Matters Blackwater (Merged thread)

[Uboat509]

Pardon me if I don't get excited about anything that Prince says. As I stated earlier, it is well known that Blackwater has some significant issues and Prince is at the root of those problems. That said, there are a lot of good guys working for BW. I am not anymore willing to throw the contractors who are the center of this incident under a bus than I am to throw the Marines at Haditha under a bus, based on media reports.

Contractors for services are a slightly different proposition from the gun-toting PMCs that sparked a great deal of this discussion. As I mentioned in another post some time back, the Army has used teamsters and other contract employees for the majority of its history. In most cases they worked with transportation issues or scouting/translation. In those cases they were considered post employees and could be fired by the quartermaster and/or the post commander with no notice. In Vietnam PAE did a great deal of support work as well. The issue here is that contractors are now being used in a direct combat (or close to direct combat) role with no real oversight and a great deal more firepower than they had in the past.

I am sure that most of the people on this board are aware of the difference between the armed and unarmed contractors. I wasn't trying to insult anyone's intelligence. I was just making a point about the huge numbers being thrown around by the MSM. When John Q. Public hears that there are 100,000 "PMCs" running around Iraq he immediately thinks that there are 100,000 thousand armed mercenaries running buck wild in Iraq and that just isn't the case. To my knowledge there are NO PMCs being used in a direct, or even near direct combat roles. We aren't outsourcing warfighting. Most of the armed contractors are engaged in security operations.

SFC W