whatever.

pick a side and fight to win.

i am so tired of usless people commenting on things you are not actually involved in.

why don't you try to live in the real world, instead of writing about what you can not possibly understand?

go and get some real expreience before you act like adults.

grow up.

it's impossible to slice open a jugular vien with a blog.

nobody cares about your opinion or analyis when you are dead.

unless you are really famous.

the problem with blogs is they are nothing more than over-inflated ego baloons. or a diary by your aunt found in the attic trunk. forgotten.

the internet is so over rated.

it's like poetry in the 1800s.

faded dusty book covers
whisping over electrons
moldy html pages
read by lonley pages
on the night when noone calls.

thinking never replaces living.

How weird is it to read in a comments section that blogging is a useless waste of time?

Rule of thumb, Jerry: Never post when you're drunk, or if you think you're Allen Ginsburg.

The problem I have with war profiteering is not the people who are seriously engaged in creating better gear for our troops, better repairs to a damaged country etc.

The problem I have is for groups that are purshing profits for the sake of profits, AND are willing to cut corners to make the most out of it. I don't have specific stories but I don't remember several antecdotes offhand:

1)Shipping trucks purchased by the military for Iraq arrive in horrible condition. Some are literally inactive, and are delivered by tow truck.

2)Afghanistan is particularly troubled by US and UN building grants to lowest bid companies that have no experience in a war zone (and little concern for the success of their enterprise). When they run out of funding they simply close shop, leaving half finished schools, hospitals, goverment buildings that are now physically dangerous.

With a little research, I could dig out some more examples, but this should serve my point. There are groups in the warzone that don't care about our outcome. I'm sure most companies have done upstanding work, but we need to have some sort of audit system to make sure our money is used wisely.

What the anti-War profiteers object to is human nature and really the defense of the West.

They seem to believe that if we all just hold hands and wear Code Pink T shirts men like Mohammed Atta will stop wanting to kill us.

Meanwhile the smallness of even the biggest contractor compared to the Federal Government means technical innovation can be applied to the savagery of the Muslim enemy.

Muslims have followed the example of the Kamikazes and sought "equalizers" in the form of suicide bombings and mass casualty terror attacks coupled with sympathetic media coverage to induce surrender on their terms. Thus Britain no longer gives out Piggy Banks, bans Piglet from Winnie the Pooh, no longer teaches the Holocaust and Crusades in schools (because Muslims object), no one publishes cartoons Muslims will kill over, and Germany allows Sharia law in marriage (it is legally permissible for Muslim men to beat their wives). Surrender.

While the political part of the equation (ignore/suppress/reform the pro-terrorist media) remains in question: do we go the Putin route (dump pro-Terrorist reporters out the window or dose them with Polonium 210) or use organized political pressure to make them choose our side, the technical issues are not be trivialized.

Terrorists in urban centers where carpet bombings cannot be used or are ineffective are like the Japanese dug in at Okinawa or Iwo Jima: able to survive air attacks and then use RPGs and AK-47s and machine guns and mortars to kill a lot of our guys in attrition attacks (just like the Japanese).

What new body armor, or new more reliable and longer range rifles, or infrared vision equipment, or disposable and portable throwable, flying, or crawling cameras, or IED/EFP resistant vehicles, or a whole host of other equipment does is change that balance. Make the attrition strategy no longer a sure thing. By making the cost to them far higher.

The smallness of all these contractors means that innovations can bubble up more rapidly instead of being smothered in red tape. Lincoln's War Dept. rejected the Henry Repeating Rifle because they had millions of muskets in inventory even though the superiority of the Henry was self evident. Blackwater has developed a controllable .45 submachine gun, an IED resistant APC, and innovative new combat shotguns that can fire grenades!! And that's just one company.

War for profit means the Western edge of innovation has at least a chance of trumping the Jihadi strategy of attrition warfare.

yeah, i was pretty drunk last night.

sorry about that.

One has to make a distinction between ideas bublying up against the inertia of a bureaucracy and the "Haliburton Hessians". For every great idea security contractors come up w/ they constantly undermine because they are not subject to much control i.e. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Hardcover)
by Jeremy Scahill (Author). Their interests are not the same as those of the state nor are they subject to military discipline.
They are a danger to the country regardless of their efficiency. In certain situations you have to recognize that the ways of capitalism are in direct conflict to military needs.

