Zero Hedge — Blackwater Founder Says US Troops In Syria Could Be Replaced By Private Contractors [read mercenaries]

Gives new meaning to "market forces." Shades of a transnational corporate military not subject to international law? Really?

Zero Hedge
Blackwater Founder Says US Troops In Syria Could Be Replaced By Private Contractors [read mercenaries]
Tyler Durden

William Craddick — Are Syria’s Russian Mercenaries Really Working For Putin Alone?

Contractors. Contractors are proliferating in military and para-military roles.

William Craddick explores the question, who is contracting them.

Disobedient Media
Are Syria’s Russian Mercenaries Really Working For Putin Alone?
William Craddick

Also

Sputnik International
MoD: Russia's Newest Hypersonic Missile Capable of Destroying Aircraft Carriers

also

The National Interest
Russia Just Fired a Hypersonic Missile from a MiG-31 Fighter. Should America be Worried?

Russia's Most Lethal Nuclear Missile Ever Will "Enter Duty in the Near Future"

Mattis: Russia Can Beat U.S. Missile Defenses (For a Forgotten Reason)

Dave Majumdar | Defense Editor

David Isenberg — Erik Prince to Prince bin Zayed: The Private Military Connection

Keeping up with Erik Prince and contractor military around the world.

LobeLog
Erik Prince to Prince bin Zayed: The Private Military Connection
David Isenberg

Jeremy Scahill — Inside Erik Prince’s Treacherous Drive to Build a Private Air Force

Private militaries and corporate mercenaries the thing of the future?

The Intercept
Inside Erik Prince’s Treacherous Drive to Build a Private Air Force

Jeremy Scahill

Chris Thompson — US Air Force Hires Private Companies to Fly Drones in War Zones

In case you weren't aware.

As a result, civilian pilots will directly participate in military operations for the first time since the drone wars began about a decade ago. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Air Force signed contracts with two private companies in 2015 to provide enough pilots to fly two “combat air patrols” or 24-hour surveillance flights that would involve as many as eight MQ-9 Reaper drones per day. The Air Force plans to eventually expand its fleet of privately piloted drones to 40 over the next four years.

Of the two companies, one, Aviation Unmanned, is a small, veteran-owned outfit operating out of Dallas, Texas, which was awarded a contract on August 24. The second is General Atomics, a large San Diego, California-based military contractor that builds both the Reaper and Predator drones and has been paid at least $700 million over the last two years for a variety of drone support services. Their contract was awarded April 15.
This is not the first time that private contractors have played a role in the drone wars. Companies such as Booz AllenHamilton, General Dynamics and SAIC have long held contracts to analyze surveillance data gathered by drones flying over war zones.

CorpWatch (December 16th, 2015)

US Air Force Hires Private Companies to Fly Drones in War Zones
Chris Thompson, CorpWatch Blog

Voltaire Network — DynCorp mercenaries replace Academi mercenaries in Yemen

In Yemen, the Academi mercenaries (ex-Blackwater) have been killed one after the other by the coalition of Houthis and soldiers loyal to President Saleh. They have been replaced by new personnel supplied by DynCorp.

This private army will be paid for by the United Arab Emirates, to the tune of 3 billion dollars. DynCorp is the property of the investment fund Cerberus, directed by the Israëli Steve Feinberg and the ex-Vice-President of the USA, Dan Quayle.

You didn't think that the Saudis fight their own wars themselves, did you?

Voltaire Network
DynCorp mercenaries replace Academi mercenaries in Yemen
Translation by Pete Kimberley

RT — ‘Use mercenaries to defeat ISIS,’ says former SAS soldier

Monetizing war.

RT
‘Use mercenaries to defeat ISIS,’ says former SAS soldier

Scott Beauchamp — Murder by Other Means

...well before the 2003 Iraq invasion, American strategic minds were already cannily sizing up the mercenary market. Paul Bremer, original viceroy of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq—who was guarded by a Blackwater security detail during his time in office—authored a revealing 2001 paper that served as a conceptual blueprint for Blackwater’s ugly reign. Titled “New Risks In International Business,” the policy document advanced a rather radical analysis: it argued that that opening new global markets leads to dramatic spikes in income inequality, which in turn cause the social unrest that leads to terrorism. But, after naming capitalism as a central driving factor behind the terror threat, Bremer goes on to cheerlead the risk-management opportunities that the situation presents. His argument is an exercise in myopic and opportunistic nihilism, but it’s also coldly rational: since global privatization is causing global unrest, it also represents a great opportunity to privatize our response to said unrest. The bottom line, in other words, is that companies like Blackwater have a vested interest in preserving a manageable level of global despair.

