The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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Dirty Little Secrets
Replacing Troops With Civilians
by James Dunnigan
July 1, 2003
The Department of Defense plans to replace some 20
percent of current uniformed personnel with civilians. And this time they're
serious. This move is a reversal of a 20th century military development that put
many of the traditional "camp followers" in uniform. Camp followers usually are
thought of as loose women following an army to service the troops. There was
always some of that, still is, but historically camp followers have largely been
male and mainly there to do the housekeeping and keep the troops alive in the
field. Battles have always been relatively rare, but the health hazards of
camping out with thousands of men and horses were constant and abundant. The
troops knew this, and until the last few centuries, most soldiers were
volunteers of one sort or another and few generals could get their lads to rough
it without a lot of camp followers to keep everyone in good health.
There were usually more camp followers than troops, with the ratio of
helpers to fighters as high as ten to one. There was a lot for camp followers to
do. Pack animals had to be cared for, tents pitched, water carried, wood
chopped, food bought or stolen from the locals and cooked. Then everything had
to be packed up for the next march. During battles, the camp followers stayed
behind in the camp, often fortifying it and using a few weapons and their bare
hands to defend it against any enemy troops who got that far. After the battles,
camp followers tended the injured, buried the dead and plundered the enemy
corpses. While it was much more efficient to have the troops do their own
housekeeping in the field, few armies were disciplined enough to pull this off.
The more successful armies did, like the ancient Romans, who traveled light.
When a Roman army of 10,000 showed up, there were some 8,000 fighters with it.
Most other armies could produce only a few thousand warriors out of 10,000.
Since most armies lived off the land, and this often limited the size of the
army, the force that hauled along the fewest camp followers had a substantial
military advantage. This lesson eventually was relearned, and camp
followers began to thin out in most Western armies, and those that remained were
put into uniform. A century ago, support troops amounted to less than 15 percent
of an army. Civilians now handled a lot of transportation and supply jobs. If
you were in uniform, it meant that you were trained to fight. But in the last
century a lot more equipment has been added. Not just things like trucks,
trains, transport aircraft and cargo ships that civilians could be hired to run,
but weapons and other gear close to the front that needed soldiers to take care
of them. In the last century, the camp followers in uniform have increased to
the point where they comprise about 85 percent of an army. Yet everyone wears
the same uniform, goes through a lot of the same initial training and gets the
same pay. Wearing a uniform now means that you are probably not a fighter.
Moreover, it's difficult to get the kind of technical specialists that are
needed because military pay scales don't allow for meeting the pay demands of
the really hard- to- get people with skills you need. Even the Army recruiting
efforts make much of the majority of non-combat, and "civilian" jobs available.
The U.S. Marine Corps is different. All marines are still considered combat
troops first, and whatever non-combat chores they might do every day as
secondary. More and more, the marines are seen as the troops you can trust if
there's going to be a really desperate fight. Out of the Marine
experience came the idea of converting more of the military "civilian" jobs to
civilians. Actually, this has been going on for some time. In the 1960s, the
army began to hire minimum wage civilians to do "KP" ("Kitchen Police," where
each low ranking soldier helped out in the kitchen one or two days a month.) It
was noted that troops who were technicians, going to a school or holding
critical jobs, were losing valuable time, or training, but getting assigned to
KP. Same thing with guard duty, which was assigned much like KP. MPs or civilian
guards gradually replaced troops doing guard duty. Many other similar jobs, like
cutting grass, were taken away from the troops, particularly after the military
went all-volunteer in the 1970s. Without much fanfare, more and more
civilian specialists began to show up in military units. Some were maintaining
complex electronic gear or computer software. Others were again, as in centuries
past, handling transportation and taking care of logistics. The pre-positioned
combat equipment held in readiness, a technique that is over two decades, was
maintained by civilians. In some army and air force units, vehicle and aircraft
maintenance was done by civilians, at least within the United States. The
current proposal is getting away from the gradual civilianization of military
jobs and going after the many similar jobs everybody knows about.
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