Brewing Flap Over Military Senior Mentors
How Some Retired Military Officers Became Well-paid Consultants – Tom Vanden Brook, Ken Dilanian and Ray Locker, USA Today.
… As “senior mentors,” as the military calls them, the retired officers help run war games and offer advice to former colleagues. Some mentors make as much as $330 an hour as part-time government advisers, more than triple what their rate of pay was as high-level, active-duty officers. They earn more – far more, several mentors said in interviews – as consultants and board members to defense companies.
Retired generals have taken jobs with defense contractors for decades, reaping rewards for themselves and their companies through their contacts and insights. But the recent growth in the use of mentors has created a new class of individuals who enjoy even more access than a typical retired officer, and they get paid by the military services while doing so. Most are compensated both by taxpayers and industry, with little to prevent their private employers from using knowledge they obtain as mentors in seeking government work.
Nothing is illegal about the arrangements. In fact, there are no Pentagon-wide rules specific to the various mentor programs, which differ from service to service…
More at USA Today.
Old Soldiers Never Cash Out – New York Times editorial.
For all the stars of ranking generals and admirals in Washington, it turns out there’s still a higher grade – “senior mentor.” These are retired brass enjoying lucrative compensation as part-time Pentagon advisers, who, in most cases, also draw VIP pay from companies seeking defense contracts. The mentor cohort has quietly grown in recent years from a handful to at least 158 ranking retired officers – 80 percent of whom hire on at the same time with defense contractors.
There is nothing illegal about the double-dipping. But few people in Congress or elsewhere knew about it until now because there is no requirement to tell anyone, even the Pentagon. As Pentagon advisers, mentors are paid hundreds of dollars an hour for offering counsel to former colleagues on war games and other specialties. As defense contract consultants, they can make considerably more. It’s time to closely manage the retirees’ good deal, documented in a report by USA Today…
More at The New York Times.
Retired Generals Getting Rich from Conflicts of Interest – Tom Ricks, Foreign Policy’s Best Defense.
… There will be a bunch of outraged responses about 30 years of dedicated service and how dare people question their ethics. My test on this is easy: Would George C. Marshall have accepted such payments? I doubt it. (Remember, he declined to write a memoir that would have made him wealthy because he thought it would have been improper to get into the failings of some of his comrades.)
By the way, if the New York Times can win a Pulitzer for its story about generals going on TV too much, this one should win two.
More at Best Defense.
The Greed of the Generals (II): Two Questions – Tom Ricks, Foreign Policy’s Best Defense.
I’m interested that in all the e-mails I’ve gotten, and responses posted on this blog about triple-dipping retired generals getting paid to “mentor” the active duty military while at the same time working in the defense industry, and also collecting their pensions, not a single person has contended that, yes, George Marshall would approve of this behavior. As a friend of mine says, this is a good gut-check: WWGMD?
Also, another friend points out that one of the dangers of this whole “mentoring” this is that if you are not careful, you wind up bringing in people who simply reinforce existing prejudices, instead of challenging them…
More at Best Defense.
