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Link. Why on earth do we do any business with these guys?
They may be an upstanding organization now (I'm dubious), but with their incredibly lengthy history of criminal conduct they should have been shuttered forever.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: You KNOW why we do business with these guys.
I have some ideas, but honestly nothing I'd swear by. It's almost as if it's a case of "the devil you know..."
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Because violence that is only loosely controlled by popular opinion or legal force but is controlled by government-backed money (openly or behind the scenes) is an attractive option to more than a few who like to wield power in the world. Because it's hard to become a commander of a well armed, experienced military force and even when you do, there's all sorts of troublesome standards and rules and oversight. But to be an employer of a well armed, experienced military force, well, that's a much simpler matter.
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Our standards have certainly been worse. What've we to care about mercs that aren't completely terrible, only mostly?
quote:Before coming to Iraq, Custer Battles hadn't done even a million dollars in business. The company's own Web site brags that Battles had to borrow cab fare from Jordan to Iraq and arrived in Baghdad with less than $500 in his pocket. But he had good timing, arriving just as a security contract for Baghdad International Airport was being "put up" for bid. The company site raves that Custer spent "three sleepless nights" penning an offer that impressed the CPA enough to hand the partners $2 million in cash, which Battles promptly stuffed into a duffel bag and drove to deposit in a Lebanese bank.
Custer Battles had lucked into a sort of Willy Wonka's paradise for contractors, where a small pool of Republican-friendly businessmen would basically hang around the Green Zone waiting for a contracting agency to come up with a work order. In the early days of the war, the idea of "competition" was a farce, with deals handed out so quickly that there was no possibility of making rational or fairly priced estimates. According to those familiar with the process, contracting agencies would request phony "bids" from several contractors, even though the winner had been picked in advance. "The losers would play ball because they knew that eventually it would be their turn to be the winner," says Grayson.
To make such deals legal, someone in the military would simply sign a piece of paper invoking an exception. "I know one guy whose business was buying weapons on the black market for contractors," says Pratap Chatterjee, a writer who has spent months in the Mideast researching a forthcoming book on Iraq contracts. "It's illegal -- but he got military people to sign papers allowing him to do it."
The system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the "entrepreneurship" of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent "three sleepless nights" putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking "like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later." The two simply "presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract."
posted
It's nice to know that in addition to the tactical aspects of the war being terribly planned, the war was horribly mismanaged behind the scenes with contracting as well.
Are there any good books that go into this further? Not just with regards to mercs, but contracting and handling of war funds in general?
For all the talk right-wingers do about auditing the Fed, why hasn't there been a louder cry to audit the war?
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quote:For all the talk right-wingers do about auditing the Fed, why hasn't there been a louder cry to audit the war?
Because close, thorough, skeptical oversight of government authority is not actually a firm principle of the right wing in this country.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: For all the talk right-wingers do about auditing the Fed, why hasn't there been a louder cry to audit the war?
Because it was obvious outright graft and kickbacks by them and for them and they don't want to look bad for, as a single example:
quote:Since time immemorial, the distribution of government largesse had followed a staid, paper-laden procedure in which the federal government would post the details of a contract in periodicals like Commerce Business Daily or, more recently, on the FedBizOpps Web site. Competitive bids were solicited and contracts were awarded in accordance with the labyrinthine print of the U.S. Code, a straightforward system that worked well enough before the Bush years that, as one lawyer puts it, you could "count the number of cases of criminal fraud on the fingers of one hand."
There were exceptions to the rule, of course -- emergencies that required immediate awards, contracts where there was only one available source of materials or labor, classified deals that involved national security. What no one knew at the beginning of the war was that the Bush administration had essentially decided to treat the entire Iraqi theater as an exception to the rules. All you had to do was get to Iraq and the game was on.
But getting there wasn't easy. To travel to Iraq, would-be contractors needed permission from the Bush administration, which was far from blind in its appraisal of applicants. In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O'Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense. O'Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron's moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan's community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was . . . an anti-smoking campaign.
It is absolutely nothing they want to talk about.
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Could it be that after centuries of corruption the military finally was getting good at policing its procurement procedures. So the crooks started promoting this idea of "Outsourcing to save money" to the military.
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: China. Russia arguably. France is borderline.
You've got to be kidding.