The Baffler
Murder by Other MeansScott Beauchamp

Kelley Vlahos — A Blackwater World Order

After more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most profound legacy could be that it set the world order back to the Middle Ages. 

While this is a slight exaggeration, a recent examination by Sean McFate, a former Army paratrooper who later served in Africa working for Dyncorp International and is now an associate professor at the National Defense University, suggests that the Pentagon’s dependence on contractors to help wage its wars has unleashed a new era of warfare in which a multitude of freshly founded private military companies are meeting the demand of an exploding global market for conflict. 

“Now that the United States has opened the Pandora’s Box of mercenarianism,” McFate writes in The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order,“private warriors of all stripes are coming out of the shadows to engage in for-profit warfare.” 

It is a menacing thought. McFate said this coincides with what he and others have called a current shift from global dominance by nation-state power to a “polycentric” environment in which state authority competes with transnational corporations, global governing bodies, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), regional and ethnic interests, and terror organizations in the chess game of international relations. New access to professional private arms, McFate further argues, has cut into the traditional states’ monopoly on force, and hastened the dawn of this new era. 

McFate calls it neomedievalism, the “non-state-centric and multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances.” States will not disappear, “but they will matter less than they did a century ago.” He compares this coming environment to the order that prevailed in Europe before the domination of nation-states with their requisite standing armies.…

In an interview with TAC, McFate said the parallels between that period in history and today’s global proliferation of PMCs cannot be ignored. He traces their modern origins to the post-Cold War embrace of privatization in both Washington and London, both pioneers in military outsourcing, which began in earnest in the 1980s.…

“In an idealized world the companies with the best practices and best performance records would end up with all the contracts, and the bad actors would be eliminated from the field,” said Singer. “That hasn’t happened in regular business, much less when you cross regular business with what you call politics.” 

Or war. Get your seat belt on, because if McFate is right, it is “back to the future,” and any choice we might have had in the matter is long gone.

Just a matter of time before they are armed with air and sea power, and WMD, too. We should be seeing some action cinema on this theme soon.

The American Conservative

A Blackwater World Order
Kelley Vlahos

Vitaliy Ankov — Nationalists want Defense Ministry to create Russia’s own ‘Foreign Legion’

Only a proposal so far. But the rationale is interesting.

Russia Insider
Nationalists want Defense Ministry to create Russia’s own ‘Foreign Legion’
Vitaliy Ankov

Vegasjessie — Blackwater's Erik Prince Blames The Left For Occupation 'Failures'

The former head of Blackwater and author of "Civilian Warriors" asserts that his company's much maligned contractors are the scapegoats in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Crooks and Liars
Blackwater's Erik Prince Blames The Left For Occupation 'Failures'
Vegasjessie

Scott Kaufman — Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince says his mercenaries could have stopped ISIS if not for Obama

At the Maverick PAC’s annual conference Friday night, Blackwater founder and former CEO Erik Prince said it was “a shame the [Obama] administration crushed my old business,” which could have easily defeated the Islamic State, The Daily Beast reports.
Blackwater, Prince said, “could’ve solved the boots-on-the-ground issue. We could have had contracts from people that want to get there as contractors. You don’t have the arguments of U.S. active duty going back in there.” 

His mercenaries “could have gone in there and done it, and be done, and not have a long, protracted political mess that I predict will ensue.”…

He encouraged conference attendees to pressure their Republican representatives to fight for conservative values. “I want you to tell your congressman that we pay them to fight,” Prince said.

Out thugs are better than their thugs.

The Raw Story
Former Blackwater CEO says his mercenaries could have stopped ISIS if not for Obama

Scott Kaufman

BillMoyers.com — Morning Reads: Blackwater Threatened US Investigator; Obama to Escalate on Southern Border

James Risen reports for the NYT that before a group of Blackwater (now known as Academi) security contractors slaughtered 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, the State Department launched an investigation into the firm’s activities in Iraq, but the probe hit a dead end when Blackwater’s top manager in Iraq said “‘he could kill’ the government’s chief investigator and ‘no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq.’”

What does the United States have a military for, on which it spends more than the world combined when paramilitary and intelligence (black ops) is thrown in. This is really over the top.

BillMoyers.com
Morning Reads: Blackwater Threatened US Investigator
BillMoyers.com Staff