A terrific article about Blackwater and the other companies the US has outsourced military operations to:
The use of contractors in Iraq is unprecedented in both its size and scope.... In 2007, an internal Department of Defense census on the industry found almost 160,000 private contractors were employed in Iraq (roughly equal to the total U.S. troops at the time, even after the troop "surge"). Yet even this figure was a conservative estimate, since a number of the biggest companies, as well as any firms employed by the State Department or other agencies or NGOs, were not included in the census.
Halliburton's contract has garnered the firm $20.1 billion in Iraq-related revenue and helped the firm report a $2.7 billion profit last year. To put this into context, the amount paid to Halliburton-KBR is roughly three times what the U.S. government paid to fight the entire 1991 Persian Gulf War. When putting other wars into current dollar amounts, the U.S. government paid just this one firm about $7 billion more than it cost the United States to fight the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish American War combined.
This "protection first and last" mentality has led to many common operating practices that clearly enrage locals. In an effort to keep potential threats away, contractors drive convoys up the wrong side of the road, ram civilian vehicles, toss smoke bombs, and fire weaponry as warnings, all as standard practices. After a month spent embedded with Blackwater contractors in Baghdad, journalist Robert Young Pelton said, "They're famous for being very aggressive. They use their machine guns like car horns."
Here's the Aegis 'trophy video' referenced in the article, with mercs shooting up a bunch of civilian vehicles for no reason:
The entire article is full of accounts of the most mind-bogglingly self-destructive behavior. How can anyone believe we're going to win a counter-insurgency operation this way? It's as if Cheney and Rumsfeld sat down one day and came up with the best war plan that anyone had ever made, and then did exactly the fucking opposite
Cost so far:
- $500 billion
- over 10,000 wounded contractors, 36,000 wounded US military
- ~1000 contractors killed, 3800 US military killed
- 750,000 - 1.2 million Iraqi civilians killed