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Blayne Bradley
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Nope, I can see the military traditions of France starting at around late 1500 to mid 1650, Russia beginning at about the Battle of Narva until today as being distinctly military-cultural extensions of their respective national identity and defense needs from then until modern day. They are continuous state mechanisms that have maintained an existence I would observe as constant even if the details have changed and evolved along with their armament and missions over that duration.
Even if you try to argue that the Red Army/Soviet Army was a distinctly cultural and national institution from the Tsarist Army of Narva until 1917 that's still some 200 years of existence as a fairly consistent institution. But I don't think you can, I find it very dubious so that leaves an additional 90 years to roughly 300 years of existence.
The United States military as a regular force however was largely non existent for most of its history until the American Civil War, only then did a truly "American" way to fight wars evolved from the national subconscious.
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I'm not talking about a military drawing on traditions and strategies from centuries ago, I'm talking about an institution that has been in continuous existence for hundreds of years without interruption or restarting or total overhaul, so on and so forth.
For example, while we could say England has a continuous history of many centuries, we cannot say its government does. Likewise with any military you choose to look at.
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Blayne Bradley
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Which may be true for England, as I don't think its military really came into its own until 1812 as we know it today, the Royal navy has arguably existed contuously since the Spanish Armada, but that isn't true of Russia, possibly not France and certainly not for China.
The Russian military has had as a institution existed under the word for word definition you have provided from Narva to the modern day; merely changing its hat doesn't change what it is or what it was.
Same for France as I do not believe the Revolutionary period actually saw the dissolution of the French military institution, merely its expansion to include a larger pool of skilled members.
Russia is an excellent example, its military has been consistent and continuous from 1700 to today; Soviet Deep Battle is simply the 1920's spin of Tsarist military thought expanded to include tanks but is very little different as an institution since its inception at Narva.
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: Russia is an excellent example, its military has been consistent and continuous from 1700 to today
No it hasn't. The Soviet military was divided by treaty and left in limbo when the soviet union dissolved in 1991. Remnants were cadged together from what was left into a completely new military doctrine. This is not "consistent and continuous."
In sum:
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: There really isn't a 'centuries' continuous history for any military on Earth.
Actual organizations that existed for centuries? That's a harder sell.
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary:
quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: Russia is an excellent example, its military has been consistent and continuous from 1700 to today
No it hasn't. The Soviet military was divided by treaty and left in limbo when the soviet union dissolved in 1991. Remnants were cadged together from what was left into a completely new military doctrine. This is not "consistent and continuous."
In sum:
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: There really isn't a 'centuries' continuous history for any military on Earth.
You don't know what your talking about, your contradicting yourself here, how does a military institution getting "smaller" or losing part of its institution "end" it? How does changing its hat? Or its emblem? Your disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing you don't actually have a logical basis in which to claim they haven't been consistently the same institution; you and no one else ever bother to define your terms so your just randomly pulling out "things that happened" but there's no reasoning as to how they correlate.
The Soviet Army had some of its assets and personnel split up in 1991? You don't say, but for that to mean anything you would have to argue that the Soviet Army was not primarily a national institution of a 'Russian' socio-political organism and that the commonly and widely accepted political theory of state succession magically doesn't apply here and that by definition the military can only exist as an multinational "Soviet" institution or not at all and believe Soviet propaganda.
The mere idea, that changing your uniforms and firing a few generals and renaming yourselves, or heck even attempting to rebrand yourself is sufficient to make you an entirely different and unrelated institution to the one before you is an entirely ridiculous absurdity with no basis in reality.
The Russian Army as a military institution at Narva holds a critical consistency with the Russian military as it is today; just as how the American military of today holds a consistency with the military of 1864.
This conversation and the blatant goalpost moving gets even more absurd when we consider the original statement was "never a centuries old military" a simple reading shows this to be true, several nations that have consistently existed for over 200 years exist and have fielding consistently standing militaries the entire time.
Germany I can argue has had its military cease to exist in 1945, it took a decade before it was reconstituted but with such radically different leadership, doctrines, and roles that it cannot be said to be the same institution as the one in 1933 or 1914.
But Russia's military I feel has remained remarkably consistent in its role, composition, and culture since its inception. The Soviets never even attempted to change its pan-'Russian' identity but instead developed it from what the Tsar's already had; Soviet Doctrine of Deep Battle comes from an entirely Russian cultural and historical perspective on war.
