N.Y.Times Magazine: The Other Army (Private Military Contractors)

[Up2Late]

(Note: This is a multi-page article about one of the biggest lies of this stupid War, that the "Private Sector" can do this cheaper.)

The Other Army

By DANIEL BERGNER
Published: August 14, 2005

When Matt Mann needed to buy armored vehicles, he phoned his brother-in-law, Ken Rooke. Rooke didn't know the first thing about bullet-resistant windows or grenade-resistant floors, but he wasn't 100 percent unqualified to do the buying. At least he knew something about cars. At a speedway in North Carolina, he once called races for a local radio station. He was the closest Mann could come to an expert.


Illustration by Nathan Fox

Mann, a retired U.S. Army Special Operations master sergeant in his late 40's, needed the vehicles quickly. And he needed guns. It was early last year, and the company he and two partners created, Triple Canopy, had just won government contracts to guard 13 Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters throughout Iraq. (The renewable six-month deals were worth, in all, about $90 million.) The C.P.A. was the governing body of the American-led military occupation. Triple Canopy -- not the American military -- would be protecting it. So would other companies. With the insurgency spiking, the job of keeping C.P.A. compounds from being overrun, and of keeping the architects of the occupation from being killed, had been privatized.

Yet when Triple Canopy was hired, it scarcely existed. Mann and one of his partners, Tom Katis, an old friend from Special Forces, talked after 9/11 about starting a business that might somehow address the threat of terrorism. They thought they might use their military backgrounds to train government agencies in anti-terrorism techniques. On a Special Forces exercise in Central America (both men were, at that point, in the National Guard, Mann having moved on from the regular Army to work as a civil engineer and Katis having graduated from Yale and begun a career in banking), they dreamed of their unborn enterprise under the jungle foliage -- the layered jungle canopy from which they took their name.

They didn't have much else. They were a name, a notion, when they heard about the C.P.A. security work and started bidding for the contracts. With money borrowed from family and friends, they began hiring former Army colleagues on the chance that the company might somehow succeed. They had little but résumés to give them hope. The résumés, though, were impressive. Mann spent six years with the Army's Delta Force, its most selective, most keenly trained and most secretive unit, and he recruited retired Delta operators. He is an irrepressible man with full, close-cropped gray hair, blue eyes and a radiant smile, and as he told me about Triple Canopy's early days, he recalled his disbelief at the men who were drawn to the company. ''He wants to work for me?'' he said he thought, over and over. But his modesty went only so far. ''Rock stars like to work with rock stars,'' he said. The ex-Delta soldiers, heavily decorated and with all kinds of combat and clandestine experience, kept signing on.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/magazine/14PRIVATI.html?ex=1281672000&en=d2d43bcb169edc55&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss>
(more at link above)

[Rich Hunt]

1. great

Let's undermine the military.

That will keep us safe.

:puke:

[Porcupine]

2. Mercenaries and Death Squads. Hired to do deniable things

The "Liberal" media seems to have forgotten the word mercenary. They also seem to be ignorant of the reasons mercenaries are despised by regular troops the world over.

May their Karma return to them swiftly.

[pokercat999]

3. Wow what an article. The "dogs of war" will never change.

With the huge bonuses we are offering our military to stay on-board we are changing them all into "dogs of war". The only innocents will lay down their weapons and come home, in irons if necessary, the remainder are already "lost" in my opinion and deserve what they will most likely get.

There is no such thing as JUSTICE in a Neo-con America, that only leaves revenge.

[bribri16]

4. They do unseakable things in our name and we will reap the blow-back

for generations.

[Up2Late]

19. You got that right...

...and they don't really fall under any laws of any nation. Same thing happened in the War in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990's.

Here's a book on the subject that I heard is really well written. It came out in early 2003.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs) (Hardcover)
by P. W. Singer

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0801441145.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801441145/102-2319134-3286550?v=glance>

[teryang]

5. Tail and tooth

Why have a Uniform Code of Military Justice if you are going to use independent contractors?

What then is the purpose of our system of laws?

These mercenaries are of the colonial variety. The proliferation of unregulated armed forces outside the scope of the constitutional form of government that we are supposed to have is just another feature of evolving totalitarian rule.

[annabanana]

6. nominated....n/t

[leftchick]

7. this is crazy....

<snip>

For guns, too, Triple Canopy had to make do. Transporting firearms from the United States required legal documents that the company couldn't wait for; instead, in Iraq, it got Department of Defense permission to visit the dumping grounds of captured enemy munitions. The company took mounds of AK-47's and culled all that were operable.

So Triple Canopy had vehicles and it had assault rifles, and when it needed cash in Iraq, to pay employees or buy equipment or build camps, it dispatched someone from Chicago, the company's home, with a rucksack filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. ''All the people in Iraq had to say is, 'We need a backpack,''' Mann said. ''Or, 'We need two backpacks.''' Each pack held half a million dollars.

:grr:

edit: They are guarding FOUR US GENERALS??? I am sure our enlisted LOVE to see that....

<snip>

Throughout his time as head of the C.P.A., L. Paul Bremer III, whom the insurgency may well have viewed as its highest-value target, was protected by a Triple Canopy competitor, Blackwater USA. Private gunmen, according to Lawrence Peter, are now guarding four U.S. generals. Triple Canopy protects a large military base. And throughout Iraq, the defense of essential military sites like depots of captured munitions has been informally shared by private soldiers and U.S. troops. If the 25,000 figure is accurate, the businesses add about 16 percent to the coalition's total forces.

