Did I read this correctly? I mean, I know it’s hard these days to find people to go to Iraq but........damn.
Under the contract, GLS will provide foreign-language interpretation and translation services to the United States Army and other U.S. government agencies supporting OIF, including embedded Iraqi translators who will operate with U.S. forces. GLS will employ up to 6,000 locally-hired translators and up to 1,000 United States citizens with security clearances who are native speakers of languages spoken in Iraq. Full contract performance will begin in March 2007.
$4.645 BILLION dollars for about 7,000 translators?
Maybe this explains it:
DynCorp International is the managing partner of GLS with a 51% ownership interest. The president of GLS, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. (Ret.) James "Spider" Marks, has broad experience in managing large, complex personnel deployments and sustainment operations-including linguists-in high-threat environments. He was responsible for the Iraq Language Program in 2003 as the chief of intelligence for the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC). He will be assisted by GLS Vice President Michael Simone, former commandant of the Defense Language Institute.
I remember Maj. Gen. (Ret.) James "Spider" Marks. He retired after being the top intelligence officer in the Iraq invasion in 2003. He then became one of CNN's "expert" retired Generals for awhile. Now he has apparently been hired to run Dyne-Corp's language training/linguist-finding program.
I needed some budgetary perspective on our government spending, so I found this article on the 2006 Budget:
Department of Agriculture was trimmed by about $2 billion, for a budget of $21.4 billion, with cuts spread between research, marketing, land acquisition, watershed protection and other accounts.
Department of Commerce budget was proposed at $9.4 billion.
Department of Education was reduced by half a billion to $56 billion (maybe if your kids offer to learn Arabic, would they get more money)
Department of Energy went down fall 2 percent to $23.4 billion. (What's the point of an Energy Department, when you have Exxon Mobil?)
Environmental Protection Agency - Bush requested a cut of half a billion dollars for a total of $7.6 billion.
Department of the Interior - down to $10.6 billion, a drop of 1.1 percent from fiscal 2005.
Department of Justice - cut Justice Department spending authority by $1.1 billion, or 5.5 percent, for a total budget of $19.1 billion
NASA - increased slightly to $16.5 billion