Black Water

[Exedous]

IF they get shot at, than they should be able to shoot back to kill.

[Vanslyke]

Originally Posted by 60-minutes-II

Blackwater are a bunch of former special forces. They are better qualified to fight than most American soldiers. Plus the pay is good and lets face it an 18yr shouldn't go fight on the front lines. These blackwater agents are all old men. Let them do the fightin.

where are you getting THIS information from!? There are plenty of blackwater people that where never in the millitary, hell, there are a ton of blackwater that are right out of highschool.

[Vanslyke]

Originally Posted by Exedous

IF they get shot at, than they should be able to shoot back to kill.

No doubt, but do you think they should be allowed to go and and attack iraqi forces (and occasionaly civilians) and cause issues and then immediately come home when the crap hits the fan, leaving the american soldiers to do deal with the retaliations?

[janeannwho]

I agree that the old men and women who put us into wars, should have to take arms and fight them, but I do thinkt they should be under the direct control of the goverment, because hired guns can be misconstrued as terrorists in their own way if they are allowed to perpetrate violence in the name of protecting private citizens in a foreign country.

[caution]

If you are interested in defense contracts, or concerned about potential problems with defense contracts, Blackwater is probably the last place you should look. There's far more interesting groups out there that provide much more fuel for conspiracy theory or the creation of blame-America echo chambers.

Since you probably pay taxes, you be the shopper:

Choice A:
- Recruit several battalions of Military Police.
- Over 10-15 years, build the force structure and logistical support.
- Grow your leaders, from 2LT to COL and from PVT to Sgt. Maj.
- Establish other units to also do work that is contracted, such as food service, laundry, transport.
- Grow your bases and housing.
- Grow your military medical units and hospitals
- Increase the end-cap on active-duty to allow for growth.
- plus up your projections for retirement and disability
- Maintain a 1-million man standing active Army force (a little more than the cold war)
- Then, go do your Saddam-removal, Taliban-hunting, Middle-East attempt at something other than 4th century nation-building.
- When done, maintain this force on bases around the world in case something else ever comes up.

Choice B:
- Contract everything you can't grow and go do all this stuff on the cheap now.
- Maintain the growing disconnect between citizenship and service.
- Drop the contracts when done (well most of them).


I would put in a choice C: stay home and do nothing or a choice D: take the oil fields and secure them for the world (something the US military was trained and equipped to do) then let State and the UN sort out the cash later. I wish this war was for oil. We wouldn't need many contracts for anything, and we trained for the last 50 or so years to take and hold resources. It would have kept us out of the cities too :-).

It's too late for C and D now.

So yeah Blackwater is OK with me. They're keeping our diplomats alive. You have to be alive to do diplomatic stuff.

[GregW]

People have not trusted mercenaries since the beginning of civilization for damn good reason. Anybody that will fight for you for money will fight for your opposition for more money.