New Document Details Obama's Contractor War in Afghanistan
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/23922-new-document-details-obamas-contractor-war-in-afghanistan
But in his remarks at the White House,
the president didnt say that the nearly 10,000 U.S. troops hes asking to remain in an advisory role will be augmented by a huge army of private contractors. As they have in Iraq, contractors will vastly outnumber the U.S. uniformed forces training Afghan troops as well as the special operations forces providing counterterrorism operations against what the president called the remnants of al-Qaida.
The role of contractors in the Afghanistan war is spelled out in a document obtained by Salon from SAIC, one of the nations largest military and intelligence contractors. The document, an unclassified PowerPoint presentation, shows exactly how contractors have been used in that war since 2009, when Obama endorsed a surge of 33,000 troops and a counterinsurgency strategy in the war against the Taliban. Those policies increased the U.S. presence in Afghanistan to more than 100,000 troops.
One of the PowerPoint slides defines the four mission areas of the companys five-year, $400 million contract with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, which provides contracted services to other combat commands, special forces and other parts of the U.S. military. They are Expeditionary Warfare; Irregular Warfare; Special Operations; Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations.
There, in black and white, is proof positive of how deeply contractors have penetrated the U.S. war machine.
Weve already taken public functions and privatized them, said Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel who was the chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell during the Bush administration, in a recent interview with Salon. But this is an example of privatizing the ultimate public function, war.