Tommy Denton

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Not long after I arrived in Vietnam, I was grateful that I had not developed a taste for fine food. I learned quickly that, with rare exceptions, C-rations were an agreeable alternative to meals prepared by Army field cooks.

Even so, Uncle Sam made sure none of us went hungry. New replacements, however, soon saw the long-termers frequently resorting to the canned cuisine, which was abundant, rather than eating at the "mess hall."

That's not to say the meals weren't nutritious, at times even more than palatable, especially those Thanksgiving and Christmas spreads that helped to lift morale. Much of the time, though, the GIs in my outfit looked elsewhere to satisfy their appetites, perhaps skeptical of the cooks' motivations but also aware that lowered expectations were better than no expectations.

Besides, adequate rations of dime-a-can beer took care of the morale part, at least to the extent life in the remote central highlands of Vietnam provided morale-lifting opportunities.

In other words, the Army provided whatever the Army considered essential, and that was that. Either Army cooks fed us, or Army supply clerks distributed cases of C-rations.

No one apparently had yet conceived the modern management tool of contracting those services to private vendors, as has become the norm for the U.S. armed forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere across the globe.

Outsourcing has become a given in applied management strategies, designed to maximize efficiency in achieving the designated goals and objectives. This approach has been a mainstay for years as corporations have outsourced certain functions to enhance their return on investment.

Successes in stimulating such bottom-line increases have not entirely dispelled some clamor against the consequent loss of American jobs replaced by those shipped overseas, but as that gentle humanist Benito Mussolini put it, every omelet requires some broken eggs. So deal with it.

The same principle now applies in the outsourcing of private contracts, not only to the care and feeding of combat troops but also to related functions such as civil reconstruction in the after-action phase of military campaigns.

Once upon a time, the Army Corps of Engineers and Navy Seabees saw to such logistical programs. Now, under the strategic doctrine of outsourcing, such opportunities fall to subsidiaries of politically favored U.S. construction firms selected without the burdensome bother of competitive bids.

Alas, outsourcing of contracts in Iraq was considerably more vigorous and effective than achieving the still-elusive peace and stability essential to allow those contractors to actually do what they've been paid considerable sums of taxpayer money to do.

In recent days, unpleasant reports have exposed certain shortcomings at U.S. medical facilities -- some critics characterized them more accurately as moral outrages of heinous neglect -- particularly the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center, that treat the American wounded from Middle East battlefields.

Extended care of combat veterans has always fallen short of the ideal, but news reports about neglect and systemic breakdowns included revelations that the Walter Reed system had come under the strategic mandate to outsource major functions.

The announcement last year that the federal work force would be replaced by a private contractor struck the facility's employees at the time as a repudiation of their value to the medical services, so large numbers of them left to find other jobs.

The further administrative breakdown from the drain of caretakers and supervisors resulted in the predictable mess now being reported. Basically, the outsourcing imperative trumped the care of the wounded. So much for the administration's support of the troops.

Such outcomes arising from a commitment to the profitable privatizing of public responsibilities should surprise no one. Private contractors supposedly responsible for shipping desperately needed vehicle and body armor to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan repeatedly missed production deadlines.

Federal no-bid contractors covered the government of the United States in shame after Hurricane Katrina.

Walter Reed's systemic failures arise from the civilian leadership's ideological determination to reward politically motivated corporate benefactors.

Certain public responsibilities -- war, natural or man-made catastrophes, urgent human needs -- require a vigorous commitment to the ideal of public accountability. Substituting slavish devotion to corporate bottom lines has never been sufficient to serve that end, as the series of recent fiascoes continues to bear out.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.