The reality is that the process of outsourcing public work to the private sector almost always fails because there is no incentive for the public servants to prioritize quality. The political direction is to show cost savings above all else so that the politicians can take credit for being such awesome stewards of the public purse.
The private sector knows this and therefore will prepare a contract that represents the minimum possible package that will only work if everything goes perfectly, always. When there is the inevitable intrusion of reality the company first points to the contract to dodge responsibility and then loads on extra cost plus billing to provide the service they were supposed to provide in the first place.
By the time the program fails everyone on the government side has moved on to new jobs and can evade responsibility.
The really sad part of this story is other Air Forces have gone down the contracted training route before and invariably the end result is less training for more money. Unfortunately governments are loath to learn from the mistakes of others as the senior mandarins are convinced that under there outstanding leadership “this time it will be different” ......
Furthermore we haven’t even touched on the problem of compartmentalizing Air Force capabilities, instead of taking a wholistic view of the service.
Training squadrons represent a break for personnel from front line squadrons who for 3 years know they probably won’t be deployed and will usually have a stable relatively predictable schedule. Take that away and retention suffers which has its own very significant costs, but of course the pointy heads in charge of outsourcing don’t have to take responsibility for that. The true organizational costs never have to be accounted for and no senior leader is ever going to get credit for that kind of strategic thinking, assuming they are even capable of that level of understanding of the organization they are leading.
Last edited by Big Pistons Forever; 2nd Apr 2021 at 17:53.