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U.S. Military’s Longtime Reliance on Contractors Fueled Afghanistan Loss

Relying on private contractors has always created problems for the U.S. military.

In the 1970s, the United States ended the draft, moving to an all-volunteer force where most of the logistical support capacity resided within the Army Reserve and National Guard. This change ensured that supporting the Army for extended periods would require deployment of hundreds of thousands of citizen soldiers from every community across the country. But after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, that proved politically unpalatable, encouraging the use of contractors once again.

Instead of deploying the full might of the U.S. military apparatus when the United States entered Afghanistan in 2001, therefore, civilian contractors provided not only the labor for construction projects, but also delivered logistical support and supplies — as they had in the earliest days of the army. Politicians understood that this practice meant fewer troops deploying and fewer difficult questions asked about the campaign.

Using private contractors allowed military units to prioritize aircraft pilots, infantry soldiers and military advisers over the personnel required to maintain the aircraft and weapons and provide life-sustaining supplies. To help build an Afghan force to counter the ever-present Taliban influence, the United States exported its support system to the Afghan military, even though this system did not match the needs of the conflict.

Yet as long as the U.S. military maintained a large presence in Afghanistan and paid the salaries of the contracted personnel, the contractors performed well. I experienced this firsthand while serving as an Army logistics planner in Afghanistan during 2013- 2014. Task Force Thunder, with which I worked, utilized more contracted personnel than Army aircraft maintenance personnel by a ratio of nearly two to one, in addition to civilian technical experts, and contractors who performed tasks that U.S. soldiers were already trained and paid to do such as cooking, laundry, transportation and construction.

The United States trained Afghan troops in fighting and using equipment but left critical maintenance to these contractors.

While this system hid the conflict, and its costs, from the view of many Americans, it proved damaging because it wasn’t suitable for providing consistent support for an Afghan military that would experience heated, perhaps continuous combat for decades. During the 2010s, as political pressure grew at home to bring the mission in Afghanistan to a close, U.S. and NATO forces consolidated contractors to select locations that smaller numbers of coalition troops could secure. But this move, made with little consideration of Afghan needs, often left the Afghans and their equipment without the logistical support that they had relied upon.