Survey and decision analysis reveals flawed contractor oversight in conscript-based militaries, highlighting the need to match monitoring tools with performance observability.
Conscription-based militaries in countries facing demographic decline increasingly outsource support functions to civilian contractors, raising the question of whether users who rotate out within 18 months can credibly monitor contractor performance. This research note examines that question in the Republic of Korea Army through two 2025 studies of laundry, equipment maintenance, and waste disposal: a survey of 361 conscripts and an Analytic Hierarchy Process and Weighted Product evaluation of 154 officers. Drawing on principal-agent theory, we find that while the monitoring channel works on the evaluation side, it is obstructed in two ways: Most users in implementation units are unaware that services have been outsourced, and officers’ most valued criteria, particularly wartime operational support, remain structurally unobservable to users. Contracts in conscription-based outsourcing should therefore match monitoring mechanisms to the observability of each criterion, rather than relying on user feedback as a uniform information channel.
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Kim et al. (2026) studied this question.
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