Yet it is hard to discern who authorized this particular outsourcing as military policy. No open policy debate took place; no executive order was publicly issued. And who is in charge of overseeing these armed men? One thing is sure: they are crucial to the war effort. In April 2004, within a few months of Triple Canopy's arrival in Iraq, its men were waging a desperate firefight to defend a C.P.A. headquarters in the city of Kut. The Mahdi Army had launched an onslaught.

[Freedomfried]

8. I know some of the guys from SEAL Team that have gone to Blackwater

In my opinion they're the dregs, lunatics and misfits of Spec war.

F

[54anickel]

9. Are they still considered against the Geneva Convention?

Is that why they want to be referred to as "security" companies?

Is that why there's this attempt to drop the term "war" with G-SAVE?

Wishful thinking on my part, maybe the world is looking into our use of these companies in an attempt to bring Shrub down? :shrug:


Yet gradually the work of the mercenary grew more and more marginalized and disdained, and in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 it was essentially outlawed, at least in wars between nations.

snip>

Not long afterward, a London company led by a former British lieutenant colonel, Tim Spicer -- whose latest firm now has a nearly $300 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense in Iraq -- tried again to rescue the West African country. Spicer failed but emerged as a kind of spokesman for the moral value of private military companies. ''The word 'mercenary,' '' he told The Daily Telegraph of London in 1999, ''conjures up a picture in people's minds of a rather ruthless, unaligned individual, who may have criminal, psychotic tendencies. We are not like that at all. All we really do is help friendly, reasonable governments solve military problems.'' (No matter that Spicer had once considered providing his help to Mobutu Sese Seko, the tyrannical dictator of Zaire, for a price.) Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and a former United Nations under secretary general, Brian Urquhart, were soon talking about the possible use of private military companies to aid the U.N. in stabilizing the world's conflict zones. The U.N. wasn't remotely ready to hire private armies to end civil wars, but a subtle shift in perception had started to take place.


Seems like a lot of these companies will go to the highest bidder - Iran's got an awful lot of bucks floating around...hmmm

[BoneDaddy]

10. Rock Stars?

''Rock stars like to work with rock stars,'' he said.

This line tells it all. These chumps have been given "rock star" status by the Bush Admin. Ego inflated mercs tanking money that should be going to our troops and not their private enterprise, that by the way, is failing badly.

[leftchick]

13. They dress like mercenary rock stars too

all these goons are blackwater mercenaries.

[Ian David]

11. I think we should have an all-gay mercenary group

Find all the guys discharged under Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Give them jobs that pay four times as much where they can pick and choose their own work schedule.

Do these mercenary groups have healthcare coverage?

[54anickel]

12. Brings up a good point about corporate use of mercenaries

But some of the firms and some of the men will no doubt be offered work by dictators or terrible insurgencies -- or by the kind of oil speculators who reportedly backed a recent mercenary-led coup plot in Equatorial Guinea (a plot involving former members of Executive Outcomes), in an attempt to install a ruler to facilitate their enterprise. And with so many newly created private soldiers unemployed when the market of Iraq finally crashes, aren't some of them likely to accept such jobs -- the work of mercenaries in the chaotic territories of the earth?

[Vinnie From Indy]

14. These American Merc's Aren't Gonna Come Home And Want To Work

at Wal-Mart after the war. They are getting rich and they are a law unto themselves in Iraq.

[leesa]

15. Remember the trillions the DOD "lost" in 2001 just prior to 9-11?

Was THIS what that money was for? I always thought it was for building their own private GOP military, Blackshirts, if you will.

[onager]

16. My employer turned down some huge Iraq contracts.

And I work for one of the biggest aerospace/defense companies in the world.

According to one of our execs, they got a lot of government pressure to work in Iraq back in 2003, along with a lot of rosy promises about how much money the company would make. Our hi-level bosses made the decision NOT to take any of those offer. They apparently sensed...like most sane people...that $hrub's Excellent Adventure would turn into a humongous cluster-Cheney.

The exec said some of our competitors were bragging that they would only be in Iraq for one year and make out like bandits. (Pun intended.)

The ones who said that are still there, 2 years later, watching their huge potential profits get eaten up by their security costs and other...uh...unplanned expenses. Like ransoming their employees from kidnappers.

[Blue_Tires]

17. piece of shit mercs n/t

[leftchick]

18. "No one in power is watching too closely".....

<snip>

Mark raised his strong forearms and performed a pantomime of washing his hands and flicking off the water. A manager with Triple Canopy in Baghdad, Mark was sitting behind his desk at T.C.'s base, demonstrating the Department of Defense's attitude about overseeing and policing the private security companies. ''D.O.D. doesn't want anything to do with it,'' he said. ''They don't have time. They don't have the numbers. And State can't investigate incidents. They don't have the investigators. So there's Iraqi law. Not that Iraqi law really exists. Am I going to give up my weapons to Iraqi police? I don't think so. That could get me killed.''

No one knows how many times gunfire from a private security team has wounded a bystander or killed an innocent driver who ventured too close to a convoy, not realizing that mere proximity would be taken for a threat. When they fire their weapons in defense or warning, the teams rarely concern themselves with checking for casualties -- it would be too dangerous; they are in the middle of a war. Besides, no one in power is watching too closely.

[NuttyFluffers]

20. As Machiavelli warns, no good comes from mercenaries.

His best advice was to send them to their deaths as soon as possible, by any means possible.

I don't have the heart to be so callous, but let me say Machiavelli's warning is still relevant today. And I shed no tear for them. Murderers for hire with allegiance to no one but themselves and money. A pox on all their houses.

[delen]

21. Chances are that

these guys aren't going any where any time soon.Even if we were to pull out militarily tomorrow, the mercs don't work for the government and I doubt that their employers are leaving Iraq any time soon.The contractors will need a private army to keep ptoduction secure.






**************Expected opportunities Iran coming soon*****************