I have a lot of respect for Blackwater, having had a chance to work with them. Still, I'd like to be clear: this or that firm may do its job well or badly. That's true; and if they do badly with taxpayer money, they should have to account for it. Corruption is intolerable.

That said, if they do good work, the fact that there are profits to be made is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing.

Having worked for blackwater, I'm curious as to your impressions of "Blackwater" by Jeremy Scahil, and the blackwater lawsuit that has apparently stalled in the last year. I've just heard about these things recently, and haven't had time to research the details yet.

I don't have any impressions of the work you mention or the lawsuit. My impressions mostly arise from two things: the one opportunity I had to work with them, which came from a friend of mine who is also a friend of Cofer Black's; and some readings on the company's attempt to sell itself as a solution to genocide. I think that latter is just the right idea.

Aside from that, I've collected some reports, some good and some bad, from servicemen I've talked to. The general consensus has been that they're extremely competent, but not really bothered about following rules. That is both good and bad (confer with the various debates about overly-restrictive ROE, but also the debates about the need for trust among the populace for effective COIN).

As I said, I'm generally impressed. I recognize there are concerns that need to be hammered out, but they seem to me to be on the right side of things. If you've worked for them, you know at least as much as I do about them.

Unfortunately genocide often has international supporters wanting the profits of genocide, or who agree the victims are "primitives" or "sub-human" who should be eliminated for the benefit of others..

All Americans should be keenly aware of their largest mine, a combined gold & copper mine in West Papua designed & built by Bechtel and operated by Freeport McMoRan. The gold & copper was discovered in 1936 by Mobil & Chevron, their geologist called it "Ertsberg" (Mountain of Ore), but it was not until 1959 when the Dutch colony discovered there was gold flowing into the Arafura Sea and began searching for the mountain source, that Rockefeller's Freeport Sulphur suddenly decided it was time to mine West Papua.

Inside the White House, McGeorge Bundy & Robert Komer told Kennedy that the US could only save itself from communism by forcing the Netherlands to sign the New York Agreement selling West Papua to Indonesian control. After Indonesian General Suharto came to power by killing a half million Javanese potential opponents in 1966, Freeport Sulphur in 1967 got its first 30 year license from Indonesia to mine the Pacific nation of West Papua.

In 2004 the Yale University Law School published its report:
"
Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua:
Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian Control"

In 2005 the US Congressmen wrote Section 1115 asking questions about West Papua & Indonesia's claim of sovereignty. In late 2005 Bechtel & Freeport & Exxon used their lobby the "US Indonesia Society" to petition the US Senate to remove the entire Section 1115.

Genocide is about denial, the US Congress was not even allowed to ask questions about West Papua. 40 years of genocide (according to Yale Law School) and colonial mining courtesy of the Indonesian military.

GW Bush has allowed Indonesia to keep Jihadist training camps OPEN, he also lifted Clinton's bans on the TNI, and even commenced U.S. funding & Aid to the Indonesian military which still works with Laskar Jihad and other al Qaeda networks. Why ? Gold & money ?

Would you please expain which groups you're calling "jihadist" here, and how Bush was involved with them? Indonesia has a lot of Islamic movements, some of which really are jihadist (e.g. Jemmah Islamiyah); some of which are Islamist but have no designs beyond the Indonesian homeland (e.g., Front Pembela Islam); some of which are Islamist but nonviolent (e.g. Hizb-ut Tahrir Indonesia); and some of which are Islamic and paramilitary, but not Islamist or terroristic or revolutionary (e.g., the Banser). I'm not sure how to respond to the charge, then, without knowing exactly who you're talking about, and exactly what Bush did or didn't do.

During 2002 Indonesia kept both its Al Qaeda and Laskar Jihad training camps open and the two organizations had their members working with each other - because Laskar Jihad having more opportunity for blooding members inside Indonesia against the Melanesian populations in Ambon and West Papua. I believe the Al Qaeda camps went underground after that but not Laskar Jihad which the TNI continues to condone and support, according to reports from Papuan TNI troops often camp with Laskar Jihad militia and their helicopters and other equipment are seen with the Jihadist. The TNI is the military which George Bush began call for support of at the start of 2001 and which Condi Rice and Bush began providing 'aid' to in 2005.