I don't understand how the military cannot afford to compete with the private sector. This is where wars will be won now (or soon). It's pretty important to defend ourselves. And we have trillions of dollars...
Infantrymen won't have marketable skills, but we are talking about military security analysts. These guys often do have skills equivalent to their civilian counterparts. You seem to be making the same assumption that many others in this thread have: that all Soldiers are infantrymen of less than average intelligence.
My surprise had more to do with learning that cyberwarefare reservists exist, let alone enlisted soldiers. (I'm not familiar with the military.)
[1]: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/R... p.64
I can see how you would be surprised. It seems counter-intuitive, but its actually normal for reservists in technical fields to be better at their jobs than the military. The best example I can think of is the field of aviation. Many reserve pilots are commercial pilots that get to fly 1000s of hours each year. Their full-time military counterparts don't get to fly their fancy fighter jets very often, because its really expensive.
Doctors are officers. This means that they get paid much more than Soldiers, but its still a laughably low amount when you compare it to a civilian doctor's salary.
Pilots are also officers. Their salaries are closer to the civilian world, but they are still probably a little low.
I don't think the Army is about to convert tens of thousands of IT specialists and Intel analysts from enlisted Soldiers to commissioned officers. Even if they did, the majority of them would still be making well below market rate.
Even the officer ranks that pay competitively require 10-20 years of service. At that point you are going to have a salary that's comparable to a civilian security analyst with a couple years' experience.
I think flexibility is the real problem with military hiring, not absolute pay levels.
Its also not a technical job in the traditional sense, 70Ds typically spend 8 years as a 70B (Even though a lot of them will be slotted as 70Ds much earlier than this) which is essentially a management position at a medical facility.
From the description of 70D, it could end up being a technical job depending on the particular assignment, but its more oriented towards healthcare management types.
Its not a bad deal at all if you are looking for a way to pay off your student loans.
The allowances in the Army are for things like jumping out of a plane, scuba diving, foreign languages, combat pay, etc.
The Army still has this attitude that if you aren't outside all day, running around yelling at people, then you must not be doing any work. I'm not sure if that will ever change.
Officer income is higher than Enlisted income, but it still starts at around 34k for a single person. Depending on where you live, its probably going to be about 46k for someone that's married. That's still pretty low for the type of people they are looking for.
My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009579 applies again. The 'cyberwar' does not matter, or at least not in a way that threatens the existing power structure. To the extent that there are duelling hackers out there, they're operating in the financial realm, which is very far from the military and extremely resistant to being told what to do.
Besides, conventional war is over between major powers. There's colonial policing, guerilla warfare, secret ops -- and then straight up to nuclear exchanges. NATO's eastern border is Poland; Russia's western border is some way east of Donetsk; in the middle is an ugly unacknowledged skirmish using Ukraine as a buffer zone. The skirmish will continue unescalated because neither side can afford to stop the gas pipelines flowing through Ukraine.
(The Russian missile launcher was tracked by, among other things, geotagged selfies on Instagram posted by one of the operators. Does that count as "cyberwar"?)
Result: "Forget it, let's just hire some contractors."
This isn't entirely true. Unlike the military pay scale, the GS pay scale does have ways to pay certain fields more money. Its not very much in most cases, but its there. IT jobs generally get you 10% more than other fields.
The only GS jobs I know of that get a substantial about of extra money are the Scientific and Medical jobs. There are special codes that allow them to add at least another 50k-100k to their income, depending on the specific type of position that they hold.
And hiring contractors from Booze ma kidney - has worked out so well for them hasn't it.
Federal recruiting can be quite a minefield, which is a significant problem in fast-moving professions. According to this article the NSA don't opt out of the GS scale, but that's not to say they don't offer temporary positions with slightly different criteria: http://work.chron.com/nsa-pay-scale-16399.html
I'm unsure if it's different on the military side but typically that pay / Basic allowance for housing / etc is also clearly defined in advance.
The biggest difference, is that their promotion structure is split into two parts: there is a technical route to promotion and an administrative route. This means that you can either be good at being in charge of people and get promoted (administrative), or just be good at what you do (technical). It leads to interesting situations where a GS12 is put in charge of divisions comprising GS15 veterans of 20 years experience, but all in all it is by far the best government run organization I've worked for.
The UK scientific civil service has similar problems in that for generic management roles they are paid fairly well for high end technical skills not so much.
Even worse once you get into roles for the TLA's - it will end up like the 30's where the only people that the security services could recruit where those with private incomes or ex military on pensions.