. I never came up with a satisfactory answer, i'm not sure there is one.
The one universal given is that our country will always be involved of some kind of conflict. America was founded on a war, and we declare war on every fucking thing, the war on drugs, on poverty, on literacy - whatever man, war war war. The military industrial complex just feeds that addiction to war, with it's more creative and innovative ways to kill people. It's a never ending cycle of lobby-types doing their very goddamn best to get the government to spend more money on military shit so thier companies can bring in more profit. As for personally lining thier pockets, i'm pretty sure that's against the laws. We all know lobbyiests have thier ways - still, I can't see it as bad as I imagine it to be.
In your case, it's not as bad I suspect - Uncle Sam is increasingly out sourcing service related functions to contractors, things like vehicle maintence, or IT support. Their take is that the military should be about the war fighter, and anything that detracts from that hurts thier ability to wage war. So, take your security clearance, sit overseas for a while, and make some good cash. Clearances are rare, and very bankable. I was offered several jobs over there, and the money was outstanding - but decided against it for personal reasons.
True, but the rate at which it will go up can change. I don't believe there's even any law saying military pay needs to keep pace with inflation.
As Andrew_Jay said it's more complicated than that. Yes, in theory we are hiring contractors because there is a shortage of soldiers. However, there is a shortage of soldiers because we had downsized our army prior to going to war, and it gets more difficult to find recruits when the news is reporting daily body counts.
Also, part of the rationale behind the downsizing of the active military was that we could simply call in contractors to fill in the gaps. At which point you could say the shortage of soldiers was created for the contractors. Of course, in a lot of ways it makes more sense to pay a contractor $100k for a year rather than pay a Joe $20K-$30K for the five years between conflicts (especially when you factor in Joe's benefits)...though I'm starting to wonder how well that cost-benefit analysis works out when something like Iraq drags on for five or six straight years.
This is true. But there is not always a need for soldiers in specific non-combat MOS's, especially the kind of MOS's that are being slowly replaced by contractors. Looking at how hard the schools for some technical MOS's can be to get into now, as well as how high the promotion points are in those MOS's, it's pretty obvious that we're moving towards an Army where all Joe does is fight, and everything gets fixed/built/serviced by civilians.
I see this as a bad thing for two reasons. One, I think it fucks soldiers because it creates less demand for them, especially between conflicts. This means actual career opportunities in the military (you know, for people who don't just want to pay for college) shrink, especially outside combat MOS's. Two, it creates a situation where our forces are dependent on civilians, which can be less than optimal at times. I saw situations where a civilian technician decided that it was too dangerous to roll out to a forward base to work on the equipment he was contracted to work on; since he doesn't fall under UCMJ, there wasn't really anything our unit could do about it...we could maybe get him fired, but that would just mean he'd be replaced by somebody else who'd probably do the same thing. So our soldiers just end up covering down and doing the extra work that he's being paid 2-3 times what they make to not do.
So you end up shrinking career opportunities for soldiers in technical fields, possibly stagnating soldiers' pay and benefits, with the added bonus of replacing soldiers who could just as easily do the job with contractors that may or may not be dependable.
The only possible scenario in which the DoD might have to reassess is if there were some sort of mercenary collective action who was somehow able to hold the line and boycott the war. Clearly, this isn't going to happen.
I agree, if you actually want to stop the war then start a strike, but since that won't work, partly cause it's america and partly cause it's in friggin war, people won't strike in war.
Now i think you should do it, simply because it is not really "war" work which is imorral. If everyone stopped repairing helicopters then some people would crash, or they'd hire mexicans or something. Not really an ideal outcome. If all soldiers stopped fighting, then that would have an impact. But yeah, it's not gonna happen.
As for all the bullshit reasons in this thread, mainly being "someone's gonna do it anyway" or "all companies that are successful are corrupt" you are full of shit. Strikes are actually pretty damn useful, and there is a reason you should not walk past a picket line. People should be able to have a decent pay, and if they don't get so, they should be able to refuse working to get one. End of story. And i am pretty damn certain not all succesful companies are corrupt, sure, most, but that's not a good reason for accepting it.
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Was in Camp Humphreys. I'm stationed at Fort Campbell now looking at a deployment to Afghanistan within the next year.
As far as military pay goes, I know that it doesnt decrease. But I also know that we just got the lowest pay increase in like, the last twenty years.
Yet every soldier I talk to still seems to think that republicans actually want to pay them more. It's like we're all just uniform filling with no actual brains.
I think I've pretty much decided that working for a contractor is like that is against what I believe in. But that doesn't mean I've decided not to seek out one of these jobs. There are alternatives to it in the civilian world, especially with my FCC license. The word I get though is that these jobs tend to be sparse and the tend to be difficult to hang on to. On the other hand I'm not really planning on making a career out of this.
Dammit, this is an irritating decision to have to make. Military guys get out all the time and take jobs with contractors.
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Good luck with it, though. Just remember that your decision whether or not to work for a contractor is not going to make any real difference in government policy...so make the decision based on how it works for you.
But if you are really feeling the need for a break from the bullshit, just remember that school is doable. And do the $600 additional contribution to the GI Bill before you get out...it adds $5400. The only reason I've mentioned it twice now is that when I got out nobody told me shit about it (and it wasn't around when I signed up). So I didn't get to do it until I got back from Iraq after deploying with the Guard...by then I had used 1/3 of my GI bill, and it isn't retroactive...so it cost me like $1800 dollars.
I've found that the average soldier is about half-retarded. Especially when it comes to politics. I think it comes from taking 18-year-old kids (who aren't exactly fully mentally developed anyway) and obliterating their desire and responsibility to think.