Talking about PMCs (Updated) - MountainRunner

Matt Armstrong of the extremely well written MountainRunner blog has this to say about the use of PMCs and accountability. I would say a very well reasoned summary of where responsibility lies.....
Talking about PMCs (Updated) - MountainRunner

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Sen. Obama and Blackwater

A Democracy Now! report asks the question; if Senator Obama is elected president, what will he do with the nearly 140,000 Private Military Contractors (PMCs) currently in Iraq. Sen. Obama is known as having an aggresive stance against the use of Private Security Contractors (PSC) from such companies as Blackwater, Dyncorp, and a host of others who provide on the ground personal security details for workers and dignitaries, saying that they are not being held accountable for thier actions. However, according to the DN! news piece, Sen. Obama has not ruled out thier use to prevent a vacuum of power in Iraq. Should Sen. Obama have a stance at this point? With the time table of withdrawal still in the back of everyones mind and Iran looming in the back ground, what choices will be the wisest at this point?

What has the U.S. involvment in Georgia been?

'What was the gentleman’s purpose of being among the special forces and what he is doing today, I so far cannot answer,” General Nogovitsyn said, holding up what he said was a color copy of the passport. He said members of the Georgian unit had been killed, and the building destroyed.'

-New York Times, August 28, 2008

This is a quote from General Nogovitsyn, senior Russian military figure after describing what they said was a US passport allegedly discovered by Russain forces in a ruined building near Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. Putin himself spoke on the issue of American involvement, claiming that the US election has come into play with US involvement. Is such a discovery possible? First let's look at the name of the man on the Passport, Michael Lee White. Apparently, White lost his passport in 2005 while flying between Moscow and the United States. White is a world traveler who has taught English in Japan, China, and Kazakhstan, according to a resume recovered from a Chinese/English Teaching site. White also has former military experience as a graduate of US Army air assault school in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. So could White be involved in some contracting capacity? The resume found on Wikipedia is flimsy evidence at best. Additionally nobody knows where White is right at the moment. This could mean any number of things. That he actually was involved somehow in an advisory capacity ( world traveler, military record) or that it was placed there after the end of combat operations in an attempt to implicate America in fomenting Georgian military action against South Ossetia. The possibility is there, as US government officials would never officially recognize a US contractor as an American military advisor in war zone.

A couple of things are for certain. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has been advising and equipping the Georgian army, stomping around former Soviet allied states, granting admission into NATO, and generally disregarding the notion of Russian state power.

This of course doen't excuse the several steps that the Russians have taken to encourage the South Ossetians to declare thier independance including giving Russian passports to citizens in South Ossetia and the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as indepedent states.

PMC costs up to $1.2 billion dollars

A USA Today report has reported that the State department is projected to spend $1 billion dollars this year on privately contracted security. This number is up 13% from last years figure. The majority of those contractors involved are from the (in)famous Blackwater Worldwide. After the September 16th 2007 incident at Nisoor square in Iraq where 14 civilians were killed and 18 injured during a questionable gun battle by Blackwater security teams, Blackwater was seen as endemic of the slippery slope that private military contracting has become. As the United States removes soldiers from the surge and diplomatic efforts increase, the need for solutions above and beyond the U.S. State Department's Diplomatic Security Service and static security provided by the army soldiers have made the PMCs more and more appealing. However as several incidents such as Nisoor Square, Abu Ghraib, and Fallujah have illustrated the price of handing core competency issues such as personal security to organizations that do not operate with a uniform code of conduct as government institutions such as the DSS or the Armed Services do.

Blackwater runs SEAL prep school...

A Blackwater press release issued along with thier weekly email newsletter announced a sort of prep school for the Naval Special Warfare and Naval Special Operations (NSW and NSO respectivly) community. The program has been in effect since 2007 and has boosted the number of candidates graduating from the various Naval programs to such a degree that the second program has been created to recruit sailors directly out of boot camp for mentoring and training.
Such a training regime brings up several questions. First, has U.S. strategy overstreched the Special operations community? Record numbers of special operations personnel have left the community in recent years, citing burnout and pay gaps between the military and private security firms. Second, should a private firm play such a large role in the training of elite forces? The expanding role of Special operations in multiple roles by the U.S. gives them unprecedented scope and scale in prosecuting the Global War on Terrorism. Should a private for -profit company have such a strong prescence in this highly classified world? Third, does this create a closed loop where mentors aid SEALS who later become mentors?
Black water has an extensive relationship with the SEAL units, as Erik Prince and Al Clark are both former SEALS themselves. The notion of a "closed loop" should be of concern to lawmakers. They are charged with carrying out the most sensitive and dangerous missions the military has been charged with. This creates a situation whereby in many ways the U.S. has become beholden to a private interest.

The trillion dollar war?

A report issued by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform details how nearly $15 billion dollars has gone unaccounted in Iraq. Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, the chair of the commitee, stated 'The Defense Department spent $1.8 billion of seized Iraqi assets with "absolutely no accountability.'

The funding for the war has reached outrageous peaks, with some experts calling the conflict the "trillion dollar war."

How is it possible that so much money (Enough to write a check for $37,500 to every Iraqi man, woman, and child) has gone into funding the war and that nearly $15 billion dollars of it has gone unaccounted for? The simple answer is Emergency Supplemental Funding. The use of emergency supplemental funding has in effect given the executive branch a way to go around requesting the funding from Congress. Emergency funding has a long history in the U.S. Eisenhower used it in the initial years of the Korean War. The same budgetary plan occurred during the Vietnam War.

From the Veronique de Rugy article in Reason:

"In 1990, under bipartisan congressional pressure to reduce the size of the deficit, President George H.W. Bush signed the Budget Enforcement Act (BEA), which exempted emergency bills from other rules of the era designed to restrain spending. The BEA allowed the government to exclude emergency spending from the deficit projections required in the annual budget. To prevent lawmakers from abusing that loophole, the law required that Congress offset supplemental spending with rescissions—that is, by permanently withholding already appropriated funds."

President Bush's plan to fund the war has consisted of manipulating the numbers to keep the money flowing with a minimum of oversight in Iraq. How this funding is of benefit to anyone other than those profiting from the war is yet to be seen.

US opts out of cluster bomb treaty

The United States as well as Russia, India, Pakistan, and Israel have declined to join 100 other nations at a conference in Dublin that examines the use of Cluster munitions. State department expert Stephen Mull acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, said the weapons have a "certain military utility." Mull states that the U.S. will instead continue to work within the framework of The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, initated by the United Nations on October 10, 1980 and ratified by 50 nations by April of the following year. The section that most specifically speaks to this issue, Protocol V on Explosive Remnants of War was adopted on 28 November 2003.

From the Article:

'For example, if the convention passes in its current form, any U.S. military ship would be technically not able to get involved in a peacekeeping operation like disaster relief, or humanitarian assistance, as we are doing right now in the aftermath of the earthquake in China and the typhoon in Burma, not to mention everything we did in southeast Asia after the tsunami in December of 2004," Mull said.'