Task & Purpose is an online news forum with a focus on military affairs. Their recent article describing the hell an Air Force family went through moving into a home “managed” (if you can call it that) by a third party vendor civilian corporation that was roach infested and impacted by mold is sadly nothing new.
Full on congressional inquiries have been conducted with much pomp & circumstance, but to no avail, asking why the past 10-15 yrs, the military’s on base housing situation has deteriorated to the shape its in. Both barracks and family housing on post are replete with example after example of failure to conduct proper rudimentary maintenance. Work orders fall on deaf ears. The issues go uncorrected to a point where an Army NCO was medically retired due to crippling migraine headaches only to find out that it was the mold in his govt furnished housing that was causing the headaches the entire time.
Now normally, I would play dumb and accept the fact that despite the $750 billion dollar defense budget, including an extra $2.5 billion Biden just gave back after bankrupting the wall project on the border, that the military is doing the best it can and that its the 3rd party contractor’s fault. However, despite there being plenty of blame on lazy and unethical contractors, I hold in full account the DoD for their own stupidity.
Imagine having the tools, training, personnel, and funding to do something about it using your own internal human and material resources but instead disallowing your people to take action, restricting them, and instead creating arbitrary rules who’s only role is to support financially the 3rd party vendors that have so greatly let you down.
THAT, friends, is the United States Military, and especially, the Army.
You may be wondering why and how that is so. Because, dear reader, the Army, Navy, and Air Force have their own construction units filled with service members who are trained and equipped to build and who are in dire need of filling their calendars currently full of white space with relevant tasks that the taxpayers pay them to know how to do. In the military, we call it training. In the civilian world, we would call it practice. Regardless of semantics, it presents a very real opportunity that is very much so ignored or shunned. The worst part? It would give the families and servicemembers a better standard of living and at a better deal to the taxpayer. And thats probably EXACTLY why the Army won’t do it.
The current standard is that when there is an issue, the servicemember reports it to base housing or the Dept. of Public Works. From there they File 13 it, sit on it a while, or pass it on to the third party vendor. That third party vendor then subcontracts a company to “repair” (a.k.a. band-aid) the situation at the most economical cost. Less scrupulous subs, knowing full well the military has a history of deep pockets and a forgetful memory and habit of not checking behind, ratchet up the cost of repairs more than 10 times normal rates. That’s if they do the job at all. See, the vendor is doing it too and sometimes fucks around and doesn’t pay the sub. Eventually the subs get wind of this and don’t want to work for the vendor anymore knowing there is a high chance they wont be paid for an extremely long time, if at all. All the while the servicemember and their families endure the living conditions. Its the servicemember that loses in the end.
But suppose there were a better way. A different way. Suppose the “person in charge of base housing” was a position to be filled by an Active Duty servicemember. Suppose one construction unit per base was assigned as that base’s maintenance custodians and were assigned the tasks of maintaining the housing and buildings. In essence, replacing DPW and Base Housing altogether. It gets better; imagine now that the unit assigned is also responsible for fielding the repair orders and making those repairs. That it serves as good practice for the servicemembers and teaches them valuable skills they could use in the civilian world or in continued service to the military. Of course, the military is already paying them but would be eliminating profit, overhead, and the labor of the subs and third party vendor. Instead, by cutting out the middle man, the military would only pay for materials (without markup of course) and would be saving a bundle. Those servicemembers could also be responsible for building new on base housing, or at least charge the leaders of that unit with supervising civilian contractors, if they’re needed, to build new larger structures such as office buildings and barracks / dormitories, schools, the PX, etc.
Imagine if each base had a public website that could be accessed tracking the complaints, responses, and resolutions in real time similar to fast food or the production and manufacturing industries. Imagine REAL accountability. Suppose the people charged with repairing and working on these homes were the same ones living there. Do you think their quality of work might be different? Do you think there may be teaching / training value in practicing their trade in real life where it counts and where failure isn’t an option?
No.
Instead, we’d rather continue paying those units to build subpar “theater of operations” structures to arbitrary standards, if they even build at all; or pay them to sit on their asses doing nothing while hiring unscrupulous, unprofessional, and unbelievably awful 3rd party contractors or better yet 3rd party nationals to do the work and create living conditions in such squalor that it should be condemned. We’d rather watch as weeks and months turn into years without doing something. And we’d rather pay hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for products and services which we should hang our heads with embarrassment to accept. Meanwhile, you’ll have construction-jobbed servicemembers who will achieve their first term and get out having never seen a project through to completion and who will be un-hirable as the civilian sector will recognize that they have no skills. And you and I will pay the exorbitant tax bill none the wiser.
We have a tall ladder and the means of which to climb out of filth, grime, and decay. But we’d much rather burn the rungs off the ladder.
redneckphilosopher 