http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/us-security-firm-grilled-about-iraq/2007/10/03/1191091144957.html

 

Pretty interesting read!

Interesting, particularly the bit about under trained or unqualified operators, this seems to be becoming a bigger and bigger problem for PMCs as being a merc is becoming more of a 'cool' thing to do and people fake quals to get in then they die because they get in over their head.

 

But I am getting so sick of all these people who want perfect wars, nothing is perfect in a war, it is organized chaos and people innocent and otherwise will die. Get used to it. How about they publish the amount of innocents killed by regular military forces in Iraq then they would be like "OMG quick shut down the military because they kill people, we didn't know that the army kills people, we thought they shot flowers from their guns and dropped candy bombs". Seriously, Damn politics.

Its even more than that really it has to do with support from the people, governments don't send troops country's do. When the people don't support the action any more it quickly becomes a political quagmire and it just makes it worse when there's business interest's mixed in with the politics.

 

*Sorry bout any spelling I'm on a work PC -_-

Edited October 3, 200717 yr by chambersAUS

Politics aside you should not as a 1st world country send in mercs when you are already using your proffesional army.

 

Mercs should be used in the dirty little secret wars no one else wants to fight.

Politics aside you should not as a 1st world country send in mercs when you are already using your proffesional army.

 

Mercs should be used in the dirty little secret wars no one else wants to fight.

 

If i remember correctly , the US hired them as a "helping hand".

 

Also PMCs hate being called mercs

As far as I know blackwater in particular gets a lot of missions from the US government when they don't want to use US troops because the mission is questionable, very risky or just bad for PR, no one cares if PMCs die but when a soldier dies everyone is all "quick call the troops back".

 

Also I heard a lot of stories from guys in 4RAR about how pissed off they get when 'the public' starts the whole "bring our troops home it's too dangerous" BS people such as those in 4RAR want to be deployed and that is their job.

I suppose it has to do allot with the freedom of information we as residents of first world country's have access to. Gone are the days where news took weeks or even months before the public had access to it. Its possible to see these things happening in almost real time and that causes allot of issues. Mainly to our governments who would prefer to have the control over the media they once did. Sure they still putting out the BS reports and deploying as many smoke and mirror tactics as they can. However were still on the receiving end of allot truth, and that scares people because they simply can't handle seeing little kids getting killed or what have you.

 

Civilian casualty's and well casualty's of any kind are a undeniable occurrence in any war. However now it really has become personal while you might not know anyone who has died in active service over seas. You all have seen any number of story's about soldiers and innocent children dieing in a war the public simply isn't sure of why were in any more. The media is making the world smaller and the world is changing is it so strange that our wars have to change with that in mind. Civilian contractors will only see greater use in the years to come as the public voices that it wants to see and know less.

Another problem is the media twisting stories to get ratings. We never see the truth not ever and that is the real problem. If we where actually told the complete and honest story I would not be surprised if more people started backing the war.

 

As an example, the vast majority of civilian deaths are caused by insurgents and terrorists. For every woman and child they kill the Western media has a field day and our soldiers get the blame. The only way for them to win is to make this war so disgusting that the public forces the military out. If that happens watch those Al Qeada camps get back up and running and we will see more attacks out West. In Afganistan the Taliban has been blowing up schools for girls again. Should we really just stand by and watch, furthermore if we do just watch the next attack will be worse than 9/11.

+1 Smokey that is exactly what I am thinking.

 

We have two choices, take the easy road and help no one but ourselves with no risk, or try to fix some things that are really F#$%ed up in this world and accept the risk that is will not be the easy road.

 

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it. - Norman Schwarzkopf.

The problem with the easy road is that it makes the problem worse. If we show that we don't even care they will hate us even more. In fact that is one root cause of the problem, they hate us because they think we don't care. Then when we do care it's because we have some hidden agenda like oil. It's also silly to be surprised that the US wants to keep it's oil supplies open, everyone does otherwise we would have already cut off Iranian exports and there would have been food for oil programs in Iraq. Oil pretty much the most important resource there is, from fuel to plastics we need that black gold running freely.

 

As it is right now the West is getting blamed for every little problem in the world. One example is in Africa how a priest is telling the people that we are infecting condoms with HIV to rid Africa of the black man. Even when we try and help their irational hatred clouds their vision.

 

9/11 is another example, what on Earth would posses a sane and rational person to kill people let alone yourself to do it? When it happend the Arab world danced in the streets. In America the people are also in the streets except no dancing just anti-war banners trying to stop the violence.

 

This is what we are dealing with, give them time and they will get their drug money and finance a much bigger better attack. As it is now, these terrorist groups are in a fight and have no time to train and execute well planned attacks. I would rather the fight in their back yard over mine.

 

Edit/// One quick fix on this war on terror would be to legalise drugs. This would make them so cheap that it would cut all their funding other than from say, Saudi Royals.....

Edited October 4, 200717 yr by Snazzy

The thing about both the Afganistan and Iraq wars is that neither of them was about helping the people of those countries. America may have had a legitimate reason for going into Afganistan but to lump Iraq in as part of the "War on Terror" is just wrong. The original reason the US gave was that their intelligence indicated that Saddam had WMDs and as such was an iminent threat to America. One US official whos investigations contradicted this was intimidated by the White House which leaked that his wife was an undercover CIA agent.

 

When it became clear that the WMD story wouldn't fly they said it was about regime change. It was only after Rumsfled's flawed invasion strategy allowed foreign terrorists to flood across the border that one could legitimately call Iraq a part of the "War on Terror"

 

The extremists may have several irrational religious based motives for their opposition to America but they do have one semi-legitimate reason and that is Israel. Knowing the history of Israel it is difficult to argue that America is doing 'the right thing' in supporting and arming them.

 

As to the question of what possesses someone to kill civilians? The answer is the belief that in order for 'good' to prevail some innocents must die or that the civilians they are killing aren't innocent. I'm sure that is how people on BOTH sides of this war and all past wars rationalise the killing of non-combatants.

 

Finally, one may not be able to trust that news reports on war are completely accurate but you can't trust that the military or the government will tell the truth either as they have an agenda too. If they had their way incidents like Abu Graib, the Canadian friendly fire incident and that rape and murder case against a group of US soldiers would have been swept under the carpet.

I know people are going to hate me for this, but I'm locking this thread as a precaution because we all know what happened with the last political thread. Feel free to continue to discuss through other means.