You know, I’d completely forgotten about PMCs. Oh it’s going to be fun watching people come to grips with private military contractors over the next 8 years, after the past 8 where they were EXCLUSIVELY characterised as the personally appointed Christian crusading, gun toting, babykilling stormtroopers of Bush/Cheney. Regardless of whether they were serving food in 8 hour shifts or not.

Seriously, I have not had one single discussion in a liberal forum where the necessity of these personnel to the function of the post-Clinton military wasn’t characterised as my own personal neo-con fantasy driven by personal greed and general naziness. Gonna be a sharp fkn reality shock, ain’t it kids. Obama’s stormtroopers now and they ain’t going nowhere.

You know, I bet Scahill goes to bed every night wishing that 1/100th of the people who recommend his book actually read it in the first place and, more importantly, bought it. After all, despite all his vapid bias and manipulation, he’s been quite forthright about who ushered these contactors into existance and that statistically, only a tiny minority of them are trigger pullers. Yet that meme of the parallel private army of 200,000 mercenaries was pretty much all anyone wanted to cite.

No doubt just another entry in the long list of things people pretended to give a fuck about for the past decade but they were really only pretending to for partisan political point scoring.
ThinkProgress is gonna be the funniest website on the internet starting next month. I can’t wait.

Yeah, but not this blog. Spencer has already declared that he’s in favor of Obama increasing the size of the military to a level that’s capable of meeting our commitments.

Yo Kilo: check this out.

Yeah, I know. I’m also not aware of him making the completely fabricated/ignorant cases I mentioned regarding PMCs. If I was critcising him for this my post would have started “hey you hairy fker, didn’t you say…”. I’m not shy.

Kilo,

The proportion of private contractors that engage in combat is roughly equal to that of the military. Of the 180,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq, only a fraction see combat — does that mean citing the total number of troops there to highlight the extent of the occupation is just a misleading “meme”?

macaquerman: Ackerman backed the Iraq war — when it was popular to do so — so no doubt he, like Obama, has a fairly expansive view of what maintaining “our commitments” to the world actually entail (hint: it’s probably not limited to trade and peaceful relations, but continued meddling on the behalf of the ruling elite justified in the name of “humanitarianism” or amorphous “U.S. interests”). Why, after, should the U.S. be expected to increase the size of its military when its “defense” spending already is equal to that of the rest of the world combined — and when tens of thousands of troops are still “defending” places like Germany and South Korea.

Actually protecting America, on the other hand, would require a significantly scaled back military (perhaps Spencer should lookup ‘blowback’ and consider the downside of maintaining a global empire), not the 90,000-plus troop increase Obama is calling for.

Protecting America “would require a significantly scaled back military”?
That’s kind of hard to understand in present circumstances, unless you mean that we should end our troop deployments outside of US territory. Is that your idea?
As for pointing out that Spencer initially backed the Iraq war, your mention that he did so when it was “popular” is the sort of sneering chickenshit that we all love.

Kilo, The proportion of private contractors that engage in combat is roughly equal to that of the military. Of the 180,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq, only a fraction see combat — does that mean citing the total number of troops there to highlight the extent of the occupation is just a misleading “meme”?

If they were portrayed in same fashion, with the same blatant, mischaracterisations, then of course it would be just as misleading. You know this, hence you don’t disagree with what I wrote.

Protecting America “would require a significantly scaled back military”?
That’s kind of hard to understand in present circumstances…

I’d say past, present and future.

BTW Jerseyfresh, if we were to compare “the military” in Iraq to the private military contractors working there based on demographics, the fact that most contractors are local Iraqis may dictate that the Iraqi military be examined instead.

Fresh as you like…
http://experts.foreignpolicy.com/node/15019

Again…. this is another fact that you’ve either seen acknowledged by liberal bloggers even just once over the past 5 years or you haven’t. You haven’t.