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Blayne Bradley
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Heck there's even a good quote here; when asked if the RN could send some battleships to help relieve Malta during WWII (and risk their loss to German/Italian naval bombers) the British Admiral replied to the Captain "It only takes a year to build a battleship, but three hundred to build a naval tradition."
There is strong evidence to suggest institutional consistency and arguments to the contrary just strike me as being pedantic nitpicking.
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quote:Your disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing you don't actually have a logical basis in which to claim they haven't been consistently the same institution; you and no one else ever bother to define your terms so your just randomly pulling out "things that happened" but there's no reasoning as to how they correlate.
"No reasoning as to how they correlate" means that you either didn't read my post, can't understand it, or really have no idea what the words 'consistent' and 'continuous' mean.
quote:There is strong evidence to suggest institutional consistency and arguments to the contrary just strike me as being pedantic nitpicking.
Yeah, that's because whenever you're challenged on things, you jump immediately to being an immature whelp about it and sell it off immediately (more for your own sake than anyone else's) as 'oh you're just disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, you're not being objective, per se ipso facto, you don't know what your[sp] talking about, this is all just entirely ridiculous with no basis in reality, something something strawman goalpost moving ad hominem.' Oh, of course you would just see it as useless nitpicking; you don't know it from reasonable and reasoned disagreement.
It gets old, because it's useless.
Try acting like a person even remotely capable or interested in mature debate about the issue. Try it. Give anyone here a reason to expect there's a point in taking you up on this issue besides evoking another Blayne tantrum.
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Blayne Bradley
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Oh shut up. I've proven you wrong now deal with it.
Your not even remotely interested in the subject being discussed and haven't provided a single argument other then to blindly disagree. Your just wanting to go through the tired old rigamarol of just wanting an excuse to criticize the poster and not the argument.
Put up an argument or just stop entirely I don't care what you do, I know I'm right.
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quote:The mere idea, that changing your uniforms and firing a few generals and renaming yourselves, or heck even attempting to rebrand yourself is sufficient to make you an entirely different and unrelated institution to the one before you is an entirely ridiculous absurdity with no basis in reality.
Blayne, I never said or even suggested 'entirely different and unrelated institution'. You took my words and decided I meant them to the furthest conceivable extent they could have been read. Well, alright, my words do admit that extreme possibility, but you'll simply have to take my word for it that I didn't mean to say there is no military institution on earth with any degree of sameness and relation to its past centuries ago.
I don't think I or anybody else would have a hope in hell of getting you to admit that was an outlandish reading of my post, and you can choose to believe or not that I didn't say something so profoundly silly, rather you misunderstood.
I just...you always do this, man. It never even takes very long. I would criticize Samprimary for being so snotty if I didn't know perfectly well that once any one of a few people dispute something with you, there's zero chance of you ever budging even the slightest inch. So, you win: I didn't say that thing I never actually said, but you were criticizing for.
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: Your not even remotely interested in the subject being discussed and haven't provided a single argument other then to blindly disagree.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. I point out exactly what is wrong with you that makes it so that you are not actually arguing anything and not actually proving anything and only really telling YOURSELF how much you've won (while everyone else knows how ridiculous you're being)
AND YOU KEEP DOING IT. You're literally more consistent than Ron Lambert in this regard.
Keep digging. I gave you an argument. You walked right around it. It's still there. I could give it to you again so you could ignore it again and tell me how much you have concluded ahead of time that I am just arguing 'blindly' just for the sake of arguing. Because you're predictable, and you refuse to better yourself.
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Blayne Bradley
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By your own admission, your only purpose in talking with me is to troll, there is no reason to engage with you on any meaningful level.
Regardless, discussing the actual topic that I feel is worth discussing:
quote: I think the Swiss militia-based military coupled with neutrality has been historically consistent for many centuries. Despite the advances in armament and tactics, the core idea of a citizen militia forming the main force of the army has not changed.
The examples tend to keep on coming when I ask people.
Others cite Imperial Rome and China as also having militaries that for a few militaries would stay the same by whatever narrow definition people are using.
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Samp...unless Blayne has asked for your help with self improvement ...which I missed...you sure are taking a lot of responsibility on yourself and in hugely negative and absolutist fashion.
Or in simpler terms, why don't you cut the guy a little slack, huh?
