The use of contractors in various functions that used to be purely military has grown consistently over the years. It began innocently enough, I suppose, with a desire to focus military members' time on the essentials: training, war-fighting and such. So some basic functions like food service in garrison, clean-up, and keeping the base commander's lawn mowed, were farmed out. Unfortunately, government budgeteers soon discovered that contracting a wide variety of services could make the military budget seem smaller than it actually is, since the costs of hiring civilians on contract wouldn't show up as part of the "military" budget. And the race was on.
Other government agencies have followed suit -- consider for example the flap a couple of years ago about the contract firm (Blackwater) the State Department hired to provide security to its people in Iraq. By now, almost anything can be, and is, contracted. The practice is conceivably defensible for the domestic work of many government agencies, but it holds a lot of drawbacks when the critical elements of the mission are performed outside the U.S. - as is the case, for example, with the work of the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA.
The contract employees are generally more expensive (even if they are usually ex-military people who were trained originally at government expense). And while their personal skills may be perfectly up to the task of providing perimeter security for U.S. installations (to cite one example), it makes little sense to put civilians, even volunteer civilians, in the line of fire, or to have them making the decision as to whether to engage or not. It's not reassuring to hear reports like this one, which says the Pentagon is now asking for proposals to broaden contractor presence/authority in combat zones in Afghanistan.
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