Boondoggle

This is the story of how a bizarre turn of events pulled the author away from a successful career in the brain sciences into the murky world of the defense contractor, a phenomenon unique to our time. The US military now employs more contractors than soldiers when it goes to war, paying international corporations astonishing amounts of money to hire back former service members. This book offers a unique glimpse from the inside into this complex world. The author takes the reader...
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This is the story of how a bizarre turn of events pulled the author away from a successful career in the brain sciences into the murky world of the defense contractor, a phenomenon unique to our time. The US military now employs more contractors than soldiers when it goes to war, paying international corporations astonishing amounts of money to hire back former service members. This book offers a unique glimpse from the inside into this complex world. The author takes the reader through the events that dropped him into his first job as a contractor at the Military Intelligence school at Ft. Huachuca in 2006. There, he trained military professionals in the art of extracting reliable information from human sources. He also came to understand how the training system sidelined some of the best people, placing the worst into positions of power, taking us down paths of lawless savagery foreign to our self-concept as Americans. As he rose within in the system, the author was appointed Director of Instruction at the Military Intelligence School at Ft. Devens while simultaneously working as the Raytheon Site Lead. This dual Army-civilian job is where the byzantine complexity of the contractor-military relationship fully manifested itself. As the Devens project expanded and Raytheon became indispensable, the Army found itself in the difficult position of cutting back contractor support without failing in its mission. The author struggled with balancing the profit requirements of his civilian employer with the Army's need to minimize costs. The interplay of the forces of expanding and reducing contractor support played out in many interesting and often horrifying ways. The story offers insight into how the government has come to pour vast amounts of money into an expensive and largely unaccountable industry. It displays the schizophrenic nature of the system which is often staffed by the same individuals, sometimes in uniform and sometimes not. The reader is left to ponder whether our defense, our intelligence, and ultimately our security is better served by the Defense Department or the defense industry, and to what degree are the two actually the same.