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We've heard it a hundred times: "The Bush administration hired mercenaries! Civilian deaths! Bush evil! KBR! Blackwater! Obama would never have done anything like that!"
Without much notice or debate, the Obama administration has greatly expanded the outsourcing of key parts of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East and Africa, and as a result, for its secretive air war and special operations missions around the world, the U.S. has become increasingly reliant on a new breed of specialized companies that are virtually unknown to the American public, yet carry out vital U.S. missions abroad.
Companies such as Blackbird Technologies, Glevum Associates, K2 Solutions, and others have won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military and intelligence contracts in recent years to provide technology, information on insurgents, Special Forces training, and personnel rescue. They win their work through the large, established prime contractors, but are tasked with missions only companies with specific skills and background in covert and counterinsurgency can accomplish.
...Oops. What was that you were saying, again?
Look, there's basically a choice here. You hire in these specialized civilian contractors when you need their special skills, or you train up additional specialized military units and you keep paying for them and their equipment and training (oh yeah, and their C3 infrastructure) all the time, even when you're not using them.
Your call. I'll wait.
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The biggest problem with the "War on Terror" is that it's a stupid name. But it was coined for the mainstream mass media, who these days are basically stupid in the first place. The truth is, it's a defensive war against fanatical, Wahhabist Islam, which takes the position that there are three kinds of humans blessed by Allah — Muslims, dhimmi, and dead ones — and that the Faithful have a holy mission to wipe the earth clean of all humans who will not either become Muslims or accept dhimmitude. And being a dhimmi, in terms of human rights, is barely better than being a slave, and perhaps slightly below being a dog. It is not a crime, under Shari'a law, for a Muslim to kill a dhimmi, for example.
As for the Red Army Faction, the Baader-Meinhof gang et al, they weren't ideological warriors; that was just a convenient cause to fly their flag under. The truth is, they just liked killing people. 9/11, despite the well-meaning (but craven) interference of Congress, effectively ended airline hijacking as a viable tactic. Terrorists have moved on to other things, and for the most part, failed ... as far as their individual operations go. But in their overall campaign, like it or not, they are WINNING.
How are they winning, when their operations fail?
Because their operations don't have to succeed. They just have to make our governments keep responding to their failed operations. They ring a bell, and our governments obediently salivate on demand. The terrorists DON'T NEED to mount successful operations. They just have to sponsor the occasional plausible attempt, and our governments will do their work for them. Because our governments are huddled in the corner pissing their pants in fear. Just recently, an Austrian judge fined an Austrian citizen 800 Euros for yodeling while mowing his lawn because his Muslim neighbors complained that it was an insult to their religion. Hello? Austrians have been yodeling for a thousand years.
I'll grant and agree with your point about interfering in other nations. The US has a particular blind spot in that regard, in that it's always been willing to overlook the overthrow of some banana republic's legitimate government for commercial profit (the origin, indeed, of the term banana republic), and willing to overlook the excesses of bloody-handed tyrants as long as they're right-wing bloody-handed tyrants who at least make a halfway plausible pretense of being our allies against communism. Because, just like our mainstream media, frankly our government is pretty damned stupid.
Personally I think we need to bring about 90% of our troops stationed overseas home, with the principal exception of embassy guards and (currently) anti-piracy patrols off the Horn of Africa. But we need to make it clearly understood by the resurgent Russian hegemony that this doesn't mean we'll turn a blind eye while they take over half of Europe again. (Then again, it would behoove Europe to learn to stand on its own more and depend less on the US for military strength. NATO is moribund and tottering, and rotting from the inside; it just hasn't fallen over yet.)
(oops. Mismatched HTML tags fixed.)