Big Pay Luring Military's Elite to Private Jobs

WASHINGTON, March 29 — Senior American commanders and Pentagon officials are warning of an exodus of the military's most seasoned members of Special Operations to higher-paying civilian security jobs in places like Baghdad and Kabul, just as they are playing an increasingly pivotal role in combating terror and helping conduct nation-building operations worldwide.

Senior enlisted members of the Army Green Berets or Navy Seals with 20 years or more experience now earn about $50,000 in base pay, and can retire with a $23,000 pension. But private security companies, whose services are in growing demand in Iraq and Afghanistan, are offering salaries of $100,000 to nearly $200,000 a year to the most experienced of them.

The Central Intelligence Agency is also dangling such enticing offers before experienced Special Operations personnel that the Pentagon's top official for special operations policy, Thomas W. O'Connell, told a House panel this month that intergovernmental poaching "is starting to become a significant problem."

Evidence of a drain of seasoned Special Operations members, including elite Delta Force soldiers, is largely anecdotal right now, but the head of the military's Special Operations Command, Gen. Bryan D. Brown of the Army, is so concerned about what he is hearing from troops in the field that he convened an unusual meeting of his top commanders in Washington last week to discuss the matter. "The retention of our special operating forces is a big issue," General Brown said.

Last December, he gathered 20 senior members of the Navy Seals and Army Green Berets and Air Force commandos and their spouses, at his headquarters in Tampa, Fla., for a weeklong session to discuss career-extending sweeteners, like special pay bonuses and educational benefits. A special panel is now reviewing those recommendations.

"The kind of people we're training today, that are culturally aware, able to work overseas, experts with handguns and rifles, physically fit, hand-selected guys that also speak a foreign language," General Brown told the Senate Armed Services Committee last Thursday, "these kind of people are very attractive to those kind of civilian private industries that provide security services both at home and abroad."

General Brown and other senior officials acknowledged that the lucrative offers by outsiders presented a rare opportunity for career soldiers to gain financial security.

"They're not leaving out of disloyalty," said Gen. Wayne Downing, a retired head of the Special Operations Command who recently returned from Iraq. "The money is just so good, if they're going to be away from home that much, they may as well make top dollar."

One of those senior noncommissioned officers who chose to leave the Army for a private security job in Baghdad paused for a few moments on Monday to describe his decision, but requested that his name be withheld. After enlisting just over two decades ago, he received Airborne, Ranger and Special Forces training. At the end of 20 years of service, he received an offer to go to Iraq to guard public officials and help train local Iraqis to do the same.

"It wasn't that I minded the op-tempo or the deployments, that's why I joined," he said about the pace of operations. "But after putting in my time, I had this chance to make three times the money, and some of the guys are making even more than that."

Seasoned enlisted troops and officers have always offered skills that make them attractive to civilian employers, including military contractors, security companies and military consulting firms. Military personnel experts are cautioning that longer and more frequent deployments are threatening the ability of all the armed services to retain many of their best and brightest.

Experienced Special Operations personnel have always been the cream of the crop. The demand for their talents has grown steadily since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"Any people with Special Operations backgrounds are in very high demand right now," said the manager of the Baghdad office of a British security company.

The possible exodus, which was first reported this month by the newspaper European Stars and Stripes, comes as the size, budget and missions of the Special Operations Command are increasing sharply. At Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's direction, the command will now plan and execute its own missions worldwide, with support from other regional commands, rather than act in a largely supporting role.

Over the next five years, the Defense Department plans to add 3,900 people to the Special Operations Command, which now has 49,000 people, focusing on more pilots, Seals members, civil affairs and psychological operations specialists.

In Iraq, Special Operations forces are hunting for former Baathist paramilitary fighters, training the new Iraqi security forces and helping conduct stability operations throughout the country. And in Afghanistan, Green Beret personnel are living in primitive conditions near the Pakistan border, helping seal the borders and hunt Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters, as well as rebuilding villages to earn the locals' trust.

Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said, "At a time when we're more and more reliant on Special Operations forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and for covert action, we can't afford an exodus of the most experience special operators."

Recruiting entry-level troops for these kinds of missions is going very well, General Brown said. In most cases, Special Operations members are recruited after they have served six to eight years in the military.

A typical Green Beret member requires up to 18 months of training, including learning a foreign language, at an average cost of $257,000 per soldier. Only one out of four candidates completes the training.

For the senior noncommissioned officers, the sergeants who specialize in weapons, engineering and explosives, combat medicine and intelligence, years of experience are needed to achieve the maturity required before even applying to the Green Berets. These noncommissioned offices now describe a time of upheaval that is wholly new to a post-Vietnam generation of Special Forces.

With the heightened pace of deployments, the prospect that Special Forces will continue to carry a heavy share of the campaign against terrorism, and the offers from security firms to protect businesses, journalists and even American government officials operating in Baghdad, Green Beret members interviewed expressed fears that even more of their colleagues will depart.

One reservist civil affairs captain now assigned to Baghdad has been away from his municipal job in a midsize West Coast city for more than a year. While he and his family have been happy to bear that burden in support of the mission in Iraq, he said, the frustration of managing a number of local development projects in Baghdad, which he said require him to fight the United States government budget bureaucracy, is prompting him to think about not rejoining the reserves.

And any complaints from these troops about their jobs has top officials worried. "We can never compete dollar-for-dollar with outside firms," said Command Chief Master Sgt. Robert Martens Jr. of the Air Force, the senior enlisted adviser to General Brown. "We compete on job satisfaction."

Gen. Brown was my deputy Cdr years ago when he was an LTC. He was and is the best of the best. If he says it, I believe it.

