There was not enough warm bodies to do all the stuff the government said needed doing, and companies were paid for the people they could put into roles. Thus sort of like college after Clinton made all student loans federally backed, it was not about the quality but the quantity of warm bodies. Due to how fucked up everything is, you could often hire a literal extra-chromosome drooling retard get your federal rate, and in a number of cases that person's 1-year contract would expire before they/the project they were assigned to were given any actual work. Elon & his DOGE cultists would have stroked out in the first week if he'd been there trying to eliminate waste.
I knew one guy who was in Iraq for three years - THREE FUCKING YEARS - making 6-figutes nearly tax free due to the FEIE and was never actually given any work to do because they were waiting to staff the team. The only professional tasks he did was mandatory compliance trainings. They wanted him to stick around for a 4th year but "Hung around the green zone bullshitting with people" wasn't a very good resume line item.
When you are recruiting people to work in Iraq, you need two things from them:
First, You need someone you can trust to not absolutely and utterly meltdown after a week in an Islamic shithole. That guy who did nothing for three years? Just before his two year anniversary he scored a $40,000 sign-on bonus because he was going to decline to sign back up due to doing nothing - they did this because they finally, FINALLY had enough people to actually start doing the thing the people had been hired to do. Except right as they were able to start reviewing specs, on of the new hires flipped out. Like full on screaming sobbing throwing things toddler trantrum because the vending machine was out of Snickers (which was apparently just the final straw in how fucked up Iraq was). The fact they were back to trying to back fill made more people leave.... you get the picture. And this guy didn't just derail the project. The contracting company had sunk probably 50,000 in to his recruitment. He had to have a full medical and dental work up to make sure he didn't have any problems that would require medical evac in the next 12 months, there was also several weeks of training about "here is how to not get shot by the US military" and "if you by some fuck up find yourselves outside the wire, here is how to act such to not get immediately beheaded by the locals" and then a couple weeks of acclimation because "shit is fucking hot, nigga. Like really, really fucking hot" - all at full salary.
Anyone who touched sand was immediately extremely valuable because it drastically lowered the odds they would freak out when stuck in a foreign country. Someone who went to Iraq for three months and their only issue was being the barracks fleshlight.... you can deal with that.
Second thing you need is you need someone the US government says you can trust on a foreign soil military compound. When recruiting people for foreign soil service, there are requirements. It can't just be any geek off the street, they need to be not an wanton and obvious criminal for starters. Thus even just going through bootcamp worked as decent "pre-background check". If the DSS hadn't found out your secret criminal history in 10 weeks, chances are it woudn't turn up on a OPM search either. There was multiple MULTIPLE cases of people answering "HAve you ever been charged with a crime?" with no, doing the pre-screens, and then the background check comes in 3 seconds with "CONVICTED: Grandtheft, Grandtheft Auto, Assault, Sexual Assault, Crimes against a minor, shop lifting, Accessory to murder, public urination". Not arrested, not charged, CONVICTED and they acted surprised when this shit comes up.
The military service also provided another marker towards successful contracting employment: It meant you were dumb and malliable.
"Wait but just doing boot camp or touching sand doesn't mean they are qualified to do anything other than eat crayons!" you say. And you are correct. But see as long as they put a warm body - ANY warm body - into that contract role, they got paid. If you were utterly incompetent, it was on the project entity to discover that and get rid of them.
One guy was... bless his heart, just the dumbest fuckup ever. He didn't mean to be a complete mong, he just didn't seem to be capable of being anything else. It usually takes at least 60 days to discover someone is utterly incompetent, and usually at least 90 when the first probationary performance review comes up. But this guy in his year contract bounced through FIFTEEN CONTRACTS. But instead of sending him home, they'd find another contract for him to transfer to.
Now this wasn't all the time. Some of the contracts did have bare-minimum quals. But unless it was like a CDL for a truck driver, you could get them waived and there was interest in getting waivers to hit warm-body minimums. And sometimes it worked out. There was an alapchia yokel who lied about graduating highschool but he turned out to be an idiot-savant at web frontend work after about 6 months with a mentor. But more often then not, people were vastly underqualified for their roles but could fake it through a year and pretend to be competent or shift blame.
I can't speak too much about the PMC guys except to say it was about the same but even more fucked. There was a guy who failed his background check because he had an attempted murder charge on his sheet (not convicted, just charged). So he couldn't be hired. But on "a tip" from "someone", he bought a plane ticket to Iraq, went to the baghdad recruitment office, and was hired that day.