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote:The mere idea, that changing your uniforms and firing a few generals and renaming yourselves, or heck even attempting to rebrand yourself is sufficient to make you an entirely different and unrelated institution to the one before you is an entirely ridiculous absurdity with no basis in reality.
Blayne, I never said or even suggested 'entirely different and unrelated institution'. You took my words and decided I meant them to the furthest conceivable extent they could have been read. Well, alright, my words do admit that extreme possibility, but you'll simply have to take my word for it that I didn't mean to say there is no military institution on earth with any degree of sameness and relation to its past centuries ago.
I don't think I or anybody else would have a hope in hell of getting you to admit that was an outlandish reading of my post, and you can choose to believe or not that I didn't say something so profoundly silly, rather you misunderstood.
I just...you always do this, man. It never even takes very long. I would criticize Samprimary for being so snotty if I didn't know perfectly well that once any one of a few people dispute something with you, there's zero chance of you ever budging even the slightest inch. So, you win: I didn't say that thing I never actually said, but you were criticizing for.
Except here's your clarifying post:
quote: I'm not talking about a military drawing on traditions and strategies from centuries ago, I'm talking about an institution that has been in continuous existence for hundreds of years without interruption or restarting or total overhaul, so on and so forth.
For example, while we could say England has a continuous history of many centuries, we cannot say its government does. Likewise with any military you choose to look at.
"Without restarting or total overhaul", which means that incremental reformations (adopting new strategies, changing focus, adopting new outlooks etc) would all qualify as still being continuous, but you still deny the examples I provided and did not present reasoning as to why. Your words are painting a narrow definition of continuous that it is only reasonable for me to understand.
Rome, Ancient China, Russia, France, the United States, the Swiss, the Royal Navy all satisfy a reasonable reading of your parameters. They are a military that has existed, they have not had a substantial overhaul and I don't consider the Red Army to be substantially different from the Imperial Army of Russia; and have maintained an institutional military culture that takes on traits and lessons learned since their inception.
I have more than a few very big and heavy books on Russian Military history that support my observations.
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Now apparently I said 'any military ever in history'. I'm learning all sorts of things about what I actually said.
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: Samp...unless Blayne has asked for your help with self improvement ...which I missed...you sure are taking a lot of responsibility on yourself and in hugely negative and absolutist fashion.
Or in simpler terms, why don't you cut the guy a little slack, huh?
You haven't spent sufficient time here to appreciate how the heart sinks when Blayne decides he's going to make a point on something. Or possibly to know the type of weary, deep regret that he has not grown up in all these years. Or to feel tired at the prospect of wading through a series of posts, never really knowing when the material will have been copy pasted from unknown and uncredited sources. Or to feel powerless and defeated at the prospect tht, should you engage with it at all, you will be the target of vociferous abuse and insinuations and paranoid persecution fantasies.
And, on top of all that, a person who says such laughably ridiculous garbage, and is embarrassingly unaware of the fact. Slack, consider slack, copious amounts of slack, has been cut.
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Yeah, that's the essence of it, stone wolf. For five years now, probably more, this has been what Blayne has done. You disagree with one of his Trigger Issues, no matter what, you get a ceaseless slew of poorly-worded, pseudo-erudite garble that
(1) ceaselessly dismisses your position as just being prattle, and get subject to multiple comments where he decides your intent for you
(2) fails to or refuses to acknowledge your real position at all (see what he's doing to rakeesh) and gives no indication that he will ever try to
(3) is usually copy-pasted, in whole or in part, uncredited, from whoever Blayne is plagiarizing that week, and
(4) reliably expresses Blayne's ingrained tendency to never deviate from a given assurance of how true and right he is on his trigger issues, and to only get more crude and irrationally dismissive (see him in the China thread, or six billion other examples).
corollary is (5) that this always happens no matter as to whether someone's got him dead to rights on a subject that he is obsessed over.
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Well, I ain't gonna front. Sometimes people are just f*%#Łng with Blayne. It's far from all gently grieved disappointment or something. Neither Orincoro, Samprimary, or myself should beat around the bush about that. Here, though, he said something silly and then in defense of it began a vigorous, aggressive, unwarranted lecturing attack of arguments that weren't made or even hinted at. Just like we shouldn't beat around the bush on some things, I don't think anyone except Blayne would dispute that is an extremely predictable pattern, either
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I...Imperial Rome?
