Military contractors are hard to fire

Was gonna show Army equipment,
but had to show this picture instead.

The nice thing about having a blog is you can post any stories, pictures, shit you want to. I chose the compassionate picture above. I've not found the right time to post it.

Really, this post is about the emphasized parts which are pure bullshit. There must be thousands of Iraqi's capable of cleaning the fucking dirt off equipment, but I'd guess ITT is too goddamn cheap to hire them. Cuts into profits, don't ya know.

Consider the 3 brothers killed in the bird market blast. They were trying to support their family by buying and selling birds. Cleaning equipment would have probably paid better, been safer and they'd be alive today.

ITT Federal Services International, a defense contractor hired to maintain battle gear for U.S. troops in Iraq, repeatedly failed to do the job right.

Combat vehicles ITT declared as repaired and ready for action flunked inspections and had to be fixed again. Equipment to be sanitized for return to the United States was found caked with dirt. And ITT's computer database for tracking the work was rife with errors.

Formal "letters of concern" [oh, so fucking scary!] were sent to the contractor. Still, the Army didn't fire ITT. Instead, it gave the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based company more work to do. Since October 2004, ITT has been paid $638 million through the Global Maintenance and Supply Services contract.

The Army's ongoing arrangement with ITT, detailed in an audit from the Government Accountability Office, shows how captive the military has become to the private sector for overseas support. Even when contractors don't measure up, dismissing them may not be an option because of the heavy pace of operations.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., co-author of legislation creating a special commission to examine wartime contracting, said poor-performing contractors are more likely to get bonuses than to be penalized.

"It has just been a mess," McCaskill, a former state auditor, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It's bad enough how much this war is costing. But it's heartbreaking the amount of money that has just gone up in smoke."

In ITT's case, there were too few soldiers to handle the maintenance duties and no other contractors ready to step in quickly, according to Redding Hobby, the Army Sustainment Command's executive director for field support operations.

Now tell me, when work has to be re-done or isn't done at all, how the hell does that facilitate the "heavy pace of operations"?

And bonuses and more work for fucking up? I gotta get into contracting. I can fuck up with the best of 'em.

Via Yahoo! News.