Another example of private-sector SysAdmin forces: born of sheer desperation

■"Opening a New Front in the War Against AIDS," by Peter R. Dolan, Wall Street Journal, 1 November 2005, p. B2.

Baylor College of Medicine and Bristol-Myers Squibb come together to invent the Pediatric AIDS Corps, or doctors who will be dropped "behind the lines in southern Africa."

Sub-Saharan Africa, the article notes, has 1% of the medical workers and more than 60% of the AIDS patients, with AIDS being a very manpower-intensive treatment regime. In that environment, kids naturally suffer the most (experts estimate that only 1 in 100 kids there gets any care whatsoever). At 1.9 infected, that's about 1,000 deaths a day.

Puts our 1,000 troops a year in Iraq in some perspective.

Why make the comparison?

We do the SysAdmin right in Iraq, then those 1,000 troops don't die. Instead, they're perhaps providing logistics and command and control and medical support for things like the Pediatric AIDS Corps.

It costs $130,000 a year to send a doc over there, but it's estimated that they can treat 1,3000 kids and trains dozens of other healthcare workers during that one year.

When we screw up the SysAdmin effort early in the Iraq "peace," we don't just condemn that country to lengthy civil strife, we tie down our military assets that might otherwise be used--as they have been so extensively throughout the Gap across the 1990s and right up to 9/11 (almost completely unbeknownst to the American public, because casualties were close to zero in such operations--save for accidents)--in exactly these sorts of humanitarian relief ops.

So it's not just our losses that should be added up when we fail to field the effective SysAdmin force. We need to add in all the opportunity costs, costs which have become so painfully obvious that private colleges and corporations are taking matters into their own hands out of a sense of moral obligation.

We can do better.