While it is nice to note that contractors have taken over many of the support jobs in the area, what this means to the average soldier is that when s/he is assigned to the Great Sandbox h/she will now be filling combat slots rather than support slots, and their life expectancy become as lot less than it might have been when the military filled all of these roles.

Of course from a practical standpoint, this support work will be done with less care, and cost substantially more than if these positions were filled with miliraty people. At least this was my experience when my squadron contracted out building maintenance - cleaning, mopping, and polishing the floors. The cleaners only worked during the day shift, they did a poor job, and as contractors, they couldn't be fired.

When we had our lower rankers on this duty, it was frequently done during our third shife when we had to have a presence during this time, but did very little preoductive - in line with an individual's job description - work, and we could spare them to clean, mop, and buff floors. This also meant that if we were going to be inspected on a particular date, we could shift a few more people onto this detail and be sure that the squadron would be "standing tall" in the morning; and we would take care to keep it this way until teh inspectors left.

Dave