Heard this segment on The Takeaway today.

In the segment, Todd Zwillich interviews Tina Jonas, the former the comptroller undersecretary of defense for the Department of Defense, to try to address the complexity and enormity of the military bureaucracy and the symbiosis of capital 'M' military with the web of federally subsidized private contractors that the military hires.

A little excerpt from the Washington Post article they were addressing on the show:

"...the McKinsey consultants had also collected data that exposed how the military services themselves were spending princely sums to hire hordes of defense contractors.

For example, the Army employed 199,661 full-time contractors, according to a confidential McKinsey report obtained by The Post. That alone exceeded the combined civil workforce for the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development.

The average cost to the Army for each contractor that year: $189,188, including salary, benefits and other expenses.

The Navy was not much better. It had 197,093 contractors on its payroll. On average, each cost $170,865.

In comparison, the Air Force had 122,470 contractors. Each cost, on average, $186,142."

Here is the entire WP article.