Personally, that doesn’t seem like a lot of money for the risks one is taking, the conditions you have to live under, plus the extra working hours and sacrifice of being away from your family.
You gotta figure the guys going over are “skilled workers” so they probably would draw at least $60K here (before taxes)...and that’s probably for an 8 hour day. Add to that extra hours (say a 12 hour day) and their pay here would be at least $90K (or more if they were hourly.)
No taxes is nice, but if you have a family, and deductions and make around $100K, your “real” tax rate is probably 15 percent or less (depending on your exemptions/dependents.)
Anyhoo, just thinking out loud...seems they should get more.
“that doesn’t seem like a lot of money for the risks one is taking”
That’s the way much of the professional military is seeing it. Many of the contractors are co-located with military personnel and the word is getting out about how much contractors make. From what I’m hearing it creates morale problems in some cases. A senior Non-Com, Cpts and Majors on their second or third tour are saying, “what am I, chopped liver?”
The unarmed contractors are a paramilitary Combat Service Support provider, freeing up the military CSS troops to be shooters, road runners and door kickers. On the other hand, they can’t bear arms and defend themselves, so their Force Protection can become burdensome to the responsible commander. The concept of the Logistics Civiian Augmentation Program goes back to Clinton’s Balkan adventures, when the Army discovered that its tail wasn’t big enough to keep the shooters shooting after the “peace dividend” stripped the Theater Army Area Commands out of the force structure.
The good thing about contractors is, when you don’t need them any more, you cancel their contract and send them home and forget about them.
Armies have core competencies, like killing people and breaking things. There are a lot of tasks that need to be done to keep an army fed, clothed, sheltered, healthy, moving, shooting, and communicating, comparatively few of which must be accomplished by a soldier. Contracting ancilliary tasks to private military companies that specialize in expeditionary logistics frees up the Loggy Toads so they can go out and be Killers.
Some clarification on the tax situation for contractors: the first $80K is deductable when earned outside the US for 330 days. Lesser time is calculated as a % of the deductable. Recent changes have reduced the effect of the reduction. As an example the taxes on $280K are over $60k.