Or they could get a desk job or warehouse manager job with their security clearance in the US for like $90k.

If their skill set is more on the pointy end of the stick, however, they may not qualify for that.

There's a lot of civilians going around the federal contracting job market who have a few years of experience working as a middle-management fobbit at LSA Anaconda in Iraq, or similar, who will get that job before another applicant who is an ex army ranger who did 5 rotations through Kapisa and Kunar provinces.

Not if it's a warm body desk job that requires a security clearance. A lot of those jobs are fairly up front about informing all the applicants that veterans will be given preference.

"fobbit" means refers to military personnel, so they would be beneficiaries of veteran preferences. How many of those jobs with veteran preference are yet more specific about giving preference to infantry or those who have directly been in combat?

In this case I was referring to administrative/logistical related contractor workers who rarely left base perimeters - who also qualified as fobbits.

Oh look, another "people in the military aren't capable of being succesful outside the military" HN comment. Even if someone was special forces, they could still get a job with law enforcement, any number of govt agencies, personal security, or just change careers to something else.

You should go read some more before you comment, because everything in your post from, prior-military career prospects to the way untaxed income works, is wrong.

Sorry, but you're also misinformed - I spent literally years as a contractor in an active combat area, doing HN-specific things (networking, telecom, Internet infrastructure), I've worked with people from some of the largest US federal contractors in a number of roles. The facts at present are that the sheer number of private contractors that were in place in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004-2011 or so are greatly diminished now.

For every one person that's currently been able to get a new contract under the LOGCAP contract doing stuff at KAF, in the year 2018, there's 19 unemployed people who used to be $160k contractors at KAF who are back in CONUS working ordinary civilian jobs at normal employee rates. Many of them in places where salaries are a lot lower than you would see in California, where you can buy a 3BD house for $130k, somewhere in middle america. Saying that people are working for $30k jobs at Waffle House may be a rhetorical flourish of exaggeration, but it's not very far off the mark if you look at the number of people who used to make $120-165k for Dyncorp who are now working for small town police or sheriffs departments in Kansas or Minnesota, as ordinary cops, for $40-50k.

The US presence in Iraq is presently about 3% to 5% of the size of what it used to be, both in active duty military personnel and number of US-citizen contractors. In Afghanistan, about 5-10% of what it was at its peak. This is why people who used to work for organizations like Dyncorp, ITT-Exelis, Blackwater, Triple Canopy, PAE and others are now going to work for even more shady contracting organizations based in Dubai (like Erik Prince's new company), and end up doing weird things in Yemen, ultimately under the command of the Saudi and UAE militaries.

You've posted several comments that break the site guidelines lately. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here? Comments need to be civil and substantive, regardless of how misinformed someone is, or seems to be.