Now apparently I said 'any military ever in history'. I'm learning all sorts of things about what I actually said.
quote: There really isn't a 'centuries' continuous history for any military on Earth.
Again, a reasonable reading of your post; implies that your assertion is that; and this is how I understood it. "There has never been a continuous military at any point or anywhere for more than a century at a time."
If you do not clarify what your argument even is and just continue being vaguely passive aggressive the only fault is yours. And what I presume is your clarification above just muddles matters because my examples become even more valid under it.
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quote:Again, a reasonable reading of your post; implies that your assertion is that; and this is how I understood it. "There has never been a continuous military at any point or anywhere for more than a century at a time."
Except you take a statement which is specifically present tense statement that says 'centuries' and unpack it to mean 'throughout all of human history, and for more than a single century'.
That is not a reasonable reading. That's taking a meaning which might have been there only if I'd badly miscommunicated, and then replying as though I had said that. I could certainly see wondering if I had meant that, and then particularly asking, but your claim that your reading was reasonable is probably wrong by the tenses of the words you read, and whether they were plural or not.
I wasn't making much of a precise argument in the first place, that's true. I'm confused as to why you would notice that, and then criticize me for...making a precise claim!
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Blayne Bradley
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I don't think it is an unreasonable reading, you agreed it wasn't a precise argument, so I had to presume one in order to make a substantive response; otherwise its a vague argument to respond to a vague argument and nothing is accomplished.
Sorry if I misread you, and I ask to you to clarify your argument. As it is, if I am to take it to just mean any present military my argument, such that I cited the examples of Russia, America, France, and Britain are all examples of militaries with a long history of continuous existence.
quote: Blayne, you should seriously reconsider that post.
Are you first going to acknowledge that he had no business posting what he did? How many threads just get derailed because of their admitted desire to simply make as uncomfortable and abusive existence for me as possible?
Just to clarify, if you want me to edit it, I will edit it, don't suggest that I do so just ask "Blayne can you please edit that."
quote:I don't think it is an unreasonable reading, you agreed it wasn't a precise argument, so I had to presume one in order to make a substantive response; otherwise its a vague argument to respond to a vague argument and nothing is accomplished.
Dude. You could've simply asked. You admit my statement wasn't very precise. How does it then follow that you 'have to' select a precise argument that (well, yours didn't, actually, I already went over that) supposedly fits into my statement...and then criticize me for making an argument you 'had to' apply to my words yourself!
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Blayne Bradley
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I said I was sorry, can we stop going back and forth on this?
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Blayne: Please edit your post. If you don't want comments on your posting style, then don't respond to those posts. You said Sam's post doesn't make sense, he said why, you didn't like it, and told him to shut up. It's all been downhill from there.
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Orincoro...I'm going to do what Samp should have done in the first place when dealing with someone whom they know they don't like..as I dislike you...butt out.
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When are you people going to learn not to engage Blayne? He's never going to learn, and you people thought for years that you should nanny him and try to play nice and to "ease up" like Stone_Wolf_ suggests and all he did with this extra niceness and leniency was train himself to blame others for when he flips his lid in response to being called out for the way he uncontrollably acts.
He has done one smart thing, though. He has figured out what he did here? He's allowed to do it. that he can just keep hurling swear words and direct abuse towards other posters and just going ahead and violating the TOS blatantly whenever he really gets in a snit. You have all trained him that he gets to get away with it over and over and he has at least learned that lesson well. He'll just call another poster a lying sack of shit on this 'family friendly' forum and then he'll do it again and then he'll do it again and then he'll do it again. Because he can. You really have given him such a useful life lesson. Right?
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: Orincoro...I'm going to do what Samp should have done in the first place when dealing with someone whom they know they don't like..as I dislike you...butt out.
You have exactly as much right to tell me to do this as I would have to tell you- your involvement here has been limited to telling others how best to behave. Which makes you a hypocrite on top of being a bore.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: ... Blayne's ingrained tendency ... to only get more crude and irrationally dismissive ...
Ridiculous! Impossible! Where could one possibly find an example of this crudity?
You sure got me pegged, I forgot how 14 times this year I just descended into swearing lewdly and hurling derogatory epithets at you making me just like blayne. Keen eye sir.
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