Quote Originally Posted by Uboat509 View Post
Let me make a few points. But first let me say that I am by no means a Blackwater apologist. I have enough friends in the industry to know that Blackwater has some significant issues.

1)Is there an official report of an official investigation by US forces out there somewhere that I have missed? So far I have seen a lot of media reports, many of which are based on Iraqi reporting. I have been here long enough to know that uncorroborated Iraqi reporting is not the gold standard for accurate unbiased reporting. If this was a military unit would we be piling on or would we be saying that we should wait for the results of the official investigation?

2)I hear a lot of really huge numbers for the number of "Private Military Contractors" here but I don't hear anybody in the MSM trying to make the distinction between the actual military contractors, who are, by far the minority and the support contractors, the cooks, clerks, mechanics, truck drivers etc, many of whom never even leave the FOB.

3)My feelings about the use of contractors fall along these lines. First of all, they take a lot of the support functions that we would normally do which frees us up to focus on operations, which contractors are most definitely not doing. Often times they do these functions better than their military counterparts because that is all they do. In the military we have a lot of crap that we have to do in addition to our main job.

4)I believe that contractors will save us a lot of money in the long run. Once we leave Iraq or at least severely reduce our footprint those contracts begin to dry up. Once the contract is done then it's done. We don't have to worry about it anymore whereas if you swell the ranks with all the service-members you need to perform all of these functions then you will still have them after the need is gone. Yes, we pay many contractors more money than we pay their military counterparts but we do not train them, nor do we feed, house, and clothe them back in the states. We don't worry about their career progression or education. When we are done with them we let the contract run out and that's it. Anybody who lived through the draw-down of the mid-nineties knows the immense ass-pain that the Army went through to reduce the troop totals after the cold war. I don't want to ever do that again.

Just my .02USD.

SFC W
All good points. But here's a question that relates to all contractors: in COIN/LIC/UW/term of choice, which is what we're probably going to be fighting for the foreseeable future, front lines are amorphous or even non-existent. Combat troops are in more danger than everyone else obviously, but even guys on FOBs get mortared. With the surge's move away from big FOBs and into more contact with the people and indigenous security forces, it would seem that support personnel would also probably be in more danger in the short term. What happens when your Sri Lankan or Nepali truck driver or cook decides that even the relatively large wages he's making aren't worth risking death, and decides he's headed home? Leaves us in a pretty tough spot if it suddenly happens en masse, doesn't it?