I wonder if they could try a rolling recapture of some of these guys....let them have a 2 year stint with one of these firms...make their 200 to 300 grand....and then come back to their units.

I predict that the boredom of watching some high-roller's kids so they don't get kidnapped will get boring for them.

That's a whole lot different than the satisfaction that comes from knowing you're a part of protecting the entire free world.

Actually not as desperately slanted as one has come to expect from the Lower Manhattan Puppy Trainer.

I commented on the Drudge teaser for this article here: http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1107470/posts.

The article is not as big a piece of crap as the teaser indicated; however, I wonder who the nameless bozo was that talked to a Times reporter. Of course, it's possible, even likely, that the guy did not identify himself as a Times reporter.

Commanders like Doug Brown don't have any choice, they have to talk to the press, but everyone else, remember that these guys are hoping our enemies kill us; let them get the story from someone else.

Or just make it up in NYT Walter Duranty/Jayson Blair/Charlie LeDuff tradition.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

That's where you're losing the fight. The SOF guys that are getting out don't lack in dedication, and aren't in it for the money. The retention problem runs a lot deeper than that.

Stop losses can paper over the problem, and excuses can distract from the real issues, but until the military really takes steps to change, they'll have a hard time keeping people in SOF.

That's a whole lot different than the satisfaction that comes from knowing you're a part of protecting the entire free world.

One thing that the contractors can offer, that the services (especially the Army) can't or won't, is "big boys' rules." The Army has a very, very hard time treating any soldier, but especially an enlisted soldier, as a human being, never mind as a responsible adult.

The Army also has an institutional belief that the value of any soldier's time (and this means any soldier, even the Chief of Staff) is worth zero. That's why personnel wallahs saw no problems with some reserve units taking three months to process through mobilization stations while they shuffled paperwork at welfare-office pace. No profit-making business can operate that unrealistically.

A smart recruiter would approach soldiers burdened with post details and hassled by 75-IQ sergeants major who understand nothing but uniform regulations, and tell them, "We hire natives to do the lawns, and we'll let you grow a normal, not Hitler, mustache." If the guy hasn't signed yet, then tell him what you'll pay him.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

Excellent post, and very much to the point. It's hard to convince a highly skilled, mature and dedicated person that he should take less pay and be treated like a dim witted child when there are other opportunities out there. It's a lot to ask when you've sacrificed so much for an organization that often won't even let you do your job the right way. Beyond a certain point, people feel like suckers for having put up with it for so long, and they jump ship.

You could accomplish what you suggest treating them by 'big boy' rules by pulling them forever out of the Army system once they get to SpecOps Command. Allow the everyday Army to continue their spoon-feeding ways with the rest of the troops, because that's really necessary for a lot of them....especialy some of the newer/younger ones. But, those that go into the SpecOps Command need one thing: know the Chain of Command. But they don't need to be pulling SDNCO, police details, uniform inspections, etc.

Posted like an experienced leader. I think in the long term we may see a separate service -- not without birthing pains, but historically you see the separation of the Signal Corps Air Arm to the Army Air Corps to the Army Air Forces, to the independent Air Force. There was a certain inevitablity attendant on that, as there is on a separation of special operations.

When I was on active duty, everything that was good about serving was unique to Group, and everything bad was something it inherited from the Army as a whole.

ARSOF actually abandoned one forward base in the GWOT that was established to support an SF FOB and certain AFSOF. The QM Corps officer that commanded it began to meddle more and more in the business of the SF soldiers that were based there, that they had to be removed in order to continue the war.

Now 5,000 logistical and other support troops inhabit the base, and feed and entertain each other, and are otherwise not involved in the conflict. The US has signed a 25-year lease for the property, and contractors are working on a third HQ for the QM colonel in command, after his ego outgrew the first two.

As the old Sergeant Major Choozhoo says in the Eastwood movie Heartbreak Ridge: "Ah. Supply. A much underappreciated field of endeavor."

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

It's own separate branch of service is an excellent idea.

The mission really is that unique. Nonetheless, they need to retain their recruiting rights within the other services -- a priority that is unchallenged over any person they want who also wants them. There should also be a way of returning back the other direction.

I worry about direct recruitment of fighters into SpecOps. Perhaps they really do need that seasoning that comes from stints in the other services. Linquists, psyops, civ affairs, etc. -- I'm more flexible in their direct recruitment.

I think what we need is more flexibility all round. I do believe that personnel flexibility is a priority of this Army CoS. Sure prefer him to the last one.

As far as direct recruitment goes, Army SF is the only overt SOF that didn't do it before, and we did in the sixties through the eighties... the RC SF have done it all along, called enlistiment option REP 63.

And of course a young man has been able to join the Air Force to try to go to the PJs and the Navy to try out for SEALs forever, and those units still maintain a high standard, from what I've seen (likewise, the enlisted terminal air controllers that accompany our teams as TACPs are utterly professional, and they are mostly first-termers).

To return to the subject of this thread, the four men killed earlier today whose bodies were abused by the Fallujahis, egged on by AFP reporters, were contractors for Blackhawk which is in rural VA near Norfolk... they have extensive SEAL connexions and these KIAs will likely be SEALs and/or SF. Waiting to see names.

The money doesn't look all that good in light of this.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

Shorten that a little bit and I'll consider making it my new tagline.

Indulge me a brief moment's theorizing: my theory is that in all previous large wars (Civil War, WWII) the peacetime, bureaucratic Army had to be supplanted by the serious warfighters who are not bound by bureaucratic falderal. I really don't see where that has taken place in this conflict yet (ask me about the heartache that I went through in trying to carry out an unsuccessful in-theater transfer request to 30th Brigade). Everything else in your post was spot-on perfect.

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